climate opinion
stoat | February 7, 2014Maybe I should save this stanza for a slightly more apt occasion, but I'm impatient, so:
But my Totem saw the shame; from his ridgepole-shrine he came,
And he told me in a vision of the night: —
"There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
"And every single one of them is right!"
(Kipling, In the Neolithic Age, of course). But back to the post.
We might hope that the blogosphere would be full of reasoned debate, with people making interesting points supported by logical argument and careful references. Of course, any such hope would be dashed by fare such as posts titled "IPCC…
stoat | January 5, 2014 ATTP has a post on this, from which I've nicked most of my links. But he also has 50+ comments, so I abandoned my original plan to put some observations there, where they'd get lost, and have written this.
I'm not going to pretend my opinion - for that is all that this is - is definitive. I worked in Antarctic science a while ago, but never went South myself. But I'll pretend I can evaluate some of this stuff.
Other people have written stuff:
* Andy Revkin
* the Frogs seem very unhappy
* Chris Turney defends himself in the Graun.
* Their blog.
* SPRI's own "Bob" Headland isn't impressed
I'd…
stoat | May 1, 2012Or so argues KK. I have some sympathy for him. Discuss :-)
Update: so, read the comments, they are interesting (to me at least). No-one has any sympathy for my sympathy.
Refs
* Brian's view of the same post.
stoat | November 28, 2011 I've said this before - in Carbon Tax Now - but you could be excused for missing it, because that was mostly about carbon taxes, oddly enough. So I'll be more explicit, here, and argue for solving GHG emissions as a matter of economics, to be handled by taxation, rather than as a matter of morality, to be handled... somehow. Context: Eli wants to handle it as ethics. And a fair amount of the comments on Can global emissions really be reduced? are about this. Disclaimer: I don't understand economics.
I think this view (the morality view) is shared by, say, Greenpeace, whatever their public…
stoat | October 26, 2011This is actually a comment made at Early Warning about the current Eurozone crisis. Any number of people, too numerous to mention, believe that the situation there (or here? We're not part of the Euro, but are economies connect closely) is a slowly unfolding train wreck, but that as so often elsewhere, the politicians don't fully understand the problem, and/or institutional inertia prevents effective action. And this will continue until the problem becomes so bad that pretending the problem will go away if we talk a lot is demonstrated to be wrong by reality rather than just careful analysis…
stoat | August 25, 2010Back in 2008, I examined the Oreskes vs Nierenberg affair and concluded that Nicolas Nierenberg was correct and Oreskes was wrong. And then NN capped that by actually writing stuff up into a paper, published in July of this year: Early Climate Change Consensus at the National Academy: The Origins and Making of Changing Climate.
And (I missed this at the time I think), Nature published a letter from Nierenberg, Tschinkel & Tschinkel, titled "An independent thinker, willing to say what he thought":
We object to the inaccurate and misleading characterization of William Nierenberg by Naomi…
stoat | July 3, 2010So often you get folks who have some brilliant theory, but unaccountably lack the courage to write the thing up and submit it for publication. However, I'm pleased to report that Nicolas Nierenberg is not such a man, and he *has* written a paper: Early Climate Change Consensus at the National Academy: The Origins and Making of Changing Climate (blog post). Whether (like me) you think it is basically correct or (perhaps, I'm guessing, like Eli you don't) you will, I'm sure, welcome the way this is being played out in scholarly debate.
What's it all about? Broadly speaking, this is but a minor…
stoat | March 31, 2010Or have I used that one before? It seems only too likely. But perhaps not: I don't seem to have had a decent go at him for four years.
Anyway, it makes a change from CRU-investigation navel-gazing (I'll get back to that in a moment). So what has the much-loved but getting-on-a-bit genius of electron capture said now?
It was bound to happen. Science, not so very long ago, pre-1960s, was largely vocational. Back when I was young, I didn't want to do anything else other than be a scientist. They're not like that nowadays. They don't give a damn. They go to these massive, mass-produced…
stoat | March 3, 2009It seems to have become axiomatic in some parts that Gore can do no wrong; Joe Romm has a long column (disclaimer: the column is too long for me to bother read it all) devoted to this implausible assumption, with which I disagree. It's yet more of that tedious business with the slide that got pulled. As RP Jr apparently says Gore was right to admit that the slide was problematic and then pull it from his talk. Romm's answer is Gore never admitted the slide was "problematic," in the way Pielke is implying. He simply agreed to remove the slide after the Belgians backtracked about what they will…
stoat | January 23, 2009You know the old T-shirt slogan: "Help the police. Beat yourself up".
Anyway, Nurture have the traditional Inuit-imperilled-by-climate-change stuff, only its a bit more interesting because they link to a paper that actually tries to quantify the effects. Or it would be interesting, if not hidden behind a money wall.
But I have my traditional response: when you're obliged to say things like But financial constraints are hindering the community. Insurance for expensive equipment, such as the snowmobiles the hunters need to use on the increasingly circuitous routes to the hunting grounds, is…
stoat | January 4, 2009So says the Independent.
The substance seems to be Just over half - 54 per cent - of the 80 international specialists in climate science who took part in our survey agreed that the situation is now so dire that we need a backup plan that involves the artificial manipulation of the global climate to counter the effects of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases. About 35 per cent of respondents disagreed with the need for a "plan B", arguing that it would distract from the main objective of cutting CO2 emissions, with the remaining 11 per cent saying that they did not know whether a…
stoat | August 9, 2007Apologies - back to climate, but opinion, not science. Bray and von Storch ride again! See Nature's blog and a long write-up of their results.
In the blog, they attack Singer for taking stuff out of context, and the skeptics for misrepresenting their results. But they also defend the methodology of the 2003 survey, which Tim Lambert attacked [update: TL maintains his opinion]. I'm still dubious about the possible selection bias, though the good news is that they will address this in the next version.
But they also need to redesign the questions (as they note). The most headline-y one was "…
stoat | June 14, 2007Vaclav Klaus says We are living in strange times. One exceptionally warm winter is enough - irrespective of the fact that in the course of the 20th century the global temperature increased only by 0.6 per cent - for the environmentalists and their followers to suggest radical measures to do something about the weather, and to do it right now. and for good measure goes on to quote the egregious Crichton. He's said it before, of course.
[Thanks (?) to Lubos for pointing this post out]
He goes on As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the…
stoat | January 11, 2007A reader writes in bafflement:
William, I just can't tell, through what seems to be all the increasing cynicism (you also seem to be going a tad CAish), what you position wrt anthro climate change (how much, why, and what we should do) and the other changes wrought by us is anymore. On a slightly different but linked tack, is your party still your party? Or are you beggining to think like a sceptic that now we've done the first two (it's not happening, it is happening) that it's now too late and we might just as well go full speed and wreck the place but have some good old hedonistic fun in…
stoat | December 9, 2006Says the latest Oxfam missive through our door. And their website has similar, sourced to the Stern report: ..the unfair way climate change affects people living in poverty. They are least responsible for the problem, have benefited less from levels of carbon use, but are paying the biggest price. The level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is historically a result of rich world activity. Therefore to be fair, the rich world should bear the full costs of adapting to climate change, at least in the early years.
People who give to Oxfam may well be supposed to be sympathetic to this (I am;…
stoat | November 19, 2006I mean, of course, the recent UNFCCC conference, not the city. There is a very negative BBC report. It seems to me that this is one of those scheduled meetings that has to be held even though nothing will come of it other than a pile of CO2 emitted by the delegates.
So... does anyone have a good word to say for it?
stoat | October 30, 2006For those old enough to remember the Oreskes-Peiser controversy, Deltoid makes interesting reading.
stoat | October 17, 2006See here for Oliver Postgates view on Global warming. And what he has to say about childrens TV is good too. This because he put an advert in the Grauniad yesterday (which I can't find online; but I can find a story about it).
stoat | April 17, 2006Thats from the Grauniad. Its was on the BBC 10 o'clock news. It was Scientist issues grim warning on global warming in the Times. But why? Thats what I was wondering, as I watched the news (just for once on TV; from my mothers house, on hols for Easter. Very nice too but no wireless connection...). Suddenly we were back to melting glaciers and dry lake beds but I could think of no particular report or reason for it coming out, and the TV gave no clue.
Most of it appears to be conciousness-raising: Prof King's latest comments are partly designed to raise the profile of the climate change…
stoat | March 30, 2006Via Chris Mooney, I find Bush talking nonsense on GW again at a press conference. Chris Mooney thinks Bush is rubbish, but actually cuts the Bush quote off to early. Bush sez:
We -- first of all, there is -- the globe is warming. The fundamental debate: Is it manmade or natural. Put that aside. It is in our interests that we use technologies that will not only clean the air, but make us less dependent on oil. That's what I said in my State of the Union the other day. I said, look -- and I know it came as quite a shock to -- for people to hear a Texan stand up and say, we've got a national…