climate science
stoat | October 28, 2017This is your last warning to update your links to mustelid.blogspot.com. I don't know when Sb is going to peg out but it may well be end-of-this-month and I don't expect to get any more warning.
stoat | October 14, 2017It seems that the cat is out of the bag: scienceblogs is shutting down. Well, nothing lasts forever; or as Bowie - who also didn't last forever - put it: breaking up is hard, but keeping dark is hateful. I regret the close, partly as a disruption to my quiet routine but also as the end of someone's dream.
[Update: still no official notice of the shutdown. Tracking, moves have been announced by:
* me,
* Martin Rundkvist
* Stein Sigurdsson
No clear end-date yet either. My old one is now archived at https://wmconnolley.wordpress.com/.]
However, it has become clear that the original concept has…
stoat | October 10, 2017 As the increasingly sparse readership of this blog will have noticed, I'm writeing less and less about science - science is hard, and increasingly GW science isn't terribly interesting, whatever James may say - and becoming increasing interested in the fringes of politics and philosophy, in which any old fool can have an opinion, and usually does. But as a terrible warning to anyone feeling too clever, my image for this post is a "welcome" leaflet for Emma chapel, doubtless thought to be very deep by those who commissioned it, but felt to be less than tactful by many others.
Recently, gunz…
stoat | October 8, 2017 When I argued for treating GW as economics not morality, I didn't trouble myself to say "and I think it is easier to agree on economics than on morality", because it hadn't occurred to me that people might disagree. But of course, this is the internet, so people do disagree. CIP says so, for example. To start off, consider the usual pieties about the intertwining of economics and morality to have been uttered.
This post won't be as brilliantly convincing as most of mine, because I haven't really thought it through; it being so obvious to me, as I said above. It's almost a layers / category…
stoat | October 7, 2017I seem to have run out of variations on Architecture and morality and Weasels ripped my flesh so I thought I'd drop the obscurity for once and use a simple post title which actually described the subject, rather than through several levels of indirection1.
The recent trigger to this was mt's The Seventieth Generation wherein mt extolls the virtues of thinking of the future, even the far future, using as an example the building of cathedrals2. I'm all for thinking forwards, of course, but not so happy with mt's climate change is an ethical problem, not merely an economic one, for reasons I'…
stoat | September 30, 2017 Zut alors! Ze Chef Frog, Macron, 'e iz not 'appy wiz ze prix of ze Carbon: Europe needed a significant minimum carbon price to boost investment in its energy transition, and a European carbon tax at the bloc’s borders to guarantee fair competition for its companies... Macron said Europe had to give “the right price signal” for carbon emissions, and make them sufficiently high enough to attract investments. He said that a carbon price below 25 to 30 euros ($35.31) per ton was not efficient to spur investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency. If in the years ahead, we don’t have a…
stoat | September 28, 2017 According to robbservations.blogspot, which may not be the most reliable of sources. Also, it is from 2009, so not fresh either; but someone asked about it so I thought I'd reply. Context:
The theory of anthropogenic Global Warming rests on the so-called "idealized greenhouse model". This Wikipedia link (Idealized greenhouse model) by a "climate researcher" and global warming advocate presents the core theory, and offers excellent insight into the problems of the fundamental premise of global warming, though that is not his intent.
It might be fairer to look at the version from December 2009…
stoat | September 26, 2017 Those of you paying attention will have noticed several approving references here recently to Cafe Hayek, run by one Don Boudreaux (an American libertarian economist, author, professor...). For economics or law, I like it. For GW, it is regrettable; for example, he's keen on George Will.
Aanyway, just recently he ventured into why he oppose[s] a Pigouvian tax on carbon emissions, and the results are unconvincing. Which is a shame, because I would have been interested in a coherent argument. Instead, we're treated to an unconvincing analogy (calling for such a tax strikes me as being akin,…
stoat | September 24, 2017 "I am the milkman of human kindness, I will leave an extra pint". But not today; try Dover beach if you want me being nice.
In this strange shadowy incestuous world of the blogosphere, it is hard sometimes to remember that there's an outside world, and even otherwise well-informed and intelligent people find the banter somewhat confusing.
In this case the offending item is a tweet of mine, and I keep forgetting that Twitter forwards my tweets to fb, where people not in the know may actually read them. And the offending words are:
This definitely wins tweet of the month, and quite possibly of…
stoat | September 19, 2017 By AC Grayling in the Graun, h/t Timmy. And it's the thing you've read so many times before, the idea that Democracy is great but, alas, doesn't deliver what the article writer wants. In this case the thing he wants is something all right-thinking people want, a solution to GW, but that doesn't mean the logic of the article is any good. And indeed it isn't; the klew if you need one is There is nothing new in this. Plato, two and a half millennia ago, criticised democracy precisely because of this. But this is now a major life-threatening dilemma for our time. Despite being given loadsa space…
stoat | September 16, 2017 ATTP started it by posting on Well below 2 °C: Mitigation strategies for avoiding dangerous to catastrophic climate changes by Yangyang Xua and Veerabhadran Ramanathan. But as you can tell from ATTP's post, the principal question - although he is far too polite to put it so bluntly - is "where's the novelty?"1 All their GHG and temperature scenarios, as they themselves stress, are consistent with IPCC; so there's nothing new there. Neither are the stochastic runs and attempts to assess the probabilities of exceeding various thresholds. Neither, alas, are the attaching of arbitrary labels to…
stoat | September 15, 2017 Or, "world is not as I like it shocker; villain must be found!". Again; sigh.
In this case the normally sensible Graham Readfearn in the Graun has picked up the unfortunately not very sensible Nancy MacLean's "Democracy in chains"2 and run with it. GR is sad about cynicism about the motives of public servants, including government-backed climate scientists and so is attracted to "reasons" why this might be so; and of course he like all right-thinking people hates the very word "Koch"; the combination is irresistible.
If you read GR's article is is fairly clear that he isn't familiar with…
stoat | September 9, 2017 Says Alan Reynolds in Newsweek, although originally at Cato. But Michael Mann says he wants you to let @Newsweek know what you think about them running Koch-funded Cato Institute climate denial propaganda. But I only care because someone called "Lawrence Torcello"1 Tweeted Quoting Popper against climate science signals Pseudointellectualism.
Obviously, quoting Popper against any genuine Science must be wrong. Although equally obviously it can't possibly, of itself, signal pseudo-intellectualism; it could simply signal stupidity or error. But the more extensive implicit claim - that quoting…
stoat | September 9, 2017 Apparently, Just 90 companies caused two-thirds of man-made global warming emissions? was so popular that it gets a retread. Despite the original being published in 20133, we're now being told that Researchers have for the first time tied a group of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies, including ExxonMobil, and their products to specific increases in greenhouse gases, global warming and sea level rise. A study published Thursday in the journal Climatic Change concludes that since 1880, 90 of the largest carbon producers are responsible for up to 50 percent of global temperature rise,…
stoat | September 7, 2017While I was away having fun in the mountains, I rudely ignored a number of comments on the blog that I'd normally answer. I could answer them in place, but if I did that now, no-one would notice, hence this post. Did I rudely ignore your fine comment here, too? Then tell me. But first, a picture: walking from La Berarde up towards the Pilatte hut.
The rule of law
Q: When will we see 'tailpipes' on cars as morally wrong? An Earth Day question
http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1101015_when-will-we-start-to-see-t…
The similarity to smoking ban in public places seems an obvious similarity to…
stoat | September 5, 2017An excellent idea, you might well have thought. But that leads me to look at the annual Sea Ice Outlook (SIO) aka SIPN. Here are some pix:
2014:
2015:
2016:
[2013: everyone underestimated. 2012 was massively low, and everyone overestimated.
If you'd just predicted from extrapolating the OLS line-fit, then 2015 and 2016 would have been very close, and 2014 would have been within ~0.4. I think that OLS extrapolation should be considered the "null method" (comparable to weather forecasting, where the null method is "the same as yesterday"). Measured against that, all the techniques fail; at…
stoat | August 31, 2017 Sez Nurture (via SR's fb feed). Notice how good I've been: I didn't even put a question mark at the end, because Nurture is a WP:RS. Let's quote:
Multiple researchers who received grants from the US Department of Energy (DOE) say that they have been asked to remove references to “climate change” and “global warming” from the descriptions of their projects, they say.
As usual, exactly why this is done is lost in a bureaucratic maze or mirrors (the official...’s office told Nature that she was unavailable for comment, and a PNNL spokesperson referred questions to DOE headquarters in Washington…
stoat | August 29, 2017 My feed, as you'd expect, is full of stuff from Houston about hurricane Harvey. A typical example is How Climate Change is Making the Houston Situation Worse. Or Stefan's Storm Harvey: impacts likely worsened due to global warming. I'm sure you can fill in any gaps.
But also Timmy's It’s amazing how few people Harvey has killed. And ~101 is indeed a very small number for a storm of this size. Of course there are many reasons: (government funded) warning systems; lots of planning; high quality infrastructure; a resilient civil society; and so on.
So the question is: if we temporarily ignore…
stoat | August 28, 2017 I don't see anyone else blogging this, so I will, even though it is old news. Record-shattering 2.7-million-year-old ice core reveals start of the ice ages says Science, but you have to immeadiately know the caveat: it isn't a continuous 2.7 Myr core. In fact, before long you discover that it's kinda the same thing as Atmospheric composition 1 million years ago from blue ice in the Allan Hills, Antarctica from PNAS, 2015, which I also unaccountably failed to blog or see blogged.
So, stepping back: rather than take a core vertically through relatively undisturbed ice, which is what Vostok or…
stoat | August 27, 2017 You're wondering - I know you are - about the unexplored connection between Kant and Cats. And I need to begin by disappointing you: this is not one of his. This is nameless cat from Vallouise whose only sin was to stumble into my viewfinder. I should continue by saying that I'm going to parrot Popper, because I think Popper has it right; and has explained something I've wondered about for a bit, viz why anyone takes Kant seriously3.
Start, if you don't mind, with the usually moderately reliable Wikipedia, and ponder their Kant's antinomies page. It is, I hope you can agree, impossible to…