climate science
stoat | June 13, 2017And now for something completely different: a man with a stoat through his head. Nonono, not that. Instead, a thing from the garden:
It is, or so I understand, a truffle. Or rather two. I found them while mowing the front lawn on Sunday. This was somewhat unexpected. And indeed, I might not even have found them had I set the lawnmower to "high" instead of "low". Here's the ground they came from:
That's one; the other is equally uninteresting. The ground doesn't obviously satisfy the truffle-bearing criteria. There are tree roots around, true, including hazel (no oak in the front) but there…
stoat | June 9, 2017 In the pre-election special I said1:
The most likely result is a Tory victory with a (perhaps marginally) increased majority. But that would be dull, so why not speculate? A possible result is a hung parliament with – if my fellow electorate are not too foolish – the possibility of a Tory-LibDem coalition having a majority.
Part A of my speculation was fine; part B was Utopian. Well, in my defence I was trying to find a bright side to look at. But instead we get the DUP4.
The initial reaction to all this is that Theresa May looks like the idiot that she is; and that it is a disaster for the…
stoat | June 4, 2017 Scott Adams is suddenly interested in global warming. Why? It isn't a new issue and he doesn't really have anything new to say about it. I think the answer is that he has become a Trump fanboi and is running cover for Trump; or is still over-obsessed by his own perspicacity; or perhaps it is just a momentary interest. Or like covfefe we may never know.
Aanyway, having cartooned it once - and not again, and my patience is now exhausted - he's blogged it a bit, and has finally said something sensible1. Or at least, sensible compared to the rest. And since it is close to one of my hobby horses…
stoat | June 1, 2017 In the politics edition I made some amazingly prescient comments that now appear somewhat dated. Not quite definitively wrong4 - next week will seal that - but before the election itself it will be fun to write down what I think to see how it stacks up against what happens.
Less than two months ago I said What will happen? Labour will do badly, obviously and I don't see anyone disagreeing with that, then. Now we have the Torygraph saying stuff like Labour continue to narrow the gap on the Conservatives, with the General Election's latest polls and odds showing that Theresa May may not…
stoat | May 29, 2017 Well, interesting to me anyway. As to whether it is an error or not, I'll let you judge. Please do attempt to judge. Comments saying "I hate Timmy" are about as much use as "Al Gore is fat".
The story so far: Timmy says Contrary To AP/Equilar's Research The Top US CEOs Did Not Average $11.5 Million Last Year and his reason for saying that is accounting for stock options. For example
The top-paid CEO last year was Thomas Rutledge of Charter Communications, at $98 million. The vast majority of that came from stock and option awards included as part of a new five-year employment agreement, and…
stoat | May 27, 2017 Another in the long disappearing-up-my-own-arse series. Photogenic teens sue US government refers, of course, but so does U.S. fossil fuel groups pull out of climate change court case (via, and I'm sure you wanted to know this, C on Twitter). To whom I'm indebted for The money quote: "But discord arose among them after a judge ordered them to submit a joint filing stating their views on climate science." Which is glorious, and reflects the obvious and often-stated: that the denialists only real position is denial; they have no concrete worldview to put in its place; no coherent theory of…
stoat | May 26, 2017 I like the "Analysis*"; it reminds me of Tesco's "Finest*", where I think they intend the "*" to mean "star" as in quality; but I always read it as "*" as in "footnote: may not actual contain fine quality ingredients". But I digress. In this case, the "*" really is a footnote: Note that scientists only assessed information related to climate science. The following analysis is not an endorsement of the economic, political, or moral content of the encyclical. One can quibble whether reading only a small portion of a document is a useful overall assessment, but clearly if we're interested in…
oracknows | May 23, 2017I hesitated over discussing this story because it only comes from one source and that source is not one that I normally trust, The Washington Free Beacon. It might be fake news. On the other hand, it is a story that is not implausible and appears to be reasonably well reported, complete with a reproduction of an invitation to the event being reported on. Moreover, even though this particular source is unabashedly conservative and partisan, it has done some reporting that even Nick Baumann at Mother Jones admitted to be pretty good. So it is with a little bit of trepidation that I note this…
stoat | May 20, 2017 I apologise for breaking into the stream of politics for some science: Temperatures in the Arctic are increasing around three times as fast as the global average, yet the pace of warming has been much slower at Earth’s other pole. A new study, just published in Earth System Dynamics, suggests the difference might – in part – be down to the great heights of Antarctica’s land surface. The article is The polar amplification asymmetry: role of Antarctic surface height by Marc Salzmann. And since it's open-access I'm sure they won't mind me copying from their abstract:
Previous studies have…
stoat | May 20, 2017A happy story for once. Isn't that nice? The Big Green Bang: how renewable energy became unstoppable (archive) from those commie pinkos at the FT: ...the disruptive impact of green energy on companies — and entire industries — around the world. After years of hype and false starts, the shift to clean power has begun to accelerate at a pace that has taken the most experienced experts by surprise... Wind and solar parks are being built at unprecedented rates, threatening the business models of established power companies. Electric cars that were hard to even buy eight years ago are selling at…
stoat | May 19, 2017A bit weird, this. The Graun reports
No seeds were lost but the ability of the rock vault to provide failsafe protection against all disasters is now threatened by climate change... the Global Seed Vault, buried in a mountain deep inside the Arctic circle, has been breached after global warming produced extraordinary temperatures over the winter, sending meltwater gushing into the entrance tunnel... soaring temperatures in the Arctic at the end of the world’s hottest ever recorded year led to melting and heavy rain, when light snow should have been falling. “It was not in our plans to think…
stoat | May 16, 2017 A minor note; President (Moon Jae-in)’s decision to halt operating aged coal-fired plants shows his strong will to provide a fundamental solution to the current fine dust problem,” said Yoon Young-chan, the chief press secretary. Yoon also said Moon has ordered the senior social affairs secretary to create a special task force to deal with measures to combat fine dust here via VV on Twitter.
Which is to say, it seems likely that lots of coal will be retired for it's other polluting properties, rather than it's CO2 emissions. This isn't a new observation of course.
Meanwhile, it's springtime…
stoat | May 6, 2017 Sorry, I couldn't resist the memory. This is about Out of the lab and into the field? by ATTP, who as usual is far too polite about Out of the lab and into the field by Dan M. Kahan & Katherine Carpenter, Nature Climate Change 7, 309–311 (2017) doi:10.1038/nclimate3283. I convincingly demolished this as a load of toss based merely on the rather short abstract, but was uneasily aware that some kind person might mail me the article itself, and so it was. Thank you, you know who you are. Since we're on "out of", I feel I should recommend Straight outta Compton, to whose sound I wrote this…
stoat | May 5, 2017 Via a VV comment at ATTP I discover How a professional climate change denier discovered the lies and decided to fight for really long headlines which is fair enough, but via that I discover the far more interesting Taking Property Rights Seriously: The Case of Climate Change by Jonathan H. Adler1, a friend of said reformed denier.
This is interesting for two reasons: the arguments it puts forwards, and FME4 itself. Here's its abstract:
The dominant approach to environmental policy endorsed by conservative and libertarian policy thinkers, so-called "free market environmentalism" (FME), is…
stoat | May 3, 2017 Economist watch: Farewell to the Arctic is one of the headlines on the front cover of the April 29th edition, and The Arctic as it is known today is almost certainly gone is one of the leaders. Which is sort-of nice, to see it so prominently and starkly.
THOSE who doubt the power of human beings to change Earth’s climate should look to the Arctic, and shiver. There is no need to pore over records of temperatures and atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations. The process is starkly visible in the shrinkage of the ice that covers the Arctic ocean. In the past 30 years, the minimum coverage of…
stoat | May 2, 2017 I'm in a boring meeting, fortunately over Skype, so have time to bring you Antarctic iceberg crack develops fork from Aunty. Nicely, they've added Wales for scale; I don't think Swansea is to scale though.
The pretty banding is SAR interferometry which is cute stuff, though I don't think the article mentions that. The other picture in the article is also nice, with a clear break in the ice speed at the crack as you'd expect.
Update: bollox! I forgot the title first time round. That led to an amusing auto-title in Feedly. Fixed now.
Refs
* Don’t Let the Core Fall Out: Nitpicking Earth’s…
stoat | April 26, 2017 Perspective: It’s Not a War on Science by Clark A. Miller puts forward the thesis that
What appears to be a war on science by the current Congress and president is, in fact, no such thing. Fundamentally, it is a war on government2. To be more specific, it is a war on a form of government with which science has become deeply aligned and allied over the past century. To the disparate wings of the conservative movement that believe that US strength lies in its economic freedoms, its individual liberties, and its business enterprises, one truth binds them all: the federal government has become…
stoat | April 24, 2017 I'm not quite sure what to make of this1, but it seems interesting, and the video is lovely.
There are two papers: Antarctic ice shelf potentially stabilized by export of meltwater in surface river by Robin E. Bell et al., Nature 544, 344–348 (20 April 2017) doi:10.1038/nature22048:
Meltwater stored in ponds and crevasses can weaken and fracture ice shelves... However, surface rivers forming on ice shelves could potentially export stored meltwater and prevent its destructive effects. Here we present evidence for persistent active drainage networks... on the Nansen Ice Shelf in Antarctica…
stoat | April 22, 2017 I didn't march for science; I was busy running the Head of the Cam (in something of a turn-up for the books, Nines won, in only a tiny fraction over 9 mins, a good time; Jesus were three seconds slower and in a welcome return to form Caius were only a second slower than that; it promises well for the summer). But my daughter went down to London for other reasons and got caught up which is where my pic comes from. But what am I to think of it all? Being English, and generally rather curmudgeonly, I can hardly be enthusiastic; but I can't bring myself to be quite on RS's side. I think maybe…
stoat | April 18, 2017 I find myself unable to resist the calls to comment on the surprise calling of an UK election. But while here I'll comment on Trump, too.
Theresa May seeks snap election to take UK through Brexit
Says everyone, including the FT, which adds things like The pound rose on expectations that Mrs May would win a much increased Commons majority, allowing her to sideline implacable Eurosceptics in her Conservative party and ensure a phased Brexit concluding with a UK/EU free-trade deal. Polls predict a heavy defeat for the opposition Labour party, which has been in disarray under the leadership of…