climate science
stoat | March 29, 2017 Rather appropriately, with all the murk swirling around Trump's ties to the Commies, Judith Curry and John Christy are looking for new sources of income suggesting that Congress fund “red teams” to investigate “natural” causes of global warming and challenge the findings of the United Nations’ climate science panel according to the WaPo. In case you're in the slightest doubt about where La Curry was aiming her testimony, she concludes Let’s make scientific debate about climate change great again. FFS. This, in case you've been asleep, is all in the context of the House Committee on un-…
stoat | March 28, 2017 So says Victoria Herrmann in the Graun; with subheading These politically motivated data deletions come at a time when the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the global average. The alert will immeadiately wonder: do you mean citations, or data? Because they aren't the same thing. Those even more alert will wonder "did you even mean citations, or just hyperlinks?" Such folk will not be enlightened by the rest of the article, which continues with paragraphs like:
At first, the distress flare of lost data came as a surge of defunct links on 21 January. The US National Strategy for the Arctic,…
stoat | March 27, 2017 Or so says the Graun: A plan to halve carbon emissions every decade, while green energy continues to double every five years, provides a simple but rigorous roadmap to tackle climate change, scientists say. Well you can't fault the simplicity; then again "everyone should be nice to everyone else" is also simple. The obvious flaw is that Moore's law is descriptive, not prescriptive: it describes a situation that is observed to exist. It is not a "law" in the legislative sense of a thing that we want to happen1.
You'd hope the distinction would be obvious; for the Graun, sometimes it is,…
stoat | March 25, 2017 Tired of tossers6, I seem to be having a ha ha ha series. And it's time for a two-month review of my brilliantly prescient Trump predictions. Except not really, because it's too early, but I think the failure of his repeal of Obamacare is a good time to take stock, without breaking my resolution to not post too much politics too often2.
[Picture: us at The Bridge at Clayhithe7. We were supposed to be going to HoRR but it was cancelled due to bad weather... as you can see.]
There are many people going "nya nya" to Trump; here's one in The Atlantic from the Republican viewpoint. Since repeal…
stoat | March 20, 2017 The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression is a history by Angus Burgin of... well, you can read the potted summaries there, none are quite exact, I'll off you another gross simplification: of the transition from Hayek as prophet-in-the-wilderness to the triumph of Friedman. So, this post is yet more politics, or economics, as you please; with only tangential reference to science.
The context - relevant for me, and therefore fascinating for you - is me reading Law, Legislation and Liberty and The Road to Serfdom (both, I admit, uncompleted tasks; Hayek is many things…
stoat | March 15, 2017 Also known as Qinghua Ding et al., Nature Climate Change (2017) doi:10.1038/nclimate3241; published online 13 March 2017 (PDF as submitted). And the abstract:
The Arctic has seen rapid sea-ice decline in the past three decades, whilst warming at about twice the global average rate. Yet the relationship between Arctic warming and sea-ice loss is not well understood. Here, we present evidence that trends in summertime atmospheric circulation may have contributed as much as 60% to the September sea-ice extent decline since 1979. A tendency towards a stronger anticyclonic circulation over…
stoat | March 12, 2017 UAH V6 has finally been published (archive). Once upon a time this kind of stuff was dead exciting, but now it is just another revision of just another dataset, and no-one cares very much. The paper itself is paywalled, but RS kindly points to the submitted version.
As DA points out, RS needs a reason why his lovely shiny new paper is in a relatively minor journal. RS's explanation is the Evil Klimate Konspiracy but I think two three other explanations are more likely. The most prosaic is that the paper simply isn't very exciting or novel; it is, as I said at the start, just another…
stoat | March 5, 2017Lents again; here's a link to 2016 if you want to re-live the past. It was a great week, full of thrills and excitement. Caius weren't up to it (as prefigured by Mays) and were caught by Downing on the first day; Maggie patiently bumped Pembroke then Caius to get their shot at Downing on day 3. Regrettably, Downing's rudder strings broke at the top of the reach1, so we didn't get a clean kill; but LMBC were clearly faster (see for example this). Jesus rowed over as women's head; Clare rose to second.
These are my videos, mostly here for my reference. But first, a nice pic of the top crews…
stoat | March 4, 2017 It am de Fail, they be at it again. With the world's longest and least coherent headline1: The making of a Wiki-Lie: Chilling story of one twisted oddball and a handful of anonymous activists who appointed themselves as censors to promote their own warped agenda on a website that's a byword for inaccuracy. The key here is their first bullet point, Wikipedia’s editors decided that the Mail’s journalism cannot be trusted. This is of course old news; the Graun reported it in early February which was when the vote itself was closed. But it seems like the Fail can't stop picking at the scab.…
oracknows | March 3, 2017The impetus for the creation of this blog, lo these 12+ years ago, was growing alarm at the rising tide of pseudoscience then, such as quackery, antivaccine misinformation, creationism, Holocaust denial, and many other forms of attacks on science, history, and reality itself. I had cut my teeth on deconstructing such antiscience and pseudoscience on Usenet, that vast, unfiltered, poorly organized mass of discussion forums that had been big in the 1990s but were dying by 12 years ago, having turned into a mass of spam, trolls, and incoherence. So I wanted to do my little part (and I'm under no…
stoat | February 27, 2017 Or, as John Abraham puts it in the Graun, Just who are these 300 'scientists' telling Trump to burn the climate? It appears that long-term union man Lindzen has been organising again, buoyed perhaps by the prospect of some kind of reward from the Trump admistration. It seems rather notable to me, however, that none of those who might have hoped for some baubles to be tossed their way have got anything; but it's still early.
This has shades of the 2007 official nutter's list. That was "100 prominent scientists"many of whom were neither prominent nor scientists. This bumps the number up to 300…
stoat | February 21, 2017 Today's lesson is from Is Decoupling GDP Growth from Environmental Impact Possible? (h/t mt), by James D. Ward , Paul C. Sutton, Adrian D. Werner, Robert Costanza, Steve H. Mohr, Craig T. Simmons; October 14, 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0164733. And here is their abstract.
The argument that human society can decouple economic growth—defined as growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—from growth in environmental impacts is appealing. If such decoupling is possible, it means that GDP growth is a sustainable societal goal. Here we show that the decoupling concept can be…
stoat | February 15, 2017 By the Climate "Leadership" Council: a who’s who of conservative elder statesmen, this statement is the first time leading Republicans put forth a concrete, market-based climate solution. The idea is essentially Hansen's fee-and-dividend, though naturally they don't mention H; and thankfully they're prepared to say "tax" instead of H's weaselly "fee". Although they do lead with the idea of "dividends"; the inevitable tax component is only visible if you read on. The initial rate is $40 per tonne, which is fair enough. The Carbon Tax Center seem happy enough. As they say, there's a political…
stoat | February 14, 2017From 2017 Underwater Photographer of the Year I select this one as the best:
It is, apparently, a Lionfish in its early larval stage. Here's my picture of a lionfish:
Refs
* Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2014
* Stoat-tastic
stoat | February 11, 2017 I have a said a number of times1 - to no great applause it must be said - that those who are "fooled" by the denialists and faux news and so on are mostly fooled because they are entirely happy to be fooled.
But now it turns out that I was definitely right, because there is a latin tag, Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur to express the same thing. Or more pithily, simply Mundus vult decipi.
I don't think I've had a post as short as this for ages. Refreshing, isn't it?
Notes
1. Although as it happens I can't find many examples. Here is one.
Refs
* ‘When I Consider Life’ by John Dryden: When…
stoat | February 8, 2017 Timmy has been for a while my prime - and possibly only - example of a sane libertarian, climate-wise. In that he has frequently advanced economic arguments on the basis of accepting the IPCC WGI science. And, it has to be said, in the face of opposition from his commentariat, who are stupid, almost to a man. However, it has never been clear that he actually does believe it, and on various occasions he has been fairly Lomborgish: accept, nominally, but then downplay. Now, with This is the point at which we rise up and hang them all it finally becomes clear that he does believe the Daily Fail…
stoat | February 4, 2017 William (good name!) Nordhaus has a new study out. The purveyors of snake oil seek to convey to the impressionable youth that he has changed his mind. However, it is a touch unclear in what manner his mind has change. Let's try reading the abstract:
Climate change remains one of the major international environmental challenges facing nations. Yet nations have to date taken minimal policies to slow climate change. Moreover, there has been no major improvement in emissions trends as of the latest data. The current study uses the updated DICE model to present new projections and the impacts of…
stoat | January 29, 2017 The Evanescent published an article entitled "Global Warming Policy Foundation – the UK home of climate change sceptics – hit by 60% membership fee slump. That link is to an archive of Google's cache; the article no longer exists [Update: but a few hours later is back: archive].
However, we can still do what the article says: Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment in London, unearthed the figures after they were submitted by the GWPF to Companies House. and see if we can verify These show that the income from…
stoat | January 28, 2017 Ha ha, fooled you. That's the director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics talking about Rex Tillerson. In more detail:
I’m especially proud of the ethics agreement we developed for the intended nominee for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson. Mr. Tillerson is making a clean break from Exxon. He’s also forfeiting bonus payments worth millions. As a result of OGE’s work, he’s now free of financial conflicts of interest. His ethics agreement serves as a sterling model for what we’d like to see with other nominees. He clearly recognizes that public service sometimes comes at a cost. The…
stoat | January 21, 2017
I was going to write something much harsher than this; but then I chanced upon "ignorant armies" and hence was reminded of Dover Beach and it was so gloriously beautiful again that I can't bring myself to be unkind, at least for a while.
So instead I'll just quietly point out that the vast slew of Trump stories are counter-productive. The one that triggered my... I'm being nice, aren't I? OK, my disapproval, was Trump has violated his oath to the Constitution. But it is just an example; there are many many others. The bit they are worrying about is "emolument"; and they're worried, for…