climate science
stoat | January 18, 2017As we all kinda knew in advance, 2016 turns out to be a record warm year. If you read UKMO you get Provisional full-year figures for global average near-surface temperatures confirm that last year, 2016, was one of the warmest two years on record, nominally exceeding the record temperature of 2015 but that's because they don't handle the Arctic very well, and the Arctic was very warm this year. NOAA is a bit more forthright (or see Moyhu): With eight consecutive record warm months from January to August, the globally averaged temperature over land and ocean surfaces for 2016 was the highest…
stoat | January 11, 2017 It am Michael Mann, saying
Climate models have proven extremely skillful in predicting the warming that has already been observed and, by many measures (e.g. Arctic sea ice loss, melting of the major ice sheets) it is proceeding faster than climate models predicted...
Notice any problems with that quote? Well yes: model inaccuracy is taken as proof of model skill. You cannot assert simultaneously that models are extremely skillful, and that change is occurring faster than they predicted. You can, of course, plausibly say If anything, uncertainty is breaking against us, not with us but that's…
stoat | January 7, 2017 Or, "philosophy advances one funeral at a time"? Oddly, no-one has ever said that (<checks Google> - no, I'm right: no-one ever has) because of course it doesn't fit. Philosophy isn't like science, with clear progress that rather leaves the Emeritus behind it3. DP says otherwise in his magnum opus, OWM, but doesn't prove the point.
So: news reaches me of the death of Derek Parfit, Philosopher. I am entirely unaware with his work, although the name is very vaguely familiar. Some people I respect pointed me initially at The whole philosophy community is mourning Derek Parfit. Here's why…
stoat | January 4, 2017Warning: tedious navel-gazing. Go elsewhere for substance. Partly this is to explore something I haven't seen before.
If I attempt to view this tweet I see
And if I then checkup twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr?visibility_check=true I see:
Obviously, if I actually just want to read it I can log out, or go via some intermediary, such as archive.is. So I know that the Text I May Not See is I've seen a lot of ugly in the climate wars, but Mann's comments on Curry's resignation are incredible (not to mention empirically false). JA replies Actually, @MichaelEMann is right on the money here. Who can…
stoat | January 2, 2017Mais où sont les neiges d'antan! Did you know that "Antan", though it now means "yesteryear" (which was itself coined to translate "antan") formerly meant "last year", as a contraction from the latin "ante annum"? Fascinating, eh. But not as fascinating as poking at the innards of dead things. Although now I come to it, most of the dead things were dead in 2015 or even 2014.
Before any harsh words here is not quite neige and indeed not antan, but it is a colchique dans le pre which is pretty well the same thing.
Let's start with a newish thing, Curry's Climate Etc review of 2016. Notice…
stoat | January 1, 2017More politics-via-fb I'm afraid. I wouldn't trouble you with this except people I know not only post it, but defend it. My headline could instead have been "a plea for toleration". Some... oh dear, I'm pleading for toleration, aren't I? So I'd better be nice and choose my words with care. Some website, "politicususa.com" wrote:
President-elect Trump delivered a bizarre New Year's message where he claimed that the majority of voters who voted against him are his enemies and losers.
Trump is indeed something of a loose cannon and I wouldn't have been especially surprised to see that he had done…
stoat | January 1, 2017 Just a quickie. In response to my last JM points me at The Greening of Planet Earth (1992), featuring luminaries such as Gerd-Rainer Weber of the German Coal Association (featured just in case you were under any illusion that it was only evil USAnian fossil fuel interests causing trouble; those nice sensible well-educated Krauts show similar) and our hero, Lindzen (looking egg-headed to an astonishing degree; but we're interested in his words, not his looks).
As you'd expect, it is the usual mixture of lies, half-truth, some genuine truth and some things technically true but in practice…
stoat | December 31, 2016 Via Twitter via ClimateDepot (hold your nose) we come to RealClear Investigations which quotes Lindzen as saying, inter alia, They should probably cut the funding by 80 to 90 percent until the field cleans up... Climate science has been set back two generations, and they have destroyed its intellectual foundations.” This is classic crusty old boy down the club stuff: it was all better when he were a lad, and so on. Just to remind you, I declared Lindzen emeritus in 2011, but he only became a shark-jumper in 2013. Although now I look he was pretty wacky even back in 2005 (older readers may…
stoat | December 30, 2016 The latest vandalism from the Dork Side is censoring the concept of "climate change" from a Wisconsin governmental website (Snopes; see-also Sou and of course half your fb and Twitter feed). As Sou points out this minor vandalism seems to have over-excited certain sections of the denialist crowd, which is to be expected: they need a constant stream of news, and are on edge waiting for Trump to do something thrilling. This latest episode has no obvious connection to Trump, and indeed has no clear author. So you don't have to go elsewhere, a present-day snapshot is this and an older pre-…
stoat | December 29, 2016A vintage year, for which the title must be Oh, and we were Gone / Kings of Oblivion. Something for everyone. Here, after review, is what catches on my mind. But first, my favourite mountain picture of the year.
Other reviews of the year: ATTP; me in 2015. Not a review of the year: Eleven Years Of Blogging by Martin Rundkvis.
* Jan: Science advances one funeral at a time discussed the unlamented death of Robert Carter, somewhat ironically preceded by WATN 2015.
* Feb: CSIRO: science as a public good because of some recent echoes; I'll probably blog those separately. And The Greatest Liberty…
stoat | December 21, 2016 Found, at last, the connection between Hayek and Climate! And from a most unlikely source, Climate Etc. Because it is at CE it is, of course, wrong. Even better, it is merely copied wrongness, from King Canute vs. the Climate Planners by "Jeffrey Tucker" (who?) at the Foundation for Economic Education, whoever they are (you might prefer the RationalWiki take).
Ignore the gumpf about Paris, wade through the irrelevance about Canute, and come to the interesting (to me; I'm not claiming to have carried you along) bit:
...the extraordinary speech F.A. Hayek gave when he received his Nobel Prize…
stoat | December 20, 2016 The latest in a long line of Exxon related drivel, this one from the Graun. It isn't drivel because it is wrong - that Rex Tillerson is a director of Exxon Neftegas is entirely true - it is drivel because it has long been public knowledge, and so the "leak" is irrelevant. The very first version of the wiki "Rex Tillerson" article from 2006 says In 1998, he became a vice president of Exxon Ventures (CIS) and president of Exxon Neftegas Limited with responsibility for Exxon's holdings in Russia and the Caspian Sea. That information has been there continuously since then to the present day. So…
stoat | December 18, 2016Or so says Climate Denial Crock of the Week. There's no real text behind the headline, just a link to a WSJ video. This seems to be about Meltwater produced by wind–albedo interaction stored in an East Antarctic ice shelf, J. T. M. Lenaerts et al., Nature Climate Change (2016) doi:10.1038/nclimate3180, published online 12 December 2016. Here's the abstract:
Surface melt and subsequent firn air depletion can ultimately lead to disintegration of Antarctic ice shelves1, 2 causing grounded glaciers to accelerate3 and sea level to rise. In the Antarctic Peninsula, foehn winds enhance melting near…
stoat | December 15, 2016 Via email spam, I end up pointed at U.S. Needs a Robust Carbon Tax, not an Exxon Carbon Tax. It is more Exxon stuff, fashionable again now that Rex Tillerson is confirmed as Trump's pick for Sec of State (if you want to see exactly the kind of stuff you'd expect - so much so that I hardly see why they bothered write it, it is so drearily predictable - see the Graun of course).
Anyway, after a bit of #exxonknew drivel they try desperately to explain why their wheel carbon tax is so much better than Exxon's wheel carbon tax. Because when you're both supporting the same thing, and yet clearly…
stoat | December 11, 2016
It's just my phone camera, so don't look too closely.
Refs
* Why We Support a Revenue-Neutral Carbon Tax by George Shultz & Gary Becker - April 8, 2013.
stoat | December 10, 2016 Via someone else (Gavin, perhaps?; his tweet is relevant) - I certainly don't read The Hill regularly - comes Trump's EPA pick will make Obama regret his environmental overreach by evil arch uber-villain Patrick Michaels. A quick search shows me not having much to say about PM; I seem to have left that to Eli (but that was waay back in 2006); there's also Tim Lambert, who certainly isn't keen; and I side-swipe PM in 2013 over some silly sea level graph.
Anyway, the piece can be taken as an indication of what PM thinks the Trump administration is likely to do, though there is no suggestion of…
stoat | December 9, 2016 The Exxon saga rumbles on. Via RK on fb I find Exxon Wins Latest Legal Round in Climate Fight With Mass. AG from Inside Climate News. And the motto is: those that live by the courts will die by the courts. Or, in this case, a federal judge in Texas says Massachusetts AG Maura Healey must answer questions about her climate investigation to Exxon lawyers. There is astonishment from the "good guys" over the very idea that their actions could possibly be subject to scrutiny: the order is extraordinary because it allows the target of her investigation to investigate her agency and so on. Well,…
stoat | December 7, 2016Preceded by Boris "the clown" Johnson, SA wins his coveted slightly damp biscuit1 for The Non-Expert Problem and Climate Change Science. TL;DR: it's a pile of dingoes kidneys. But before we get down to the insightful analysis, here's a barely relevant cartoon.
Notice the use of the words "weasel" and "expert", and the dig at ethics. Anyway, if you want someone slowly patiently and sorrowfully taking SA's junk to pieces, then you want Victor Venema2. Sou didn't like it either, but deferred the analysis to VV. Via a comment at Sou's I discover that PZ Myers has had some complaints about SA…
stoat | November 28, 2016 Look! No question mark in my title. This is from a post on retraction watch about "Nuclear energy and path dependence in Europe’s ‘Energy union’: coherence or continued divergence?" by Andrew Lawrence, Benjamin Sovacool, and Andrew Stirling, Climate Policy, 2016; 16 (5): 622 DOI: 10.1080/14693062.2016.1179616.
Given the title and conclusions the pro-nuke folk weren't likely to like it, and it looks like they were right not to like it. Two criticisms (linked from the RW article, another I'll skip because it was too shrill) are by Stephen Tindale and Suzanna Hinson and Nicholas Thompson. Those…
stoat | November 27, 2016 To be fair, only one of them is known to be photogenic1. Bizarrely, according to Slate, the young plaintiffs "range in age from 9 to 20"2. Brian reports but doesn't comment on the weirdness of having 9-year-olds suing in the courts. Are we really to believe that a 9-year-old has sufficient command of the issues? It seems utterly weird to me, more of a piece of performance art than a real thing, but the USA is a funny place. Apparently,
climate change violates their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property by causing direct harm and destroying so-called public trust assets such as…