climate science
stoat | November 26, 2016 Tis David Roberts, at Vox. I say that up front because although I'm pretty sure I've disagreed with him on just this kind of stuff before, I can't find it now. Although maybe I was thinking of the related How much is climate change going to cost us? at Grist, which is presumably much the same thing. DR starts with:
It's fairly well-established at this point that there's a robust scientific consensus about the threat of climate change. But analysts and journalists often say (or imply) that there's less of an economic consensus, that economists are leery of the actions recommended by…
stoat | November 23, 2016 Ah, excellent. I was looking for a post to hang my musings off, and Phil Plait's rant is a splendid peg. Not only that, but via fb I find this charming astronomer fox in Discarding Images; it is clear that the stars have aligned so I'll proceed.
PP is not just sad but outraged that
In an interview with the Guardian, Bob Walker, a senior Trump adviser, said that Trump will eliminate NASA’s Earth science research. This is the mission directorate of NASA that, among other important issues, studies climate change
and so on. And if you read the Graun's headline Trump to scrap Nasa climate…
stoat | November 21, 2016 In A proportionate response to Trump’s climate plans?" I reported RT's opinion that WTO rules only permit border taxes if there is an equivalent domestic tax. VV, no great fan of Tol, replied
William, a scientific article published this May came by on Twitter. It states: "The implementation of such measures is likely to be technically possible under WTO rules (Veel, 2009 Veel, P.-E. (2009). Carbon tariffs and the WTO: An evaluation of feasible policies. Journal of International Economic Law, 12(3), 749–800. doi: 10.1093/jiel/jgp031; Zhang, 2009 Zhang, Z. (2009). Multilateral trade measures…
stoat | November 18, 2016 Sea ice, having been rather dull this summer - though it was also briefly interesting in April / May - has suddenly become really quite interesting. Which is odd; the minimum is usually the only time anyone pays attention.
Tamino has a nice post as does Mark Brandon and so does every man and his rabbit. What does that leave me to say? I have to fill in quite a few lines before I get to the bottom of my inset image, after all.
While NH ice is clearly low - indeed, a record for the time of year - it will look much less exciting if it recovers (duh!); just as in summer the April / May excursion…
stoat | November 16, 2016 An interesting article by Chris Hope (a climate change policy researcher, PAGE model developer, and faculty member at Cambridge Judge Business School, interested in environment and energy; archive) of - oh dear - Arctic methane ‘time bomb’ could have huge economic costs fame. But never mind that. CH looks at Sarkozy's mooted plans to levy a "carbon tax" on US goods if trump leads the US out of the Paris agreement.
Tol, in the comments, correctly points out that France couldn't do this alone: it would have to be EU-wide. Never mind, pretend its a EU wide plan. Tol, in the comments, points out…
stoat | November 14, 2016 In Myron Ebell, Evil Arch Climate Uber Villain I touched on his wiki entry which is as of now rather better. Naturally, I'd like to claim to have been the impetus for all that but I rather doubt it.
A largeish blob of critical stuff got ripped out but it soon went back. More interestingly, someone tried to supply my "{{cn}}" for "In 2001, Ebell stated his belief that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the [[European Union]] and the rest of the world to harm America's economy", although in the process they felt obliged to change it to "Ebell has stated his belief that global warming is a…
stoat | November 14, 2016 JC has been veering more and more to the dark side in recent years1. Or maybe not so recent? I find that all the way back in 2010 I wrote Hopefully Curry isn’t going to fall off that cliff, but she is teetering. And I managed to be nice to her soon after. But in August of that year I felt obliged to announce her shark-jumping. And by 2013 it had only got worse to the point where I think I stopped reading her, and certainly made an effort to stop writing about her. She is suffering - uninterestingly - from having nowhere to go. Her scientific papers are of no interest but she is, by now,…
stoat | November 12, 2016It has been drawn to my attention that Myron Ebell will be Mr. Trump’s lead agent in choosing personnel and setting the direction of the federal agencies that address climate change and environmental policy. Not everyone is entirely happy about this3 and doubtless Trump will be distressed by that, but he is unlikely to take this unexpected opposition too seriously. Scratching my head and trying to think of a contrarian way to approach the matter, I thought I'd try reading what he has actually said, instead of reading what other people who don't like him say. First of all, slightly to my…
stoat | November 12, 2016 Or, The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government3. From Tacitus, Annals.
I wanted to say something about the Trump victory over Hillary2. I find that writing down what I actually want to say is difficult, because my thoughts are not entirely clear on the matter. But - searching for a latin proverb about the weather, since today's Fours Head looks to be rather damp1 - I ran across this, which whilst not covering in breadth everything that needs to be said, does I think have depth.
Coming soon: what Hayek and Hobbes have to say on Brexit, and funny quotes from the Times.
Notes
1…
stoat | November 6, 2016I haven't read the paper (Observed Arctic sea-ice loss directly follows anthropogenic CO2 emission; Dirk Notz and Julienne Stroeve; Science 03 Nov 2016: DOI: 10.1126 / science.aag2345), of course, because it is paywalled. Curiously, it doesn't seem to have made anyone else's blog (a paper about sea ice in Science, and everyone ignores it like it was in poor taste or something?). But I found U.S. and German researchers calculate individual contribution to climate change which offers us the immortal quote
“The observed numbers are very simple,” Notz said. “For each ton of carbon dioxide that a…
stoat | November 4, 2016 Those who poke around in obscure corners of the wub may have noticed that Force X from Outer Space was due to be published in October:
We are ramping up the end of this series because we’ve been informed that both of David’s papers will be published in October — one on the error in the climate models and one on the notch delay solar theory.
This was an event of somewhat less note than AW's epoch-making non-paper but surely it deserves some kind of mockery rather than total contempt? Or perhaps not.
Anyway, it is now November. Perhaps the papers didn't make Nature after all. I tweaked them…
stoat | November 2, 2016 Um, well, yes. What is this stuff? Pointed out to me first by Russell - see-also his Troglodyte narrative. This is about something sent to, or from, John Podesta which has surfaced via the increasingly-suspect Wikileaks. Which is to say MEMORANDUM JANUARY 28, 2014. CLIMATE: A UNIFYINF THEORY TO THE CASE.
An unified theory of climate? Excellent... we've all been looking for that.
After reading some dodgy websites I think it was sent by Chris Lehane ("a Democratic strategist and Steyer confidant"; or, if you're RS, one of "K-Street's famed Masters of Disaster". I don't even know what K-…
stoat | November 2, 2016 This will be old hat to most people but I've discovered two funky new location-type things today.
Number one, after I got a puncture and so needed a taxi back home, was getting a text from the taxi company saying "your driver is 2 mins away; click this to track him" whereupon I did, and got a cute Google map that showed him moving up the Milton road, stopping at all the traffic lights. I haven't tried Uber; I presume it is similar.
Number two was after I discussed with him how this was done. It is, of course, as I should have guessed but didn't, not a special hardware fit to the vehicle but…
stoat | October 31, 2016 Way to go, lefties. Via ATTP on Twitter I find Eric S. Godoy and Aaron Jaffe in the Op-Eds of the NYT1. I think it popped up because of Marx thought of the human body as part of the natural world and called nature an extension of our bodies. Following Marx, contemporary theorists like... and if you're trying to alienate the right wing - and indeed, almost everyone - invoking Marx is an excellent way of doing it2.
The ostensible theme of the article - that it might be better to think of climate change in terms of "revolution" rather than "war" - I find uninteresting. The bit worth commenting…
stoat | October 29, 2016 It seems a shame to be not discussing the greatest political scandal of the age wasting clickbait: Exposed: How top university helped secure £9million of YOUR money by passing off rivals' research as its own... to bankroll climate change agenda. That is by David Rose, who is an idiot1, in the Daily Fail, which is a stereotypically unreliable source.
You can, of course, discuss it in the usual swamps - and I see ATTP, who has a strong stomach, has. However it seems to have been curiously uninteresting to the folk in White Hats; I wonder why that is? Possibly because it is a stormette in a…
stoat | October 28, 2016Found via the Beeb but also available from Youtube. Lovely.
Refs
* Applications are invited for an artist to join HMS Protector for a three to four week placement during the Antarctic summer season (January to April 2017, precise dates TBC). The successful candidate will have the opportunity to work as the resident artist on board HMS Protector.
* ASICS GREATER MANCHESTER MARATHON IN TRAFFORD APRIL 2ND 2017. A bit shouty but I've entered anyway.
* All Brexit arguments settled by 0.5 per cent third-quarter growth
stoat | October 25, 2016
Oh FFS, more politics? Still no science? Sorry, but yes. The Economist doesn't like Putin, or rather what he's doing to Russia, and who could disagree with them. Certainly not me. The Commies themselves do, as you'd hope. I think the Economist is basically right: Putin and Russia are weak and flailing and dangerous because of that; much like (as they don't say) North Korea. Foundation and Empire, part II refers as does Foundation and Empire.
Vaguely connected to science, or at least the debate around it, it is nice to think that only two years ago I was vaguely relevant. And I liked Eli's…
stoat | October 12, 2016Post-referendum thoughts, and indeed Say no to Brexit refer. But so do Timmy's NO, DON'T LET MPS HAVE A VOTE ON BREXIT (Timmy is very shouty, as you'd expect) and The Brexit Conundrum - Freedom Of Movement Means Only Hard, Or Clean, Brexit Is Possible (so perhaps it is the ASI that is shouty. Well, you know what they're like).
Before we get into all the messy and unpleasant politics, here's a picture.
Chamois against the Pelvoux, seen from where the glacier Jean Gauthier used to be. You should see my close-up of a marmotte. Anyway, onwards.
[Far too late update: I've now added the question…
stoat | September 30, 2016 Browsing Twitter after a break I was unsurprised to see the usual suspects dissing that fine chap, Peter Wadhams. Heaven forfend that I should ever stoop so low. It is tempting to describe the "lame article" they were dissing as the usual stuff, but alas it isn't. It lards extra Yellow Peril guff onto the pre-existing guff. Incidentally the author, Paul Brown, was once a respectable chap - my great-aunt Proctor knew him somewhat. But that was many years ago. Bizarrely, the first "related posts" link in the article is to a far better article by Ed Hawkins pointing out how bad the previous…
stoat | September 20, 2016In comments on the sea ice post, both Rob Dekker and Chris Randles has queried an apparent change to the definition of "ice free" as applied to the Arctic. As any fule kno, the definition of "ice free" usually used is "less than a million square km" (1MSK) in order to account for the misc pockets of stuff that will hang around Greenland. FWIW, I'm not sure how useful this defn is, or whether it will survive closer analysis as we get closer to the event, but we're decades away now so it hardly matters.
Except, there's an unclarity. Is it 1MSK for a single year (maybe not; there could be a…