climate science
stoat | September 19, 2016Plan 8 from outer space refers. If you can guess how that relates to this post's title1, then you will understand Gavin's tweet (which I didn't at the time). There's also a WaPo article and doubtless much elsewhere. This is for stuff so stupid that even WUWT is now rejecting it (though they used to like it). It's the pressure-causes-warming-not-GHE stuff, by Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller, or possibly by Den Volokin and Lark ReLlez, or perhaps by my cat Phoebe, it is rather hard to tell.
As Neuroskeptic points out, publishing under a pseudonym is a bit of an odd reason for rejecting a paper, and…
stoat | September 17, 2016 Time to declare this year's sea ice race over - thanks to those of you who pointed this out to me while I was on holiday. As an apology for the lack of interesting things to say about sea ice, there's a couple of nice pix of mountain ice at the end. Follow them to links to the full set but believe me there are far too many to look at. My lead pic I've ripped from Tamino; as compensation to him, if you click on it you'll get to his post.
Before people get confused, I should point out that "dull as expected" just means "the long term trend of decline continues". Those predicting imminent…
stoat | September 15, 2016 It's the folks over at No Truth Zone again. Thanks (do I mean that? No, I don't) ATTP for drawing it to my attention (via the swamp that is Breitbart). The wiki part is tediously wrong; see A child’s garden of wikipedia, part I in the unlikely event of your not being able to work out why yourself. It is though important to realise that Breitbart and NTZ are lying about everything; not just the important bits. Notice also the way that Peterson is Rasooled.
NTZ achieves it's trick by the not-very-subtle method of redefining the meaning of "global cooling scare". Instead of being a worry about…
stoat | September 15, 2016You may have noticed that blogging here has been a little thin recently. That's because I've been on holiday. It was glorious. There will be a full post or indeed series of posts in due course; for the moment you get just this.
If you can work out where that is without cheating you're doing well.
I plan to catch up on my email and blog comment backlog in due course.
* 2013
* 2012
* 2009
* 2007
stoat | September 3, 2016 The answer turns out to be "Arrhenius, of course" and the details turn out to be not desperately interesting. But if you want to know more see Which early works are cited most frequently in climate change research literature? A bibliometric approach based on Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (no, I didn't bother find out exactly what they meant by that) by Werner Marx, Robin Haunschild, Andreas Thor and Lutz Bornmann. h/t Retraction Watch although this appears to have nothing to do with retraction.
Most of the others aren't really "climate change" at all - trade winds and the like.…
stoat | August 31, 2016There's a vair nice post at Moyhu called climate feedbacks and circuits.
I think it is particaulrly nice that someone competent has finally taken and shaken the gibberish about feedbacks that the EE's fling about so thoughtlessly and actually made some sense of it.
stoat | August 29, 2016
An image from the Economist's Technology Quarterly. Interesting to me: I've been following the Space X (not to be confused with Force X) stuff with great interest. But I hadn't realised that launch was such a tiny fraction of the overall spend.
As a minor tie into the nominal subject of this blog, notice that meteorology is 3% of the satellites. That probably folds in climatology too.
stoat | August 28, 2016 There is, of course, a theory of law. As soon as you ponder the question, you realise there must be. But it had never occurred to me (in my faint defence I find, now I look, that whilst wiki has a category for theories of law, it doesn't seem to have an overall article on the concept of theory of law). Nor, when I mention it to various friends, did the question strike any kind of "oh yeah, I know that stuff" answer. My children, who have done some "philosophy" in school, hadn't heard of the idea either.
So this post is likely to be naive. But my dumb opinions are just as good as anyone else…
stoat | August 22, 2016 Andy Skuce, in On and against method and process is (to me) bizarrely keen on Paul Feyerabend (though presumably he discards the numerous cites to Lenin, denigration of modern medicine, and all the really wacko stuff). I kinda tend to mix F up with the other out-of-their-depth French folk like Latour that Sokal and Bricmont shredded but that's probably unfair; either way my suspicion is that if you're interested in a criticism and analysis of F, you'd be better off with Sokal and Bricmont. But that's rather long; who has the patience nowadays to carefully read reasoned expert critiques when…
stoat | August 19, 2016 A delightful phrase that I've just discovered. And the answer is, it is John Vidal; and so Peter Wadhams is the wind. Perhaps that's just a bit closer to the knuckle than even I tend to sail but its late on a Friday night. Thanks to VV on twitter for the first link and a variety of folks for the second.
This is the familiar "Time to listen to the ice scientists about the Arctic death spiral" type nonsense, only in this case - as pointed out on twitter - we're being urged not to listen to the opinions of scientists in general, but only to the extreme fringe of opinion. Or in JV's words:
In a…
stoat | August 17, 2016 Or so says the Fail. If you don't want your mind poisoned, you can read much the same press release from Reuters. If you'd prefer it described in more moderate language (you weirdo!) you can read the BAS PR directly: New Antarctic ice discovery aids future climate predictions:
A team of British climate scientists comparing today’s environment with the warm period before the last ice age has discovered a 65% reduction of Antarctic sea ice around 128,000 years ago. The finding is an important contribution towards the challenge of making robust predictions about the Earth’s future climate.
Or…
stoat | August 15, 2016 Every now and again I say something, and someone replies with stuff about wild-eyed Libertarians, and I don't care because I don't know any of them. But anyway, via RS I ended up at lp.org and this seemed a reasonable chance to find out what they thought; so I ended up reading their platform. I urge you to; it is short, succinct, and quite readable; as well as being rather wild-eyed. As I know nothing about flavours of Libertarianism in the US of A, I'm going to assume they are typical or mainstream, for libertarians that is.
I pick out a couple of things: schools, taxes and the environment…
stoat | August 15, 2016Summer Atmospheric Circulation Anomalies over the Arctic Ocean and Their Influences on September Sea Ice Extent: A Cautionary Tale (Mark C. Serreze, Julienne Stroeve, Andrew P. Barrett, Linette N. Boisvert, DOI: 10.1002/2016JD025161) says "sea ice is complicated". Or, in more detail:
Numerous studies have addressed links between summer atmospheric circulation patterns and inter-annual variability and the downward trend in total September Arctic sea ice extent. In general, low extent is favored when the preceding summer is characterized by positive sea level pressure (SLP) anomalies over the…
stoat | August 14, 2016 The roasting of the Middle East: Infertile Crescent: More than war, climate change is making the region hard to live in. Or so says the Economist, Aug 6th 2016. I admit, I'm surprised. I'd put utterly crap government (which includes the current wars) top of their list of problems. Still, let's see what TE has to say to justify its headline. Before that, some basic googling reveals what I already knew - that the idea is hardly new - and that Mike Hulme doesn't believe it. This is also an excellent excuse to link to JF's What happens to local weather/climate when cities tear out lawns?
“UNTIL…
stoat | August 13, 2016 Good grief, I am becoming a veritable post-generating machine. Don't worry though I'll dry up soon enough. This one is a cheap rip-off of PW's post which is a pointer to the rather nice What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists. That's about a physicist talking to a variety of "I have a theory" physics nutters, although as she says One or two seemed miffed that I didn’t immediately exclaim: ‘Genius!’, but most of my callers realised that they can’t contribute to a field without meeting today’s quality standard. Then again, I hear only from those willing to invest in…
stoat | August 13, 2016 Oh dear oh dear. But this one is almost about sea ice, so I get a free hand to rant about yet more faux-greenie drivel. The news: a giant floating gin palace is going to visit the Arctic so that giant floating gin-drinkers can drink giant gins while surrounded by ice and, occasionally, poor people. And they've chartered a UK "icebreaker"1 to kinda hang around and look red, in case they need rescuing or something. Or perhaps just to look good in pictures, the red really stands out. I have a gorgeous picture of the Bransfield (RIP) with a floating-in-cloud pure ice peak above her, above my…
stoat | August 12, 2016 A local kerfuffle. The apparently-determined-to-tear-itself-apart Labour party got taken to the courts by some of its members who didn't like a decision the NEC - the party's governing body - had made, in respect of the rules for who was eligible to vote in the upcoming leadership contest. My preferred response from the courts would have been "we will only intervene in the internal affairs of a political party (or indeed, any other organisation) when there is a clear and obvious need to do so, and when a clear and obvious error or injustice has been committed; and in this case, clearly, the…
stoat | August 12, 2016 In a success for the "invisible hand" over "big government", we have People gather to buy fresh produce that was brought into rebel held areas of Aleppo by private traders from a newly opened corridor that linked besieged opposition held eastern Aleppo with western Syria that was captured recently by rebels, in Aleppo versus U.N. Seeks 48-Hour Aleppo Ceasefire to Deliver Aid to Syrians.
I heard the second link on R4 a day or so ago and thought to myself "how typical of a giant lumbering bureaucracy". The first, contrasting, link was a throwaway line in the FT, that I then found online.
stoat | August 11, 2016 The normally sensible John Fleck has a post pointing out the bleedin' obvious - well; it points out the issue; the solution suggested is of course hopelessly wrong1 -, although to be fair it has escaped the attention of many other people too, so perhaps it is only obvious if you think about it. In this case, the obvious is that scientists ...have characterized and clarified the physical science part of the problem, and it’s only natural to then turn to those scientists in our discussion of what to do about it. But... the “what to do about it” stuff lies in a domain different from the…
stoat | August 10, 2016 About the most useless game to play in discussions about global warming is to worry much about the distinctions between "proven facts", "theories", "hypotheses" and so on and so forth. These are ideas best left to philosophers and schoolmen. My image comes from the ever-helpful RS which is my excuse for having noticed a WUWT post. RS has picked out one obvious problem - which, oddly enough, the WUWT commentators notice too. A further one comes up when our hero attempts to probe these concepts further:
In the scientific community, for both a law and a theory, a single conflicting experiment…