climate science
stoat | August 8, 2016A hectic week of rowing and two weeks in Norway has left a bit of a hole in my blogging schedule. I also think it is about time to recognise that my long drift away from active involvement with science, combined with not-a-lot-going-on-really in actual climate science means I'll need to find other things to write about. Fortunately I spent quite a lot of my free time in Norway reading Hayek so there's a lot to discuss, starting with theory of law, which I discover is a thing. But that's not for today. Also, I'll get back to the sea ice at some point and try not to annoy Brian too much.
This…
stoat | July 23, 2016It has been rather quiet around here recently. That's due to a combinations of Summer, Work and Rowing. The latter has culminated in the annual festival called "Cambridge town bumps" and the answer is up three, which is a decent result in the first division. Not quite blades, because we stuffed up Thursday, but who knows we might not have caught Tabs 2 anyway.
The full wildly exciting story - which I'll spare you - is told in posts on the club blog for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
Briefly: after a good winter and a spring training camp in Sabaudia our M1 was shaping up well,…
stoat | July 8, 2016 I can never ever find this quote when I want it. But, I've got a blog. So now I will be able to find it. It is from Hobbes of course; but Elements not Leviathan - though there's a similar passage in Leviathan which I can't find just now. Here's the full quote in context, from Chapter 7: Of Delight and Pain; Good and Evil
Seeing all delight is appetite, and appetite presupposeth a farther end, there can be no contentment but in proceeding: and therefore we are not to marvel, when we see, that as men attain to more riches, honours, or other power; so their appetite continually groweth more and…
stoat | July 6, 2016Paxton Drops Challenge as Exxon Mobil Probe Shifts says the Texas Tribune - strangely, Inside Climate News, normally so fascinated by Exxon related legal matters, doesn't seem to have covered it. The Washington Times offers Climate change prosecutors suffer setback as AG pulls Exxon subpoena, which appears to be much the same thing.
Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude E. Walker agreed Wednesday to withdraw his climate-related subpoena of ExxonMobil, a stunning reversal that delivered a blow to the Democratic-led effort to prosecute climate change dissent.
And so on. I just thought I'd…
stoat | July 3, 2016A photographic essay.
Hive #2, "flattop", with a smoker on top and surrounded by a carpet of weeds. The bees don't really mind that, I think. The observant will notice the roof is in rather poor condition - but its been like that for years and not getting much worse - and the queen excluder is above the first super, which is careless of me.
Hive #1 is even more covered in weeds, perhaps a little more than is desireable. The odd blob on top is my gloves.
General view, with my shed in the background.
Looking the other way to the (not visible) stream at the bottom. The triffid on the left is…
stoat | June 30, 2016 I haven't had a tosser for a while, the last was Quentin Letts, so it seems appropriate that this year's winner should be another joke Tory pol, Boris the Clown. For whom Satirists can’t f*cking type quick enough seems to have been written.
Having joined "Leave" purely for his own stupid selfish political gain, the bozo has taken fright at what's happened and ducked out of the Tory leadership race like the pathetic low-grade coward he is. I suppose he was a useful idiot to head the Leave campaign... but, really, what was the point?
He wasn't in "Leave" from conviction, he was in it for his…
stoat | June 25, 2016Just as I wrote down my thoughts pre-vote, and advised against leaving, I'll write down my thoughts a day or so after, for posterity. Doubtless it will be grateful. First off I like my son am already bored with the Diana-esque levels of news clogging that the vote has caused, so I apologise for adding to it. Feel free to comment at ATTP or Sou if you like. Or here.
But before all that, a picture of a rose, otherwise everything would be somewhat depressing. Fittingly, it is slightly downcast and perhaps past its finest bloom. But it's a brand-new forward looking Perse rose.
Anyway, just as…
stoat | June 22, 2016 Pah, another el-cheapo clickbait post, spawned by Twitter. The conversation went something like this:
mt: Exxon knew, of course. Every decent geophysicist has known about climate problem for decades. How could they not know? All oil majors know.
me: Errm, this is what I've been saying for some time. I didn't get traction, though. All govts knew, too, of course.
Gavin: I am too sexy for this conversation The issue is not that #ExxonKnew, but that #Exxonknewthenliedaboutit (possibly in contravention of securities law). At some point, Exxon went from standard industry bias to funding &…
stoat | June 19, 2016 Bored with force X from outer space? Was Force F just too fuckwitted, and part 22 just too dull? Then why not play "hedge funds"? Hedge funds do lots of complex maths and make lots of money (only not so much recently); they also have the advantage of being opaque. So play today, with Jo Nova and her band of performing marsupials. Yes, I know, its a picture of a monkey with an arrow up it's bum, and a monkey is not a marsupial. But no known mediaeval manuscripts feature marsupials.
Context, context: I forget the context in my obsession with primate posteriors. coolfuturesfundsmanagement is,…
stoat | June 13, 2016People have been asking for the sea ice post, so here it is. I've been putting it off, obviously. The $10k bet comes due this year but its looking like a bad year; and secondly I don't really have all that much to say. Just to remind you, the terms are
If both NSIDC and IARC-JAXA September 2016 monthly average sea ice extent report are above 4.80 million km^2, RD pays WMC US$ 10,000. If both are below 3.10 million km^2, WMC pays RD US$ 10,000. In all other cases the bet is null and void.
You should also read the argument that Rob presented in that post. That bet was arranged in 2011. 5 years…
stoat | June 12, 2016I first started watching the Mays in 2011, when Caius went head, bumping Pembroke and First & Third along the way. So I selected Caius as my college-to-support, even though we then rowed out of Peterhouse and now row out of Queens, and know people in King's and Christ's. In 2013 they were outstanding; in 2014 good and in 2015 they only survived the last day due to a regrettable Pembroke crab.
But this year, whilst they survived Pembroke on Wednesday and LMBC on Thursday and Friday, they finally fell to Maggie on Saturday half way down the reach:
Anyway, this post is for me to collect the…
stoat | June 6, 2016 UK ports look beyond fading coal imports says the FT:
Ports from south-west England to central Scotland have been taken aback by the speed at which demand has evaporated for what had been one of their most dependable cargoes — coal. As coal-fired power stations across the country shut, ports have been hit by a sharp drop in imports... At the Port of Tyne — located on a river that has shipped coal since the 14th century — coal imports are expected to dive from a record 5m tonnes in 2013 to zero this year... In recent decades, imports have been boosted by the contraction of UK coal mining and…
stoat | June 6, 2016A very good post from Brian which manages to say in few words many of the things I've been thinking about the "debate" recently, using Global-Warming Alarmists, You're Doing It Wrong by someone called "Megan McArdle" as his text. Disclaimer: I haven't read that.
Naturally, you should comment at the original rather than here, unless you really want to comment here.
As a special bonus, I'll spare you a rowing post by tacking it on here: us winning IM3 at Peterborough this Saturday. Sadly the official time of 2:56.3 is nonsense; you need to add on 20 seconds.
That's (from furthest away) Fitz (…
stoat | June 2, 2016A Delayed Review of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate by Naomi Klein By Peter Dorman (Evergreen State College); h/t Hank. I agreed with it all, so largely skimmed it nodding. I haven't read the book though, obvs.
Hank sourced it to Understanding Climate Radicalism on metafilter, which I never look at, but this time I did and amidst the dross was a link to yet another blog which had a number of nice posts, including Hobbes’s difficult idea which I thought very good; on why positing an ideology, called “market fundamentalism,” which is somehow supposed to explain our inaction…
stoat | May 30, 2016 Or so say Science and various others; you can read the EU PR directly. And of course, mixed into the tenor of the times, this becomes "another reason to stay in the EU" (and we'll quietly forget about an apparently insane new car hire rule). Anyway, what immeadiately strikes me about this "new" thing is that it is what the US has had forever, so why is it being touted as so exciting? Even Science, who are USAnians, don't mention that aspect, so perhaps I'm wrong. Also, I shouldn't forget to snark how pathetic it is that in EU-world (or perhaps just snail-like-government-in-general-world) "…
stoat | May 23, 2016[Update: and the answer was: leave. Oh dear.]
This indecision's bugging me
(Esta indecision me molesta)
If you don't want me set me free
(Si no quieres librame)
Exactly who I'm supposed to be
(Digame que tengo ser)
Don't you know witch clothes even fits me?
(Sabes bruja ropa me queda)
Come on and let me know
(Me tienes que decir)
Should I cool it or should I blow?
(Me debo ir o quedarme)
I thought the mixed-in Spanish verse was a nice touch for a post about Europe.
This post is largely for me to record my own opinion, so that in later years I can read it and realise how foolish I was. Or…
stoat | May 15, 2016 Now that Sou has written at length, I can throw in my few thoughts. The first of which is that it is all really very silly indeed, in so many ways, by so many people.
Firstly, what were Shukla, Maibach and all the others thinking when they did all of this from their work email accounts? As wiki says Edward Maibach is a widely recognized expert in public health and climate change communication; he's a pro. So why is he acting like some naive child in the woods? Half way through they finally get a clue and swap to private email but good grief its a bit late by then. Idiots. They initially try…
stoat | May 13, 2016As I've argued before, carbon taxes are better than carbon trading because they are simpler, there is less bureaucracy, less room for political interference, and less room for a parasitic class to form. In witness of which, David Hone's article about the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA)'s "vision".
Well, that was a bit short, wasn't it (I couldn't be bothered to do any more). Now I remember a rather silly recent article at RC, Recycling Carbon? by Tony Patt of ETH Zürich, which says We know, from two decades of social-science research, that [carbon tax or cap-and-trade] do…
stoat | May 11, 2016 There's much tweeting going on of Real Global Temperature Trend, p18 – Now how high is climate sensitivity? Here’s the answer of the world’s 13 leading climate experts! especially by those blessed to be in the magic 13. However, I like Jonathon Gregory's answer:
It’s a good question but I don’t place any confidence in gut feelings, so my answer would be the likely range of the AR5. I found Kahneman’s discussion convincing in “Thinking, fast and slow” of the ways in which intuition misleads us, and in particular that experts are overconfident.
Refs
* If We Don't Know Where The Jobs Are To…
stoat | May 2, 2016 It's in the graun, so it must be true. However, just for once I'm going to agree with them. So, quick summary: Minnesota has a social cost of carbon, ish, and a Commission to quantify and establish a range of environmental costs associated with each method of electricity generation; and requires utilities to use the costs when evaluating and selecting resource options" in some sense or another. They were sued to update the value they used, from a rather low one set in 1997, to the current federal government’s Social Cost of Carbon. That was always going to be pretty hard to defend against;…