climate snarking
stoat | January 30, 2014Can I really be the first to snark about this?
Expert and Government Review Comments on the IPCC WGI AR5 Second Order Draft – General is now available for download.
As you'd expect, the pompous "Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, United Kingdom" notches up a string of "reject", please read the guidelines. Someone called "Jyrki Kauppinen, Finland" gets all his comments rejected with "please read what we said the first time". That was just the general stuff. There may be some treasures buried in the individual chapters.
John McLean gets lots of retractions; he seems to be some NN from the ASSC…
stoat | January 3, 2014
Image credit: The Phytophactor
After a hard day down the lint mines realigning brackets, its nice to turn to the comic section and such greats as:
rpielke says: January 3, 2014 at 1:21 pm: ...Your work really should be funded by the NSF or other such grant awarding organizations.
I hasten to add that RP Sr is not speaking of me, no, he is talking of renowned blogger Bob Tisdale. BT has, he says, been spending 8 to 16 hours-per-day blogging, writing books and producing videos over the past few years, but alas it doesn't pay the rent so he needs to get a job. I don't think I need to say…
stoat | August 7, 2013The AGU has a revised policy statement on Human-induced climate change requires urgent action (h/t: everyone).
As with any serious item like this, people release comedy versions. RP Sr had a go and JC threw in her bit, and now Screaming Lord Monckton has had a go, at the home of Blog Science Comedy, WUWT. To paraphrase M'lud:
* Global warming isn't happening
* But if it was, it would be great
But whilst risible, he wins no points for originality: that kind of stuff is old hat.
So, I proudly announce (don't let me down now) the Stoat Competition of the Month (ta da!): in your own words (but…
stoat | June 22, 2013What a weird phrase. It sort of sounds like it ought to mean something, but it means nothing at all. "It speaks clearly of truth" would be better - but the grammar doesn't quite work. The alternate title to this post, incidentally, was "Like a trouser, yet not a trouser". I'll reserve that for future use.
I picture a large mountain, immaculate and shining with pure snow, glowing with inner fire: Mt Truth, the abode of all that is truthy. And down below, gazing up at the summit glimpsed dimly through the clouds, a small (but clear-voiced) figure speaking. Errm, to the mountain. Is the figure…
stoat | June 15, 2013Yes, its the wonderful Heartland / WUWT own-goal over the Chinese translations of HI's Climate Change Reconsidered. I have nothing to add except laughter, so you may as well read
* BCL(SB),
* Eli,
* HW.
Not edifying, true, but certainly amusing.
Since I'm here I may as well put up something: can I interest you in this fine photo of a goldfinch, lying symbolically on a bed of peony petals? The peony represents transient beauty, and so it would seem does this particular goldfinch. The culprit may just be circumstance, or may be closer to home.
After a day, she decided to eat it anyway:…
stoat | January 19, 2013Um. sorry folks, don't blame me, blame Eli. 'twas the now-aged lagomorph who attempted to interest me in the good old days of sci.env when we were all young and bushy-tailed. And indeed that thread does make for interesting reading: the present-day switch to blogs doesn't encourage that style of discussion any more.
Anyway, what prompted this post (is this incestuous enough for you yet?) was TB's witty rejoinder that "Clearly Eli hasn’t kept up with recent developments in the literature at JASTP, Elsevier and elsewhere. Well, what fun, I could but follow, and discover that
My thanks to…
stoat | October 1, 2012 h/t to JM for More on the Iconography of IPCC 1990 Figure 7 - scroll down for the breathless prose.
First the background: why does anyone care about figure 7.1.c of the IPCC '90 report? Well, if you're a denialist you care, because it represents the true uncorrupted state of climate science before the evil taint of the hockey stick crept in. I suppose if anyone doesn't believe that and challenges me I'll have to go crawling in the slime for references, so please don't make me do it. So, the septic storyline is "true uncorrupted state" -> "corrupt hockey stick". That works OK with a naive…
stoat | September 13, 2012 Ah, superb.
WATTS EXPLAINS WHY LEWANDOWSKY PAPER ON CONSPIRACY THEORIES IS WRONG: ITS A CONSPIRACY BETWEEN JOHN COOK AND THE PROF
Sorry for the all-caps, I couldn't be bothered to re-type it without.
stoat | July 30, 2012 I've started reading it (I was going to read BEST, but the little b*gg*rs have it behind a permission-wall at the moment. So much for openness. Update: because their site is screwed; its really here), and got to:
As documented in surveys presented in Watts, (2009)
OK, well, obviously, its "Watts (2009)" not "Watts, (2009)" but he'll fix that eventually. Perhaps Christy can help, assuming he is on the author list for doing something and not just to add respectability. But Watts (2009)? I didn't realise he had any pubs. And indeed he doesn't, because this turns out to be:
Watts, A., 2009: Is…
stoat | July 28, 2012 When BEST first came out I said it was boring, because it just said what everyone knew already "Summary: the global temperature record is just what we thought it was". There was some soap opera thrown in for fun, but that didn't affect the science.
But now (New Global Temperature Data Reanalysis Confirms Warming, Blames CO2, Ronald Bailey at reason.com, h/t JB at RR) it seems that Muller is announcing his "new" findings via op-ed in the NYT [Important note: reason.com isn't exactly a brilliant source, but I can't see a good reason why they'd make this up. Update: the real thing is now…
stoat | July 23, 2012 Well, bumps is over for another year, so some kind of normal service can resume.
WUWT was pushing "Investigation of methods for hydroclimatic data homogenization" by Steirou and Koutsoyiannis. Why? Because it appeared to show problems with station data homogenisation. There was some comedy before AW realised it wasn't a peer-reviewed paper, just a conference presentation, although he's still misleadingly calling it a "paper". Open Mind has largely done this, but what I wanted to point to was a trail of (sane) blog conversations.
Marcel Crok has a largely uncritical post (uncritical meaning…
stoat | March 12, 2012So, Lindzen f*cked up (Misrepresentation from Lindzen) badly enough that he needed to apologise. He is being weaselly, though, in throwing the blame on someone else. And he is wrong to say that the URLs of the datasets were the same.
Part of his "apology" is rather amusing:
The public interest in this quantity, however, does make it a matter subject to confirmation bias
and to pull a comment out (thanks dp):
That's exactly true - someone (Howard Hayden) got a result that they liked (looked like GISS had changed numbers) and confirmation bias made them and Lindzen believe it and publicise it…
stoat | January 19, 2012There is an absolutely classic WUWT piece of stupidity up from Joe Bastardi (h/t QS, who has been annoying me with ZOD nonsense recently). Sometimes, it is nice to find a small simple easily understood issue which demonstrates how clueless the septics are.
And the quote is:
Nor am I going to question them as to why they believe a trace gas like CO2 (needed for life on the planet) with a specific gravity of 1.5 as compared to the atmospheres 1.0, was going to mix with air in a way to affect the earth's temperatures
(bear in mind that isn't all that is wrong with the article, only the stupidest…
stoat | July 26, 2011"Dr" Roy Spencer has finally and conclusively demolished all arguments opposing his position that... well, whatever his position is. Read All About It.
But that isn't the interesting bit, obviously. The interesting bit is that the black helicopters are coming for him and his tin-foil hat:
Given the history of the IPCC gatekeepers in trying to kill journal papers that don't agree with their politically-skewed interpretations of science (also see here, here, here, here), I hope you will forgive me holding off for on giving the name of the journal until it is actually published.
So, great paper…
stoat | June 15, 2011For a fair while now I've defended Lindzen {{cn}} on the grounds that he is actually a Real Scientist, albeit edging ever further off onto the sceptical wing. And this has been difficult because whilst his papers have, I think, been reasonable his public pronouncements and his congressional-testimony type stuff has been poor.
But, happily, the recent "peer review gate" nonsense he has been spouting allows me to declare him Emeritus. I was going to say he has jumped the shark but I think that is wrong; this isn't some Curry-like stupidity, this is more the kind of full blown Black-helipcopters…
stoat | May 14, 2011The Younger Dryas was a cooling event about 12 kyr ago - see the wikipedia article, which still has the pic I drew in it. It is an example of rapid climate change, and was probably caused by THC shutdown caused by meltwater from the Laurentide icesheet, though exactly how is unclear.
However, some people would like it to be caused by a comet. That was first suggested in 2007, and RC said we doubt it. Then again in 2009 some more evidence was produced, and RC said we still doubt it. Others were less cautious; and Unscientifc American gushed over it as did Nat. Geog.. Bits of their work turned…
stoat | March 5, 2011And apsmith's Mathematical analysis of Roy Spencer's climate model has the story.
Poor Roy. He has backed himself so far into a corner that he no longer has anyone competent to discuss his ideas with, with the result that he publishes (in a book, because no-one would publish it in a journal) utter twaddle. It is really very difficult to do science all by yourself, and Spencer is certainly failing.
[2015 update: I often think of this post, and this concept, when reading the stuff from the Dork Side. Its not just Spencer; Curry is in the same boat and then so is JoNova with her Force X stuff;…
stoat | January 9, 2011 Or so says KLIMARETTER.INFO. Here is the google auto-trans from the German:
Provocative it is, but apparently it is not enough: the issue of the conservative magazine, Focus on the benefits of global warming is only a little German kiosks have been sold to the. The booklet, entitled "Great atmosphere!" is , according to the Hamburger Abendblatt 84 000 times over the counter moved only - that is the worst result in the entire year 2010.
Just in time for the world climate summit in Cancun, Mexico made the Focus a frontispiece with, the polar bear with sunglasses showing a. For this, the…
stoat | June 23, 2010I thought I've have a go and see if I couldn't tweak JA a bit.
This is about Expert credibility in climate change by Anderegg et al.. Which tells us what we already know: that there aren't many "skeptics" and that most of them aren't much cop. Or in their more measured prose:
we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that (i) 97-98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and…
stoat | June 13, 2010Poor Richard Tol. He has been invited (nominated by the Oirish Gummit, apparently) to be a convening author, though only for WG II.
But all he can do is whinge that "Political interference in the IPCC continues" because they won't provide him a blank cheque for his travel costs. Diddums. I'm sure you can all see the interference inherent in the system. Still, at least he is better than RP Jr, who refuses (for some reason he does not trouble to explain) to take part. So he can be outside the tent pissing in, would be my guess. Or he might be jealous of Tol getting *convening* lead author,…