climate snarking
stoat | April 27, 2010 Oh well, everyone else has a gate, perhaps I can have one too. Incidentally the picture is there for two reasons: firstly I have far too many pix of Darling Daugther and no-one looks at them. If Jules can put up huts, I can do children. And second, it is a cunning attempt to make me a human bean rather than just a face on the internet, so my enemies will find it harder to attack me. Clever eh?
So, the story so far (pay attention at the back!): I wondered about the list of 3 "key" papers that Curry was proposing should have been considered by the Oxburgh inquiry. Or perhaps by the…
stoat | February 12, 2010 Every cloud has a silver lining, and it looks like Zorita is jockeying for some of the silver: the Future of IPCC apparently is to morph into one of those nice International agencies which pay so well and are headquarted in rather nice cities, staffed by... well, clearly by the likes of independent-minded folk such as Eduardo. As he says so wisely As with finance, climate assessment is too important to be left in the hands of advocates, or other scum like the current IPCC authors: sweep them all away and leave it in the hands of people who are prepared to admit their errors... oh, wait.
And…
stoat | February 5, 2010Asian ones that is, not red ones. And not all of them of course, only Minister for environment & forests Jairam Ramesh so far. The Torygraph says:
"There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report, [the] IPCC doesn't do the original research which is one of the weaknesses... they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks. "I respect the IPCC but India is a very large country and cannot depend only on [the] IPCC and so we…
stoat | November 12, 2009The color of solar cells -- and their short energy payback -- are trivial factors when considering the huge climate benefit they provide in avoiding the release of CO2 from the combustion of fossil fuels. That was a central point I made when I broke the story on the error-riddled book Superfreakonomics...
Really? No: what JR actually said was:
"Here are the howlers in that paragraph for the record::
1. they aren't bloack, they are blue,
2. their efficiency may be higher than 12%,
3. The biggest howler... What was the absorbtivity or emissivity of the material that the panel covered up,
4.…
stoat | November 9, 2009This stuff just gets weirder; maybe you should just read Brian for some sense instead. Anyway, so as the Breakness Institute (-it all fits together, folks, with the Emeriti) point out, Romm has silently changed his headline from "Meet Trash Journalist Keith Kloor" to Meet blogger Keith Kloor. But even if you don't remember the original you can tell he's done it, because of the post URL. This is all very funny, because one of the first charges that Romm throws at Kloor is having his Nature post altered.
Meanwhile, over at the Dark Side, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus try to pretend…
stoat | October 23, 2009Roger is having a spot of trouble: everyone is being nasty to him. Once upon a time the mighty Prometheus bestrode the world like a Colossus and ate big fish for breakfast, but now it seems Roger swims with the minnows and it isn't a nice world down there. Eli shows him no mercy - wabbits are a vicious bunch - and Tim Lambert is not kind either but Whiskey Fire probably has the best take on all this.
Incidentally, it isn't really Roger's fault but he does seem to be attracting the wacko septics in the comments, for example Of course DeepClimate consistently refuses to publish my charts…
stoat | September 28, 2009We all hate science by press release which is why we all love the good old stodgy UKMO (now rebranded the Met Office, note no dot) who would never write Met Office warns of catastrophic global warming in our lifetimes oh no of course not. The Torygraph has much the same thing. Sigh. They seem to have delegated the pressing to Oxford (the shame; oh no, you can have the UKMO instead but it is equally vapid) and it is all in aid of some conference 4 degrees and beyond; "beyond" apparently in reference to their bizarre typography.
Actual substance seems to be rather lacking; Nurture does its best…
stoat | April 1, 2009I hate blogs that force you to jump through hoops to post comments, especially when those hoops don't work. So I could mail Gareth to complain about my inability to comment on "The inner mounting flame" but I'm too impatient, so instead I'll just post my minor snark here:
It sez: "This is a global event now, and the inertia for more permafrost melt is increasing." Not good news.
I agree. It isn't good news. It means that ecologists (or, to be slightly fairer, one particular ecologist) doesn't understand the difference between inertia and momentum.
Meanwhile, Gareth asks So why are we…
stoat | March 31, 2009Well no, of course they haven't. It is yet more septic twaddle from Avery; David Appell has a screenshot, since he expects the original is so blatantly stupid that it will be taken down. And he was right, it is now gone, though not silently: *Apologia: I deeply regret my misstatement that CO2 levels are Mauna Loa were declining. They are not. Nor is there clear evidence that the increase in atmospheric CO2 is yet slowing. In the past, I have demanded a higher standard of evidence than I had for the first edition of this column, and will return to that policy. says The American Daily, and the…
stoat | January 29, 2009Nowadays I seem to rely on wikipedia for my news stories. Not necessarily for the truth, but that something has occurred. So this little thread at global warming piqued my interest (note, BTW, how the poor dear septics don't even bother trying to edit the page any more, having been crushed so often by the Mailed Fist): I'm a sceptic now, says ex-NASA climate boss says The Register. Working in an office full of software engineers (not to mention the odd visiting hardware bod) I see lots of people reading El Reg (very briefly of course, in their very short lunch breaks, did I say lunch break, I…
stoat | December 19, 2008http://climate.columbia.edu/blog/ defines "abrupt climate change" as:
A large-scale change in the climate system that takes place over a few decades or less, persists (or is anticipated to persist) for at least a few decades, and causes substantial disruptions in human and natural systems.
apparently oblivious to the problem that they have just declared that no abrupt climate changes occurred pre-humans. Indeed they have just declared that the D-O cycles are not known to be abrupt changes, since we don't know that they caused any substantial disruption to humans.
Bit of a shame, since I'm…
stoat | December 15, 2008I've already used Clowns to the left of me.... And then I run across an opinion article in today's Guardian: "Let's Get Real on the Environment." by David Appell nicely counterbalanced by Yes. We Can.. Oh dear oh dear.
To begin with the obligatory snarking, anyone with young children in the UK will instantly recognise "Yes we can" as the irritatingly cheerful cleft-free Bob the Builder and his army of health-and-safety violating machines (Nah then nah then sir. Did you let that digger drive around by itself? Please come down to the station with me sir...). In Tamino-world, it means the…
stoat | October 14, 2008The pollsters in question being Bray and von Storch, who get ratty on Prometheus about Gavin "too sexy for my model" Schmidt's RC piece dissing their latest survey.
Slightly confusingly, although the piece is signed by B+vS, it says I am a sociologist and Hans von Storch is a climate scientist... I attend first to the blog posting... which suggests to me that Bray wrote it. I'm going to go with the asserted attribution for the moment. Anyway... oh, before I head off, there is also First a thanks to those... who contributed favorable comments on the RealClimate blog. Yup, thats science for you…
stoat | September 28, 2008Or so says some spam for terradaily that made it to my inbox (which is just a rehash of the Berkley press release, though thankfully without the stupid flood picture). This is obvious b*ll*cks, as google shows. The wiki page is a bit rubbish, largely because the only example anyone can ever think of is the Younger Dryas, and we aren't going to have another one of those (yes yes I know). Its certainly the only one terradaily can think of. Woods hole too. And there is a whole NRC report on ACC. And indeed if you look for "rapid" climate change you'll find Spencer Wearts history.
But TD is…
stoat | June 16, 2008As Atmoz noted, its a bit of a slow season, but via Deltoid comes probably the most stupid ever explanation for GW: yes, its the microwave radiation from satellites warming us up. This is blindingly obviously nonsense, but John Mashey provides some numbers if you're in any doubt.
Mind you, the basic lack of power isn't the sites only mistake, there's When a microwave transmission is sent to a receiving satellite dish the transmission is sent in a spherical direction or Earths atmosphere is made of water as well as many others. However, overall its just stupid rather than entertaining :-(
stoat | May 14, 2008Lucia lost the plot some time ago, mostly by cherry-picking her time period, using a weird data-fitting method and failing to understand what she was looking at. Now RP Jr follows her down the rabbett hole and bizarrely describes her post as "clear". Well, when people are telling you what you want to hear you're apt to approve.
As usual, you're better off avin a larf with James . Though if you're tired of slapstick, maybe reading the truth at RC would be more useful. I prefer bluetooth myself nowadays :-)
[Update: it gets worse. Roger is losing his temper, and unfortunately hasn't found…
stoat | April 19, 2008Says the FT, via DSB. Since I've already argued that Stern is over-bleak, Im surprised he has got more pessimistic. Whats up?
Apparently "We underestimated the risks . . . we underestimated the damage associated with the temperature increases . . . and we underestimated the probabilities of temperature increases.... Stern said data published since the report came out had led him to change his mind.
Aha! Interesting. What is this new data?
He highlighted the publication last year of the most comprehensive study yet undertaken of climate change science. Conducted by the Intergovernmental Panel…
stoat | April 16, 2008Just a provocative title, to point you towards I accept Bill Gray's climate bet offer - will he seal the deal? by Brian Schmidt. My feeling is that Gray will wimp out - I'll even put money on it if anyone is interested :-)
stoat | April 15, 20081.5 m sea level rise this century, that is. Nature sez the "estimate released today says that it could be as as much as 1.5 metres (4.9 feet) by the end of this century". Their source seems to be Reuters, and we'll pause briefly to condemn the oh-so-typical inflation of the worst case from the range into the only number mentioned in the headline. Sigh.
So... Melting glaciers, disappearing ice sheets and warming water could lift sea levels by as much as 1.5 metres (4.9 feet) by the end of this century,... Presented at a European Geosciences Union conference, the research forecasts a rise in…
stoat | February 7, 2008More gumf from the Grauniad. Supposedly based on something in PNAS: anyone seen it? The usual suspects: the Potsdam folk and Tim Lenton and so on. Sadly (?) the online version doesn't have the appalling map that the print edition has, featuring highly implausible timescales for those bits I know anything about (Greenland and W Ant gone in 300 years). One of the dangerous tipping points was the greening of the Sahara, errrrm, because that could lead to dangerously low food prices? Shurely shom mishtake. I'm being unfair: that gets a mention (in print) as a rare beneficial example.
Anyway, I…