climate snarking
stoat | January 21, 2008James is too busy worrying about his shares so I shall have to continue Corbynwatch. He's popped up in the Times, making the implausible claim that his forecasts for November were correct. Quite where he is going to find -17 oC for January is a mystery - in fact we have record warmth. I don't suppose that will stop him.
stoat | January 10, 2008RP Jr has a whole succession of posts, starting here. I was going to point out why it was all rather pointless, but it seems so obvious and tedious to wade through that I'm not going to bother.
This probably wins my award for least enthusiastic post of all time :-(
[Update: RC do this in rather more detail. And there is a vaguely-relevant old post of mine -W]
Mind you, Nature isn't any better.
stoat | December 18, 2007According to google reader, RP Sr posted the below today to his "blog" (only its not really a blog cos it doesn't allow comments), in a post entitled Question The Weblog Real Climate. And indeed he did; the comment is here. This is something RP has been harping on about for a while. Gavin gave him the obvious answer: I fail to see how you are parsing this to find an inconsistency. The footnote is clear that the term 'radiative forcing' in the IPCC report refers to the change in forcing from a 1750 baseline. More precisely, it is defined as the change in radiation at the tropopause after…
stoat | December 8, 2007Jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I can now read the full lyrics and realise I haven't got a clue what they are on about. Wiki doesn't know either, but does include the curious line "The song is often mistakenly attributed to Bob Dylan, likely because Rafferty's distinctive voice is similar to Dylan's"... errrm, then how can it be "distinctive"?
Anyway, this long rambling introduction has no great purpose, other than to lead into the next level of rambling:
As I was rowing along the Cam this morning, trying to avoid feeling or…
stoat | September 17, 2007A reader writes... I trust you will critique Ingrid is born; Humberto and Felix--a sign of climate change?. Naturally I'm stupid enough to fall for that sort of a challenge.
On the issue of cat5 records I think he misses the obvious point (stoat passim): cat5 numbers are low, their statistics are unstable, and you can't tell much from the record. He does say "We've now had six Cat 5's in the past three years, and eight in the past five years. Is this an indication climate change is at work? Well, we did have back-to-back years with two Cat 5's each (1960 and 1961), so one can still argue that…
stoat | July 16, 2007The goal of Climate Science on this subject (of glacier advance and retreat) is to present documentation that the frequently stated claim that glaciers are retreating everywhere is an inaccurate statement sez RP in response to his first comment. Of course, this is a waste of time (as well as attacking a strawman), as IPCC section 4.5.3 have already done it.
stoat | May 31, 2007Bush said something about climate change. Sounds like the usual nothing to me: My proposal is this: By the end of next year America and other nations will set a long-term global goal for making sure we don't have to do anything in the near future. Sorry, that should read ...for reducing greenhouse gases. Predictably enough, Blur hailed this as a Great Leap Forwards whilst Merkel was sensibly more cautious.
[Update: Nature has an editorial entitled "No more hot air": The leaders meeting at this year's G8 summit must grasp the opportunity to assert themselves and commit to real action on…
stoat | May 11, 2007Oh dear, now we have Does The 2007 IPCC Statement For Policymakers Accurately Present The Observations Of Recent Global Temperature Trends? [2014 update: dead URL. Here's a wayback machine link] on the grounds of a lack of trend over the last 5 years (actually "statistically significant", though its not clear how the stat sig was calculated - probably once you are emeritus you can do them in your head).
But the first commenter makes the obvious point very well (and has actually gone to the trouble of doing the work): I did the exercise of looking at all overlapping 5-year periods in the…
stoat | May 9, 2007Um, I do like my new category of "climate snarking", since it allows me to offend people but get away with it because I'm being ironic. Or something. Anyway: Natures Climate Feedback blog has undergone a quiet revamp. Perhaps they have been listening to Eli? Unlikely I know - no one else does (remember, this is ironic). Anyway, I *still* wish them well, and clearly they have been listening to feedback, and they still have the good taste to include me on their blogroll, but despite that I'm still going to criticise them for silently revising their list of "core contributors", from the original…
stoat | May 6, 2007 Interesting to see that M&M, Landsea and Wegman all get thanked for contributing to TGGWS (from Brian commenting at Deltoid). This contradicts McI, who says I had nothing to do with the Swindle presentation; though of course we don't know who is wrong. Given Durkins history of gross errors, its not unlikely that he is.
stoat | May 4, 2007Prompted by some comments over at CA I've been wondering again about the Hans von Storch and Eduardo Zorita post at Nature. A moment ago I said that McI was justifiably annoyed that S/Z appeared to be claiming prior credit for demolishing the HS (just for ref I don't think it has been demolished, but thats an old argument). But is this wrong? M&M's claim to priority is based on their E&E 2003 paper ("your paper apparently the being the seminal date for the beginning of the "healthy" debate (at least in your minds)... which is a back-handed way of saying the publication of M&M 2003…