climate tripe
stoat | February 13, 2014A question raised by the normally sensible Geoengineering Politics. They come to an odd conclusion:
any damages caused by SRM [Solar Radiation Management, I believe - W] would essentially be the negative side effects of a response measure intended to remediate harms caused by excessive fossil fuel use, and fossil fuel companies have been the primary direct beneficiaries of this activity, it stands to reason that they should be the ones to pay for its cleanup
and offer an analogy:
This is precisely how the international oil spill liability regime works--the International Oil Pollution…
stoat | February 7, 2014Maybe I should save this stanza for a slightly more apt occasion, but I'm impatient, so:
But my Totem saw the shame; from his ridgepole-shrine he came,
And he told me in a vision of the night: —
"There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
"And every single one of them is right!"
(Kipling, In the Neolithic Age, of course). But back to the post.
We might hope that the blogosphere would be full of reasoned debate, with people making interesting points supported by logical argument and careful references. Of course, any such hope would be dashed by fare such as posts titled "IPCC…
stoat | December 19, 2013Two posts in one day! You do spoil us, ambassador.
Whenever one or more denialists gather together or alone, they inevitably make something up about climatology, and then criticise climatologists for doing whatever imaginary thing it is they've made up. Today's invention is linearity (but, sigh, I'm giving too much credit for novelty, of which there is none. I mean, of course, reinvention):
global climate models are all based around the idea that in the long run, when we calculate the global temperature everything else averages out, and we’re left with the claim that the change in temperature…
stoat | November 30, 2013 Quite some time ago I re wrote the Dada article on wiki to be more in the spirit of the movement. It didn't last long. My thoughts were irrestistably drawn to that when I saw a can climate count global How lay on skeptic’s view warming ("thanks" R) at WUWT; here I present a translation that makes more sense than the original, a sort of anti-Dadaist art, if you will.
A a a a a a a a a agitated alarmists am an an And and and any apart apple apple argue ask at back bodies Bowring but But by call Cambridge can can century change Christopher climate climate climatology dare dare day denier…
stoat | November 9, 2013For my sins, I decided to listen to Murray "I have a theory" Salby talking about his ideas about why the recent rise in CO2 isn't human-caused (note that isn't his most recent UK tour; that's back in April). By all means read my notes below if you're interested in the various ways that he is wrong; but if you're interested in how we know the increase really is human-caused, then try RealClimate from 2004, a somewhat pithier response from me, point 5, in 2005, or the ever-popular Skeptical Science version; and Eric Wolff is excellent. Or, if you belong to the Dark Side, then perhaps…
stoat | October 8, 2013 You may say "but you declared Lindzen emeritus in 2011", and so I did. But that was over the issue of peer review. This is concerning science:
arctic sea ice is suddenly showing surprising growth.
That's just stupid. Really; its nothing but propaganda: designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind to quote one R. Lindzen quoting one G. Orwell.
And if you really don't know why, the answer is: this is just natural variability. Last year was exceptionally low; this year isn't exceptionally low. This is very basic stuff, and…
stoat | September 28, 2013 Judith Curry has a weird post called "IPCC diagnosis – permanent paradigm paralysis" which starts off with a perfect example of the denialists favourite tactic - a walled garden of links to their own nonsense. She says:
In a previous post, I discussed the IPCC’s diagnosis of a planetary fever and their prescription for planet Earth...
Now if you're a person prepared to believe that JC isn't lying through her teeth, you might actually not follow that link, and in consequence you might believe that what she said was true. But it isn't; its a fantasy as wacky as AW's about wikipedia. If you…
stoat | July 29, 2013[Don't miss the 2nd birthday!]
About a year ago the entirety of the intertubes were rocked to their foundations by an announcement of epochal proportions: WUWT publishing suspended – major announcement coming. Or so we were told. Speculation was rife: had AW finally found those pix of Mann's Prince Albert? But exactly a year ago the Truth Was Out and it all turned out to be very dull - it was just a paper preprint [*].
Most scientists of any kind of quality manage to produce at least a paper a year, anyone with ambitions for their step up is looking at two or more, in decent journals. Even a…
stoat | July 27, 2013 Its shooting fish in a barrel, of course, but you must go and read Another uncertainty for climate models – different results on different computers using the same code [WebCitation].
The issue here is a well-known one - it dates back to Lorenz's original stuff on chaos. That trivial differences in initial conditions, or in processing methods, will lead to divergences in weather forecasts. The (entirely harmless) paper that has sparked all this off is an Evaluation of the Software System Dependency of a Global Atmospheric Model by Song-You Hong et al. and sez
There exist differences in the…
stoat | July 21, 2013 This entire episode is so depressingly stupid that I almost threw the post away. But, courage!
As my title suggests, this is a morass of stupidity, of interest only to the navel-gazers within the incestuous world of climate blogs. Anyone with an interest in the actual science should steer clear. Metaphorically: if you're starting from one side of the Sargasso Sea and wish to reach clear water on the other side, you're better off going round rather than pushing through and clearing an endless buildup of weed off your rudder.
The motive for this was, now that I have a moment from the rowing to…
stoat | June 6, 2013This spawned by reading DA, who comments that "Roy Spencer has a very unprofessional post", EPIC FAIL: 73 Climate Models vs. Observations for Tropical Tropospheric Temperature. And it is very unprofessional: its just not what you write, if you have any hope of belonging to a scientific community. Its what you write if you know you've marginalised yourself and there is no way back. And as DA points out, the UAH record itself has suffered numerous disastrous failings over the years, up to and including getting the very sign of the temperature change wrong.
“Dr” Roy Spencer is sad and lonely and…
stoat | April 1, 2013 I haven't called anyone a tosser recently, indeed I think that RP Jr is the first 2013 winner of this most prestigious of awards. I believe that Sr was the last winner, almost a year ago. And I bestow this award sadly, because despite my naughty words I still have a deal of respect for RP (Jr and Sr). But in this instance, he's worked himself up into a froth over nothing and is casting evil aspersions over blameless people. I'm not sure why; perhaps as ever Oscar Wilde had it right (and I don't mean about the bat's urine).
Before I go on, I should point out that this post is mostly just a…
stoat | March 1, 2013 Just when you thought this tripe was dead, it comes round again. Well, its winter at least in this hemisphere, and a bit chilly, so perhaps it seems plausible - the septics usually have trouble telling weather from climate.
Anyway, your reference is We’re number 1! which provises you a handy link to The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus - the paper that the denialists are too scared to address. Ta da. I've helpfully cut out a nice figure from that paper, which rather summarises the situation.
And maybe now is a good time to say, if I haven't before, how grateful I am to…
stoat | December 22, 2012W00t, its the Big Fight, or at least its the spat du jour. Does anyone outside the little blogospheric circle care? My guess is no. As I said over at Timmy's recently, my personal "does-the-outside-world-give-a-shit-o-meter" (as applied to the latest septic nonsense to hit the blogospheric fan) is "has anyone tried to push it into any of the major GW type articles on wikipedia"? By that test, the latest stuff from Lewis scores zero. Even Schwartz managed better.
But (whilst Romm wouldn't be my choice as the prime upholder of Truth and Light) the latest to-and-fro provides an interesting way…
stoat | November 20, 2012The Watties are back to plaintively whistling for cooling. This time its "Dr." Norman Page, and just like last time there isn't really any point wading through the details because its all self-deluding nonsense.
But what's funny is to realise how throw-away all this is, how it lacks any coherent theory, and how they are effectively admitting that themselves. If this actually meant anything, if it fitted together, then the new post would reference the old one. Obviously. Because the old post was valuable - wasn't it? The new post advances the state of the art the old post represents, or…
stoat | October 10, 2012
Continuing vaguely along the theme of use and abuse of IPCC 1990 fig 7.1(c), its worth noting explicitly the worship of Hubert Lamb by some of the denialists. I don't think I need to repeat what is said there, but make sure you read the comments, especially those from Willard, and me of course.
One interesting example of this, which illustrates the same problems, is Premonitions of the Fall (in temperature) at WUWT by David Archibald. Its a very silly post, but it adopts the usual policy of taking all of Lamb's stuff uncritically, whilst ignoring recent work, in order to push the authors own…
stoat | October 4, 2012Since we're on fig 7.1.c, I was browsing around for google images and came across the following:
Well, that's certainly odd. The pic is a copy (stolen with no attribution, are you surprised?) of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ipcc7.1-mann-moberg-manley.png]] which I uploaded to wiki (once again I'm moved to comment that although the denizens of WUWT pretend that they don't trust wiki, actually just like everyone else they use it, and forget their scruples whenever convenient. Note also that the current wiki pic has had the green line added by DS). Its from When the IPCC ‘disappeared’…
stoat | September 5, 2012If you've seen the latest septic drivel (the clearest example of the need for open peer review that I've seen for a while) then you may find Comment on “The phase relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature” worth a read, as well as the rest of the blog.
stoat | August 13, 2012WUWT is still on my google reader list, even though I got banned from commenting for pointing out AW's wiki-fantasies. So I get to see the rather plaintive When will it start cooling?, in which David Archibald, Solar Nut, wonders why his brilliant predictions don't seem to match reality. But, I hear you ask, what are his brilliant predictions? [And to those who want to talk about sea ice, hang on a bit, and to those waiting with baited breath for my review of Watts, Muller et al.: have patience.]
My papers and those of Jan-Erik Solheim et al predict a significant cooling over Solar Cycle 24…
stoat | July 29, 2012So, a few days ago, WUWT said "WUWT publishing suspended – major announcement coming". And not just any old event, oh no:
To give you an idea as to the magnitude of this event, I’m suspending my vacation plans. I weighed the issue, and decided (much to my dismay) this was more important. I can go on vacation trips another time, but this announcement is not something I can miss now and do later.
So whatever it was had to be major, and it had to be timely. How thrilling! But, sigh, we are doomed to be disappointed: its just a paper preprint. All over the world scientists produce draft papers…