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illconsidered | October 15, 2009Check out WAG's simple, yet quintessential message on his Blog Action Day post, aptly titled "The only thing you need to know about global warming"
On a slightly related note, Matt Nisbet gets a guest post on C&L to talk about getting the public involved. And how does he use his brief chance to reach a very large audience of progressive minded but non-scienceblogy audience? He takes a cheap swipe at Chris Mooney and PZ Meyers as part of a long running in-fight and rambles on in jargon filled scientific mumbo-jumbo about "dimensions of knowledge".
Hmm..."those who can't, teach"...?
illconsidered | October 8, 2009Peter Sinclair is remixing some of his Climate Crock of the Week videos to improve the sound quality.
I would like to use this Mars Attacks! episode as an opportunity to close the Mars is Warming too thread.
Watch and learn:
illconsidered | October 5, 2009Yet another faux fraud in the climate wars with the same liars and hypocrites piping in.
Real Climate has a nice display of all the hockey sticks out there, and Denial Depot has the most compelling attack.
Deltoid gives us a great run down of the kerfuffle.
illconsidered | August 21, 2009I had an open thread a couple of weeks ago about Ian Plimer's recent novel supposedly exposing the lie that is Anthropogenic Global Warming.
I have not read it. A few commenter's defending the book asked how anyone can judge it if they have not read it.
Well, no one can read every book that is out there, not even every book about global warming. We all have to choose. This of course introduces the possibility of bias confirmation. If I feel it in my gut that this particular book will be crap, I won't read it and I will assume I am right about it.
But here's the thing, it is possible to…
illconsidered | August 20, 2009So this is good news for defenders of the fair use principle.
You can, and if you haven't yet should, watch Peter Sinclair's video demolishing Anthony Watts' surfacestations.org embedded below. Watts' complaint of copyright violation was at best a head scratcher and at worst a cynical and childish outburst but no matter what obviously unjustified.
Watts has a post up supposedly to explain his reasoning, but it is very long and says virtually nothing that is relevant to copyright issues relying mostly on ridicule. It is also rather condescending and smug, an attitude that looks all the…
illconsidered | August 11, 2009At least this is the standard if you are Roger Pielke Jr and the accused is a member of Real Climate. When pressed as to how he knew an accusation of plagarism he was leveling was really true, in his own words:
if the authors provide evidence [...] I'll stand corrected. [...] Meantime, I am perfectly comfortable with the views expressed in this post.
This is how he defends his very serious accusation of plagarism against a commenter who expresses surprise at Pielke leveling such a charge with admitted lack of anything more than circumstantial evidence.
maybe they were alerted by one or more…
illconsidered | August 10, 2009I have mentioned it frequently before, there is another serious problem with pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, ocean acidification.
Geoengineering should never be discussed without mentioning it. The Way Things Break tells Nature as much.
illconsidered | July 28, 2009I have tried to make it quite clear a few times that regardless of no new record, there is no evidence that the underlying rising trend in global surface temperatures has reversed or stopped. But absent a short term rising trend the inattentive public is very vulnerable to disengenouous denialists claiming warming is over (did they ever admit it was happening??). So I am afraid that that talking point will not go away until 1998's record status does so as well.
So when will that happen? I'm not talking about statistically insignificant 0.05oC win by a nose in one record but not another, I…
illconsidered | July 21, 2009It has come up in the comments a couple of times now, so I would like to state for the record that the following is a lousy analogy of a negative feedback. As far as I know, Richard Lindzen came up with this in his speech at the recent Heartland climate sceptic conference.
The analogy is this:
In your car, the gas and brake pedals act as negative feedbacks to reduce speed when you are going too fast and increase it when you are going too slow.
(You can find Lindzen's presentation, with that quote in it, at WUWT)
Lindzen goes on to imply that the climate models act like a car with the brake…
illconsidered | July 7, 2009Marc Morono (sick) breathlessly announces that Gavin Schmidt has finally admitted that weather is chaotic and GCMs can not model it.
And yes, that is about as shocking an admission as water is wet.
Here is the incriminating quote:
"The problem with climate prediction and projections going out to 2030 and 2050 is that we don't anticipate that they can be tested in the way you can test a weather forecast. It takes about 20 years to evaluate because there is so much unforced variability in the system which we can't predict -- the chaotic component of the climate system -- which is not…
illconsidered | June 26, 2009This has been an open tab in Firefox for a long time now, so I figure I had better just point people to it and be done with it...
James Hrynyshyn (love that last name, but only because computers have copy and paste!) has an interesting comparison of two interviews on Island of Doubt (note to self: add this to the blogroll). The first is Gavin Schmidt of RealClimate fame (oh yeah, he also works for some outfit called NASA GISS or something) being interviewed at Salon a few weeks ago. The second is an interview with Freeman Dyson on Yale's Environment 360.
Go have a look for some excerpts and…
illconsidered | June 21, 2009Just like those national debt clocks showing you dollar by dollar how high it is, this site has a "Carbon Counter" showing how many metric tons of carbon have been released into the atmosphere.
As I post this, we are at 3,642,255,344,781. No wait, now its 3,642,255,367,521...no, it's 3,642,255,381,988...well, you get the picture!
They have some other interesting resources there as well.
illconsidered | June 17, 2009Via MT, I came across a most excellent and interesting essay by Herman Daly on the Oil Drum (one of those great and meaty blogs that I only wich I had the time to read everything on!)
The subject is how to establish a steady state economy versus the current paradigm based on the fantasy of eternal growth. The reason you should read it is because it is not your usual Utopian hand wave about what a perfect world would be like, it is a specific set of policy prescriptions.
Worth your time!
illconsidered | June 10, 2009Tim Lambert over at Deltoid has a great illustration of how denialists play the telephone game.
It basically goes like this:
NASA: "New study confirms greenhouse gases, not the sun, are causing the current climate change"
Denialist 1: "NASA confirms that the sun is causing the current climate change"
Denialist 2: "NASA confirms that the sun is causing the current climate change and Al Gore is fat"
And then we get to read the cut and paste in the comments here and elsewhere around the blogosphere. But do go read a few more details at Deltoid, it is why the label "skeptic" is just about the…
illconsidered | May 23, 2009By the by, I have another post up on The Energy Grid called The Blame Game.
This week's question is one of finding fault. What brought us to the current confluence of crises? Was it a failure of the political, or the technological?
Unlike the beltway pundits and the political scoundrels they defend, who use the phrase "blame game" to mockingly to retreat from accepting responsibility for, well anything, I don't think blame is just a game. Insanity is sometimes defined as trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Well, if you never bother to revisit your…
illconsidered | May 14, 2009Science Blogs has a new special blog on sustainable energy called The Energy Grid. It is a short term project, planned to run a few months, where each of the six contributors posts once per week on a subject introduced on Sunday.
I am flattered to have been asked to contribute and you can read my first contribution posted today, here. It is headlined Sustainability will not come without reductions in consumption and here is a free sample:
Our energy system faces security and environmental challenges because we have created a social and economic paradigm based on over-consumption and a non-…
illconsidered | May 1, 2009It`s kind of nice to hear an expert in the field making the same observation I often have about the economic arguments that swirl around the climate policy debates.
Specifically, opponents to mitigation policy have no trouble relying on the magic of the market and technology to rescue us from any possible difficulty climate change might visit upon us. This of course includes the loss of huge services nature provides us for free. You know, things like rain and sea food and forests.
Yet, make a suggestion that CO2 emissions need to be forced lower and the Pollyanna`s instantly become the most…
illconsidered | April 28, 2009Ok, so I have to do it, I`m adding Denial Depot to my blogroll in a new section, _The lighter side of catastrophe_.
I know I will probably regret it, but I just can`t help having a little fun while I`m over there.....
illconsidered | April 24, 2009Now this is good stuff!
A big thanks to Eli Rabett for finding this site!
Here are a few favorite highlights:
Why are the so-called experts silent about all the snow that is everywhere?
Well it's most likely because they are all shut indoors all day with their climate models. That's right, they are so busy playing Climate Tron that they haven't the foggiest idea what is going on outside anymore. They don't see the REAL world that REAL people like you and me see
When so-called "experts" in their "peer reviewed journals" say one thing, we dare the impossible and find imaginative ways to believe…