septic tripe
stoat | June 25, 2013 (I'm sorry, I'm doing it again. I'll try to stop, honest. Grammatical errors are in the original, don't blame me guv).
Via Bruce Schneier an interesting article about Spear Phishing Attack Against the Financial Times. What's so lovely about it is that they've used genuine FT email text, and segued straight from warning people about not clicking links in emails straight into providing a link in the email to lure people in. And apparently it worked, somewhat.
Meanwhile (ah, you knew this was coming, I'm sure) anonymous contributor "Abzats" has an essay at WUWT entitled Peer Evil – the rotten…
stoat | June 4, 2013An interesting little saga. WUWT had a post up as An interesting issue with ice core data. That's a link to the webcitation, beacuse as of now the post has been removed from WUWT, on the grounds that it was utter drivel. Which is correct - it was. Pretty well the whole thing was error, but for outstanding stupidity it doesn't get much better than:
Prior to the Little Ice Age, most of the areas where today’s core samples are taken, were not covered with ice. The ice that scientists have stated is hundreds of thousands of years old can be no more than a maximum of 650 years in age...
[Even the…
stoat | May 29, 2013This one is a bit odd; via HotWhopper is the WUWT post Obama was right–‘the rise of the oceans began to slow’. This purports to show a graph of rate-of-SLR, and shows it declining. The graph has no clear source, the post says "h/t to Dr. Pat Michaels". And down in the comments Michaels admits to it, so it must be his. However, it appears to be simply faked [*].
But weirdly, crudely faked [*]. All of this is at HW but: first of all the recent data showing that SLR isn't declining, has been omitted. This is just std.denialist stuff. But then the graph has been smoothed or mangled in some…
stoat | May 9, 2013 Not me you silly - that's a quote from WUWT. And as if in answer to his desperation, along comes The effectiveness of CO2 as a greenhouse gas becomes ever more marginal with greater concentration, a deeply stupid post.
It starts with a nod towards pretending to have a clue:
According to well understood physical parameters, the effectiveness of CO2 as a greenhouse gas diminishes logarithmically with increasing concentration... This inconvenient [sic] fact is well understood in the climate science community...
...because not even WUWT readers are going to fall for the idea that it's a surprise…
stoat | March 14, 2013 Apparently, something called "climategate 3.0" has occurred. This caused massive excitement in the denialosphere for a day, but now everyone has quietly forgotten it. You can tell its a damp squib because the only even vaguely "mainstream" news report of it that WUWT can find is a blog piece by James Delingpole, a man so unimportant I haven't even bothered call him a tosser. AW managed to find two emails that he thought were really interesting, but his slightly-more-on-the-ball readers pointed out they were already in v2. There's a mildly interesting third one about Oreskes but: is that…
stoat | February 11, 2013Or, perhaps, not so strange, you might well say. I'm talking about Has Global Warming Stalled? I'm not sure what is supposed to be new about it - it looks like the same tired old stuff. The "gotcha" bit is supposed to be
The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more
and we then are shown a picture with some flat lines on it. The picture doesn't show the 95% confidence intervals for the trends - I suspect that was beyond the poster's ski1z. But anyway, that's not the point: the point is the words that have been omitted, which I'll bold below:
ENSO-…
stoat | December 20, 2012The latest denialosphere nonsense is proving quite entertaining - not for the subject matter itself, for without exception no-one in the debate has troubled to read the gumpf - but for the mudslinging in the comment thread. If you want to see Bad William you can go over there.
Vinny, I think that pays you off, yes?
Wackos from the Dark Side: you can have the debate here if you want, but only if you're prepared to talk sensibly. As a teensy test of your interest in being sane, I'm making a special rule just for the comment thread: anyone unable to spell my name, or get my title right, or do…
stoat | October 17, 2012Eli has the details.
Coming soon "Addendum: The Warren Commission" - in which they conclude that Kennedy committed suicide.
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 18, 2012Is a question Open Mind asks re yet more Wattism. And so I looked and found the absurd Another paper refutes the Mann made hockey stick – MWP was ≈1°C warmer than current temperatures. To support his headline, AW highlights:
the conclusion that the early MCA was warmer than the late 20th century by ~ 1 °C
but this is an old trick, and his commenters (well, the ones that are awake and not entranced) quickly see through it:
No, that’s not what this paper says. What they’ve done is to obtain a seasonal analysis of temperatures. They say that *if* you looked at shell evidence for MWP temperatures…
stoat | May 22, 2012Many thanks to commentor Bam who alerted me to A comment by Alex Harvey: CLIMATE CHANGE ARBITRATION BIAS AT WIKIPEDIA by Hans von Storch CLIMATE CHANGE ARBITRATION BIAS AT WIKIPEDIA complete with big shouty letters.
[This is a copy from back-up of a post that was on the old mt site, and didn't get auto-moved to the new wp site. It will have lost any comments made then, sorry.]
Before you read that, you probably need to at least see Junk from von S (especially if you're a von S reader, because he has previously censored links to that post). If you read the comments there, its clear that von S…
stoat | September 1, 2011
The story so far: some nut attacks Rahmstorf, comparing him to Aryan physics in a letter to the German TV channel ZDF. The usual fools get confused, the usual fools propagate the nonsense. But this time there is a happy ending, as the lawyers step in and stamp it out (lawyers good? Well maybe not on balance. But that doesn't mean they can't do good sometimes). This won't make anything clearer.
stoat | August 29, 2011Clearly, everyone wants to have a long discussion about GW etc etc, and maybe I haven't provided a venue for this for a while. But I've now found an excuse, prompted by (or perhaps more accurately, simply ripping off) mt, who has looked at The Truth About Greenhouse Gases by William Happer.
mt says various wise things, and I too balk at the very first thing he says about climate, viz:
The argument starts something like this. CO2 levels have increased from about 270 ppm to 390 ppm over the past 150 years or so, and the earth has warmed by about 0.8 C during that time. Therefore the warming is…
stoat | February 9, 2011 A while ago I reported Watching the Deniers say that "There will be no US Congressional investigation into "Climategate": or how global warming sceptics got duped" and commented that Even the wackos aren't really wacko enough to take on the science. But! Maybe I'm wrong. Science says:
The House of Representatives science committee's panel on basic research and education plans to hold hearings on climate change to present more views on the topic, says its new chair, freshman Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL).
Mel Brooks is very clearly a wacko, because he is dumb enough to try and take on The…
stoat | August 31, 2010Right, the previous thread has spilled off a discussion of Jastrow, Nierenberg and Seitz and their representation of a Hansen et al. figure. I have the feeling that the JNS paper may have appeared in multiple places, but the one I have access to is:
There is a lot wrong with that abstract (culminating in the once-traditional but now discarded over-reliance on the S+C satllite record) but the bit that is of immeadiate interest (because it figures in the previous discussion) is their take on figure 5 from Hansen et al. Which is:
And which they "reproduce" as:
The "2" after "Hansen et al." is…
stoat | June 27, 2010This post is about the ridiculous "hide the decline" video. I watched it when it first came out. It wasn't funny, it was dull. Apparently it has now been pulled from YouTube, but who cares?
But... because the thing is anti-science, the std.anti-science septics on wiki feel inclined to have an article on it. Sigh. There enough real subjects to create articles about without wasting time on vapour. I really ought to point you to the current version, and the current edit war: should this edit be included - viz, is the fact that some guy with a blog thinks the video is funny worth noting? I don't…
stoat | June 24, 2010 An unfair headline; but I think it is a known phrase: the "Dumb America" phenomenon, wherein the public has the hubris to believe that they really have something valuable to contribute to discussions that they can hardly begin to understand (I'm assuming that if you aren't part of DA then you're intelligent enough to realise I'm not talking about all Americans).
Yes, I'm talking about the comments in Under the Volcano, Over the Volcano by Willis Eschenbach at Wattsup (ht: mt). Incidentally, anyone tempted to complain about my sneering or elitist tone is invited to comment somewhere else. If…
stoat | May 2, 2010It seems shame to root thorugh the trash, but people do, and JM points out the following weird ref in t' Wegman report:
Valentine, Tom (1987) "Magnetics may hold key to ozone layer problems," Magnets,
2(1) 18-26.
The odd thing is that is doesn't appear to be a ref for anything. What is it doing there? And what is this odd paper? Or is Wegman one of those people that wear magnetic bangles to cure rheumatism?
* Is this the same Tom V?
* Of course, you should read Deep Climate
stoat | April 21, 2010We interrupt your schedule of cats and rowing for a brief snark at the denialists: courtesy of mt, who clearly ventures where angels fear to tread, we have Newsletter: NZCLIMATE TRUTH NO 244 by Vincent Gray: THE FLAT EARTH... The attached graph is in all of the Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change, and it is fundamental to all their activities. It assumes that the earth can be considered to be flat, that the sun shines all day and all night with equal intensity, and that the temperature of the earth's surface is constant. This is abysmal stupidity and ignorance at its…
stoat | March 26, 2010Eli has a wonderful post on the McLean mess. So wonderful I can't resist ripping bits of it off :-).
McLean et al. quote:
"But as it is written, the current paper [Foster et al. draft critique] almost stoops to the level of "blog diatribe". The current paper does not read like a peer-reviewed journal article. The tone is sometimes dramatic and sometimes accusatory. It is inconsistent with the language one normally encounters in the objectively-based, peer-reviewed literature."
But oddly enough they don't continue the quotation...
The real mystery here, of course, is how the McLean et al.…