stoat

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…

Non-beardy says “I’ve met the head of Wonga and I’ve had a very good conversation and I said to him quite bluntly we’re not in the business of trying to legislate you out of existence, we’re trying to compete you out of existence” (see-also the Gruan). When I first heard this while driving into…

Says Aunty. And the Graun says "Arctic thawing could cost the world $60tn, scientists say". $60tn is a big number. But lets not trouble ourselves with the popular press: lets go straight to the source, which is Nature ("Vast costs of Arctic change", by Gail Whiteman, Chris Hope and Peter Wadhams…

I know; everyone's already seen it. But its still beautiful.

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.…

We rock. M1 up 3, and the rest of the club did well, so we win the John Jenner trophy for 2013. Tally for the week: * day 1: epic row-over n front of Sharks * day 2: bumped Nines 2 * day 3: bumped St Neots (revenge) * day 4: bumped Press Press had a GoPro on a rigger, which sounds like a good idea…

Epic row over the first day (St Neots got Nines 2 quickly) but today it was our turn to get Nines, even more quickly. Make that up two: St Neots, in the gut, with an oar. See-also: the final tally.

I thought this was "vipers bugloss" but I'm no longer at all convinced by that. Even in the unwarped version. But this is an odd one. See how the stem has become flat, and the flower head all congested? I'd be interested to know what sort of oddity or gall this is, and also the True Name of the…

I go away for a week and the bees go mad. I don't mean so mad that they put their honey in a pot for me - only that they seem to have filled up the hive to the top, probably with rape. And this despite them being a new swarm, in place only since late May. That's 13 kg of honey (err, with wax mixed…

Says the Economist. THIS is an unusually busy moment in the unhappy history of efforts to curb climate change. In two weeks at the end of June the world’s three biggest polluters unveiled carbon-reducing measures. In China and America these are more ambitious than previous policies. But they fall…

Need I say more? Source: QS. Oh go on then. I'll say more. Here's a different pic: which is from whitehouse.gov/share/climate-action-plan. Or you can read the PDF. So, full marks for heart-in-the-right-place kind of stuff, and of course he's fighting a Congress stuffed full of wackos. The bit…

(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…

What a weird phrase. It sort of sounds like it ought to mean something, but it means nothing at all. "It speaks clearly of truth" would be better - but the grammar doesn't quite work. The alternate title to this post, incidentally, was "Like a trouser, yet not a trouser". I'll reserve that for…

Isn't this gorgeous? Its not new; BA blogged it last year, from Emily Lakdawalla, but I didn't notice. I forget why I noticed now. Its all fluid-dynamicsy of course; and it (or something very similar) can be recreated in the lab. There's another very nice image here. I think its gorgeous partly…

Its well past time to look at the sea ice extent. I don't have much to say, so here is a picture: We're currently well above the minimum - indeed, we're pushing the maximum of the AMSR era. That's not as meaningful as it might be, because 2012 was quite well up until only a few weeks back, so this…

Yes, its the wonderful Heartland / WUWT own-goal over the Chinese translations of HI's Climate Change Reconsidered. I have nothing to add except laughter, so you may as well read * BCL(SB), * Eli, * HW. Not edifying, true, but certainly amusing. Since I'm here I may as well put up something: can…

So the world is desperately excited by a programme called "PRISM", and we learn that - shockingly - the NSA reads people's emails. Can that possibly be true? Hard to believe, I realise, but stay with me. The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook,…

Peonies. Beautiful and ephemeral. Like the Mays, which is next week.

This 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.…

An 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…

This 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…

My personal ones, that is. Around the start of April, on about the first sunny day of the year, I wandered down the garden to see the bees, who had been very very quiet. And when I saw none, I went closer, and tapped, and breathed into the entrance, and put my ear to the side, and heard nothing.…

After this, it seems to me that the human race has realised its ultimate potential; no further progress is possible. We might as well all go back to bed. Some things I see, I think: yes, you're doing that very well. But I understand what you're doing, and I could, if not do it myself - I could…

VV has a thoughtful post about the value of peer review, looked at mostly through the lens of a couple of recent poor papers. Peer review (or whatever system you choose for choosing which papers will see the light) has to balance weeding out dross with not suppressing the unusual but good. It is…

I got wound up by this whilst reading news on my phone while sitting in a boring meeting. So I'll vent here. The usual scheme of things that we see so often is that bad things happen (the Assad regime in Syria); it goes on and on and people wring their hands, or ignore it, and anyway whilst bad…

I get an astonishing amount of comment-spam, nominally about dresses - wedding dresses, prom dresses, square dresses and how to fold them, and so on. None of it ever appears so I don't know why they bother, but simply deleting it all from my email queue is becoming ever more tedious. So I've…

Well, I got this (some days ago; I got backlogged): As one of the more highly trafficked climate blogs on the web, I’m seeking your assistance in conducting a crowd-sourced online survey of peer-reviewed climate research. I have compiled a database of around 12,000 papers listed in the 'Web Of…

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…

That's over at P3. But I've seen it elsewhere. The idea is that because we'll need to keep unburnt oil in the ground to hit (or rather, to not hit) a 2 oC commitment, a pile of oil companies are wildly overvalued, leading to... well, who cares what it leads to, because it doesn't matter. Via AS I…

It's the law, it seems. And a suitable title for a misc post. I've been busy, which accounts for my pathetic lack of posts recently. * I ran the Brighton marathon (3:46). * We entered the Town Bumps at Oxford, in IVs! * I ran the Head of the Cam again. * I've discovered that Yahoo and Flickr are…