William M. Connolley
stoat
Posts by this author
October 26, 2006
Don't you just hate it when the newspapers write up something based on selective leaks and insider info, and then fail to properly report on the real thing because its been done already? Well, I'm not going to do that to the Stern Review (side note: if you look up Stern report on google, I'm one of…
October 25, 2006
Sometime inthis post I reached comment 1000. I think it was Dano's. So congratulations to him and happy anniversary to me. Incidentally, there are 143 posts...
Meanwhile, back at some science, the GRACE stuff gets updated at, so it is said, higher resolution. Leading to "Greenland Ice Sheet on a…
October 22, 2006
Mark Lynas has a posting on this (sadly I can't work out how to link to it directly, so I'll have to tell you its the Oct 19th post), saying that various from the NOC have nipped off to the states in a private jet. Which is probably dubious.
But the disturbing (to me) point about the post was the…
October 17, 2006
Why is a Stoat like a Bus? Because you wait days for a post and then 3 come along at once :-)
Its been ages since I've posted any wiki stuff (ahem: apart from Citizendium, tangenitally). Mostly because the climate side of wiki is very quiet and I spend my time merrily blocking people for 3RR.
But…
October 17, 2006
See here for Oliver Postgates view on Global warming. And what he has to say about childrens TV is good too. This because he put an advert in the Grauniad yesterday (which I can't find online; but I can find a story about it).
October 17, 2006
With a title like that it has to be about folk music, and indeed it is. My last music recommendation was a year ago and somewhat more highbrow. But folk is good too. You can listen to BSR here, which is from the site of official Spiers and Boden website. We first heard them at the Cambridge folk…
October 16, 2006
Exciting BAS press release...
The first direct evidence linking human activity to the collapse of Antarctic ice shelves is published this week in the Journal of Climate. Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, University College London,…
October 13, 2006
Someone has kindly sent me the NYT articles that Inhofe references. Lets have a look... but before we do, there are plenty more out there if you care to look...
1895. The headline ("Geologists Think the World May be Frozen Up Again") is as described, though Inhofe fails to note it appeared on page…
October 12, 2006
Now you may well say, Inhofe talking nonsense is nothing particularly notable. But in this case he is talking about my particular hobbyhorse, the global cooling stuff. The NYT has an Opinion piece pointing out Inhofe's nonsense. Unsurprisingly, this has pissed him off, which is all to the good.
The…
October 11, 2006
Yes, it was the Holocaust of the fluffy toys. With its explicit mention of "holocaust" it evokes... well, in RP Jr's words: "Let's be blunt. This allusion is an affront to those who suffered and died in the Holocaust". Of course RP is actually talking about the phrase "Climate Change Denial" (or…
October 9, 2006
Apparently (this from listening to the 10 o'clock news on radio 4) there was a brief moment recently when gas prices in the UK were negative... due to mild weather, and new pipelines, and no capacity to store the stuff, people were being paid to take gas off traders hands. Weird or what. Anybody…
October 9, 2006
A not very subtle climate-and-flying campaign... checkout top-10-facts point 2 for fun with extrapolation...
October 8, 2006
We took a pile of stuff down the the dump today. I don't like throwing things away (which is a large part of the problem: thngs accumulate because I can't bear to throw them away), but it has become necessary - too much stuff has been piling up. The fluffy toys of the title weren't ours: it was…
October 5, 2006
A little while ago I wrote about CLOUD which is a CERN expt designed to test theories of cloud-cosmic ray connections, and the mechanisms of how the said CR's might influence clouds. But there is bad news... they've been scooped: A team at the Danish National Space Center has discovered how cosmic…
October 3, 2006
There is a new paper in GRL, Does the Last Glacial Maximum constrain climate sensitivity? (subs) by Crucifix. Now the assumption of linearity in sensitivity was part of JA/JH's work on constraining climate sensitivity, this may be a partial challenge (note that JH is thanked in the paper, so…
October 3, 2006
One of the things that just about no-one bothers contest is that CO2 is rising from anthropogenic contributions. There are good reasons for this; CO2 is well measured since Mauna Loa; it tracks (scaled by 50% for absoption) the known human sources... and so on. However, its a wide net out there and…
September 30, 2006
It seems there is a new version of the Spencer and Christy MSU product out (see here; S+C must be about the only people that still allow directory listing on their web sites). This is a provisional product and its not clear that there is any great point in talking about it, especially when RSS is…
September 24, 2006
Head in a Cloud has a post about a GRL paper: Luis Eduardo Antunes Vieira and Ligia Alves da Silva of the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais, Brazil, entitled "Geomagnetic modulation of clouds effects in the Southern Hemisphere Magnetic Anomaly through lower atmosphere cosmic ray effects".…
September 21, 2006
A thing called the U.S. Climate Change Technology Program Strategic Plan has been released (thanks to commenters at RC for the link). It seems (of course, I haven't read the whole thing...) to be a set of options for reducing CO2 emissions. All very splendid. But what is missing is... *why* would…
September 20, 2006
Yesterday I noted with approval a letter from the Royal Society asking Exxon to stop funding climate change denial. RP Jr, bizarrely, finds this inconsistent with the open and free exchange of ideas. Its bizarre because Exxons funding of these dubious organistaions has nothing to do open exchange…
September 20, 2006
News just in... California is suing its own governor over his Hummer... no, of course not. But California sues carmakers over global warming.
California sued six of the world's largest automakers over global warming on Wednesday, charging that greenhouse gases from their vehicles have caused…
September 20, 2006
I really must try to interact more with the other Seed bloggers. As a minor help towards that, I'm going to paste here the link I always lose to the internal fora. I assume it won't work for outsiders.
September 19, 2006
And you can read about it at http://citizendium.org/. Predicatably enough, wikipedia already has an article on it. Will it fly? Who knows...
[Update: Nature has an article on this, featuring a brief appearence by yours truely... I don't get to say anything exciting though. Or perhaps more precisely…
September 18, 2006
Over at pharyngula (which I *cannot pronounce... I could never be a biologist) there is an account of the silly ID's folks attack on Chris Mooney for not having the right credentials to talk about the science. Its a silly attack, of course, and PZ dutifully rips it apart (I'm a bit baffled as to…
September 18, 2006
The AMQUA (American Quaternary Association, bet you didn't know that) takes AAPG (American Association of Petroleum Geologists) to task for giving Crichton its journalism award for State of Fear, with the laughable assertion that "It is fiction, but it has the absolute ring of truth". The award…
September 18, 2006
Nature has a review on its front cover (subs req, of course) that pretty well says forget solar forcing for explaining current climate change ("brightening of the Sun is unlikely to have had a significant influence on global warming since the seventeenth century"; not to be outdone, Science refers…
September 17, 2006
Says the Guardian. The full report is here (by the Tyndall follk) but the summary (by FOE/Coop) is here. There is a clear void between the scale of the problem and the actual policy mechanisms proposed well I can agree with that, but from there on...
"...the report says that 90% cuts are achievable…
September 14, 2006
Or, Reading the entrails of chickens: molecular timescales of evolution and the illusion of precision. Pointed out to me by a palaentologist friend. There's a pdf here. Nothing at all to do with climate, but an interesting tale nonetheless. Or so I assume: it seems sensible, and was recommended by…
September 12, 2006
A reader writes: where is the paleontological data showing the correspondence between CO2 levels and ice age events?. The answer is, all over the place; here is one possible source. The correspondence isvery good.
At this point, the s(k)eptics jump up and down and say, aha, but the T leads the CO2…
September 8, 2006
The Economist has a special survey on climate change (you get to read the intro for free. The rest is sub-only :-(). Its headlined "The heat is on" and storylined "Global warming, it now seems, is for real.".
[Oh wonderful. I read the special supplement on the assumption that it has most of the…