climate science
stoat | October 5, 2014Next: Mullerhutte to Nurnberger
Having got to the Mullerhutte I finally had a chance to climb the Zuckerhutl, which at 3505 m is the high point of the Stubai and something I've wanted to climb for ages. My diary reminds me it was a cold night: the hut is quite high at 3145 m, and I was alone in my dortoir, and used two blankets. There were a few other people in the hut: two Germans, who I'd half-met on the Signalgipfel, and another group of four; not sure where they went. Naturally, being a reserved Englishman, I merely nodded politely at them.
Happily, as you saw from the last pix on that…
stoat | October 4, 2014Via sekrit, in the Journal of Science Communication, comes a deeply flawed article, Science blogging: an exploratory study of motives, styles, and audience reactions by Merja Mahrt and Cornelius Puschmann. The flaw, you'll be unsurprised to learn, is that it doesn't mention "stoat". I'm not sure that all the rest of it is too interesting either.
This paper presents results from three studies on science blogging, the use of blogs for science communication. A survey addresses the views and motives of science bloggers, a first content analysis examines material published in science blogging…
stoat | October 1, 2014 David G. Victor & Charles F. Kennel have an opinion piece in Nature arguing that it would be a really good idea to re-arrange the deckchairs on the Titanic. Or possibly ask the orchestra to play a somewhat different tune. I paraphrase somewhat, you understand.
Naturally, you should read their actual article first, and then secondly you should read the excellent RC response by Stefan. However, I disagree with both of them.
To be somewhat less sarcastic, V & K urge that Average global temperature is not a good indicator of planetary health. Track a range of vital signs instead, or…
stoat | September 29, 2014 Did I ever tell you how exciting snails are? No, wait, don't go away... Oh well. Now the rest of you have settled down, I'll continue. My pic, incidentally, shows some Sphacterian snails I met in Greece this summer, which exhibited this odd clustering behaviour I've not seen before. But that's nothing to do with this post.
I was reading the Times, as one does in Waitrose cafe when one can't find the Torygraph, and came across an interesting article which is paywalled, so in revenge I won't point you at it. Extinct snail re-discovered at Aldabra Atoll will do instead, and its rather more…
stoat | September 29, 2014 Ah, the (self) pity of it. AW has a long lame series of excuses for why he went all the way to Bristol to hear Michael Mann talk but did not ask, or even try to ask, any questions. Sou takes it to pieces, but you really don't need that. Obviously it wasn't necessary to ask a question in order to want to go - the lecture was fully pre-booked, and who wouldn't want to go and hear
In this special Cabot Institute lecture, in association with Bristol Festival of Ideas, Michael E Mann will discuss the science, politics, and ethical dimensions of global warming in the context of his own ongoing…
stoat | September 28, 2014Every autumn I think - too late - that its about time I looked at my bees, took off some honey, and put on the Apistan strips. Ideally this would be done in late August, I think, because the Apistan needs to come off 6 weeks later, and once you get much into October the weather gets unfavourable to opening the hive(s).
But every year summer is too busy, so lets not complain. Here we see the main hive, with the supers and queen excluder removed. There are plenty of bees, so that's good. And the bees are still bringing in pollen, which tends to mean they are happy:
What's not so good is that…
stoat | September 26, 2014Crandles kindly reminded me that I had three £100 bets with him; they're formalised here (an earlier version at £67 each is here), as:
Crandles offers 3 separate bets on the average of [2012, 2013 and 2014] (to be above/below 4.294, I take the high side), of [2013, 2014 and 2015] (4.119, ditto) and of [2014, 2015 and 2016] (3.94, ditto). In the event of anything that clearly throws things out like a VEI6 volcanic eruption bets are voidable.
Those are NSIDC extent not area. CR kindly reminded me of the 2012 and 13 values as 3.63 and 5.35 respectively. 2014 is pretty clearly going to be higher…
stoat | September 25, 2014 Over at NoTricksZone they claim they're desperate to bet that (Arctic) sea ice will increase, not decrease, in the "future". However, the cheapskates are only offering $1k, which isn't worth getting out of bed for out to 2022. I offered them $10k, and a closer date, and guess what - they jumped at it!
No, I'm kidding you. Of course they didn't jump at it; they ran away. I'm pursuing, but I expect it to run into the sand. They're interested in propaganda, not an actual bet. They blowhard, but there's nothing behind it.
But perhaps dear reader you (like they) believe that Arctic sea ice will…
stoat | September 24, 2014Next: Wilder Pfaff and Zuckerhutl
After the Habicht I walked across to the Bremer hut and then the Nurnberger, and my next mountain was the Wilder Freiger. Its not difficult (incidentally, for a nice piece about the same region from the viewpoint of someone more cautious than me, see here) and this would be my third ascent but conditions were less than perfect:
That's a view across the valley to the Simmingjochl, yesterday's route from the Bremer; look closely and you can see the Zollhutte on the skyline. I'd got up at 6 as an act of faith, but the snow, and the cloud base at ~2700 m, and…
stoat | September 20, 2014
Not perhaps entirely fair - it is a cartoon, after all - but I liked it (nicked from the Times, if you were wondering). I also feel somewhat critical of Salmond: with his shiniest toy taken away he's chosen to walk off and leave others to sort out the mess. Perhaps. Is there a mess to be sorted out? (Timmy thinks there is but his analysis is poor) Right now it seems possible, with everyone desperately excited. That will probably soon pass. I was just going to leave you with The Gods of the Copybook Headings which has many relevant lines; and everyone can read their own mottoes into the words…
stoat | September 18, 2014Next: Wilder Freiger to the Muller Hutte
I packed some stuff (too much as it turned out) and headed off to the Stubai. First stop is the Innsbrucker Hutte (interior pic, including the lovely huge ceramic stove) and first mountain is the Habicht, which SummitPost doesn't take too seriously, at least for the Voie Normale. Probably correctly; it isn't hard in decent conditions. Last year I failed after backing off in heavy snow conditions and thick cloud. I was about 270 m off the summit but couldn't see that on the ground, due to the cloud, and my old watch, unlike the new 610, wouldn't tell me…
stoat | September 16, 2014Yes, Stoat, the pundit you've all been waiting for. Well, at least one person asked.
Coming back from hols I misread a headline on my phone (I don't have data roaming so gloriously missed everything while I was away) that suggested that Scotland had voted for independence. "Good for them" I thought, though I was surprised they'd been that brave. Then I realised I'd misread it. Anyway, the point is that whilst my overall opinion is that the Scots should vote against independence, my view isn't very strong, and I do at least feel emotionally in favour of independence. But as an exercise I'll…
stoat | September 15, 2014 I've been on hols, so allow me to be a little behind the times. The EU is proposing to ban vacuum cleaners of more than 1600 watts. If you follow that link you'll find a fairish discussion of whether this matters or not: its easy enough to argue that no-one needs more than 1600, and that Evil Manufacturers merely push the wattage up to fool Idiot Customers into buying something that "must be better". The EU itself says It is not power that makes a vacuum cleaner perform well. The EU will now require that all vacuum cleaners clean well and at the same time avoid wasting electricity. This will…
stoat | September 13, 2014I've been on holiday in the Stubai. It was great. My apologies for the few comments that got stuck in moderation over the past two weeks, they are all released now. If you think there's anything else do let me know.
Be reassured that I will bore you with more mountaineering photos in the near future. In the meantime a teaser: which peak is this?
stoat | August 27, 2014I'm delighted to announce that Roy Spencer has joined the select company of such as Lindzen (sea ice; also emeritus), Curry (septic capture) and von S (wikipedia) as a shark jumper. Its all there in full public view.
How Much of Atmospheric CO2 Increase is Natural?... Natural Variations in CO2 are LARGE... We should remember how much we have anthropomorphized recent warming: Human activities produce CO2 in reasonably well known amounts, humans do the monitoring of CO2, then humans do the modeling. Since we really don’t understand the natural sources and sinks very well — not to the <1%…
stoat | August 26, 2014 No no don't go away, there's actually some science in this post, courtesy of the increasingly-heavyweight Nick Stokes. Or, perhaps more fairly, whatever science there is comes from NS. But there's a lot of snark too, as I hope you'd expect. That comes from me. The title isn't quite right; I could have tried anopsologists but I bet you wouldn't have recognised that - I wouldn't have, until I looked it up. But let me attempt to come to the point. Over at JoNova is yet another of those tedious posts where they complain that a weather station has been "adjusted" to show warming (and they're…
stoat | August 18, 2014 A year ago, the entirety of the intertubes were rocked to their foundations by a post of epochal proportions - me taking the piss out of AW's "paper". And now, I'm rather distressed to see, the anniversary of this anniversary has passed unnoticed by everyone. When your major "paper" is so contemptible that people don't even remember to mock it on time, you'll probably be reduced to publishing cartoons. Oh, wait.
As George Montgomery said in August 15, 2012 at 5:24 pm: I know you’ve been really busy, but when’s the final draft coming out, Anthony?
[Update: revivification effort / assertion…
stoat | August 14, 2014Alternatively, "Despair of the Dork Side part 2". But I'd thought I'd stick with the Hamlet theme.
So, no sooner does AW write not one but two barking mad posts about CO2 (see DotDS) than the what-I-had-thought-comparatively-sane Jo Nova complete the trilogy with It’s an Unsettling Climate for skeptical scientists like Murry Salby. Its all totally hatstand, as you'd expect. Salby is a brave noble scientist whose ideas are being suppressed - suppressed I tell you - by the black helicopters. But the truth is that Salby's mad ideas on CO2 are drivel; I took them apart and plenty of other people…
stoat | August 6, 2014 Carlos Frenk, Director of the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University says some sane-but-not-surprising things about peer review. In other respects, the venue this appears in - IAI, the Institute of Art and Ideas - appears to have been taken over by septics, see for example Climate Change: a Rhetoric of Risk, Are climate change sceptics unfairly ignored by mainstream media? where they take Benny Peiser seriously.
Musings on Quantitative Palaeoecology is Richard Telford's blog, which I've only just found. He takes the piss out of Monkers which is always a difficult sport…