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illconsidered | February 12, 2009I guess Marc Morano has found out about google alerts and seems to pop up on blog posts that mention James Inhofe, or his 650 scientists and probably his own name (Hi Marc!) Nice way to use the tax payer's money.
He popped in on Things Break and TB gave him a nice spanking! Well done! : )
illconsidered | February 12, 2009As I mentioned briefly before, I have just returned from Australia and as you could imagine, the heatwaves and wildfires were a hot topic(how funny am I?).
So the death toll is expected to exceed 200 people. Southern Australia has been experiencing extreme drought for many years now, so the whole place is a tinder box. Increased risk of wildfires is an anticipated, and probably already observed, consequence of global warming.
You are never on solid ground when attributing a particular extreme event to such a slow moving change in the average of all events, which is what climate change is,…
illconsidered | February 3, 2009Just a quick update on my recent post noting Roger Pielke's lack of integrity:
Roger makes a note of my post and John Fleck's and adds this underhanded toss-off line: Hansen's forecast "did not survive the peer review process" and so did not "appear in PNAS". Of course, the alledged "prediction" of a super El Nino ("there is a good chance") from the draft was not submitted to PNAS for peer review. Roger is refering to Hansen's passing the draft to a few friends and colleagues, inadvertently distributing it more broadly (oops, Roger's not a friend!).
There is a must read exchage at John…
illconsidered | February 3, 2009I have made it pretty clear before that I am no fan of Roger Pielke Jr. Everytime I stick my nose in there the smell seems to get a little worse.
His latest effort at sabotaging productive discourse on climate science and policy is a really low blow, putting to rest any lingering hopes one might have had that he still had some integrity stashed away in there somewhere. Now I know these are strong words, but I have to confess this really gets my blood pressure up, it is just the slimiest of tactics. (I will happily retract this post and apologize if Roger makes ammends for his ethical…
illconsidered | January 29, 2009"Growth is not finite". Well, that was easily settled!
For some reason, this bothers Michael Tobis. He's such a downer, we mustn't invite him to the next economic recovery party (there will be one anyday now, won't there?)
illconsidered | January 24, 2009Nature magazine recently published a paper showing that Antarctica has actually been warming about .1oC/decade since the 1950's. It was the cover story:
A new reconstruction of Antarctic surface temperature trends for 1957-2006, reported this week by Steig et al., suggests that overall the continent is warming by about 0.1 °C per decade. The cover illustrates the geographic extent of warming, with the 'hotspot' peninsula and West Antarctica shown red against the white ice-covered ocean.
That the antarctic seemed to be slightly cooling despite elevated greenhouse gas levels has been a…
illconsidered | January 20, 2009Michael Tobis presents an interesting case study on the denialist echo chamber at work.
I guess if you copy/paste a falsehood often enough it just becomes true!
illconsidered | January 13, 2009It was feeling for a while that the faux debate over climate change was waning and maybe engaging in it was more distraction than a constructive effort. That feeling started after the very striking change in mainstream climate change coverage that followed An Inconvenient Truth.
It got a bit stronger with the election of Obama and his reaffirmation of carbon controls and alternative energy as important goals.
But In it for the Gold has some bad news on that one and the denialist blogosphere is really picking up steam, so perhaps that was a bit of premature jubilation...sigh. Maybe when the…
illconsidered | January 7, 2009Real Climate has a brief discussion of some recent research connecting the Younger Dryas cooling with a comet impact event.
They point to Open Mind which has some very interesting discussion.
Just FYI...
illconsidered | December 17, 2008How's this for jaw dropping, mind-boggling, unintentional irony?
Question to the Bush administration at this year's UN climate change talks:
If you look back over the course of the last few years, is there anything you would have done differently or is there anything you wished had happened but didn't happen?
Answer:
I wish first that Russia had made its mind up sooner as to whether it was going to join Kyoto or not.
Read the particulars here. (No it won't make anymore sense)
illconsidered | December 16, 2008My first Common Lisp programming job was for Mercury Scheduling (no longer around) working on the back end of airline crew control software. The main focus was assisting crew controllers in scheduling personnel on flights. We had to satisfy literally hundreds of constraints from union regulations, government regulations to...what else?...oh yeah, the constraints of reality like not being in two places at once or starting a new shift 1000 miles away in an hour's time (computers are stupid, you have to tell them everything!).
One thing I learned is just how complicated time can be when you…
illconsidered | December 5, 2008We have discussed that persistent question here before: what word to use when talking about people who simply refuse to acknowledge in the slightest the rather solid case for the theory of anthropogenic global warming.
I was thinking it would be worth a very in depth and lengthy post. But I gratefully bow to Greenfyre's excellent essy on the subject which you can (and should IMO) read in full right here.
He makes all of the points I would have plus a good deal more.
illconsidered | December 4, 2008Tired of the same old crap for Christmas?
Why not buy some new crap?
illconsidered | December 3, 2008I know blogs are supposed to be all about up to the second news and gossip. but sometimes I just don't get through my reading list in a very timely manner, what can I say?
So I thought I would just quickly share a small pile of good postings from around the local climate blogosphere, along with a smattering of pithy commentary (because if I'm anything at all, it is pithy ;-)
Eli Rabbet is a masochistic bunny who likes to visit horrible places like Jenn Marohasey's blog. Jenn is one of those "honest" sceptics who just likes to explore interesting alternate views of science, like maybe the…
illconsidered | November 18, 2008This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic.Objection:
In October, 2008, Al Gore's science advisor, James Hansen announced yet another "hottest" month on record. After all the alarmist banner headlines sank in, yet another "correction" quietly contradicted this, and October was not particularily warm after all. This is yet another example of why the temperature record can not be trusted.
Answer:
Wow. Where to begin with this one? There are many versions of this myth around already at the time of…
illconsidered | November 11, 2008How far do you have to lower your standards if you are the Heartland Institute and want four Texans for a list of "experts" on global warming?
Pretty low. Despite "dozens if not hundreds" of working climate scientists in Texas, to get four deniers for their list, the Heartland Institute had to use an energy expert, a policy analyst, an emergency physician and a petroleum engineer!
Like damning with faint praise, that list says alot about the opinions of the actual community of experts.
illconsidered | November 6, 2008Michael Crichton has died of cancer. He was 66 years old.
Climate Progress has a lengthy obituary for those of you unfamiliar with his destructive role in the climate debate.
I enjoyed Jurassic Park.
illconsidered | October 28, 2008"Skeptics use a scatter shot approach, using one kind of physics to 'disprove' one aspect and an opposing kind of physics to 'disprove' another. You need to have an internally consistent argument."
As Jen's site [Jennifer Marohasey's site] demonstrates so well, you don't need anything of the sort.
Check out Eli Rabett's post about how climate sceptics have no problem believing any number of mutually exclusive theories at one time, as long as they share the common thread of confirmation bias.
I have been wanting to put together an exhaustive list of all the internal contradictions there are in…
illconsidered | October 27, 2008From the "Laugh, Don't Cry" department, Tamino has a bit of fun at the expense of, well, quite a few!
illconsidered | October 22, 2008"It's not really that hard to understand" is the catch phrase in this YouTube video featuring Herman Daly, the subject is the insanity of the economic cult of perpetual growth:
I got this from the most recent posting at Things Break, which you should read and be sure to follow the links.
I would also offer here the very compelling image from New Scientist that isn't actually clickable from TB's post.
(this image is courtesy of New Scientist and is part of this article)