septic tripe
stoat | January 28, 2010This was an ask stoat question, and probably a fairly easy one, so I'll have a go.
First of all, what is it? AF (ie, Airbo(u)rne Fraction, is the proportion of human emitted CO2 that stays in the atmosphere, the rest being sunk in land or ocean. Now it is important not to confuse the "proportion that stays in the atmosphere" with "the concentration in the atmosphere" otherwise you get silly little skeptics running around thinking that "airbourne fraction is constant" means that CO2 has stopped increasing. Sigh. However, I see that last time I looked at this I was having to slap down the…
stoat | October 13, 2009I liked Freakonomics, so I'm a bit sad to see the (inevitable) sequel being so hopelessly wrong. Probably this is a case of the old rule: whenever you see people write about stuff you know, they get it wrong. Joe Romm has a fairly characteristic attack; and just for a change I'll agree with him; though he chooses odd bits to assault. It looks like the "global cooling" junk is just one chapter, but of course it is the only one I'll pay any attention to.
Diagnosis, in brief: (1) they write about stuff they clearly don't understand (2) they pick a catchy reverse-common-wisdom nugget as a…
stoat | April 6, 2009I quite like reading the Torygraph. Unlike the Grauniad it doesn't tell me what I want to know. But every now and again it is time for a reality check, and the most recent demonstration of their utter incompetence at reporting GW is Rise of sea levels is 'the greatest lie ever told', which uncritically repeats the tripe from "dowsing" Morner (the "facts" in the article are so badly at variance with reality that they aren't even worth refuting). And there is a good reason why he is the *former* head of the INQUA commission: http://www.edf.org/documents/3868_morner_exposed.pdf will provide some…
stoat | March 1, 2009As organisations that downsize too aggressively discover, having people around who actually remember what happened in the past can be very useful (no, this is no reference to CSR; though I have noticed that one of the most valuable and oft-forgotten ways to solve some new bug reports is to simply type the appropriate key into the bug database and discover how and why this was or was not fixed last time).
But instead, this is a pointer to Noam Chomsky's contribution to the George "I'm cr*p" Will debate.
stoat | March 3, 2008Via a wiki edit (which I rather unkindly sabotaged, though I doubt my version lasts for long) I discover the grandly named "Summary for Policymakers of the Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change''. DeSmog reports that its thick on the ground at the septic extravaganza.
The existence of the "Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change" outside SF's mind is uncertain; as indeed is the report: I can certainly find the summary, but the report itself is ellusive, or possibly illusive. The summary, oddly enough, is copyright SEPP, which makes you think it…
stoat | January 30, 2008Morano can't jump the shark, because in his case it comes pre-jumped. But he does his best here. Nice to see Eli getting so much publicity, he deserves it. But why Morano is reduced to commenting on blogs, surely his golden rat award winning website is platform enough?
Oh, and there is KDPs version on wiki. For "prominent scientists", there are an awful lot of redlinks.
stoat | December 17, 2007Lindzen sez Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.
This sounds like tripe - they continue to publish; and if they ever said anything about GW, I missed it.
Anyone know what Lindzen is on (about)? RC touched on this.
[Update: SB points out that L says in this, "The Italian situation was more benign. Some of Italy's leading younger atmospheric scientists like Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza publicly questioned alarm and organized a meeting in early autumn of 1991…
stoat | October 22, 2007A brief break from bashing my own side, to point up the stupidies of the Evil Ones, to prove that I haven't Gone Over myself. Its not terribly entertaining, as we replace issues of judgement and representation with lying, but needs to be done on occaision.
So, from my own comments (heavens! is there no censorship in this world?) we have: Steven Milloy at Fox News points out that if you take GORE's movie, and remove the 9 proved false statements, and also correct Gore's false statement that 2005 was the hottest year on record (1934 was).... Well, no. 1934 wasn't, as a fairly cursory look at…
stoat | August 31, 2007For a long time the AAPG enjoyed the dubious distinction of being the only organisation with any kind of scientific credibility that maintained an officially septic position on climate change, as reported by the official journal of record, wikipedia. That changed recently when they adopted a new statement. The old statement was at least brave in being boldly scientifically illiterate, and was (presumably) only there to demonstrate to the left that some of their prejudices against Big Oil were correct. The new one, as Eli points out, is pathetic in its desire to appease both sides,. and yet…
stoat | August 31, 2007Tim Lambert provides the abstract of Zhen-Shan and Xian; MW was kind enough to send the text. I've seen it before... probably via Monckton or one of the std.septic channels. Lambert describes it as "just a rubbish paper that should not have been published". It comes up as one of the Schultz 7.
But why is it rubbish? (of course it must be, since it rejects the consensus :-), but is more detail of any value?).
Well, lets start off with the nearly-ad-homs: the English is in places terrible, although better than my Chinese. In most cases, this isn't a fair accusation to level at authors, since it…
stoat | August 30, 2007Back to the septic tripe I fear (thanks Fergus). From dailytech.com, whatever that is, we have someone "updating Oreskes". And the work has been submitted to... yes you guessed it, E+E. Bit of a hint there re quality. Does this come under be careful what you wish for?
Oreskes said The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting…
stoat | August 29, 2007Have a look at this edit, where Lumidek loses his rag.
Slightly less wacko, but not losing touch with the septic, the AAPG seems to be coming closer to reality whilst being careful not to get there.
Meanwhile someone calling themselves SFredSinger, who may or may not actually be Singer, tried this on for size but it didn't work. [Oops, and I missed the connection with item 1].
stoat | August 12, 2007Its been obvious for quite a while that there is no trend in solar to explain climate trends; this is the bleedin' obvious but Lockwood managed to get a paper out of it a while back. Of course neither paper nor data will affect the wild-eyed fringe, as Piers Corbyn demonstrates by tilting at windmills in the Grauniad letters page.
Corbyn also doesn't undertand the difference between weather and climate, but is bold enough to use his technique to make predictions, such as there will be periods of major thunderstorms, hail and further flooding in Britain, most notably July 22-26, August 5-9 and…
stoat | July 13, 2007Since we were on TGGWS-wanabe's (can it really be true that no-one has pointed out to her that her CO2 graph is junk? Why is it still there?) it seems appropriate to note that a heavily-cut version has aired in Oz. Most of the cuts (I haven't seen the thing, of course) are hacking out Wunsch, who was misrepresented in the original - there is a nice interview with him here.
But thats reality. In Durkin-world Wunschs appearence in the film "perfectly accurately represents what he said". So why was Wunsch cut? Are Australian lawyers saner than Durkin?
stoat | July 10, 2007So whats new you ask? Well nothing, but its worth pointing out. The issue in question is What do we learn from Glaciers in the Highest Altitudes In The Alps? which found (quick reminder) that though low-altitude glaciers were retreating, the very highest ones on Mt Blanc were not, because ablation is negligible there, because its too cold.
This was on CCnet (thanks J), which seems to have picked it up from World Climate Report. Which spends so much of its time wurbling that it doesn't have space to quote bits of the paper such as the shrinkage of numerous glaciers in the Alps over the last…
stoat | July 10, 2007Eli has the septics latest example of TGGWS-style graph faking - take a look. Or it could just be incompetence, I suppose (theirs, not Eli's).
stoat | June 21, 2007We now know what Vaclav Klaus thinks. And the answer is... some very stupid things. On the "science", he says No in answer to "If it is a reality, is it man-made?" and "if it is a reality, is it a problem?". This is explicit enough. Unfortunately the very next question reveals the weakness of his understanding, as he fails to grasp the difference between climate and weather (see this, this\and this).
Next Q is "Why do you disbelieve the science when every serious national scientific establishment appears to support it?" to which his answer is "I do not disbelieve the science, but I see a big…
stoat | May 21, 2007The IEA are the Institute for Economic Affairs. The quote on their mainpage shows what they think of themselves The price of economic freedom is eternal vigilance, and as long as the IEA is around, we may be sure that the forces of regulation and state control will have a formidable obstacle in their path. Long may it flourish.
Almost inevitably, this kind of attitude translates into skepticism on global warming. The illogical argument is, roughly, "we're for economic freedom and low taxes and against government interference. GW, if real, will probably require state intervention to fix it.…
stoat | May 13, 2007Oh dear oh dear oh dear, just take a look at Citizendium's article on Global Warming (though I have cheated slightly; the current version, while still rubbish, is marginally better).
The question is, what to do about it? At the moment my answer is "nothing" - Cz is not going to get taken seriously with articles like this, and if no-one reads it what is the point of writing it? Its no better than Conservapedia. The way to improve it would be to replace it with wiki's article, which would be rather pointless.
stoat | May 9, 2007There is a curious post over at CA about yet more TGGWS tedia... read on if you can bear it. This time the issue is the 1990 IPCC graph, which McI seems to accept uncritically despite its lack of good source (see wiki for more). TGGWS used the old graph uncritically; this is obviously wrong.
This looks like becoming the latest septic tactic: we must return to the Age Of Gold: in the Good Old Days there were graphs like IPCC '90 fig 7.1.c (see the wiki link above) which, despite having no source at all, were Wot People Thought and therefore Must Be Good. Of course, if McI didn't like the IPCC…