stoat

It's the folks over at No Truth Zone again. Thanks (do I mean that? No, I don't) ATTP for drawing it to my attention (via the swamp that is Breitbart). The wiki part is tediously wrong; see A child’s garden of wikipedia, part I in the unlikely event of your not being able to work out why yourself…

You may have noticed that blogging here has been a little thin recently. That's because I've been on holiday. It was glorious. There will be a full post or indeed series of posts in due course; for the moment you get just this. If you can work out where that is without cheating you're doing well.…

The answer turns out to be "Arrhenius, of course" and the details turn out to be not desperately interesting. But if you want to know more see Which early works are cited most frequently in climate change research literature? A bibliometric approach based on Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy…

There's a vair nice post at Moyhu called climate feedbacks and circuits. I think it is particaulrly nice that someone competent has finally taken and shaken the gibberish about feedbacks that the EE's fling about so thoughtlessly and actually made some sense of it.

An image from the Economist's Technology Quarterly. Interesting to me: I've been following the Space X (not to be confused with Force X) stuff with great interest. But I hadn't realised that launch was such a tiny fraction of the overall spend. As a minor tie into the nominal subject of this blog…

There is, of course, a theory of law. As soon as you ponder the question, you realise there must be. But it had never occurred to me (in my faint defence I find, now I look, that whilst wiki has a category for theories of law, it doesn't seem to have an overall article on the concept of theory of…

Andy Skuce, in On and against method and process is (to me) bizarrely keen on Paul Feyerabend (though presumably he discards the numerous cites to Lenin, denigration of modern medicine, and all the really wacko stuff). I kinda tend to mix F up with the other out-of-their-depth French folk like…

A delightful phrase that I've just discovered. And the answer is, it is John Vidal; and so Peter Wadhams is the wind. Perhaps that's just a bit closer to the knuckle than even I tend to sail but its late on a Friday night. Thanks to VV on twitter for the first link and a variety of folks for the…

Or so says the Fail. If you don't want your mind poisoned, you can read much the same press release from Reuters. If you'd prefer it described in more moderate language (you weirdo!) you can read the BAS PR directly: New Antarctic ice discovery aids future climate predictions: A team of British…

Every now and again I say something, and someone replies with stuff about wild-eyed Libertarians, and I don't care because I don't know any of them. But anyway, via RS I ended up at lp.org and this seemed a reasonable chance to find out what they thought; so I ended up reading their platform. I…

Summer Atmospheric Circulation Anomalies over the Arctic Ocean and Their Influences on September Sea Ice Extent: A Cautionary Tale (Mark C. Serreze, Julienne Stroeve, Andrew P. Barrett, Linette N. Boisvert, DOI: 10.1002/2016JD025161) says "sea ice is complicated". Or, in more detail: Numerous…

The roasting of the Middle East: Infertile Crescent: More than war, climate change is making the region hard to live in. Or so says the Economist, Aug 6th 2016. I admit, I'm surprised. I'd put utterly crap government (which includes the current wars) top of their list of problems. Still, let's see…

Good grief, I am becoming a veritable post-generating machine. Don't worry though I'll dry up soon enough. This one is a cheap rip-off of PW's post which is a pointer to the rather nice What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists. That's about a physicist talking to a variety of…

Oh dear oh dear. But this one is almost about sea ice, so I get a free hand to rant about yet more faux-greenie drivel. The news: a giant floating gin palace is going to visit the Arctic so that giant floating gin-drinkers can drink giant gins while surrounded by ice and, occasionally, poor people…

A local kerfuffle. The apparently-determined-to-tear-itself-apart Labour party got taken to the courts by some of its members who didn't like a decision the NEC - the party's governing body - had made, in respect of the rules for who was eligible to vote in the upcoming leadership contest. My…

In a success for the "invisible hand" over "big government", we have People gather to buy fresh produce that was brought into rebel held areas of Aleppo by private traders from a newly opened corridor that linked besieged opposition held eastern Aleppo with western Syria that was captured recently…

The normally sensible John Fleck has a post pointing out the bleedin' obvious - well; it points out the issue; the solution suggested is of course hopelessly wrong1 -, although to be fair it has escaped the attention of many other people too, so perhaps it is only obvious if you think about it. In…

About the most useless game to play in discussions about global warming is to worry much about the distinctions between "proven facts", "theories", "hypotheses" and so on and so forth. These are ideas best left to philosophers and schoolmen. My image comes from the ever-helpful RS which is my…

A hectic week of rowing and two weeks in Norway has left a bit of a hole in my blogging schedule. I also think it is about time to recognise that my long drift away from active involvement with science, combined with not-a-lot-going-on-really in actual climate science means I'll need to find other…

It has been rather quiet around here recently. That's due to a combinations of Summer, Work and Rowing. The latter has culminated in the annual festival called "Cambridge town bumps" and the answer is up three, which is a decent result in the first division. Not quite blades, because we stuffed up…

I can never ever find this quote when I want it. But, I've got a blog. So now I will be able to find it. It is from Hobbes of course; but Elements not Leviathan - though there's a similar passage in Leviathan which I can't find just now. Here's the full quote in context, from Chapter 7: Of Delight…

Paxton Drops Challenge as Exxon Mobil Probe Shifts says the Texas Tribune - strangely, Inside Climate News, normally so fascinated by Exxon related legal matters, doesn't seem to have covered it. The Washington Times offers Climate change prosecutors suffer setback as AG pulls Exxon subpoena, which…

A photographic essay. Hive #2, "flattop", with a smoker on top and surrounded by a carpet of weeds. The bees don't really mind that, I think. The observant will notice the roof is in rather poor condition - but its been like that for years and not getting much worse - and the queen excluder is…

I haven't had a tosser for a while, the last was Quentin Letts, so it seems appropriate that this year's winner should be another joke Tory pol, Boris the Clown. For whom Satirists can’t f*cking type quick enough seems to have been written. Having joined "Leave" purely for his own stupid selfish…

Just as I wrote down my thoughts pre-vote, and advised against leaving, I'll write down my thoughts a day or so after, for posterity. Doubtless it will be grateful. First off I like my son am already bored with the Diana-esque levels of news clogging that the vote has caused, so I apologise for…

Pah, another el-cheapo clickbait post, spawned by Twitter. The conversation went something like this: mt: Exxon knew, of course. Every decent geophysicist has known about climate problem for decades. How could they not know? All oil majors know. me: Errm, this is what I've been saying for some…

Bored with force X from outer space? Was Force F just too fuckwitted, and part 22 just too dull? Then why not play "hedge funds"? Hedge funds do lots of complex maths and make lots of money (only not so much recently); they also have the advantage of being opaque. So play today, with Jo Nova and…

People have been asking for the sea ice post, so here it is. I've been putting it off, obviously. The $10k bet comes due this year but its looking like a bad year; and secondly I don't really have all that much to say. Just to remind you, the terms are If both NSIDC and IARC-JAXA September 2016…

I first started watching the Mays in 2011, when Caius went head, bumping Pembroke and First & Third along the way. So I selected Caius as my college-to-support, even though we then rowed out of Peterhouse and now row out of Queens, and know people in King's and Christ's. In 2013 they were…

UK ports look beyond fading coal imports says the FT: Ports from south-west England to central Scotland have been taken aback by the speed at which demand has evaporated for what had been one of their most dependable cargoes — coal. As coal-fired power stations across the country shut, ports have…