Posts by Steve Crook

Re: Repeat of the same article, this time the biased variant

Well, that didn't take long did it? You've already resorted to the 'blogs funded by oil companies' slur. It's interesting in the light of the recent rather laughable Lewandowsky paper, because it seems to me that in fact it's often the true believers that can't let go of the idea that there's this massive fossil fuel based conspiracy.

Despite there being no credible evidence of large scale donations to 'denier' blogs or NGOs. By large scale I mean anything that isn't dwarfed by government funding by at least a factor of 100, and probably closer to 1000 on a global scale...

Next, you'll be saying the Illuminati or the Masons are involved.

@ Mike Richards 70% CO2

There are scientists that'll disagree with the attribution to GHGs, they maintain that a significant portion of melt is caused by 'soot' emissions. I can remember seeing photos of melt pools where the bottom of the pool was black from the soot in the melt, but can't find a link to post...

See this paper from Pielke Snr/Liston: http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2012/04/10/another-climate-feedback-the-influence-of-shrub-height-in-tundra-regions-on-northern-high-latitude-climate/ Ok, shrubs aren't the issue here, but the paper quantifies the effects of soot on snow/ice melting.

iBag

Your analogy is interesting.

Imagine that Apple had designed a handbag. It wasn't the first handbag ever made, and had two handles and internal pockets like many other bags, but the iBag used a magnetic clasp and adjustable straps. The first time a mag clasp/adjustable straps are used on a handbag, but they *have* been used on other types of bag.

Then someone produces a handbag that looks similar to the iBag and it has a magnetic clasp. The galaxy bag *cannot* be mistaken for the iBag despite being similar and in addition the rival bag is branded in such a way that no-one could possibly think Apple made it.

The whole thing is daft. I understand Apple want to protect their hard work and their development costs, but this is beyond that, they also want to inhibit competition and that's not a good thing for anyone, even Apple.

Re: Just too much

The price is steep, but for me at least the increased resolution and brightness on the screen and the ability to use it in daylight is the most important thing. That said, I could probably live with a Nexus 7. I suspect that the price may move into line with the more or less equivalent IPad. So I'll wait and see...

Re: fee

In principle, Australia's carbon tax was a reasonable thing if pitched at the right level. The plan was to ensure that there was no overall change in the tax burden, but to switch the emphasis to carbon so that companies would have a direct financial incentive to reduce their footprints.

Of course, in a country that relies so heavily on coal and heavy industries that use the energy generated from it, it was always going to be a hard sell. Particularly when it came from a party that had promised categorically that there wouldn't be such a tax.

It does seem that you need a politician to make a crisis out of a drama.

Re: Quote of the week - the FULL quote

For something where the science is settled, there seems to be an awful lot we still don't know about the way the planets climate actually works. When someone reasonably explains the differential rates of absorption now and in the nineties I'll be more inclined to accept their predictions of what might happen over the next two or three decades.

Until then, it's another unknown in what would appear to be a slowly growing list that make me wonder if the only settled science is that CO2 is a ghg.

Some of the statements in the paper really do read like some sort of disclaimer, sort of don't shoot the messenger. Has it come to that, where you just can't present the facts but have to display your credentials as part of the 'consensus' to ensure that you get the opportunity to write more papers.

Re: Still warming, but less so

Well, there's been little official help for Watts and the volunteers of surfacestations.org. Indeed, I recall that, when Watts originally announced the project in 2007 (yes, really, this isn't a recent thing) the station database was removed from public access within a couple of weeks, and Watts had to resort to legal action to regain access.

The trouble is that the 'establishment' don't want this made public because it will dilute the message and the fact that it comes from Watts, the denier-in-chief adds insult to injury. I expect that the 'official' response will be that, yes there are problems with some stations in the USA, but:

1. It's only in the USA and there are plenty of others worldwide.

2. We're in the process of fixing those in the USA

3. We've carefully calculated adjustments to account for station location. The procedures used by the independent BEST team confirm their accuracy.

4. Other peer reviewed papers have shown that UHI is negligible and can be ignored.

5. There's plenty of other peer reviewed evidence that AGW is a real and present danger.

Re: Cat's cradle

Deepness In The Sky. Yes, great story. Being fair to Vonnegut (and me), the the science was a small part of the fiction, and you'd have to criticise a lot of dystopian SF on the same grounds...

JG Ballard novels: Wind From Nowhere, Crystal World, The Drought and Drowned World spring immediately to mind... In fact, the premise behind The Drought is not that dissimilar to Ice9

Re: Surely the point is

No, Sammie are saying:

1. We had our designs before Apple released the IPhone and they were not materially changed by the IPhone

2. Apples original phone looked much different to the released version because Apple got sight of Sony designs and copied aspects of them (and the pictures do look urrrrm interesting)

3. Apples claim to originality is based at least in part on those aspects of the Sony design that they copied

4. Apples claim that Sammie *must* be guilty of copying because they do tear-downs of the competition is rubbish, because Apple do the same thing

Which really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, because we're long past the point where anyone can claim genuine originality in this field. I wish both sides would grow up.

That said, I was reading that the publishers of Minecraft are being accused of patent infringement (by a troll?) because they use a server to perform license checks (among other things)....

Re: So what?

The only thing that's important is how often this has happened in the past, and, if it has, is the frequency or intensity increasing. AFAIK there's nothing in the report that would indicate that it's abnormal. What's interesting is that there appears to be yet another cyclic pattern in the climate.

So alarmists and deniers can sit back down because it does nothing for either of your causes :-)

Re: Science is not a democracy

What people think matters. Perception is almost everything. They vote, they buy stuff, they pay tax. It doesn't matter if it's true or not. Jews were not wrecking the German economy between WW1 & WW2, but someone managed to convince the German population that they were, and look where that got us.

Re: Oooh look, a hockey stick

The graph data appears to stop ~1970. Last time I checked, it was 2012. Are we expected to believe that the data from 1970 to now is either missing or otherwise unavailable for analysis?

Given how polarised the climate debate (that's assuming debate is the appropriate word to describe it) has become I'd have thought it might have been better to either show everything or just not bother. I know both sides like to make a point, but every time one group or other produces a graph like this, the other lot immediately cry foul and accuse them of cherry picking their data.

Re: Not dramatic

The economy grows, we earn more money, there are more jobs, more people are employed, so the gubermint spends less on benefits and receives more tax income. So it can either choose to take less tax or spend the money on hospitals, police, schools, green spaces, cleaner air and enormous subsidies to generate green energy...

Oh, and we're talking about doing this at a time where inflation is running at ~3%, and there's no growth at all. What about those who are on low incomes????

Re: We interrupt this conversation...

The expiry was what made me decide not to buy any more Skype credit. After all, why would I if my money (and it is mine) apparently becomes worthless while Skype are looking after it for me...

Re: Can't read the paper but...

@ Robert Long 1

Perhaps you've been living in a cave for 30 years and missed the IPCC reports that clearly state that the world is warming, that the warming is *mostly* caused by anthropogenic CO2? Some people, Pielke Snr among them have been trying to get acceptance that there are other first order forcings including land use change and particulates, but it's been uphill work.

Since you mention them:

Milankovitch cycles, are tens of thousands of years long, and therefore considered to be largely irrelevant in terms of warming seen in the last 150 years?

Solar TSI is also considered to be more or less constant and therefore Sun has also been dismissed. Svensmark may have more to say though...

Vulcanism is mentioned, but only as a source of CO2, and I thought that the orthodoxy said that it was also irrelevant because rates of vulcanism are more or less constant over time so the CO2 put into the atmosphere by volcanos can't account for the recent temperature rise.

Doesn't the orthodoxy say that continental configurations have not changed significantly in the last 150 years and cannot account for recent temp rise.

TV and Wikipedia? Meh

Eurofighter???

Why shut up about it? It and the Tornado are costing a fortune and their purchase and operation have eaten a huge hole in our defence budget.

The thing that I find to be so depressing is that there appears to have been no change at the MOD despite everything we've been told.

We're still going to be paying vastly over the odds for our defence equipment, mostly in the form of dane geld to BAE, who, no doubt, threatened to withdraw even more of their manufacturing from the UK to the USA. Not that they won't do it anyway, just at times more convenient to them...

Re: Oh dear.

Same applies to non sceptics. You can't claim proxies are accurate, and then say that a correlation between solar activity and those proxies should not be taken seriously. It may not be causation, but it might be.

Svensmark and others are beginning to show that there are a number of possible ways in which the Sun can significantly influence climate without the total solar irradiance needing to vary too much. Nothing is certain, but the science *is* interesting.

I have to say that it's strange that all this climate science is being done, and that the majority of those doing it have simply ruled out significant solar effects. It seems so.... unscientific.

Re: Another tiresome fingers-in-the-ears tirade

Yup, I read it three or four times and came to the conclusion that the operative word in the block quote is "could", and then it depends on your interpretation. The scientists *may* be saying that the rate of slide will slow and that even so there is still a chance that the 4 inch lower limit of rise may still be breached. In that case they may also be saying that less than 4 inches is also possible.

Either way, it's a hell of a lot less than Al Gore or Greenpeace have been regularly touting.

I think that 10 years data is not enough to form a definitive conclusion, though it is interesting.