Stoat

Oops #2

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 14:00:34 -0500

Spot the problem:

So, my Top Tip is, Don't drop your camera onto a hard stone courtyard. Apparently http://www.fixationuk.com/ may be able to help (thanks Andrew). Another Top Tip might be learn from your mistakes but that is just too hard.

In unrelated news, I finally got one of the coveted orange tee-shirts by running in the Cambrdige Fun Run round the Science Park. 7:04 which is quite passable, though it brought back the Old War Wound (those who kindly commented in rowing and running that I was probably fit enough to break myself were correct :-). In this pic, however (thanks William), we're standing around waiting for the start of our division of the notoriously never-on-time Winter Head. It is such jolly fun watching the London crews trying to spin on a river no wider than their boat is long and in a wind. It was even more fun watching the one following us round Grassy misjudge the corner and hit the side. It was a bit less fun when they recovered and caught us up and our cox decided to play "clashing blades". Still we came second with 10.15; 10.05 without the clash maybe.

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Floods not linked to climate change shocker

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:24:43 -0500

In shocking news just in, record heavy rain in the Lakes and extensive flooding has not been linked to global warming. Dr Bogus, spokesman for the Made-Up Institute of Twaddle, said "This is completely unprecedented. Normally, any unusual - or even merely somewhat uncommon - weather event is immeadiately linked to global warming. All of the usual Pinko suspects have failed us in this case. The best we have so far is "David Balmforth, a flooding expert at the Institution of Civil Engineers, said deluges on a similar scale will become more frequent as a result of climate change." and that is very weak. But in breaking news, the Torygraph has supplied the void with "The flooding in Cumbria is part of a pattern of weather which shows that global warming is occurring faster than anyone expected, says Geoffrey Lean."

Oh lordy, that last one is pretty awful. I was hoping not to have to see it, but now I have. It sez Three factors cause heavier storms as the climate heats up. As it gets hotter, more energy is injected into the climate. There is a sharper contrast between land and the sea (which warms more slowly), causing stronger winds and greater instability. And as the seas do heat, more water evaporates from them - and comes down as heavier rain. Can you see the obvious problem? Yes that's right: if it was correct, there would be an enormous seasonal cycle in rainfall, with far more in the summer than winter. As it happens, there are places where this is true - Cairns, for example, according to [[Wet Seaason]]. But the UK isn't like that - there is more rain in winter, as we all knew. Which immeadiately tells you that the primary driver of rainfall in the UK is not temperature. Global warming might produce more rainfall in the UK - but it might not. If you were relying on the interseasonal T-PPN regression as a proxy for the long-term T-PPN relation, you'd predict *less* rainfall as the climate warms.

Incidentally, whilst writing this I ran across:

Isn't that nice. It's from the http://www.skepticalscience.com/ site, originally from An observationally based energy balance for the Earth since 1950 by D. M. Murphy et al..

Oh yes: I'll get on to the emails some time.

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Rip her to shreds

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:25:38 -0500

Shamelss fanboy stuff I'm afraid.

The great Klotzbach wars have been playing for a little while now ([1], [2], [3], [4] etc etc), but the arbitrator has spoken and its time for the Dark Side to stop digging and throw in the towel.

Now you can settle down to enjoy a nice video and wonder what the moral might be.

Meanwhile, for a little light geek relief, try this.

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Agreeing with Pielke, Sr

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:09:33 -0500

Just to show how ecumenical I am, I agree with (most of) RP Sr's post Comment On News Article On Weather Modification Titled ""Playing With Weather Stirs Debate In China". Which basically says "stop being such a bunch of credulous bozos".

I reviewed that "Human Impacts on Weather and Climate" for Weather, once, you know.

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Volcano from space

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 18:14:38 -0500

I like this one. It is from NASA though I've heavily hacked it around (I saw it today in a copy of Wired at Mr Polito's; oh yes, it is online too: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/gallery_volcanoes/3/, but I don't recommend visiting, the site is mindbogglingly slow, lord knows how much Javash*t they load up). Anyway, it's the Sarychev volcano (Russia's Kuril Islands, northeast of Japan) in an early stage of eruption on June 12, 2009. I'm not entirely sure what I'm seeing here - real Met Men should comment - or how tall the plume is. Is it hitting the stratosphere?

[Sorry folks -forgot the title :-(]

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Whom should I attack?

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:25:17 -0500

I'm not a mass-media-audience type of blog, so I excuse myself from having to be kind to "my side"; I don't think I need to avoid worrying Joe Public about dissent in the "we believe in GW" side of the blogosphere, because I don't think JP reads me. And it is far more fun trying to pick holes in the relatively minor errors of "my side" than it is to point out the gross stupidity of The Dark Side.

Which brings me on to Terms of Engagement by Keith Kloor who points to Shellenberger and Nordhaus explaining why they don't take on the other side: The work of holding Republican obstructionists, anti-government extremists, and right-wing conspiracy mongers to task is work for principled conservatives, not liberals... And now I think of it, this makes sense (Kloor thinks this is too restrictive, and I agree, taken as an absolute restriction it is bad). It is rather like the Tories being the ones to cut the Army. Your own side knows you better and knows (or at least ought to know) that you are "on their side" and ought to be able to take the criticism in that light. The Dark Side, however, will just react to criticism from an enemy.

[Aside: you may like: http://www.badscience.net/2009/11/wtf/]

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What we learn from the APS revision

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 07:24:15 -0500

Having just read Eli being unhappy on the APS I'm struck by a thought, which is that no-one at all seems to think they might learn anything useful about actual climate change from the APS statement or its revised version. All anyone is doing is picking over it to see whether the miscellaneous physicists have managed to understand the research. So: why do these people bother have a statement at all? Would they have felt left out of the party otherwise? Its just the tedious old physcis arrogance again.

Background:

* http://physicsfrontline.aps.org/2009/11/10/aps-council-overwhelmingly-rejects-proposal-to-replace-societys-current-climate-change-statement/
* http://www.aps.org/policy/statements/07_1.cfm

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Comments elsewhere

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:47:51 -0500

Experimentally, I'm going to try to keep track of the comments I make on other blogs. I'll spare you the totally trivial ones, but I don't guarantee this to be especially interesting. One point of doing this will be to track the ones that "disappear" on various sites (no names for now) that I've found don't post anything that might frighten the horses.

I might move this up to the top by fudging the date, so don't be too surprised if it moves.

[Update: reverse order seems more likely to be useful, and everything except the most recent moved off into the "extended" part. Also, I swear it isn't my intent to only comment at CM :-)]

2009/11/15.

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Oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:36:20 -0500

RP jr.

Need I say more, guv?

Revisionism with Romm

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:57:22 -0500

The color of solar cells -- and their short energy payback -- are trivial factors when considering the huge climate benefit they provide in avoiding the release of CO2 from the combustion of fossil fuels. That was a central point I made when I broke the story on the error-riddled book Superfreakonomics...

Really? No: what JR actually said was:

"Here are the howlers in that paragraph for the record::

1. they aren't bloack, they are blue,
2. their efficiency may be higher than 12%,
3. The biggest howler... What was the absorbtivity or emissivity of the material that the panel covered up,
4. Unparseable. Read it yourself."

He later posted an update, after John O'Donnell pointed out that the major error is CO2. RC also made the same point. I'm not sure what the exciting "exclusive new analysis" is supposed to be, either. It looks like it covers the same ground as the RC post. But the factors that Romm has now, correctly, realised are trivial are the very ones he was promoting as major errors before.

[Update: JR is somewhat offended by my charge of revisionism and says there was no intention on my part to revise history and the current version is what I was trying to say all along. I'm not entirely sure what the differences are between the current and the original version - anybody keep a copy of the original? I've asked JR but no reply so far on that point - because the current version seems equally open to the criticism I first made.

His post now has a footnote NOTE: I have updated this post slightly for absolute clarity since some people might not read the first debunking post that I linked to above (click here), which lays out the timeline of how I came to include this factor of 100,000.; the footnote itself has been updated; originally it said ... for absolute clarity since some blogger out in the ether failed to read my first debunking post that I linked to above (again, click here, it isn't hard folks)... I was that "some blogger".]

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India 'arrogant' to deny global warming link to melting glaciers?

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:03:21 -0500

Says the Grauniad. Their not-very-useful article is about a Discussion Paper (as it calls itself) of Himalayan Glaciers, A State-of-Art Review of Glacial Studies, Glacial Retreat and Climate Change by V.K.Raina, Ex. Deputy Director General, Geological Survey of India.

The Telegraph of India has an opinion. No idea if it is at all representative. Maribo has a lot of sense about the report; go read that and come back here if you need any more.

Back? OK then.

0) For the science, they say (I presume correctly) All the glaciers under observation, during the last three decades of 20th century have shown cumulative negative mass balance and although there is a lot more text in the report, there isn't really any more than that to interest the wide world outside the glacio community. Or another quote, if you like: Glaciers in the Himalayas, barring a few exceptions, here and there, have been reported to be in constant retreat, since when the observations started in midnineteenth century. There are no two views about it. It is an established fact. You could compare this the the std.IPCC view: Whereas glaciers in the Asian high mountains have generally shrunk at varying rates (Su and Shi, 2002; Ren et al., 2004; Solomina et al., 2004; Dyurgerov and Meier, 2005), several high glaciers in the central Karakoram are reported to have advanced and/or thickened at their tongues (Hewitt, 2005), probably due to enhanced precipitation.

1) Having skimmed the thing, it has the look of a whole pile of studies just thrown together without much attempt at synthesis.

2) The exec summary begins Almost a century ago, fears began to be expressed about the possible impact of the rise in atmospheric temperature on mountain glaciers. The fears led to the initiation of concerted scientifi c efforts to identify and examine the fl uctuations along the front-snout of glaciers. It was believed that such studies, over the next century or so, would enable scientists to establish the relationship between the climate change and the glacier fluctuations. That seems wrong to me, and contradicts what I thought I knew of the timeline of climate change concern.

3) The constant emphasis on the "glacier-snout" stuff reads oddly to me; I suspect this is a reflection of battles fought in the glacio community in the 50's and being re-hashed here to an uncomprehending audience.

4) It is all observations. Observations are very nice - indeed, essential - but unless synthesised by some kind of theory they are hard to make sense of. Hence the rather plaintive text in the final "review" chapter 8 While one may not doubt the fact that the climate, by and large, does appear to be getting warmer; what, however, does tax the mind is the attempted linkage of the glacier retreat in the Himalayas to the global warming. This chap has, as it says in the intro, made epic efforts, which involved several long expeditions to remote glaciers, in trying circumstances and with limited resources, and he knows a lot about Indian glaciers, but unfortunately he hasn't studied climate change so really he has nothing to say on the subject that everyone is keen to hear about.

5) The Grauniad reports that Jairam Ramesh, India's environment minister, released the controversial report in Delhi, saying it would "challenge the conventional wisdom... "My concern is that this comes from western scientists ... it is high time India makes an investment in understanding what is happening in the Himalayan ecosystem," so this may be just yet more tedious nationalism; "western" science isn't good enough, Indian glaciers must be studied with "Indian" science (you have to read the book for the link).

6) Perhaps following on for that, as an afterthought, I notice that the report is remarkably insular. It doesn't mention IPCC even once, which is odd for a "state of the art" review (probably they were a bit pissed off with IPCC for having such a short section on Indian glaciers; the quote I gave above is just about it). The list of papers at the back looks very "Indian", too: westerners only get a brief look-in in the early days (what happened to the likes of "Walker, H. and Pascoe, Sir, E.H. (1907): Notes on certain glaciers in Lahaul"?).

And just like that, without even a hint of a conclusion, the post was over.

[Update: oh no it wasn't. But late to the party, and with nothing new to say, Nurture appear to have decided to waste their readers time by telling them about it. Odd]

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Yet more snarking

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:56:32 -0500

This stuff just gets weirder; maybe you should just read Brian for some sense instead. Anyway, so as the Breakness Institute (-it all fits together, folks, with the Emeriti) point out, Romm has silently changed his headline from "Meet Trash Journalist Keith Kloor" to Meet blogger Keith Kloor. But even if you don't remember the original you can tell he's done it, because of the post URL. This is all very funny, because one of the first charges that Romm throws at Kloor is having his Nature post altered.

Meanwhile, over at the Dark Side, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus try to pretend that Romm is McCarthy. This is absurd, and dull (also, presumably in an effort to wrest the irony prize away from Romm, they "out" Eli in an attempted piece of bullying). They do it, I think, not because they care, but because it serves as a smokescreen to try to defend the indefensible SuperFreako global cooling junk (reminder: I junked it here; Elizabeth Kolbert junks them in the New Yorker, if you prefer things slower and gentler. Lots of nice quotes there).

While I'm snarking, Romm recently wrote about sea ice again so I put in a comment inquiring if he wanted to increase our bet. Mysteriously, that comment hasn't appeared. How very strange.

[Update: if you want to read utter drivel, then you could do worse than A Great Jump to Disaster? By Tim Flannery in the New York Review of Books -W]

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First Look at Carbon Capture and Storage in a West Virginia Coal-Fired Power Plant?

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 12:51:32 -0500

So says Sci-Am. The article is high on pic and low on facts. Only a small percentage of the CO2 is captured - 1.5% - but that is OK, it is only a demo plant. The key question, of course, is how much extra coal is burnt to achieve this? This vital fact is not clearly provided. The 1.5% is clear And now roughly 1.5 percent of the CO2 billowing from its stack is being captured... but the other half is vague: But the primary benefits of the chilled-ammonia process for capturing CO2 are lower electricity and steam consumption, compared with other potential technologies for carbon capture, such as using amines, another ammonia compound, which can consume as much as 30 percent of the plant's power just to run, says Shawn Black, product manager for Alstom. The goal here is to get that number down to under 15 percent. So is that 15% of 1.5%, which seems to good to be true, or 15% of the total, which seems too bad to be true?

Wiki says Capturing and compressing CO2 requires much energy and would increase the fuel needs of a coal-fired plant with CCS by 25%-40%.[2] These and other system costs are estimated to increase the cost of energy from a new power plant with CCS by 21-91%.[2] That is more in line with what I was expecting. [2] turns out to be a 2005 IPCC report. Their table SPM 3 (yes, its true, I didn't get very far through) says that coal, sans CCS, is 0.04-0.05 $/kWh, and 0.06-0.10 with CCS and geological storage. The Sci Am article is consistent with that, saying Cleaner coal will be more expensive, too, adding at least 4 cents per kilowatt-hour to the power Mountaineer produces at roughly 5 cents per kWh. So I think they do mean 15% or 1.5%, but are probably being optimistic.

Clearly, until carbon acquires a sensible price (hopefully via a carbon tax) these plants will not be commercially viable.

In other news, Mars looks good.

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Wadhams on sea ice

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:54:27 -0500

Nothing new, but M pointed me at Greenman on sea ice which has a quote from Wadhams (starts around 5:00, quote around 5:20 I think) that is the "the arctic will be ice free in summer in 20 years" or words to that effect (which got noted in my Arctic to be 'ice-free in summer'?.

I still don't believe it, not that that matters. Watch the video anyway for a glimpse of Wadham's / SPRI's rather haphazrd filing system.

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Fireworks

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:08:22 -0500

To the city fireworks. Park in Mount Pleasant House and walk with the children to the river, when James and Emma and James and Amy are having a party. Arrive in time for the mulled wine to just run out; watch the fireworks (ooh! ahh! how long do these go on for?); tour of the boats (hello Lyra!); hello people; home.

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