Category Archives: Science And Society

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Most Extreme Temperature Predictions

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…are “looking less likely.” The climbdown begins, at least at the BBC.

But remember, we’re still doomed:

Is there any succour in these findings for climate sceptics who say the slowdown over the past 14 years means the global warming is not real?

“None. No comfort whatsoever,” he said.

Well. All right then.

[Update a few minutes later]

The Guardian says we can’t let our guard down:

Otto said that this most recent pattern could not be taken as evidence that climate change has stopped. “Given the noise in the climate and temperature system, you would need to see a much longer period of any pause in order to draw the conclusion that global warming was not occurring,” he said. Such a period could be as long as 40 years of the climate record, he said.

Got that? Only warming trends are important. Cooling is irrelevant.

And their unjustified self confidence never flags:

Richard Allan, reader in climate at the University of Reading, said: “This work has used observations to estimate Earth’s current heating rate and demonstrate that simulations of climate change far in the future seem to be pretty accurate. However, the research also indicates that a minority of simulations may be responding more rapidly towards this overall warming than the observations indicate.”

He said the effect of pollutants in the atmosphere, which reflect the sun’s heat back into space, was particularly hard to measure.

He noted the inferred sensitivity of climate to a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations based on this new study, suggesting a rise of 1.2C to 3.9C, was consistent with the range from climate simulations of 2.2C to 4.7C. He said: “With work like this our predictions become ever better.”

Onward, comrades!

Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Upper Body Strength And Political Beliefs

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It’s not as simple as reported:

Put another way, this study says that liberals are a coalition of rich wimpy men and strong poor men. Bu contrast, conservatives are a coalition of rich strong men and poor weak men.

The study found that women are different from men: a woman’s upper body strength did not affect her politics.

Partisans would like to think that it is the smart people who support their side. In reality, though, that doesn’t work: both sides have their share of both smart people and dumb people.

Yes, the notion that smart people are naturally “progressive” is just one of their many conceits.

Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Climate Models

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…are getting worse than we thought:

The author hypothesizes the reasons for this are that attempts in the latest generation of models to reproduce observed changes in Arctic sea ice are causing “significant and widening discrepancy between the modeled and observed warming rates outside of the Arctic,” i.e. they have improved Arctic simulation at the expense of poorly simulating the rest of the globe.

It continues to amaze me that so many supposedly smart people take this junk science seriously. You know what this stuff looks more and more like to me? Epicycles.