Benny and his buddy Andy (no relation) are going camping this weekend. Benny sent this adorable video postcard to Andy to get him jazzed up about the festivities! See below the fold...
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...This is the very first paragraph of Monckton's response to Gavin Schmidt's demolition of Monckton's paper on climate sensitivity.
For the second time, the FalseClimate propaganda blog, founded by two co-authors of the now-discredited "hockey-stick" graph by which the UN's climate panel tried unsuccessfully to abolish the mediaeval warm period, has launched a malevolent, scientifically-illiterate, and unscientifically-ad-hominem attack on a publication by me.
Monckton goes on to make many more ad hominem attacks on Schmidt. And what are the ad hominem attacks that Monckton alleges that Schmidt makes?
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...I shall replace all comments by him that are purely ad hominem with "+++". I shall refrain from any ad-hominem remarks of my own, and shall answer what little science there is in his blog ad rem. Schmidt's text is in bold face: my response is in Roman face.
Schmidt: "+++ ... the most egregious error is a completely arbitrary reduction by 66% of the radiative forcing due to CO2. He +++ justifies this with reference to tropical troposphere temperatures ..."
M of B: Schmidt somehow fails to point out that my division of climate sensitivity by three to take account of the failure of observed tropical mid-troposphere temperatures to increase at thrice the surface rate as predicted by all of the models relied upon by the UN, far from being "completely arbitrary", was taken from a paper by Lindzen (2001), read together with the lecture-notes and drafts that preceded the paper. Here are two quotations from Professor Lindzen, ...
... we can reasonably bound the anthropogenic contributions to surface warming since 1979 to a third of the observed warming, leading to a climate sensitivity too small to offer any significant measure of alarm ...
Ok, The Official Dynamics of Cats Obama Campaign Donation Funding Match is on.
Via the contest notification I posted about here, I just watched a very effective video they say was conceived, written and directed by a 10 year old boy. Watch it below, it is about a minute:
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...Once again, you, my readers, have come through with some really high-grade crackpottery. This one was actually sent to me by its author, but I didn't really look at it until several readers sent me the same link because they thought it was my kind of material. With your recommendations, I took a look, and was rewarded. In a moment of hubris, the author titled it A Possible Proof of God's Existence from Multiverse Assumptions.
This article is basically a version of the classic big-numbers probabilistic argument for God. What makes this different is that it doesn't line up a bunch of fake numbers and saying "Presto! Look at that great big probability: that means that it's impossible for the universe/life/everything to exist without God!". Instead, it takes a more scientific looking approach. It dresses the probability argument up using lots of terms and ideas from modern physics, and presents it as "If we knew the values of these variables, we could compute the probability" - with a clear bias towards the idea that the unvalued variables must have values that produced the desired result of this being a created universe.
Aside from being an indirect version of the big-numbers argument, this is also a nice example of what I call obfuscatory mathematics. See, you want to make some argument. You're dead sure that it's right. But it doesn't sound convincing. So you dress it up. Don't just assume your axioms - make up explanations for them in terms of math, so that it sounds all formal and mathy. Then your crappy assumptions will look convincing!
With that said, on to his argument!
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...Here is recent article about beavers in the UK newspaper - The Guardian. This is a classic example of how a lack of appreciation for ecological history leads to ignorance. The journalist tries to compare the ecological consequences of North American beaver that have been introduced to southern South America some 50 years ago with the reintroduction plans of European beaver to the UK - where they were present just a couple of hundred years ago! Beavers were an important ecosystem driver in Europe for millennia; we should be reintroducing them when and where we can. North American beaver are invasive to South America and are an ecological disaster. Take home message: history informs our conservation strategies.
Read the comments on this post...This is great.
And this is also an image that seems appropriate when choosing to speak about water as a resource generally - it might, for instance, be a good prelude to discussions like this.
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...Do you remember this study (also see it here, here, here) we did a few years ago?
Well, I just got my hands on some pictures from the time we did it - just individual animals, not pairs as they fought (we had to pay attention to score behaviors, not waste time on taking pictures):
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