by Judith Curry
A few things that caught my eye this past week.
Ship of fools
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Well the ill-fated ship passengers in Antarctica have been rescued. Mark Steyn has a piece in the Spectator that sums it up. Excerpts:
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It’s like a version of Titanic where first class cheers for the iceberg.
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But alas, eating one’s shipmates and watching one’s extremities drop off one by one is not a part of today’s high-end eco-doom tourism. Instead, the ice-locked warmists uploaded chipper selfies to YouTube, as well as a self-composed New Year singalong of such hearty un-self-awareness that it enraged even such party-line climate alarmists as Andrew Revkin
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Anyway, as part of his ‘Living On Thin Ice’ campaign, Al Gore’s own luxury Antarctic vessel boasted a line-up of celebrity cruisers unseen since the 1979 season finale of The Love Boat
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Like James Cameron’s Titanic toffs, the warm-mongers stampeded for the first fossil-fuelled choppers off the ice, while the Russian crew were left to go down with the ship, or at any rate sit around playing cards in the hold for another month or two.
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Mark Steyn is wicked.
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Weather wimps
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Seth Borenstein has an article Scientists: Americans are becoming weather wimps. Excerpts:
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As the world warms, the United States is getting fewer bitter cold spells like the one that gripped much of the nation this week. So when a deep freeze strikes, scientists say, it seems more unprecedented than it really is.
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Many climate scientists say Americans are weather weenies who forgot what a truly cold winter is like.
“I think that people’s memory about climate is really terrible,” Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler wrote in an email. “So I think this cold event feels more extreme than it actually is because we’re just not used to really cold winters anymore.”
Well, its about time somebody started acknowledging weather amnesia in the rush to attribute every severe weather event to AGW.
Ken Caldeira and geoengineering
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The European Magazine has an extensive interview with Ken Caldeira about climate change and geoengineering. Its a lengthy article that is worth reading, this statement in particular caught my eye:
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I have a very high degree of uncertainty in regard to how bad climate change would be for humans. I also study coral reefs and the effects of carbon dioxide on coral reefs. And I think that if we continue on our current path for a few more decades, they will be essentially a thing of the past. The question is how adaptable humans are. And it is difficult to predict how social systems and our social networks respond. I think that climate change is going to be felt regionally. You are going to have heat waves or drought in certain regions. The question is how much economic disruption that will cause. I don’t know whether our economy is like a house of cards that will then just collapse or whether it is a house of bricks and we don’t really have to worry about those little regional things. I have really no idea.
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UK storms
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While the focus the last few weeks has been on extreme weather in the U.S. and Antarctic, there is plenty of interest going on in the UK. Carbon Brief has an article on the recent storms in the UK, arguments about whether these are connected to climate change, and the politics surrounding the issue.
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Perspective from Australia
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Michael Asten has an article in the Australian entitled Bring science to climate policy. Excerpts:
I identify five segments of science – all detailed in peer-reviewed journals in the past three years – which demand scrutiny before we believe current global warming projections.
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Read the article to see if you agree with his list.
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Interview with Peter Higgs
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The Guardian has a very interesting interview with Peter Higgs of boson fame. The title and subtitle pretty much sums up the article, and it raises a very serious issue: Peter Higgs: I wouldn’t be productive enough for today’s academic system. Physicist doubts work like Higgs boson identification achievable now as academics are expected to ‘keep churning out papers.’
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Quote of the week
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Tweeted by Machavelli Medici:
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“You’ll never reach your destination if you stop to throw stones at every dog that barks.” – Winston Churchill