Posts by Russell Brown
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It's alright Russell, you didn;t need to explain.
I kind of feel I do, if only to explain that I've explained it before. It's the only Labour Party event I even attend, let alone participate in.
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possible communist, homosexual sympathiser".
Definitely not the former, absolutely the latter!
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I see russell is is in McCully's sights
Sigh ... it's presumably only just come to his attention, but I do the Hero Debate every year -- it's really good fun. Gay audiences laugh like drains when you tell 'em foul jokes. The fouler, the better. Although Stephen Gray out-fouls me every year, the bitch.
It is organised by Judith Tizard, as part of the wider Hero Festival, and some of the funds go to her campaign, but it also benefits the Cartier Bereavement Trust, a truly inspiring HIV-AIDS support organisation.
Karen Ritchie, the founder of the trust, is an amazing woman. I got teary-eyed when she spoke.
Apart from anything else, McCully's description of me as a "Judith Tizard campaign activist" is completely false, and I'm sure he knows it.
I've explained this several times before, including to NBR: in the mid-90s, I helped out a friend by joining the Auckland Central branch of the Labour Party. I went to about three meetings and helped with a pamphlet. I cancelled the membership years ago. That's it. Naturally, I'd rather not be photograohed in front of a party banner, but I'm not going to avoid a group hug. And neither will I be intimidated into not participating in a worthwhile event.
I really think this is extremely improper behaviour from McCully -- and a direct attack on my livelihood.
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Thanks for that link, James. It has prompted an extremely useful demonstration of how the denialisers* aproach science.
* I'm experimenting with the new word denialisers, to see if it mollifies people who absolutely insist that "deniers" is an explicit reference to Holocaust denial. (Poneke did that recently, but the effect was rather spoiled by her comparison of the AGW side to Goebbels.)
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Here's the 2007 record from the GISS group, one of those cited in that blog post, James. It begins:
The year 2007 tied for second warmest in the period of instrumental data, behind the record warmth of 2005, in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) analysis. 2007 tied 1998, which had leapt a remarkable 0.2°C above the prior record with the help of the "El Niño of the century". The unusual warmth in 2007 is noteworthy because it occurs at a time when solar irradiance is at a minimum and the equatorial Pacific Ocean is in the cool phase of its natural El Niño-La Niña cycle.
Then observes further down:
**Global Predictions**
The quasi-regularity of some natural climate forcing mechanisms, combined with knowledge of human-made forcings, allows projection of near-term global temperature trends with reasonably high confidence. Prediction for a specific year is a bit hazardous, as evidenced by an incorrect prediction of record global warmth made by the British climate analysis group for 2007. Such speculations are useful, as they draw attention to the mechanisms, and allow testing of understanding. Presumably part of the basis for their prediction was an assumption of a continued warming contribution from the 2006 El Niño. However, evidence of El Niño warmth disappeared very early in 2007.
Solar irradiance will still be on or near its flat-bottomed minimum in 2008. Temperature tendency associated with the solar cycle, because of the Earth's thermal inertia, has its minimum delayed by almost a quarter cycle, i.e., about two years. Thus solar change should not contribute significantly to temperature change in 2008.
La Niña cooling in the second half of 2007 (Figure 2) is about as intense as the regional cooling associated with any La Niña of the past half century, as shown by comparison to Plate 9 in Hansen et al. (Hansen et al. 1999) and updates to Plate 9 on the GISS web site. Effect of the current La Niña on global surface temperature is likely to continue for at least the first several months of 2008. Based on sequences of Pacific Ocean surface temperature patterns in Plate 9, a next El Niño in 2009 or 2010 is perhaps the most likely timing. But whatever year it occurs, it is a pretty safe bet that the next El Niño will help carry global temperature to a significantly higher level.
Competing with the short-term solar and La Niña cooling effects is the long-term global warming effect of human-made GHGs. The latter includes the trend toward less Arctic sea ice that markedly increases high latitude Northern Hemisphere temperatures. Although sea ice cover fluctuates from year to year, the large recent loss of thick multi-year ice implies that this warming effect at high latitudes should persist.
Based on these considerations, it is unlikely that 2008 will be a year with truly exceptional global mean temperature. These considerations also suggest that, barring the unlikely event of a large volcanic eruption, a record global temperature clearly exceeding that of 2005 can be expected within the next 2-3 years.
Short version: we wouldn't be at all surprised if 2008 was a cool year.
The post you linked to has been replicated verbatim across dozens of similar sites. I'm not even remotely inclined to regard it as a reliable assessment.
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It seems Mr Romm hasn't caught up with this, rather solid looking data. Doesn't fit in too well with his rather definitive statements that the world is warming up.
How helpful that that blog post should trumpet its scientific illiteracy right there in its subhead:
**Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming**
Duh.
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Why did matt and Catherine add an indefinite article to their daughter's surname? Stutter? Uncertainty?
No that was me leaving the last two letters off Matt's surname. Told you I was tired.
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and frankly, the suggestion that public servants should be prevented from using social media like wikipedia is both miserly and mean.
how about running that wiki-user-checker over the bnz or state insurance?
I strongly believe they should be using and contributing to social media. I'm just hoping the main point about transparency in the case of more political edits doesn't get lost here.
It'd be very easy to address and I hope someone does it.
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Vanity Fair's Raising Obama backgrounder paints a picture of a remarkable and focused individual.
Compare and contrast with the White House incumbent.
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Just a quick comment to get this onto PA System, given that the RSS feed funning into the System home page is broken today. (And I'm not going to drag Matt away from his new baby to fix it either.)
Please note the part addressed to people who think they've discovered the identity of the phantom Wikipedia editor. It's not. He's the IT guy, okay?
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