After this, it seems to me that the human race has realised its ultimate potential; no further progress is possible. We might as well all go back to bed. Some things I see, I think: yes, you’re doing that very well. But I understand what you’re doing, and I could, if not do it myself…
Author Archives: William Connolley
Bad Science
VV has a thoughtful post about the value of peer review, looked at mostly through the lens of a couple of recent poor papers. Peer review (or whatever system you choose for choosing which papers will see the light) has to balance weeding out dross with not suppressing the unusual but good. It is primarily…
Syria: the West makes the usual mistake
I got wound up by this whilst reading news on my phone while sitting in a boring meeting. So I’ll vent here. The usual scheme of things that we see so often is that bad things happen (the Assad regime in Syria); it goes on and on and people wring their hands, or ignore it,…
Approaching the spampocalypse
I get an astonishing amount of comment-spam, nominally about dresses – wedding dresses, prom dresses, square dresses and how to fold them, and so on. None of it ever appears so I don’t know why they bother, but simply deleting it all from my email queue is becoming ever more tedious. So I’ve changed one…
University of Qld/Skeptical Science survey of climate research
Well, I got this (some days ago; I got backlogged): As one of the more highly trafficked climate blogs on the web, I’m seeking your assistance in conducting a crowd-sourced online survey of peer-reviewed climate research. I have compiled a database of around 12,000 papers listed in the ‘Web Of Science’ between 1991 to 2011…
I’ve not found much of interest to write about tonight, and story submissions have been a dry hole lately
Not me you silly – that’s a quote from WUWT. And as if in answer to his desperation, along comes The effectiveness of CO2 as a greenhouse gas becomes ever more marginal with greater concentration, a deeply stupid post. It starts with a nod towards pretending to have a clue: According to well understood physical…
The Carbon Bubble: All we have to do is decide to not commit civilizational suicide – and the markets crash?
That’s over at P3. But I’ve seen it elsewhere. The idea is that because we’ll need to keep unburnt oil in the ground to hit (or rather, to not hit) a 2 oC commitment, a pile of oil companies are wildly overvalued, leading to… well, who cares what it leads to, because it doesn’t matter.…
Frolic and detour
It’s the law, it seems. And a suitable title for a misc post. I’ve been busy, which accounts for my pathetic lack of posts recently. * I ran the Brighton marathon (3:46). * We entered the Town Bumps at Oxford, in IVs! * I ran the Head of the Cam again. * I’ve discovered that…
What’s the similarity between economics and climatology?
Answer: both are complex disciplines. But because they deal with every-day events, amateurs regularly assume that they know enough to dismiss the entire field. Suppose you wanted to know what was wrong with climatology: how far is it really understood, what can it usefully describe and what not, what can it usefully predict: who would…
Death of a salesman, part 2
Continuing an occasional series on non-notable folk. Marcel Leroux stirred up the septics quite a bit. By contrast, who cares about Tim Ball? He was declared [[WP:NN]] some time ago but then someone recreated his page. And so we have [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Tim Ball]] (Tim, Timmy, Timothy, who cares about trivia?). Apart from the giggle-factor,…