Unthreaded
I know it's the silly season so called - but I had an episode of shouting at the car radio last night on a late night drive which I see (I think ) nobody else has mentioned ...
BBC world service wee UK hours news three times in a row (as much as I could take without leaving the road) featured with very obvious positively drooling relish the apparently serious (???) proposal by some whack job eco-activist outfit to get the IMO I think it was to stop giving Cyclones/Anticyclones/Hurricanes and Tornadoes anodyne simple names and to name them after prominent eeevil DENIERS
This of course, could have wider implications for everyday phenomena.
On the whole though - the BBC - when you haven't heard the usual claptrap for a while - they just lurch back into fine form - isn't it great to see money extorted under threat of imprisonment and paupery being so responsibly spent?.
Hurricane Montford? I think the law of unintended consequences might be lurking :-)
hmmm... has a ring to it.
tomo
@Skiphil
It matters not a jot. Cook's paper was always an exercise in public relations rather than science. The paper was published for the sole purpose of getting the "97%" figure into the public consciousness - something which it achieved rather successfully, judging by all the articles in the popular press that just casually cite the "97%" figure.
Even if the paper were to be utterly discredited or even retracted, the "97%" would still be out there in the wild, accepted without question by all the environmental journalists, and cited over and over again.
Turning Tide
Richard Tol has shredded John Cook's paper, but Cook still won't release all the data (think he has something to hide??):
[Richard Tol]:
...I found that the consensus rate in the data differs from that reported in the paper. Further research showed that, contrary to what is said in the paper, the main validity test in fact invalidates the data. And the sample of papers does not represent the literature. That is, the main finding of the paper is incorrect, invalid and unrepresentative.
Furthermore, the data showed patterns that cannot be explained by either the data gathering process as described in the paper or by chance. This is documented. I asked Mr Cook again for the data so as to find a coherent explanation of what is wrong with the paper....
Skiphil
jamesp
They have a web site Vi-Aqua but it still sounds too much like viagra for my bs detector.
Lord Beaverbrook
Lord B
I'd like to think that was the answer, too, but I found this on the RHS forum, from 2008...
And nothing since! I suspect it's one of those things that contains a grain of truth (I have a Permutit gadget that supposedly softens our water in a similar way, and it has some effect) but has been spun a bit too hard.
jamesp
ooh BBC News - Hyper- arid Atacama desert hit by snow "sorprise but climate is changing"
...em I used to live there. The Normal pattern is 1 day of severe rain every 20 years so if night it will be snow . Not new it's a desert & high-up
stewgreen
A nice posting on WUWT by Lord Monckton with a sentence in it about climate models worth remembering:
"That, in a single hefty paragraph, is why the models are doing such a spectacularly awful job of predicting global temperature – which is surely their key objective. They are not fit for their purpose. They are mere digital masturbation, and have made their operators blind to the truth. The modelers should be de-funded. Or perhaps paid in accordance with the accuracy of their predictions. Sum due to date: $0.00."
Martin A
This from NoTrickZone
Seems to be a strong reinforcement of the effect of ocean currents on climate.
http://notrickszone.com/2013/08/26/leading-ipcc-scientist-concedes-oceans-have-profound-effect
-on-average-global-surface-air-temperature/
Ross Lea
David Porter
I too am a bit confused by your problem now. I consulted 11:15am 27-Aug-2012 and see 7.82GW for Other Special Regime. Today's data shows 4GW giving the difference you say. Also the total output has fallen from 34.3GW to 29GW.
Wind generated power has always puzzled me in Spain too, even when there appears to be no wind across Europe they still manage to get large amounts from eolian sources. Today 3.7GW vs UK 0.45GW and France 0.98GW when the European Wind Map shows similar conditions across all three countries. When I mentioned this previously on Unthreaded someone posted a comment that Spain had got electricity generation sorted with lots of pumped storage to cover the night and low wind situations. I'm still doubtful For instance Spain is a fairly dry country so hydro might be a bit hit and miss too.
Annual Precipitation
Days Location inches mm
37 Alicante 13.2 336
55 Barcelona 25.2 640
45 Castellón 17.4 442
67 Girona 28.5 724
46 Lleida 14.5 369
51 Reus 19.8 504
86 Turo De L'Home 41.9 1063
44 Valencia 17.9 454
Compare with Englan (driest of the UK Countries)
125 Birmingham 26.8 681
108 Cambridge 22.4 568
115 Eastbourne 31.3 795
122 Exeter 33.4 848
116 Ipswich 24.2 614
110 London 23.3 592
117 Lowestoft 24.4 620
155 Newquay 40.1 1017
116 Oxford 26.0 660
183 Dartmoor Park 78.7 1998
Yet today they are getting 4.8GW from Hydro, even for pumped storage you need water available in the first place, and if you don't want it to escape then you need two large storage lakes (one at the top and one at the bottom) which is tricky in itself.
Perhaps the UK needs advice from the Spainish on how to generate electricity from the resources available to you?
SandyS
@tomo we tolerate people namecalling ddenier" here , basically cos it reflects so badly on those who use it , as it shows they have no strong argument, and have poor science with an inability to define terms properly.
- However if the BBC allow it's use then it is no longer "funny" it is libellous & defamatory. It's like allowing a salesman on and allowing him to call everyone who doesn't like his product "a liar" ..(as calling someone a denier is effectively calling them a liar)
- If you are a teacher, the next morning your class could say "The BBC man said you are a denier !"