Really Sciency

Visit my other blog 'Really Sciency' looking at Climate Science and its portrayal, misrepresentation and denial in the media.

Tuesday 10 January 2012

Lighting Farts

I apologise for the title but it is unfortunately typical of the standards used by Steven Goddard, which is all about Real Science - apparently.

This is what you get when there is some good news on climate change for once. It all comes from a piece that appeared on Real Climate called 'Much ado about methane'. This was mirrored in NYT's Dot Earth and also appears in a condensed form on Scientific American.



The good news is that it looks as if a catastrophic release of methane from the thawing Arctic is unlikely and that methane, though it is a more potent GHG than CO2 by some 72 times, will not be such a major player in future climate change.

The problem on Goddard's blog is that he claims he has been saying this for years, (and perhaps he has), by linking to one of his posts just 6 months ago, in the again imaginatively titled 'Methane Is BS'.

But what I don’t quite understand is why ‘skeptics’ accept this idea so readily when it is extensively based on modelling, yet reject the output from so much modelling as to have just proclaimed, ‘climate models have demonstrated no skill, and are nothing more than research projects’.

It wouldn’t simply be that this model tells them what they think they want to hear would it?

5 comments:

  1. Perhaps all models simply tell people what they think they want to hear.

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  2. Anonymous,

    Unsubstantiated tripe that shows you have no knowledge of the subject.

    End Velocity = Start velocity + acceleration*time.
    Kinetic Energy = 1/2*mass*Velocity*velocity,

    Two of the core equations needed to make a simple model that can help determine how much damage a 10kg weight will cause when dropped on your foot. It's not a case of 'wanting to hear' it's a case of immutable physics.

    Lazarus,

    I'll be doing a series of posts about Arctic methane. From my reading so far I'm much more concerned about wetland and melting permafrost emissions of CH4 than I am about the East Siberian Shelf clathrates. Concerned but not alarmed.

    PS - I do hope you're using a 'no follow' attribute on your links, otherwise every time you link to Goddard's carp you'll be bumping him up the ranks in search engine results.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for the tip. No Follow attribute? I'll have to figure that out.

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  4. Here is the format:
    http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569
    Second html example down. If you use the blogger interface to make links then you just need to click on HTML view tab above the editing box that you write your page in, usually you write into the box COMPOSE. Then edit the links as html using the example in that page above.

    I tend to handwrite the links in windows notepad and paste into the html window because it can take me days to write a post - horses for courses.

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  5. Cheers Chris, thanks for that. I didn't know such a thing existed. I looked for an option in the Blogger settings after you mentioned it but couldn't anything. Now I know.

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