Here’s another photo from the recent trip to Tasmania – looking at the ridiculously pretty Tamar River north of Launceston. Good wine, good views; a very nice part of the world.
I’m going to have to post more slowly here for a while – a series of family things are happening soon which will no doubt distract me, and I really need to stop worrying about how many people are wrong on the internet (there are so, so many) and concentrate more on finishing work.
One thing I will be looking out for, though, is Anthony Watts’ spin on his surfacestation.org paper. He has promised a post about it, and I can’t wait to hear his explanation as to why, a year ago, he was telling Andrew Bolt that bad siting warming bias could account for .5 degree C of warming in the US. There is also no excuse for Andrew Bolt to ignore Watts’ (and others) actual paper.
If you have time, drop over to Bolt’s blog and ask for him to look into this, until he does.
Anyhow, see you around.
UPDATE: I just realised that, when using Mercury browser on my iPad, it treats surfacestation.org as an address and you can link to one of those empty domain search pages. Maybe there's a setting I need to change on Mercury? Anyway, it doesn't seem to happen on Firefox on my PC, or even Safari. Rest assured it wasn't intended.
"I really need to stop worrying about how many people are wrong on the internet (there are so, so many) and concentrate more on finishing work."
ReplyDeleteI agree. And I don't mean that in a mean way.
Once upon a time, I too was like you (I can almost hear myself peppering this with "laddy" and "young'un"). I'd go around having lots of arguments with people who were 'wrong on the internet' as the xkcd cartoon goes.
But you know, it's exhausting, it's draining, it's stressful, and too much of it is bad for your mental health.
Let it go. You have given it your best shot. Surely you have realised by now that there's no magic bullet in climate change, no end of the line where you'll back someone into a corner and decide that they are wrong and you are right.
Honestly at a certain point the climate debate starts to get pretty arcane, and there are a lot of rabbit holes and tunnels that you have to run down, chasing arguments. Is that really how you want to spend your life?
I'm saying this in good faith. I don't know you, really, although I do feel that I know one face of you - the blog-facing face if you will - pretty well. Your smile is slipping, Steve. Think about hanging up your skeptic-hunting equipment and giving it a rest.
It's just a suggestion.
Just posting slower, d-d, not giving up the skeptic hunting entirely (although I won't be doing it much at Catallaxy.)
ReplyDeleteI find the issue particularly problematic because, as I have explained many times, I genuinely consider it is poisoning the right of politics both here and in the US. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a time where something equivalent has happened - a large swathe of conservatives thought has been conned by a small body of contrarians who have been able to use modern communications to build up a following using arguments that mainstream science has to keep hitting like a 100 gopher heads popping up out of holes.
It is a worry not just for the long term future, but as to how politics is conducted.
That's not entirely the fault of the 'right side of politics.'
ReplyDeleteThe flip side of this 'unprecedented' situation is that scientists are trying to influence policy outside their areas of expertise. This is equally wrong and a cause for concern in the long term. And, not coincidentally, all the solutions they are offering are turkeys. As plenty of people at catallaxy have said, if you're serious about it, then put nuclear back on the table.
..or iron seeding, or just pumping crap into the atmosphere. Nope, all these things are off the table because we must TAX ourselves into submission.
ReplyDelete