Bloggies 2014 finalists

A gentle reminder to our readers. There are still a few days left to vote  Voting ends tonight in this years Bloggies. We have been selected as finalists in the ‘Best European Weblog’ section. Thanks for your consideration.

Voting for the Bloggies 2014

• Saturday, March 1
  Finalists are announced and voting reopens to all to choose the winners.
• Sunday, March 23
  10:00 PM EDT (early Monday morning European time)
  Voting closes.
• Monday, March 31
  8:00 PM EDT
  Winners are announced and the Weblog of the Year receives a prize of 2,014 US cents (US$20.14).

Lets have a look focussing on blogs we know well, no offence meant to others.

Bloggies 2014 finalists (list at end of page there)

Weblog of the Year
*JoNova
*No Frakking Consensus
Quirky Chrissy
Travel Geek Magazine
The Modern Nomad
*Watts Up With That?

Tony Thomas: A rather one-sided conversation

Tony Thomas wrote this article a while back in February. I didn’t repost it at that time, but a recent post on ‘the Conversation’ drawn to my attention yesterday (H/T whoever it was – sorry I can’t remember), makes it apropos. The Conversation’s strap line is ‘Academic Rigour – Journalistic flair’. Even as the APS reconsiders IPCC science and it’s position statement on climate change, the publicly funded activists at the Conversation discuss how to ‘drown out’ ‘deniers’…

A rather one-sided conversation
Tony Thomas – 14-2-2014

Cory Zanoni “Quietly concerned about everything”

Staffed by left-leaning refugees from commercial news organisations’ withered operations, largely publicly funded and lavishly so, the online pulpit for academics to bang their favourite drums has little sympathy for those who doubt the planet is melting

The lavishly-funded leftist blog for academia, The Conversation, has hired a new manager specifically to make contributors converse more politely. Cory Zanoni, an RMIT psychology graduate and social media guru, got the job of Community Manager in January. He was hired after complaints last year about vulgar comments on the articles with the responsibility for  ‘creating a space for intelligent discussion’.

Internet freedom: ‘Don’t Spy On Us’ launched in the UK today

We can do this. Today, people around the world are coming together to say no more.

GCHQ in the UK and the NSA in America are hoovering up your personal data when you visit websites, send emails and texts, make calls and use social media and sharing the data with each other.

When I first heard these revelations from Edward Snowden, it was overwhelming. Now though, we’ve got an ambitious plan to change UK surveillance for good.

The Day We Fight Back is today.

Red letter day: Printed copies of PRP special edition arrive

Around ten days ago I made an enquiry to Copernicus (the innovative science unpublishers) asking when they would be billing me for the order I made at the end of 2013. It turned out they had forgotten to do so, and they provided an invoice for a fresh order on Jan 27, 10 days after they axed the journal.

Internet freedom and privacy rally: GCHQ and NSA under the spotlight

On Tuesday, internet users all over the world are standing up to say no to GCHQ and the NSA’s mass surveillance. Over the last eight months we’ve heard plenty about how intelligence agencies monitor us on the Internet.

Our surveillance laws have let the intelligence agencies extend their reach deep into our private lives.Tuesday 11th February is The Day We Fight Back.

Alexa Traffic Rank for the Talkshop vs Realclimate

It seems that the Bloggies have decided to axe the ‘Best science or technology blog’ category this year, probably due to the amount of earache the organisers were getting from the usual suspects about the climate sceptic blogs consistently packing the category finals. So I thought I’d get my own back by publishing a comparison of global traffic rank for the talkshop vs flagship global warming science site realclimate.org

Stitch that Gavin.

But surely Realclimate will beat the tiny Talkshop on its home turf in the US? Let’s have a look:

Nils-Axel Morner: An Unbelievable Decision

An Unbelievable Decision
Nils-Axel MÖRNER
Handling editor of the Special Issue of PRP

The idea that the planetary motions affect and control the solar variability is old, but in the stage of an unproven hypothesis. In recent years major advancements have occurred and in 2013, it seemed that time was ripe for a major, multi-authored, reinvestigation. Therefore, a Special Issue of Pattern Recognition in Physics was devoted to: “Pattern in solar variability, their planetary origin and terrestrial impacts”.

The volume includes 12 separate research papers and General Conclusions, co-authored by 19 prominent scientists. Indeed, they agreed that the driving factor of solar variability must emerge from the planetary beat on the Sun, and by that its emission of luminosity and Solar Wind both factors of which affect the Earth-Moon system.

2014 Bloggies: A few days left until nominations close

The Bloggies are underway again, and the 2014 award nominations have been open since Jan 1. There are a few days left before nominations close on Friday.

WUWT demagoguery: Parting of the ways, and new beginnings

I was dismayed this morning to find Anthony Watts had chosen to end strained but outwardly reasonably polite relations with me by throwing down a gauntlet I had no option but to respond to on a comment chain starting last night. This stuff goes back two years, and has been brought to a head by the recent smear campaign Willis Eschenbach and Anthony Watts have launched against the group of honest scientists I have been working with on our special edition of Pattern recognition in physics. The comments reproduced below are from a new thread where Willis Eschenbach misrepresents the work of Professor Jan-Erik Solheim, (University of Oslo Inst of Theoretical Astrophysics) who contributed two papers to our special edition.

tallbloke says:
January 22, 2014 at 8:31 am

Nicola Scafetta says:
January 22, 2014 at 7:43 am
[snip – you are welcome to resumbit without the ad homs – mod]

Yes Nicola, behave yourself on his Nibs thread. Here’s an example of the sort of thing you can’t say:

“Copernicus, as a publisher of scientific journals, cannot afford to become known as a place where reviewers don’t review and editors don’t edit”

Peer Review Debacle: Friends and Foes in the Fog of Battle

The view from my bedroom window yesterday morning

 

There’s nothing like a good strong ethics controversy to sort out friends from foes, and the last five days have been decisive in laying out the battle lines. The trouble started when James Annan whipped up an email campaign directed at science publisher Copernicus, complaining about our Special Edition of Pattern Recognition in Physics. Although the various proponent authors of the Planetary Solar Theory have different ideas about viable mechanisms we came to the same conclusions via different phenomenological methods: that an imminent solar slowdown is upon us, and it is likely to be deeper than the Dalton Minimum, possibly stretching until the latter decades of this century.

In the General conclusions paper all the contributing authors signed, we agreed that “This sheds serious doubts on the issue of a continued, even accelerated, warming as claimed by the IPCC project”. This did not please the proponents of the ‘trace gas levels control Earth’s climate’ theory, AKA cAGW, and emails trickled into Copernicus headquarters in Gottingen, Germany.

Tallbloke’s Talkshop 2013 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for Tallbloke’s Talkshop.

Click here to see the complete report or click image.

Tim writes.

We haven’t had notification for this report yet so I guessed where it might be.  Barely looked at it myself.

Andrew Orlowski: Boffins find MEXICAN WAVE pattern in random climate wobbles

Just published at popular UK based tech-news site the Register: an article by Andrew Orlowski which looks behind the curtain following the new paper by Curry & Wyatt which raises the probability that natural cyclic variability underlies most of the ‘global warming’ seen in the late C20th, and the ‘plateau’  (TM Nature.com) seen since the turn of the C21st. In the second half of the article, Andrew looks at the possible causes, and provides several links to the talkshop, in addition to mentioning Abreu et al and Nicola Scafetta’s work.

A new paper has found hitherto undiscovered rhythms in the climate. What is today regarded as random natural variability actually conforms to a “standing wave” (aka, Mexican Wave) pattern, boffins have found, meaning the climate is much more predictable than previously thought.

Google enters the mooc arena – offers free services

I’ve registered my interest in setting up some Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) at mooc.org, Google’s new venture in partnership with edX, the long running MOOC provider partnership of Harvard, MIT and 26 other leading global educational institutions. It offers the possibility of using free services to run courses with interactive learning tools in an educationally supportive environment. Given the complex nature of the material we are dealing with here at the talkshop, I see possibilities for taking advantage of what Google is offering. We could use the collaborative space for holding online conferences with video, whiteboard scratchpads everyone can doodle on for instant sharing of concepts, data etc. I’m wary of Google, but they do some things well, and the wider the audience for our ideas the better. Nothing we do is a secret, we believe in open and collaborative development of ideas, so it all seems to mesh. Ideas, worries and criticisms welcome.

The Conversation has this:

The entrance of Google onto the Massive Open Online Courses market this week has the potential to reignite the spirit of openness that saw these alternative routes into higher education emerge in the first place.

The internet giant is to work with Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a website calledMooc.org, which will go live next year.

MOOCs have exploded over the past year. With companies likeCoursera teaming up with a number of US universities to offer free online courses and Open University launching FutureLearnto offer an alternative for UK universities, it seems that everyone is frantically scrambling for a MOOC solution.

Jaime Jessop: A Sensitive Issue and Why Advocacy is not a Moral Imperative

This article is a repost from new climate blogger Jaime Jessop’s site Notes on a Scandal. One for the bookmarks file.

A Sensitive Issue and Why Advocacy is not a Moral Imperative
Jaime Jessop : August 6 2013

So, the climate debate rushes swiftly on, not so meandering now, not gently spreading out and forming nice ox-bow lakes of comfortably ‘settled science’, but gushing anew, foaming and bubbling as ‘radical’ viewpoints begin to be expressed in the mainstream media and observations of ‘non-warming’ start piling up like so much drifting snow against the front entrance of the warmists’ enclave.

I would say that this paper by Otto et al in Nature Geoscience caused the first really major geological upheaval and set the waters rushing downhill once more. It is authored principally by IPCC scientists and is peer-reviewed (a must it seems, on any papers having to do with climate science, though noticeably not so in many other scientific research fields). I quote:

“The authors include fourteen climate scientists, well known in their fields, who are lead or coordinating lead authors of IPCC AR5 WG1 chapters that are relevant to estimating climate sensitivity. Two of them, professors Myles Allen and Gabi Hegerl, are lead authors for Chapter 10, which deals with estimates of ECS and TCR constrained by observational evidence. The study was principally carried out by a researcher, Alex Otto, who works in Myles Allen’s group.”

Comment Reinstated by Adam Corner on Publicly Funded Climate Discussion Blog

UPDATE 15.20 – Sincere thanks to Adam for relenting and allowing my comment. Inclusive debate is good.

@alicebell @James_BG @keithkloor my thoughts on this week’s science, scepticism & advocacy debates http://t.co/xSZM7eHwng

— Adam Corner (@AJCorner) August 2, 2013

Warwick Hughes blog defaced by spammer

Warwick Hughes has had his blog site defaced by a spammer, nothing to do with climate people. Added content is the red outlined text at the head of the image above.

Someone with close contact please let him know.

Obama’s Spooks “quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type”

Rodin: The Thinker

From Politico

By Dylan Dybers

The Washington Post has published a remarkable report showing that the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been monitoring the central servers of major Internet companies — Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple — and “extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.”

The string just broke

Hi folks, Rog is busy, I am not ready to post anything of general interest to readers, although I have a mountain of new material. New here means I do some work, takes time and effort.

Take this as an opportunity to discuss the blog, we could do with a discussion on where things ought to go. Subjects, kind of, etc.

I think we are suffering from technical obstruction, no good way to split between political and technical articles.

Is what we do right?

Or other things needing air.

If I can I’ll put up some articles, means taking my focus off something important.

Bangladeshi Bloggers “will be prosecuted if found guilty” of insulting prophet – Syria disconnected from net

From the BBC:

Clashes between police and Islamist protesters in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka have left at least thirty two people dead and 60 injured.

Up to half a million protesters gathered in the city, where rioters set fire to shops and vehicles as police fought to contain them.

Thousands of activists from Hefajat-e-Islam blocked highways, isolating Dhaka from other parts of the country.

They are calling for those bloggers who insult Islam to face the death penalty.

They also want greater segregation of men and women, as well as the imposition of stricter Islamic education.

Peter Gleick: This may be the stupidest of your many stupid #climate posts

Earlier today, I spotted the wailing and gnashing of teeth beginning over the fact that the airborne fraction of co2 is about to pass 400 parts per million – 0.04% of the atmosphere. Peter Gleick was one of the protagonists.

So I tweeted this response: