Andrew Marr is a Tosser

See the Grauniad for the proof. But ZOMG now I’ve proved him right so I must be wrong. <pfft!> – that is me disappearing in a pile of logical smoke.

More seriously: yes, vast numbers of blogs are full of junk, and probably rude aggressive junk (though I don’t know this from personal experience, since I don’t bother read those). Most (measured by volume) of journalism is junk too – it is just that in general it is fairly polite, well-written junk. At least in the UK the most obviously trash stuff gets conveniently dumped in the Sun, Mirror, Mail and so on. But there is plenty of rubbish left over for the Grauniad and Beeb.

Meanwhile, Marr’s successor as political editor, Nick Robinson, has previously criticised the tone and and quality of online debate, saying he had stopped reading most of the comments on his own BBC blog. “It’s a waste of my time,” he said in March this year, adding that the blog’s comments section was frequented by people who had “already made their minds up, to abuse me, to abuse each other, or abuse a politician”.

Yes, I’ve noticed that at the Beeb blogs whenever I’ve bothered look (which is infrequently, because they are, as he points out, full of trash). This occurs for the obvious reason: they are high-profile but unmanaged. Blogs are not supposed to be a substitute for leader columns (Dead White Man writes from on high to the Unwashed Massed). They are supposed to be part of a conversation between blogger, readers, and other blogs. Unless AM or NR can be bothered to get their hands dirty and (a) weed out trash in their comments and (b) take the time to respond t the better ones then his blog is, indeed, a waste of time.

Flat earth – and Piers too!

We interrupt your schedule of cats and rowing for a brief snark at the denialists: courtesy of mt, who clearly ventures where angels fear to tread, we have Newsletter: NZCLIMATE TRUTH NO 244 by Vincent Gray: THE FLAT EARTH… The attached graph is in all of the Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change, and it is fundamental to all their activities. It assumes that the earth can be considered to be flat, that the sun shines all day and all night with equal intensity, and that the temperature of the earth’s surface is constant. This is abysmal stupidity and ignorance at its septic best: Gray really does believe that this simplified picture is the basis for the climate models. Good grief. Need I say more, guv?

Well all right. Gray continues… It ought to be obvious. The earth does actually rotate. The sun does not shine at night. The temperature is not constant. Every part of the earth has a different energy input from its output. There is a correct mathematical treatment. It would involve the division of the earth’s surface into a large number of tiny increments, and the energy input and output calculated for each one, using the changes in all the factors involved. There would then have to be a gigantic integration of all these results to give a complete energy budget for the earth. This is a not-too-bad description of how GCMs actually operate.

I’m finding it hard to believe that Gray really is this rubbish. There must be something else that he means. Or is Inferno now posting as Gray?

Update: Special bonus snarking: I should read climaterealists more often: I missed an exciting plug for Piers Corbyn. He predicted the volcano. Or something. To be honest I couldn’t be bothered to read it all. But is has a nice pic and one of those hand-drawn weather front maps that went out with the ark.

Selective quotation

Eli has a wonderful post on the McLean mess. So wonderful I can’t resist ripping bits of it off :-).

McLean et al. quote:

“But as it is written, the current paper [Foster et al. draft critique] almost stoops to the level of “blog diatribe”. The current paper does not read like a peer-reviewed journal article. The tone is sometimes dramatic and sometimes accusatory. It is inconsistent with the language one normally encounters in the objectively-based, peer-reviewed literature.”

But oddly enough they don’t continue the quotation…

The real mystery here, of course, is how the McLean et al. paper ever made it into JGR. How that happened, I have no idea. I can’t see it ever getting published through J Climate. The analyses in McLean et al. are among the worst I have seen in the climate literature. The paper is also a poorly guised attack on the integrity of the climate community, and I guess that is why Foster et al. have taken the energy to contradict its findings.

How very curious.

[Comments off here; go to Eli instead]