While I've been in limbo (there's light at the end of that tunnel) I've been renting a static caravan for the winter in Dunbeath, about 8 km SW of the prospective plot. I've, unfortunately, not got a lot of exercise this winter but when I have it's mostly been walks round this area on sunny days. Here are a few pictures from last autumn and the last week or two.

David Rose is at it again with this article in the Mail on Sunday. As with last time lots of people have expressed their displeasure at various points. To find this commentary a good place to start is the update to and comments on the post from which the graph at the top of the article was originally taken: Updated comparison of simulations and observations by Ed Hawkins on the Climate Lab Book blog.

I just want to focus on an answer to one particular point. More...

I continue to exist while waiting for the crofting situation with the plot to be sorted out.

Introduction

In the same Green Building Forum discussion as the previous comments about Stefan's Law, which I blogged about, Tony also made remarks about warming possibly causing the increase of CO₂ in the atmosphere rather than being the result of it. His idea seems to be that warming of the oceans causes them to be less able to dissolve CO₂ so it comes out of solution and bubbles up into the atmosphere.

...and the rises in the levels of CO2 could even be an effect of these rises rather the cause of them were the rises to be due to some other factor.

As the temperature of seawater rises we know that it can't hold so much dissolved CO2 so at least some of it must be a result of that.

I think this is ridiculous. Here's why.

This morning Karen Munro tweeted:

2 large whales spotted blowing in Sinclairs Bay, near Wick today, I am stuck at work car-less. Really hoping someone gets an ID on them

By the time I read that, about an hour later, it was a bit of a long shot but, still, I needed to get out for a while so I went up to Castle Sinclair Girnigoe which is on the north coast of the little peninsular sticking out from Wick past its airport forming the southern boundary of Sinclairs Bay, at the end of the footpath shown here on OpenStreetMap. (Memo to self, go back and map the car park and castle.)

A while ago on the Green Building Forum, in the context of asserting that current theories of anthropogenic global warming are wrong, Tony wrote:

Finally any model that shows consistently rising temperatures or exponentionally rising temperatures must be ignoring Stefan’s Law which says that heat is lost in proportion to the fourth power of the absolute temperature, setting up a very strong force to stop or at least reduce any increases.

I think that's not right and I gave a quick response in the next post on that thread giving a “meta” reason why I thought so: that it's ridiculous to think that climate scientists aren't perfectly well aware of this law. Another quick near-meta argument I could have given is that feedback resulting from the supposed steep effects of Stefan's Law were not enough to prevent global temperatures dropping by around 6 °C during the last glacial maximum.

However, there's a physical reason, too, and the details are interesting enough that it seemed worth writing up my understanding of the situation.

My previous Decrofting post summarises the situation with the purchase of the plot as it was at the beginning of November. Since then not a lot has happened but just about enough to be worth reporting.

It both amuses and scares me how people are frightened of high voltages but often seem amazingly relaxed about low-voltage high-current situations.

High voltages are relatively easy to deal with. Wrap them up so people can't contact them with bodily parts and put an over-current protection device (fuse or circuit breaker) in the way so they're not likely to start a fire. For extra points, put an RCD in the circuit to defeat those more intent than normal on a Darwin award and even an AFCI to stop relatively small sparks causing fires.

High current circuits, particularly DC ones, are intrinsically harder to make safe even at low voltages as any poor connection, with higher than nominal resistance, can dissipate significant amounts of power as heat and so, maybe, cause a fire. Over-current protection doesn't help as normal operating currents can cause such problems.

I've been doing some redrawing of my house designs in Google SketchUp. SketchUp is generally pretty well thought out and impressively clever at working out what you want it to do except the odd occasions it isn't at which point it can become seriously frustrating. Here's something which has a simple explanation which took me a while to figure out.

Apparently, and sadly, this Daily Mail article (FreezePage) about the Home Secretary's wish for the security services to have access to records of a lot UK internet accesses is not a spoof. Expressions like “non sequitur” and “foaming at the mouth” float into my mind for some reason. They're followed, not far behind, by “mission creep”.

The BBC manages not to get quite so embroiled in the nuttier aspects of the home secretary's rant. I'm not sure this is entirely good; maybe people need to see the whole thing to make their own (non-clinical) judgement.

Still, from a practical point of view it's interesting to consider what the implications of email logging would be.