30±1 books in 2022

In 2021, I set myself the challenge of reading one book a week. That was silly and the consequence was that I ended up selecting the more slender volumes from the tottering stacks of books that surround me. For 2022, I decided to take it more slowly so I could read something weightier (in one sense or another). I went for one book a fortnight with a fortnight off. It didn’t quite work out like that. What follows are the books that I read in 2022 with what I can remember about reading them (often frightfully little, I’m afraid). There be spoilers. You be warned.

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Heidelberg, city of romance

I was asked to give a presentation at a conference in Heidelberg. This was a great honour and blah, blah. I don’t travel well¹ and the mere prospect of giving a 10 minute presentation can stress me out for weeks before the event, and for several years afterwards as I’m forced to relive the worst moments in infinite slow-motion detail usually at three o’clock in the morning. I estimate that the few hours of heart pounding terror that constitute the actual sessions in which I’ve spoken have shortened my life by years. Add to this the agonising discomfort of networking, the grey backrooms horror of hotels and the manifold indignities of air travel and I find myself wondering why I ever do it.

On the first day of Christmas WUWT gave to me, a flawed analysis of uncertainty

Months go by without WUWT ever surfacing in my conscience. Occasionally though, a post will come up in my twitter feed that I read for old time’s sake. It doesn’t change over there, it just becomes more the same. My favourite posts are about uncertainty and how it should be handled. They are always a source of surprisingly bad arguments⁰ and invincible ignorance on even minor points.

The most recent example “Plus or minus isn’t a question” is a classic of the genre, a mix of truth, half-truth, and untruth bound together with conviction and pomposity. Although it never reaches Frankian depths of madness, it is, nonetheless, the quintessential WUWT experience 8/10.

Was that 1.5°C? Was it wearing a hat and waving?

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review

Assessing Internal Variability of Global Mean Surface Temperature from Observational Data and Implications for Reaching Key Thresholds is the wordy title of a paper which aims to answer the question, how will we know when global temperature has passed 1.5°C above pre-industrial? It’s paywalled, but googling the title gave me an accessible pdf of the manuscript.