James' Empty Blog

Timely given events all over the place , this new paper by Mann et al has just appeared.  It's a well-aimed jab at the detection and ...

Presently hunkered down at home awaiting the forthcoming -17C minimum temperature overnight, which is something I don't think I have ex...

We seem to have missed rainy season this year ( not all of Japan was so lucky ) and moved straight into heatstroke season , which means it...

I mentioned some time ago that Piers Corbyn had been up to his old tricks with an apocalyptic prediction of doom for the coldest May ever ...

There is a faction arguing for re-opening of the nuclear power stations that were shut down after the tsunami. I don't know to what ex...

Well, it had to happen. The meeja demands a forecast, but the Met Office won't give one any more (basically because they realise it'...

These famous "gassho-zukuri" (praying hands style) steeply thatched buildings (which we visited last year, incidentally) are supp...

So the surface temperature analyses for 2010 are in, and depending who you believe, it was either the hottest year (NCDC), or it wasn't ...

...when your Mac laptop won't even charge. Apparently the minimum operating temperature for these things is 10C. Fortunately, other tha...

While some have been grumbling about the cold winter, we've been having fairly mild weather. In fact Tokyo dropping as low as 1.8C made...

And no, that's not a reference to the spicy noodles. I thought we might have missed typhoon season by being away over the late summer, b...

Oh, I suppose I shouldn't poke fun. Having got their fingers burnt last year - or perhaps I should say, having had their parade thorough...

Spotted some sad news in the papers today. Kamakura has a famous old ginkgo tree in front of the main temple in the middle of town. It is qu...

Couldn't help but laugh at this from the Grauniad, complete with caption: And with this much snow they can't even run trains in tunn...

They don't have a great record with their recent annual temperature forecasts, but it's still encouraging to see another set of expe...

Fashionably late to the party as always, but (in contrast to Stoat's snark ) I thought this was a pretty well-done piece by Seth Borenst...

I've not really paid that much attention to the sea ice area myself, but I did take a punt on Lab Lemming's betting pool , mainly b...

The latest More or Less has Andrew Gelman being politely dismissive of some extremely dodgy work on sex ratios that he has blogged about a...

The Tokyo Daibutsu may vanquish the forces of evil on a regular basis (or whatever it did, I'm happy to say I've never seen the pro...

We've recently had three big quakes and a typhoon, all in the space of less than a week. Fortunately they were all centred some way off ...