WordPress comments on HotWhopper - two solutions

After hearing several Wordpress users say they had problems commenting here, the problem may lie with WordPress itself, and there are solutions - hopefully.

The problem apparently lies with how WordPress authenticates users. (Update: To clarify - HotWhopper is on Google's Blogger. The ID of people who leave comments can be authenticated by different platforms such as WordPress, TypePad, Google etc. if you comment using those IDs. Or people's ID won't authenticated if comments are posted as "Anonymous" or if you comment using "Name/URL".)

From an article from November last year, it's likely that "WordPress, which in general is using SSL security, has an OpenID server that has not been upgraded" - which causes the problems when commenting as WordPress.

Read on for two possible solutions.

The Paris Agreement has been adopted by COP21

It's agreed. On Saturday 12 December at 7:31 pm (Paris time), 195 nations adopted a new, universal Paris agreement. A momentous step signalling a commitment to end the use of fossil fuels.

Watch the moment when the new, universal #ParisAgreement was adopted at #COP21 pic.twitter.com/b3F6p0KBWi

— UN Climate Action (@UNFCCC) December 12, 2015

COP21 update - highlights of the final draft agreement

In case you missed the live streaming of the final draft COP21 agreement, here are some of the key points. These are taken from the stirring speeches from the COP21 President H.E. Mr. Laurent Fabius, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and the President of France François Hollande.

Some highlights from the final draft agreement

Some of the main elements of the final draft agreement are:

• Keep well below 2C, and aim for no more than 1.5C
• Legally binding - a universal legal agreement
• Differentiated, depending on the circumstances and capacity of each nation
• Updated / stocktake every five years
• Includes an increased role for adaptation to climate change
• Cooperation on loss and damage - $1 billion a year at the base level to be be reviewed by 2025 (I think)
• Caters for: island states re sea level, Africa re development, South America re forest protection
• Also addressing food security, public health, poverty and peace.

This week governments try for a sane response while some in the climate world went a little bit mad

Today is the day when COP21 is hoping to finalise the climate change agreement. The meeting was extended by a day, with many people remaining hopeful that a meaningful agreement will be reached. The UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon put out a press release saying that while there were still some important issues to be resolved, there has been considerable progress.

The latest draft can be downloaded here. As at the time of writing, it's Draft 2. (You can compare it with Draft 1 to see the progress in negotiations. Where the brackets have been removed it signifies agreement was reached on that point.)

---

UPDATE: I've just seen that the final text has been agreed. I'll let you know as soon as it's available - or you can keep an eye on the UN website. There's a press conference scheduled for 11:30 am CET today - Saturday (Europe time).

Sou 2:23 pm AEDT 12 December 2015

---

This week there was real silliness from deniers and from people campaigning to stop climate change.

Wild weather report - early December

Do you know one explanation for science deniers not "believing" that weather extremes are getting more extreme more often? It's because they only read climate conspiracy blogs, like WUWT. Despite Anthony Watts claiming to be a meteorologist (unqualified) - that is, someone who used to announce the weather on television - he doesn't like to report unusual weather. Some of his readers might wake up to the fact that he's a charlatan, a fake, a fraud.

For example, in the last few days there were at least 245 people who were killed as a result of unseasonal torrential rains in Chennai, India. You can read about that disastrous weather event at the Times of India, which reported that:

The deluge destroyed crucial road and rail links, shutdown the airport, snapped power and telecom lines and left lakhs [hundreds of thousands} of people stranded. 

Then there's northern England and Scotland that was drenched and battered by record-setting Storm Desmond. You can read about that at the BBC. There are also some photos on Quartz, just in case you thought it was a fuss over nothing. It isn't. The BBC reports that thousands of homes were flooded, one person died, and power is slowly being restored to thousands. As quoted on Quartz:

Storm Desmond dropped a total of 262.6 mm (10.3 inches) of rain in Cumbria county, in northwest England, from Friday through Sunday. Floods minister Rory Stewart told the BBC that Desmond had “broken all the UK rainfall records.”

There's also wild weather in the Pacific north west. Not as bad as the flooding rains in the UK, but the storm has caused power outages affecting 18,000 homes in Washington state.

While down here in Australia not long ago, there were deadly bushfires. The fire in South Australia's mid-north was burning at a rate of 580 acres a minute. One woman described it as ""It was like a fireball, 90 kilometres an hour." If you can't imagine a fire burning that quickly, then just make sure you aren't in the bush on a catastrophic fire danger day. To make matters worse, the communications systems failed the volunteer firefighters. Two people died in those fires, and at least 87 homes were destroyed or severely damaged. One man was watching his property burn from 3,000 km away (from Darwin) via a feed from cameras he'd installed. He saved his home by activating sprinklers via his mobile phone. The ABC has mapped what happened where in the fires in South Australia's mid north. The agricultural land could take years to recover.

Denier weirdness: Heartland Institute deniers don't want their disinformation questioned

You know how deniers are always going on about free speech. What they mean is that sometimes when they protest climate science they get rebuffed with sciency facts. I've already commented on the fact that Mark Steyn, that champion of "free speech" (or his version of it) doesn't allow comments on his blog. Now it seems that the Heartland Institute has decided that their public denier fest is not going to be public after all - although I'm guessing they will still be streaming the event to anyone who won't be bored senseless by it. (The only people who'll like it will be the already senseless.)

Kyla Mandel from DeSmogBlog reported on Twitter that the Heartland Institute has just kicked out one third of the women who rolled up to attend their denier fest at COP21, which has just begun - that is, Kyla Mandel, I'm guessing:

The formerly open to the public Heartland climate denial conference just cut number of women present by a third pic.twitter.com/8uUZzRDcyu

— Kyla Mandel (@kylamandel) December 7, 2015

COP21 Week 2 - and open thread

The COP21 meeting in Paris continues this week and is due to conclude on Friday 11 December. There is a draft agreement on the table now, which runs to 46 pages including Annexes. There is also an addendum. The main document has the following at the start of the draft agreement:

El Niño in the Lower Troposphere - watch this space

Some people wonder when El Niño will show up in the lower troposphere. It takes some months before the temperature of the lower troposphere peaks - up to three months later than the peak in surface temperatures. That means that it will still be a couple of months before the El Niño shows up strongly in lower troposphere temperatures.

Roy Spencer has posted an update of UAH lower troposphere temperature. Here is an update of the chart from a few weeks ago, with November 2015 included. This version is 6.04 beta which is slightly different to previous beta versions in the detail. The shaded area covers the general period of an El Niño - from around April in year 1 to March in year 2. The lower troposphere temperature doesn't normally peak till the end of the El Niño:

Fig 1 | Lower troposphere temperature anomaly - global. Data source: UAH

What a treat for Judith Curry - supping with the morally depraved

Judith Curry is going to be testifying to a Senate Committee next week, along with some other climate science deniers and at least one scientist defamer. The others testifying are from the rogues gallery of science disinformers. The GOP could only find two people who are employed as climate scientists, Judith Curry and John Christy. So they reached into the science denier bag and fished out two disinformers for hire: Will Happer, and Mark Steyn.

Why do the Republicans bother with this crude pantomime? Why not just hang a sign around their necks saying "we want the world to burn"?

Schoolboy sniggers at COP21 and conspiracy theories from WUWT deniers

While the leaders of the free and less free world have gathered in Paris to address the biggest problem the world is facing, there is nothing but schoolboy sniggers from deniers. You may remember sneering, sniggering lads or lasses in your class when you were at high school. The underachievers of low self-esteem who thought a leer, a forced swagger and a dab of Clearasil might get them the admiration they sought. These types were either ignored or scorned by the rest of the class, just as the world's leaders are ignoring the abysmal efforts by disinformers and deniers to make the world hotter instead of containing global warming.