Will Twitter Replace Google for Journalism?

I think Mark Cuban is probably right that, with Twitter, newspapers no longer need to rely on Google to spread their links.... The problem is, who the heck wants breaking news from Rupert Murdoch?

I'm sure I'm not Murdoch's typical customer, and frankly I can't imagine buying any of his papers off a newsstand. I'd only pick up one of his copies if it was on a subway seat and I had 5 minutes to kill towards the next stop.

But I might not be typical and there may be neanderthals out there who want to read about how Paris Hilton spent last night with an itchy tag on her panties. I guess that's why I'm not rich.

Is this really what people want, Twitter announcements about new items? I don't -- I mean, leave me the hell alone so I have time to read, think, and write. I will catch up with the news when I get to it.

Media Voyeurism

I haven't watched local news in...about as long as I can remember. Here's why.

I checked the Web site of a local TV station in Portland today (KOIN), wondering about a shooting near Portland that killed two and left several wounded. What did I find?

A story about someone who fell in front of a subway train.

In Boston.

That's right. Despite a shooting rampage here in Oregon, this news station decided that the lead story was about a subway incident in Boston.

Why? Because they had good pictures about it. No other reason at all. Why would anyone in Portland care about a women who fell in front of a train in Boston? Sure, it's a sad story -- there are thousands of them around the world, ever day.

This was pure voyeurism. It's disgusting.

I mean, today's shooting incident in Oregon was just the Shooting-of-the-Day, right? They happen nearly every day in American now -- 2 killed, 7 wounded; 13 killed, 25 wounded; 4 dead, 8 injured. No one even gives a fuck anymore. Now they aren't ever worth exploiting by the media -- they're rather people fall in front of trains.

This country is becoming more intolerable all the time. Doesn't it anger you?

Elk Calf

Here is a great video of an elk calf...just having fun.

This reminds me of my new cat Sophie (now 3.5 mths old) who, literally, bounces off the walls when she's wound up. She just seems to run around because she likes it.

Where does that go when we get older?

Today's Deep Thinkers

Newt Gingrich: "I believe the most important question in the United States for the next decade is: 'Who are we?' Are we in fact a people who claim that we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights?" Or, are we "just randomly gathered protoplasm -- and lucky for us we're not rhinoceroses...

James Inhofe, on health care reform: "I don't have to read it or know what's in it. I'm going to oppose it anyways."

You know, I am beginning to think that actually it's Inhofe himself who is the hoax....

Kazakhstan's radioactive legacy

Here is a very important but very disturbing photo essay in the Boston Globe on the consequences of Soviet nuclear testing in Kazakstan. The Soviet Union exploded 456 nuclear devices there in a 40-yr period. More than one million people are thought to have been impacted....including those in these pictures. You need to see them.

Hadley: 4th warmest Sept ever

The Hadley Centre recorded Sept 2009 at the fourth warmest September in their records (which begin at 1850) -- warmer even than 1998.

UAH Oct temperature anomaly

The global temperature anomaly as measured by UAH is, well, kind of in the middle: +0.284°C. (Can these things really be measured to one part in a thousand?)

Quote

"I can almost remember when a suspect being human was a given, not an option."

-- Agent Broyles, Fringe, "Bad Dreams," S1E17

Archive of Debate with Tim Ball

My Monday night radio debate with Tim Ball is available on Victoria Taft's site:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Be sure to read this afterward: Is Phil Jones Suppressing Data? (Short answer: No. Slightly longer answer: No, of course not.)

Earthquake off the Oregon Coast

There was a (relatively strong) Mw 5.3 earthquake early this morning off the coast of Oregon. No reports of any tsunamis. I didn't feel anything, but usually at that time of the morning I'm trying to stay asleep while fending off my cat, who nips at my fingertips to remind me it's almost breakfast time.

R Pielke Jr's Open Invitation

Roger Pielke Jr is running an open invitation on 10 questions, and I'm going to respond to one of them:

• 9. In their political enthusiasm, some leading scientists have behaved badly

I have been attending climate conferences for years now -- a couple each year, as many as I can on my tiny freelance earnings, and hardly all of them -- and have attended talks by scientists locally. I've questioned them in person and on the phone and via email. And I have never once seen any canonical scientist "behave badly." On the contrary, everyone I've talked to or communicated with -- including many of the big names -- have all behaved professionally and politely and responsibly, without fail. Without fail.

On the other hand, I estimate that about half the time I contact "skeptics," they come back as brash and truculent and bordering on impolite, sometimes even before you ask them a question. Many seem, frankly, to already have a chip of their shoulder, or ticked off at something I wrote earlier (usually this, or this), or angry for some reason I can't really tell (though I have my suspicions). I too often have to just stop communicating with them out of frustration, and even then some of them hound me with emails for days and weeks until I put my foot down. I have never, ever reached that point with a scientist who, if you want to apply labels, would be labeled as accepting the AGW hypothesis.

I don't see any "scientists" behaving badly.

Good Prevails

AP: La. Justice Quits After Interracial Wed Flap

Boxer and the Absent Republicans

You may have seen this picture of Barbara Boxer at today's markup of the greenhouse gas bill before the Environment and Public Works committee.

Ha, ha. Only one Republican showed up. Doesn't she look like an idiot.

Well, we'll see. Republicans, of course, seem to be thrashing about wildly, like a washed cat who just needs to escape, anywhere.

But I think it's clear that it's these Republicans who will pay the price. Michelle Malkin -- sure, we can dismiss her as an attention-seeking idiot, who, like Limbaugh and Beck and Coulter will say absolutely anything as long as it gets them on the air. But she knows no science whatsoever, as far as I've ever been able to tell. Her opinion on climate change is completely driven by politics, and thus completely worthless.

Even Bjorn Lomborg now admits that the scientific debate over anthropogenic climate change is over.

So what do these absent Republican legislators really think they're accomplishing? Future generations will view them as no less irresponsible than if they had sat out efforts to ameliorate the Great Depression or to respond to the threats of the Cold War.

In a perverse way, it's kind of fun to watch.

Is Al Gore Conflicted?

You know, if you took this NY Times article and replaced the words

• "Al Gore" with "Fred Singer"
• "green" with "conventional"
• "wind" with "coal"

almost anyone would be suspicious, and has been in the past. So I can certainly understand why skeptics and those who aren't convinced would look upon Gore's advocacy with suspicion. He has scientific legitimacy on his side, but it's still a tight rope to walk, it seems to me.

Is Phil Jones supressing data?

On the show tonight Tim Ball and the host Victoria Taft tried to hone in on Phil Jones somehow suppressing or losing data. I wasn't as up on this subject as I could have been, but quickly found this page and this recent statement from Jones. Like much of what Ball claimed, he was wrong and didn't seem to look very hard for the full story:

No one, it seems, cares to read what we put up on the CRU web page. These people just make up motives for what we might or might not have done.

Almost all the data we have in the CRU archive is exactly the same as in the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) archive used by the NOAA National Climatic Data Center [seehere and here].

The original raw data are not “lost.” I could reconstruct what we had from U.S. Department of Energy reports we published in the mid-1980s. I would start with the GHCN data. I know that the effort would be a complete waste of time, though. I may get around to it some time. The documentation of what we’ve done is all in the literature.

If we have “lost” any data it is the following:

1. Station series for sites that in the 1980s we deemed then to be affected by either urban biases or by numerous site moves, that were either not correctable or not worth doing as there were other series in the region.

2. The original data for sites for which we made appropriate adjustments in the temperature data in the 1980s. We still have our adjusted data, of course, and these along with all other sites that didn’t need adjusting.

3. Since the 1980s as colleagues and National Meteorological Services (NMSs) have produced adjusted series for regions and or countries, then we replaced the data we had with the better series.

In the papers, I’ve always said that homogeneity adjustments are best produced by NMSs. A good example of this is the work by Lucie Vincent in Canada. Here we just replaced what data we had for the 200+ sites she sorted out.

The CRUTEM3 data for land look much like the GHCN and NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies data for the same domains.

Apart from a figure in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) showing this, there is also this paper from Geophysical Research Letters in 2005 by Russ Vose et al. Figure 2 is similar to the AR4 plot.

I think if it hadn’t been this issue, the Competitive Enterprise Institute would have dreamt up something else!

Radio Debate Tonight with Tim Ball

I'll be debating Tim Ball on the Victoria Taft radio show (KPAM 860 AM Portland) tonight at 7:05 pm PST. It's available live online.