Quark Soup by David Appell

Oregon Court Makes a Pro-Privacy Ruling

2012-01-30T16:11:00.001-08:00

An Oregon court rules that it is a violation of Fourth Amendment rights for a policeman to search someone's digital camera without a warrant:

http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2012/01/eugene_verdict_clarifies_law_p.html

I like this: "That's the electronic equivalent of police walking off with several file cabinets of private papers without benefit of a judge's signature, said Lauren Regan, Schlossberg's lawyer."

John Houghton on IPCC Transparency

2012-01-29T17:59:00.000-08:00

"The work of the IPCC illustrates the following five important features which I believe should characterize the scientific assessments that form an input to policy making....

"...Thirdly, all parts of the assessment process need to be completely open and transparent. IPCC documents including early drafts and review comments have been freely and widely available - adding much to the credibility of the process and its conclusions."

-- John Houghton, "An Overview of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Its Process of Science Assessment," Issues in Environmental Science and Technology, No. 17, Global Environmental Change (2002), p. 6.

Houghton, of course, was the lead editor of the first three IPCC Assessment Reports. (Via Bishop Hill) This policy was changed last May at the IPCC 33rd Meeting in Abu Dhabi (see section 8 of this IPCC document), writing only that "issues related to confidentiality of draft reports is important...."

The ATI's Outrageous Spin of the Mann Emails

2012-01-29T12:18:00.000-08:00

Here's a good example of the lengths to which American Tradition Institute is spinning these emails to try to find something -- anything -- untoward: the circumstances surrounding the Soon & Baliunas paper. (A blast from the past.)

Maybe this is worth a little review: that 2003 paper published in Climate Research reviewed over 200 published papers and concluded "Across the world, many records reveal that the 20th century is probably not the warmest or a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium."

Sounds definitive. Yet it contained such huge and elementary errors that it wouldn't have been acceptable as a first-year graduate student paper. As Malcolm Hughes said in Scientific American, "The Soon et al. paper is so fundamentally misconceived and contains so many egregious errors that it would take weeks to list and explain them all."

In short:

their work lacked a quantitative foundation (Soon: "I was stating outright that I'm not able to give too many quantitative details, especially in terms of aggregating all the results.")
they grouped 50-year periods by "wetness" and "dryness," but didn't even define those words. When asked they said they "referred to the standard usage in English."
what they did define was so broad as to include nearly any conclusion. Worst of all was defining "climate anomaly" as any 50+ year period that was wetter or dryer, or warmer (for the MWP) or cooler (for the LIA).

So even if the temperature was completely constant in the period, it was considered an "anomaly."

So a 50-year dry period anytime between 800 to 1300 AD, anywhere in the world, counted as evidence for the Medieval Warm Period. Regardless of temperature.
So did a 50-year wet period. Regardless of temperature.
By choosing a 50-year window, they excluded anything that happened after 1950.

You can read more here in Scientific American.

So it wasn't that the paper was inconvenient to paleoclimatologists -- it was so appallingly bad anyone had to wonder how the hell it ever appeared in a so-called peer-reviewed journal, and what was going on there. And, in fact, later that year several scientists resigned from the journal's editorial board, including the newly on-board editor-in-chief Hans von Storch.

It's bad enough to get sucker punched, but when it's a low blow as well, what do you do? Clearly you avoid that person, and you recommend to everyone they do the same. Which is what Michael Mann wrote in PE-15:

From: "Michael E. Mann"
To: Phil Jones, Ray Bradley, Malcolm Hughes, Scott Rutherford, Thomas Crowley
Subject: Re: Fwd: Soon & Baliunas
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 08:14:49 -0500
Cc: [several]

The Soon & Baliunas paper couldn't have cleared a 'legitimate' peer review process anywhere. That leaves only one possibility--that the peer-review process at Climate Research has been hijacked by a few skeptics on the editorial board. And it isn't just De Frietas, unfortunately I think this group also includes a member of my own department...

So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering "Climate Research" as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board...

What do others think?
mike

Seems straightforward. Why would anyone who cares about science and their field want to encourage a journal that was publishing such atrocious stuff? And why wouldn't you want to minimize the threat of more sucker punches in the future?

Yet how did the American Tradition Institute characterize this?

The selected emails include graphic descriptions of the contempt a small circle of largely taxpayer-funded alarmists held for anyone who followed scientific principles and ended up disagreeing with them. For example, in the fifteenth Petitioners’ Exemplar (PE-15), Mann encourages a boycott of one climate journal and a direct appeal to his friends on the editorial board to have one of the journal’s editors fired for accepting papers that were carefully peer-reviewed and recommended for publication on the basis that the papers dispute Mann’s own work.

Which is a 180 degree spin-job, because whatever S&B was, it clearly was not "carefully peer-reviewed."

But, of course, an accurate portrayal is about the last thing the ATI is interested in, and there's nothing traditional about it, either.

--
Anyway, enough of that. I just thought it was important to accurately review what all the fuss was about while some people are trying to rewrite history.

The Cheesiness of John Stossel (No, not his Mustache)

2012-01-29T10:45:00.000-08:00

The emails released by the court in the American Tradition Institute v. University of Virginia seem pretty tame, so far. The ATI is clearly trying to spin them as hard as they can. Aside from that, they're interesting as gossip, such as this one (PE-3), about John Stossel of ABC, that is hardly surprising:

Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 13:50:49 -0500
From: John Christy <...>
To: "Michael E. Mann" <...>
Subject: Re: IPCC

Hi Mike:

Here's what happened. ABC News 20/20 with Stossel wanted me to be part of a segment that will air at the end of June on the climate change. Four of us were taped for almost 2 hours, and from this they will select about 8 minutes, so I doubt my remarks will make the show. When Stossel came back in after all was said and done, he said to me that I might be a good scientist but I didn't have the emotion and passion necessary to excite the audience. In one way, that is a compliment I suppose....

Good to hear from you.
John C.

So a scientist agrees to fly halfway across the country to be interviewed for Stossel's show, and Stossel calls him boring to his face. Nice.

At least he was clear about his priorities. (As if you really were.)

Founding Fathers Who Weren't So Virtuous

2012-01-27T19:22:00.000-08:00

I learned some interesting things from Richard Brookhiser's book James Madison -- mostly, that the "founding fathers" where hardly paragons of virtue, and the same shenanigans went on then as go on today. Did you know:

(Incidentally) It was Benjamin Franklin who came up with the terms "positive" and "negative" for electric charge?
Also, that he had a grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, who was a journalist referred to as "Lightning Rod Junior." Is that a great nickname or what?
Bache was jailed under the Alien and Sedition Act. A Vermont newspaper editor was convicted for writing that President John Adams "grasp[ed] for power" and exhibited "ridiculous pomp," and was fined $1000 and spent four months in a freezing, stinking jail cell. Journalist James Callendar was arrested and convicted for calling Adams a "hideous hermaphroditical character" and was sentenced for nine months in jail and fined $200. Torture then, torture now.
That journalists of the time were frequently beaten up by those angered by their rhetoric.
James Callendar, mentioned above, first wrote the story about Thomas Jefferson and his mistress Sally Hemings (his slave) after James Madison (who was then Jefferson's Secretary of State) turned him away when he came looking for a patronage job. Callendar was found drowned in a river only 10 months later, which the coroner ruled an accident (Callendar was, reportedly, bathing while drunk).
That George Washington and the Senate passed a treaty signed with Britain in 1794 and tried to keep it secret, partly because the treaty did not require that Britain return escaped slaves. Benjamin Franklin Bache printed the treaty and made it known by distributing it widely.
George Washington advocated that a canal be built near where he owned land, because he knew the canal would open up the area, lead to development, and increase the value of his property.
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison did not know that the Louisiana Purchase did not include Florida. Then they paid France $2M to try and steal it away from Spain.

And more. It's a great book -- I recommend it.

Blogsam and Websam

2012-01-27T18:47:00.000-08:00

Stuff I think is interesting and once probably thought about blogging more about but now it's too late:

The United States has more people in solitary confinement than any other country in the world. Read that again..... What a shameful statistic.... Now read this essay in the Washington Post by someone who spent a decade in such confinement in China, and somehow came out still able to communicate his experience and feelings. If you need more, read the Jonathan Turley piece from earlier this month, also in the Post, titled 10 Reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free.
What the hell is happening to us? Really? Does anyone have a clue??
I have a long news article in the January issue of Physics World about light field cameras -- digital cameras that take pictures you can focus after you snap them. Just might be the next big thing in photography -- there is certainly a lot of big Silicon Valley money behind the idea.
An op-ed in today's WSJ repeats the myth that there has been no warming "for well over 10 years." (I'm being kind by calling it a myth.) We've already seen that the ocean continues to warm, though I haven't calculated the trend yet. It's true that the surface isn't warming lately -- the linear trend of the last 120 months of HadCRUT3 surface data is -0.078 ± 0.027 C/decade (R²=0.07) -- but if you wanted to find temperature of some system, would you only measure the temperature on some boundary in its interior? Of course not! You'd measure many different parts of it. (The 10-yr trend of the UAH lower troposphere temperatures is +0.032 ± 0.097 C/decade, which is not statistically significant.) They seem not to even know about the recent Loeb paper in Nature Geosciences, despite writing,
If elected officials feel compelled to "do something" about climate, we recommend supporting the excellent scientists who are increasing our understanding of climate with well-designed instruments on satellites, in the oceans and on land, and in the analysis of observational data.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Guess_His_Party-VA) actually said this about Warren Buffett's secretary, who was invited by Pres. Obama to attend his State of the Union address after Buffett wrote that he pays less taxes than his secretary (17.4% to 35.8%):
"We want her to make more money, we want her to have more hope for the future. . . . [But] this notion that somehow the income that Warren Buffett makes is the same as a wage income for his secretary, we know that’s not the same."
Clearly he thinks some people's money is better than other people's money. Unbelievable. And now the long knives are already after her.
This didn't seem to get much news time, but... the U.S. health insurance situation continues to fall to pieces: about 1% fewer workers are covered every year, for several years now. Since 2008 the uninsured rate has risen from 14.8% to 17.1%. That's about 2.3 million adults a year who have lost their insurance -- 189,000 per month. Have you heard any discussion of this at the Republican candidate debates? Any? Even Obama barely mentioned health care in his SOTU. The whole system is going to shit and it's like no one wants to talk about it until it hits them.

Joke Too Good Not to Post

2012-01-27T14:55:00.000-08:00

Did you hear about the homeopath who forgot to take his medicine?
He died of an overdose.

Via Tallbloke (where they are busy constructing an alternate scientific reality. Really.)

New Ocean Heat Data (And Yes, the Trend is Up)

2012-01-27T12:18:00.000-08:00

NOAA has updated their upper ocean heat content data to Dec 2011, and it doesn't look like much cooling is going on. (Tamino deconstructs those who are trying to spin it otherwise.)

Here is a nice chart that explains why ocean heating is a much better indicator of warming than atmospheric temperatures -- let alone atmospheric temperatures measured where we happen to live, on the surface -- about 90% of the heat being added to the planet ends up in the oceans. (Also known as, why you can stick your hand in a 200°F oven but not 200°F water.)

Hadley's December Temperature

2012-01-26T21:41:00.001-08:00

The Hadley Centre publishes their December '11 temperature anomaly: +0.262 C.

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3vgl.txt

At least by my records, that makes 2011 the 11th warmest year in their records (which go back to 1850), and last month the 16th warmest December -- ignoring subtleties of uncertainties and all that. I'm on a deadline.

Another IPCC Demand for Secrecy « Climate Audit

2012-01-26T19:47:00.001-08:00

Steve McIntyre has received another request from the IPCC to remove text and a figure from the AR5 ZODS (Zero Order Drafts) that appear on his site:

http://climateaudit.org/2012/01/26/another-ipcc-demand-for-secrecy/

He responded with a request for the legal basis behind their request; it will be interesting to read the response, if any.

I haven't responded to the IPCC request I received, and as of now don't plan to. I continue to strongly believe the documents are of public and journalistic interest (especially those of WG2), and have been working on a piece with more on this. As a journalist I believe I have every right to publish this material, which I did not obtain by illicit means. (And, as far as that goes, I also have that right as a US citizen.) Nor do I see how I can possibly be bound by any IPCC strictures.

I honestly don't know enough about Canadian law to know Steve's position -- he writes that he knows of nothing that legally binds him, either. And I certainly think his long record of investigation and blogging demonstrates he should qualify under any freedoms of the press (while recognizing that courts both here and there are still sorting this out). He said that he registered as an IPCC reviewer of the FODs but never received any documents, and didn't (and wouldn't) agree to confidentiality agreements.

In any case, the documents are now mirrored at Cryptome, as well as Wikispooks.

I think the IPCC is making a mountain out of molehill on this, and fanning what were barely warm embers. It makes me wonder if they aren't pressing this issue just because they can.

Cool Pic of a Dust Cloud Over the Atlantic

2012-01-23T22:05:00.000-08:00

Here's a great image of a a dust plume from the western Sahara making its way across the Atlantic Ocean. (Taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite, on January 19th.)

Greedy Lying Bastards

2012-01-23T18:08:00.000-08:00

This looks like it will be provocative (to say the least) -- an upcoming documentary on the oil industry called Greedy Lying Bastards, by Craig Rosebraugh. Here's the trailer:

Via PRNewswire:

How can you right the wrongs when the fossil field industry wields so much influence over energy and environmental policies? "Greedy Lying Bastards" details the people and organizations casting doubt on climate science and claiming that greenhouse gases are not affected by human behavior and includes interviews with scientists, industry experts, international political delegates, climate change victims as well as deniers, and people affected by the practices of the fossil fuel industry. Among them: UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon; Rep. Henry Waxman; former EPA head Christine Todd Whitman; leading climate science skeptics Myron Ebell, Christopher Lord Monckton, and Jay Lehr; Ken Wiwa, the son of the slain Nigerian environmentalist; farmers in Peru and Uganda; and Mike Robichaux, one of the few doctors willing to treat Gulf residents sick with chemical poisoning from the BP spill, Republican Presidential candidates, Texas governor Rick Perry and Minnesota representative Michele Bachman, as well as other prominent politicians like Senator James Inhofe, from oil-rich Oklahoma.

"This film is an investigation into an industry that is simply out of control," Rosebraugh contends. "The fossil fuel industry has shown that it will stop at nothing to maximize profits for shareholders, whether it's cutting corners on safety, employing highly paid lobbyists to impact the political process, giving huge amounts to climate change deniers to ensure that no legislation is passed that would impact the bottom line, or complicity in the murder of individuals who speak up against environmental degradation."

No release date yet.

IPCC Writes to Request Removal of the ZODS

2012-01-23T13:35:00.000-08:00

I received an email from Sophie Schlingemann, the IPCC Legal and Outreach Officer, requesting removal of the Zero Order Drafts from my site. The wording is nearly identical to the letter received by Gallopingcamel. I believe these documents are of public and journalistic interest, and that I have a right to publish them, and plan to decline.

Also, I've put up a Zipped file (71 MB) of all the ZOD documents here, and an RAR-compressed file (77 MB) here. The latter is also mirrored at Cryptome.

Trenberth Response to Today's Loeb et al Paper on Missing Energy

2012-01-22T17:31:00.000-08:00

I asked Kevin Trenberth for his thoughts on today's Loeb et al paper in Nature Geosciences, since he and John Fasullo have been doing a lot of work on determining and identifying the missing energy. It's interesting:

"It seems to have its main point that our earlier paper was wrong. I will certainly disagree with that. In our earlier papers (refs 2,8 and 27) we pointed out that there were major discrepancies between the inventory of energy uptake in the climate system, mainly in the oceans, and the top-of-atmosphere observed changes. The period of "missing energy" was 2008-2009 which was a La Nina period and their Fig 2 shows indeed that there was a large input of energy into the climate system at that time. But 2008 was the coldest year this century and so where did the heat go?

We did not make a big deal about the uncertainties in the observations which are highlighted in this paper. But we were well aware of them. The main point of our paper was that yes, perhaps the observations are consistent within the error bars but if so, the error bars (uncertainties) are so large as to make the values useless. A key purpose of our paper was to challenge both the ocean heat content community and the CERES (atmospheric radiation) communities to do better. Both have responded and the situation has improved somewhat. The latest CERES data as reported here has corrected their data and found about 20% of the problem. In addition the OHC communities have improved their estimates and some of the problem has gone away from that standpoint too. But there remain some major problems. As they note on p 3: the correlation with two of the OHC data sets is only 0.05, and they choose to use the one that is correlated 0.46. Even that is not very good and is not significant for so few values.

Moreover, the uncertainties computed by Loeb et al for CERES appear to be wrong. They included the systematic error in the interannual error bar, so the real error bar on the change is less than shown and in fact it seems likely the agreement is not within the uncertainty.

So while their conclusions may be valid: yes there is no evidence of a discrepancy, given their uncertainties, and yes there is no "statistically significant" decline in OHC rates of change, but the uncertainties are so large that neither dataset is useful to know what is really going on, and that is the key point. The discrepancies among OHC data sets remain huge. We MUST do better. So the key point in their title is "within uncertainty". It should add: "but the uncertainty is too large."

The necessity and difficulty of combining all these datasets is a good reminder that all the people building sensors and launching satellites and transmitting data and slaving away at their computers all day long to make the data compatible, consistent, and usable are doing really important work. I hope their office has a window.

New Paper Says No Missing Climate Energy

2012-01-22T12:20:00.000-08:00

There's a new paper just out in Nature Geosciences that seems important: it says there is no "missing energy" in the climate system after all, and that the Earth continues to accumulate energy [as expected with AGW]. Here's the abstract:

Global climate change results from a small yet persistent imbalance between the amount of sunlight absorbed by Earth and the thermal radiation emitted back to space. An apparent inconsistency has been diagnosed between interannual variations in the net radiation imbalance inferred from satellite measurements and upper-ocean heating rate from in situ measurements, and this inconsistency has been interpreted as ‘missing energy’ in the system. Here we present a revised analysis of net radiation at the top of the atmosphere from satellite data, and we estimate ocean heat content, based on three independent sources. We find that the difference between the heat balance at the top of the atmosphere and upper-ocean heat content change is not statistically significant when accounting for observational uncertainties in ocean measurements, given transitions in instrumentation and sampling. Furthermore, variability in Earth’s energy imbalance relating to El Niño-Southern Oscillation is found to be consistent within observational uncertainties among the satellite measurements, a reanalysis model simulation and one of the ocean heat content records. We combine satellite data with ocean measurements to depths of 1,800 m, and show that between January 2001 and December 2010, Earth has been steadily accumulating energy at a rate of 0.50 ± 0.43 W/m² (uncertainties at the 90% confidence level). We conclude that energy storage is continuing to increase in the sub-surface ocean.

The reference is "Observed changes in top-of-the-atmosphere radiation and upper-ocean heating consistent within uncertainty," Norman G. Loeb et al, Nature Geosciences, Jan 22, 2012, doi:10.1038/NGEO1375.

Granted, that is a rather large uncertainty. (But hey, this is a really difficult analysis.) ENSO plays a large part in the radiation budgeting:

The Future's Name for Our Great Carbon Event?

2012-01-22T10:31:00.000-08:00

I came across this really interesting thought:

"As seen by paleoclimatologists 10 million years in the future, whatever species they may be, the present era of catastrophic release of fossil fuel carbon will appear as an enigmatic event which will have a name of its own, much as paleoclimatologists and paleobiologists refer today to the PETM or the K-T boundary event. The fossil carbon release will show up in 13C proxies of the carbon cycle, in dissolution of ocean carbonates through acidification of the ocean, through mass extinctions arising from rapid warming, and through the moraine record left by retreating mountain glaciers and land-based ice sheets."

-- Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, Principles of Planetary Climate (2010), Ch 1

I wonder what these future beings will call this event. The "Anthropocene" might be OK for now and the hundreds of thousands of years following it, but it doesn't seem right for the event itself, will appear to them as a sudden carbon event of only 200-300 years duration -- a veritable spike. So maybe "The Great Burning," or for the more scientific-minded "The Pleistocide," since it will end the Pleistocene with its characteristic repeated glaciations.

Pierrehumbert's is an absolutely fantastic textbook, if you really want to drill down deep into climate science. (There was a free PDF on his Web site, but it appears to be gone.) He continues:

"As an event, it is unlikely to permanently destroy the habitabilty of our planet, any more than did the K-T event or the PETM. Still, a hundred generations or more of our descendants will be condemned to live in a planetary climate far different from that which nurtured humanity, and in the company of a greatly impoverished biodiversity. Biodiversity does recover over millions of years, but that is a long time to wait, if indeed there are any of our species left around at the time to do the waiting. Extinction may not be precisely forever, but it is close enough."

By the way, did you know it was Andrew Revkin who came up with the word "Anthrocene," in his 1992 book Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast, which evolved (perhaps independently) to "Anthropocene." Brilliant.

Canada's Cost from Climate Change

2012-01-21T14:02:00.000-08:00

By the way, a study published last September estimates that climate change will cost Canada C$5 B/yr by 2015 and C$21-43 B/yr by 2050. With an estimated 5% chance the costs then are a least C$ 91 B.

All that oil ought to be able to pay for that.

They estimate Canadian GDP in 2050 will be C$5000 B in 2008 C-dollars. So C$43 B will be about 1% of GDP (sounds low compared to the Stern Report), and up to about 2%.

So while Canada will make trillions from selling their oil, and pay up to $100 billion a year to combat climate change. And they'll pay almost that much if they don't sell their oil. I'd say that pencils out, for them at least.

Steven Harper on Canadian Oil Sands

2012-01-21T13:46:00.000-08:00

Here's an interview of Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper, done a day or two (I think) before President Obama's decision to deny the application of the Keystone XL pipeline. He doesn't sound like somehow who will be deterred by that denial.

And remember, Obama's denial wasn't on the merits of the application, but, he said, because the State Department couldn't meet the deadline Congress had imposed. At least, that's their story. Clever.

Climate Winner of the Week

2012-01-20T21:05:00.000-08:00

I suppose Bill McKibben has to be named the Climate Winner of the Week, for spearheading the effort to stop the Keystone XL pipeline.

But it's hard to see him and the environmental lobby winning the war. There's just too much money at stake. Who do these people think they are, corporations?

That oil is too valuable not to be sold. Period. That simple factor will swamp all other considerations: of CO2 and environmental destruction in Alberta and the fear of pipeline breaks. You'd have to be a saint not to rip that oil out and sell it, and there are very few saints among us.

After Obama's decision earlier this week Canada's Minister of Natural Resources issued a statement that said, basically: That's unfortunate. But this is going to happen.

Sure, there will be some jobs created if the pipeline were built: about 20,000 man-years worth, said TransCanada. That's not very many, really: the US worker force grows by roughly 100,000 people per month.

So the jobs created would be a drop in the bucket. The big factor is the profit -- for oil companies, and the Canadian government.

There's an estimated 175 B barrels of oil to be recovered from the Canadian tar sands, at current prices and with current technologies. That's worth about $17.5 trillion on today's market -- 10 times Canada's 2011 GDP of $1.7 B/yr (US$ or CAN$ -- they're almost equal now).

In 2006, Royal Dutch Shell said they made an after-tax profit of $21.75 per barrel from their Canadian oil sands unit. Canada wants to get production up to 4.4 Mb/d within this decade, so that's $35 B/yr in profit to be had. They will mumble something about carbon capture and sequestration and the Canadian government will do away with some more tax incentives in the name of "environmentalism" and they will find a way to get it.

CO2? Author David Strahan estimates that CO2 emissions from the tar sands are 20% higher than average emissions from oil (mostly from production), and that a barrel of oil, with production and refining and consumption, emits about 500 kg CO2e per barrel.

So the Canadian oil sands will put about 0.8 Bmt CO2e/yr into the atmosphere. If all that's recoverable eventually gets burned, it would put about 90 Bmt CO2e into the atmosphere, or 24 GtC using the famous 44/12 ratio.

Worldwide emissions in 2010 were 9139 Tg C, or 9.1 GtC. (Maybe it's weird, but I actually enjoy doing these numbers.)

So the entire recoverable Canadian tar

sands represents about 3 years

of current worldwide CO2 emissions.

Is that so bad? I don't have the exact numbers, but looking at this chart and calculating the area of the triangle it seems the world has emitted about (1/2)*(70 yrs)*(9000 MmtC/yr), or ~ 300 GtC. (Here Myles Allen said 500 GtC, and we'll probably emit another 250-500 GtC before we're finished.)

So the Canadian tar sands will increase "expected" "conventional" emissions about about 5-10%.

Instead of adding a total of about 800 GtC

to the atmosphere, burning the Canadian tar sands

will increase this to about 825 GtC.

If what we've burned so far (~500 GtC) has resulted in a ~1°C increase in temperature, and (throwing in some feedbacks) what we'll burn before we're through (~350 GtC) will add another ~ 1°C, then using all the Canadian tar sands (~25 GtC) we can get our hands on will add another ~0.1 °C.

Canadian tar sands = another 0.1 °C of warming

Is that so bad if, it makes the Canadians and a whole bunch of other people rich (~$15-20 T)?

I guess I'm just too cynical to think 350.org and the environmental lobby is going to stay in the way of $15-20 trillion worth of money sitting under the Canadian wilderness.

Most IPCC AR5 ZOD files Are Up

2012-01-20T14:50:00.000-08:00

I've uploaded most of the IPCC AR5 Zero Order Drafts (ZODs) to here.

If you have any of the remaining chapters (WG1 Ch6 and Ch7) and are willing to share, you can write me here. Confidence guaranteed.

Incidentally, the site where the ZOD files were first leaked, Megaupload.com, was shut down yesterday.

Oh, Come On!

2012-01-20T12:00:00.000-08:00

Now this is completely ridiculous, from the Irish Times (via Bishop Hill):

As climate issues intensify the media, incredibly, throws in the towel
JOHN GIBBONS

OPINION: GLOBALLY, 2010 was a year of weather-related disasters on an almost unprecedented scale. Last year was worse, with a record $380 billion in economic losses attributed to “natural” disasters, many climate-related, according to insurance giant Munich Re.

Few experts expect to see any break in this upward trend this year, or any time soon. Instead, as record emissions of greenhouse gases continue unabated, the climate system is now behaving precisely as scientists have been projecting for decades. The rapid build-up of energy in the system is the “engine” that is fuelling extremes, from storms and floods to severe droughts.

Actually the facts are (as Scientific American explains) that 2/3rds of the amount was not due to climate change, but to the Japanese tsunami and the New Zealand earthquake.

Natural disasters around the world last year caused a record $380 billion in economic losses. That's more than twice the tally for 2010, and about $115 billion more than in the previous record year of 2005, according to a report from Munich Re, a reinsurance group in Germany. But other work emphasizes that it is too soon to blame the economic devastation on climate change.

Almost two-thirds of 2011's exceptionally high costs are attributable to two disasters unrelated to climate and weather: the magnitude-9.0 earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in March, and February's comparatively small but unusually destructive magnitude-6.3 quake in New Zealand.

It's probably good to be on the watch for this sort of thing.

Another Bastardi Failed Prediction

2012-01-19T22:16:00.000-08:00

This is like shooting fish in a barrel, but.... In November 2010 Joe Bastardi made a prediction about 2011 Arctic sea ice -- that it would reach a low of "5.5" Mkm², and be back to 2005 levels:

So how did he do? Guess.

NSIDC's Arctic sea ice data is here. In 2011 the Arctic sea ice extent reached a monthly low of 4.61 Mkm², 16% below Bastardi's prediction.

For the year 2011's average was 10.66 Mkm² (average of the monthly averages). 2005's average was 11.11 Mkm².

In fact, 2011's average Arctic sea ice extent was the lowest in their records (which go back to Nov 1978). It's true that the low point of 2011 was higher than the low point of 2007 (4.61 Mkm² in Sept 2011 compared to 4.30 Mkm² in Sept 2007), but for the year the average was the lowest.

Bastardi concluded with "The ice is coming back, will do so in forward and back steps, with forward defeating the back steps."

For more such Bastardiness, see today's WUWT, where Joe thinks CO2 can't mix in the atmosphere because it has a higher molecular weight than air.

Nor am I going to question them as to why they believe a trace gas like CO2 (needed for life on the planet) with a specific gravity of 1.5 as compared to the atmospheres 1.0, was going to mix with air in a way to affect the earth’s temperatures.

Which is, of course, pure bunk, and demonstrably false.

Soggy Oregon

2012-01-19T17:14:00.000-08:00

It's been miserably wet here this week -- snow (about 8"), rain, melting, more rain, and then, still more rain, and now flooding. I noticed moss has been growing around the edges of my car windows. They don't really try to plow the side streets here, but luckily I didn't need to go anywhere. It's easy to understand why Lewis & Clark and their men were completely miserable in the winter they spent on the mouth of the Columbia River in 1805. They were there for 105 days -- only 12 of them were without rain, and there were only 6 days of sunshine.

"...the men suffered from colds, influenza, rheumatism, and other ailments that the captains treated. Clothing rotted, and fleas infested the blankets and hides of the bedding to such a degree that a full night’s sleep was often impossible."

They left to head back east 8 days before they had planned to. Whatever the pioneer equivalent of "fuck this shit" was, I'm sure it was said when they finally decided to bail.

Anyway, John Fleck told me about this nifty NOAA site that shows river conditions in the Pacific NW. Next to my town, the Columbia River has risen about 5 feet in 3 days and is forecast to rise another 3 ft before peaking.

Oliver doesn't seem to mind cold or wet or snow or rain -- he goes out no matter what the weather. Lately he has found a way onto the crest of the roof, where he sits and meows loudly at the neighborhood.

But Sophie is particular and has spent the last three days in one spot, except to get up to eat or go the box. I've had to work at the kitchen table.

NASA PR Sorta Spins 2011 Temperature, Says It's 9th-Warmest

2012-01-19T11:59:00.001-08:00

NASA public relations says 2011 was the 9th-warmest year in their records, but that's not really true.

The scientists at NASA GISS have summarized 2011 here, and it's much more nuanced presentation than from NASA HQ. It reports they finds an average global temperature of

2011: +0.51 ± 0.05 °C

compared to the 1951-1980 baseline. (The uncertainty is 2 standard deviations.) That's statistically cooler than last year:

2010: +0.63 ± 0.05 °C

which is the warmest year in their records.

But

the numbers depend on a lot of factors, which the GISS technical page rightly discusses, even if HQ doesn't (and most journalists probably won't either).

The resolution of the underlying virtual network -- that is, as I understand it, GISS (and the Hadley center) take into account the fact that temperature stations aren't evenly distributed around the globe (or evenly distributed in time). There are regions with a higher density of stations than others. You don't want to just average all the stations across the world, because that would over-represent regions with many stations (like, say, the northeastern US) and under-represent regions with few stations (like, say, the Arctic, or undeveloped countries, or places were few people live, like the Sahara Desert). So they construct a virtual, even-spaced grid, and then average all the stations within a grid, and then average all the grids. That way all regions get an equal weighting. So the final number is going to depend on the chosen grid size; as they write, the 2011 average global surface temperature anomaly was +0.51 °C for a resolution of 1200 km, but +0.44 °C for a 250 km resolution (both are ± 0.05 °C). Which is better? It's a judgement call -- do you ignore regions where there's no data, or try to estimate them by interpolating across them? GISS believes the first is preferable, and give their reasoning in a footnote.
Each year has a statistical uncertainty, which GISS calculates to be 2σ = 0.05 °C. But being good scientists they say comparing years depends on how close the years are, and go on to say
"The size of this uncertainty and the small temperature differences among different years (Fig. 2) is one reason that alternative analyses yield different rankings for the warmest years. However, the magnitude of global temperature change of the past century is in good agreement among the GISS, NCDC (NOAA National Climatic Data Center), and HadCRUT (UK Met Office Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit) temperature analyses."
Statistically speaking, you can't say one year is warmer than another if their difference is not statistically significant. It's like asking if Romney is ahead of Obama if a poll shows their support levels at 51% - 49%. It depends. If the uncertainty of the numbers if ± 3%, you can't make a statistically significant about them (i.e. one that holds to a certainty of p% -- usually in climate science 95), but you can make statements about the probability that Romney is ahead of Obama (you'd have to calculate the overlap of the Bell curves that surround each number, and it depends on the objectivity of the questions, the randomness of the poll participants, yadda yadda. So 2011 was "statistical significantly" cooler than 2010 by the statistical standards of climate science. That doesn't mean that you can rank it as "warmer" or "cooler" than an earlier year if the difference in their anomalies is less than 0.10 °C.

The 12-month running mean (Fig. 3a) provides a useful alternative measure of temperature change on the annual time scale, and 60-month (5-year) and 132-month (11-year) running means (Fig. 3b) reduce the variability caused by the Southern Oscillation (El Niño-La Niña cycle) and the solar cycle. The current status of these running means (Fig. 3) adds some weak evidence for the frequent assertion that the rate of global warming has been less in the 21st century than in the last two decades of the 20th century. However, that impression is dependent on the end point, which is heavily influenced by the strong La Niñas in the past three years. If an El Niño occurs in the next few years, which is likely as we discuss below, the mean warming rate will probably exhibit no slowdown on the decadal time scale.

They then go on to summarize by saying, basically, Yes, warming has been slowing down lately, due to a strong La Nina (the one in 2010-2011, not the current one) and a solar minimum, but

We conclude that the slowdown of warming is likely to prove illusory, with more rapid warming appearing over the next few years.

Anyway

the NASA HQ press release is simplistic
NASA GISS did a great job of presenting all the nuances
there's certainly no reason to think global warming is "over"
you can be sure contrarian bloggers will try to say that it is, and
later, when/if it does get warmer, these same bloggers will revert back to claims that the data is junk because someone, somewhere near a temperature station, once grilled a piece of chicken.

More Hulme

2012-01-19T11:01:00.000-08:00

"There is an increasing appreciation, both among scientists and among the public, of the contingent factors of personal belief, cultural context and institutional arrangements, which influence the way scientific knowledge is established. Somewhere in between science as the sublime discovery of absolute truth -- a purely positivist reading of science -- and science as a hopelessly subjective activity -- a purely constructivist mentality -- is a more nuanced understanding of what science can do and what it can't do and a deeper understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge. Essential to this new understanding is an appreciation of scientific uncertainty. Far from being able to eliminate uncertainty, science -- especially climate science -- is more useful to society with it finds good ways of recognizing, managing and communicating uncertainty."

-- Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change (2009), Ch. 3

First ZOD is Up

2012-01-19T10:34:00.000-08:00

I've put one IPCC AR5 Zero Order Draft (ZOD) here: Chapter 4 - Observations: Cryosphere.

Still looking looking for the others....

Where to find the ZODs?

2012-01-18T18:10:00.000-08:00

Does anyone know where to find copies of the IPCC AR5 Zero Order Drafts? I've only found one, WG1 CH4, which I will put up soon on a separate site. If you don't wish to leave a comment, you can write me confidentially. (UPDATE 1/19: First ZOD is here.)

Judith Curry also believes the ZODs should be made public:

Steve McIntyre has a must read post Stocker’s Earmarks. It addresses efforts by IPCC WG1 to circumvent the transparency objectives recommended by the IAC by inhibiting distribution of draft reports. The justification is “These could prematurely circulate in the public domain, creating confusion, and that would be a bad service of IPCC to society.” It seems that the only people interested in looking at the ZOD and FOD drafts are people that are interested in auditing the process of the IPCC assessment. I don’t encourage any participating in the IPCC as an author or reviewer to break their agreement with the IPCC. However, all of these drafts should be made public and if they are made available by whoever and however, I see no problem with discussing them publicly.

More on the IPCC Takedown Notices

2012-01-18T16:44:00.000-08:00

After writing about the IPCC notices to remove the Zero Order Drafts and discussion about them, I came across this relevant thought:

"Because the stakes about climate change are high, science must recognise that the process whereby knowledge is created must be open to public scrutiny and engagement. And since policy decisions about climate change are being made now, and being made continuously, the ways in which knowledge is condensed, packaged and brought into social discourse also need to be re-thought."

-- Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change (2009), Ch. 3

Bingo.

What harm does the IPCC see if the public does read the ZODs and, say, later notices that the final version of the Fifth Assessment Report is different? That it lacks some kind of consensus? That someone will have to explain why the change was made? What would be wrong with that, anyway? Isn't it an opportunity to explain the process and the evidence and the thinking? Is that a terrible thing? The IPCC seems to think so. I don't.

Their apparent notion that the 5AR is just going to be handed down as if from on-high, written in stone, and all the world's technocrats can work off that is troubling. Imperious. Arrogant. Yes, there are people who would use any such changes for less than admirable (IMO) purposes. But they will do it anyway with some other aspects of the report or process, and already have in the past. That's the way things things are. That's life. Invoking secrecy to try to combat that, which the notices seems to be, just compounds the problem.

UPDATE: It seems Steve McIntyre hasn't yet come to any decision about his IPCC notice.

2011's Arctic Sea Ice Volume, Down Big Again

2012-01-18T08:57:00.000-08:00

Sea ice volume is a better indicator of the planet's energy imbalance than area or extent. PIOMAS recently released their estimates for Arctic sea ice volume through December, so it's possible to compare last calendar year to those going back to 1979.

The 2011 daily average volume dropped to 12.92 Mkm², down 5.7% from last year. It's dropped 49% since 1979 (the first full-year of data), and has dropped 35% in just the last 10 years.

You can slice it up lots of ways -- I've chosen to look at each year in relation to the volume 10 years earlier:

You could fit several different curves to that, but the trend is obvious.

By the way, PIOMAS recently published a paper in JGR about their model calibration and uncertainties. The preprint is here.

About Obsessively Checking Smartphones

2012-01-17T10:03:00.000-08:00

I'm not the only one complaining about smartphones in restaurants (and other places):

Don't Remove the ZODs

2012-01-16T23:49:00.000-08:00

It seems some blogs have received formal notices from the IPCC to remove documents and discussions of leaked 5AR drafts. I hope these bloggers choose not to do so.

On December 12, 2011 documents titled "Zero Order Draft" (ZOD), purportedly from the IPCC 1st Working Group (they're the ones who summarize the science) appeared on the Web. On Jan 4th a site named Galloping Camel received a request from the IPCC to remove them (link here):

The Secretariat of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has learnt that a number of chapters of its interim draft reports, the so-called Zero Order Draft (ZOD) of the IPCC Working Group I and Working Group II reports, have been posted on your website. These interim reports were sent for review to invited experts for their comments. The ZOD is a preliminary, draft report, not meant to be cited, quoted or distributed as specifically indicated on the document itself. This draft was provided to a number of expert reviewers under the condition that they did not disseminate it.

It is likely that these preliminary drafts will undergo many changes during the IPCC's revision process. It could, therefore, be misleading to draw conclusions from these versions -- which is why they are not widely circulated.

The IPCC Procedures in Article 4.2 of the Principles Governing IPCC Work state that "The IPCC considers its draft reports, prior to acceptance, to be pre-decisional, provided in confidence to reviewers, and not for public distribution, quotation or citation." (http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/ipcc-principles/ipcc-principles-appendix-a-final.pdf). We therefore request the immediate removal of the ZOD chapters from your website.

In accordance with the IPCC Procedures, subsequent drafts, the so-called First Order and Second Order Drafts, will be made available for review by experts and by governments and experts, respectively. After finalization of the report, these drafts together with review comments and responses by authors will be made available on the IPCC website.

Please note that the First Order Drafts (FOD) of the Working Group contributions to AR5 will be made available for open, expert review according to the schedule posted on the IPCC web sites, and the Working Groups welcome comments that are submitted through the appropriate channels. For Working Group I, the review period has already begun and is open until 10 February 2012. Information for experts interested in registering to review the WGI AR5 FOD can be found on the web site www.ipcc.unibe.ch. Registration to serve as an expert reviewer of the WGII AR5 FOD will open in June 2012. One of the conditions of the review, to which reviewers must agree in order to access the chapters of the WGI AR5 FOD, is that the drafts may not be cited, quoted or distributed.

Yours sincerely,
--
IPCC Secretariat
WMO
7bis, Avenue de la Paix
P.O. Box 2300
1211 Geneva 2
SWITZERLAND
Tel: +41 22 730 8208/8254/8284
Fax: +41 22 730 8025/8013
Email: IPCC-Sec@wmo.int
Website: http://www.ipcc.ch

The owner of Gallopingcamel, Peter Morcombe, seemed a little too happy to be in such a position of leverage, but removed the documents and sent back this reply:

Subject: Zero Order Draft (ZOD) of IPCC Reports
To: IPCC-Sec IPCC-Sec (Add as Preferred Sender)
Date: Sunday, Jan 08, 2012
From: Peter Morcombe

Gentlemen,

Your request that certain files be removed from my website was done in a non threatening way so it may be possible to reach a mutually beneficial arrangement. Please be assured that my intentions are entirely constructive.

As a gesture of good faith, access to the files posted on the Gallopingcamel website will be restricted by the time you receive this email. The files will only be available to the team that is reviewing the documents.

I am the owner of the web site in question and therefore can make binding agreements relating to it. If the IPCC is prepared to enter into discussions I will need to know what authority their representative has.

You may be wondering how the ZODs came into my possession. All I can tell you is that there are insiders who believe that the deliberations of government working groups should be open to the public unless matters of national security are involved. It follows that you can no longer count on maintaining secrecy, especially given the huge financial implications of your work.

It is clear that the IPCC's review procedures have some shortcomings given the large number of serious errors that were found in AR4. Many of these embarrassments would have been avoided if early drafts had been open to the public.

If you agree to allow my team to receive updates of the Working Group drafts we will undertake to send you our comments without making them public. None of us will be applying for registration as “Expert” reviewers as that might compromise our independence.
Sincerely,
Peter Morcombe

I think he should have just ignored the request. He has not obligations to the IPCC, whose request strikes me as breathtakingly imperious.

A few days later Steve McIntyre received a similar notice. As is usually the case with him, following the story is like reading a 1903 Hungarian engineering document for the plot (Michael Tobias said something like whatever Steve writes, you can be sure there is less to it than there seems), but it seems he's still mulling it over. I hope he, too, declines to remove any ZOD discussions.

The thought that everyone is just supposed to wait until the IPCC Kingdom hands down its findings, on a problem of this magnitude, complexity, and consequence, is very rich. (Tone deaf, too.) They have no authority to impose such requests, and if they don't like leaks they should plug them. (They've given no indication that the ZODs were obtained via illegal means.) They -- and the UN in general (and for that matter, all governments around the world, including mine) are already too much of a closed book. This issue affects everyone, and the more information we have about it the better off we are. Yes, I know that's inconvenient for the IPCC. But the IPCC's lack of transparency has its problems too. Just not for them.

I think what I find most galling was asking McIntyre to remove discussions of the ZODs. As if the climate problem is people talking about it too much. As I said, extremely imperious.

The Latest Cyberterrorism

2012-01-16T18:52:00.000-08:00

Late (I've was very under the weather), but worth linking to still -- Morano's Minions have been busy threatening yet another climate scientist, Kerry Emanuel of MIT, after he appeared in this video about conservatives in New Hampshire who believe in climate change. This time they dragged his family into it. The section with Emanuel starts at about the 4:00 mark, and apparently what he said wrong was "it makes me feel, to some extent, disgusted with politics and, to some extent, ashamed to be an American."

But that wasn't enough, Morano saw fit to write that "His wife, the Boston-born Susan Boyd-Bowman, actually surrendered her U.S. citizenship to become a UK citizen...Though she lists her primary residence as Lexington, MA, she only has a U.S. resident visa."

That came from Steve Milloy at Junkscience.com, which elicited this priceless pair of comments from someone named Frank Dias:

Hey, who cares, as long as Frank got to rant, right? (At least one of Milloy's commenters spoke up for decency.) The Third Horseman of Science Hatred, Lubos Motl, made sure to get in while the getting was good. Then Morano came back for more.

By the time they were done, there was plenty of evidence making it clear why Emanuel might feel (to some extent) the way he did. Or why others witnessing this sorry episode might now feel the same way. Way to go, guys.

It's clear now that this is an accepted strategy by these people to terrorize -- yes, it's a form of terrorism -- scientists who speak up on climate science. It's deliberate, it's purposeful, and it's cyberterrorism.

I wonder if Anthony Watts has denied these threats?

Steven Weinberg on The Beginning

2012-01-15T22:06:00.000-08:00

“We don’t know if the universe is infinitely old or if there was a first moment; but neither view is absurd, and the choice between them will not be made by intuition, or by philosophy or theology, but by the ordinary methods of science.”

-- Steven Weinberg

Too Good

2012-01-15T18:04:00.000-08:00

Via Flickr.

An Apology to President Obama

2012-01-07T22:20:00.000-08:00

A woman in Los Angeles who had felt that President Obama had let down the middle class -- she changed her party registration from Democrat to Independent and had blacked out the top of the "h" on her Obama bumper sticker, so that it read, "Got nope" instead of "got hope" -- wrote an open letter of apology to President Obama because she was able to obtain health insurance under the federal government's Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan (part of President Obama's healthcare plan) after she got cancer.

So this is my public apology. I'm sorry I didn't do enough of my own research to find out what promises the president has made good on. I'm sorry I didn't realize that he really has stood up for me and my family, and for so many others like us. I'm getting a new bumper sticker to cover the one that says "Got nope." It will say "ObamaCares."

Funny how that stuff works, isn't it?

And allow me to take this opportunity to say that Rick Santorum is a disgusting piece of puke who isn't even worthy of his Google link. Not just for his pure hatred of GLBTs and absurd arguments in defense of his bigotry. Here is what he said to a woman in Keene, New Hampshire yesterday:

Earlier, at a town hall meeting in the basement of the public library in Keene, Santorum was gently confronted about health insurance by an emergency room nurse who had just worked an overnight shift and apologized for being tired.

She said her son, who recently graduated from college, had been diagnosed with cancer at age 5. Why, she wanted to know, should her son pay more for health insurance as an adult when he had done nothing wrong and had not caused his own health woes.

“You believe that someone with a healthcare issue should pay the same amount as a healthy person?” he asked.

The nurse replied that she did.

“That’s not how it works,” said Santorum, comparing health insurance to auto insurance. “People with higher risk should pay more. Why should we charge more to people who have done everything right?”

That's right, Santorum thinks a 5-year old child did something 'wrong' and that's why he got cancer. And it's fine if the guy now is priced out of buying health insurance, or can't buy it at any price because of his health history. Santorum thinks people should be treated like cars.

Rick Perry Science Fail

2012-01-07T21:48:00.000-08:00

Rick Perry at tonight's New Hampshire debate:

"We're going to see Iran, in my opinion, move back in at literally
the speed of light."

(Plus, you can't see something coming at you at the speed of light because light is how you see.)

The 2nd Battle of the Carbon Tax War

2012-01-07T21:20:00.000-08:00

Things are getting hot with the European airline carbon tax. China says it won't pay it, and U.S. is complaining too, and Europe is sticking to its guns.

Here is the basic idea, via the BBC:

Under the scheme...a pot of carbon credits will be created, set at 97% of the aviation industry's 2004-6 emissions.

These will be divided up between carriers according to how much pollution their flights caused in 2010.

Airlines will get 85% of their permits free, with the remaining 15% being auctioned.

Because so many are given away, the EU says the whole scheme will add just over £2 to a London-to-New York flight.

If airlines want more, they have to buy them, but equally if they have too many, they can sell them to other carriers.

"For example, British Airways, if they emit less than the cap, they have extra allowances which they can sell to make a profit," said Mr Valero.

They go on:

The aviation industry does not think this outcome will be very common. The latest figures from IATA show air passenger traffic grew by 8.2% in 2010.

"Our estimates are that it would add close to one billion euros ($1.4bn, £862m) in the first year on to the industry's costs and this is an the industry running on a margin of 0.7%," said Mr Goater from IATA.

So how much carbon dioxide does the airline industry emit (in the name of its passengers)? About 2-3% of worldwide emissions (half of that comes from US airlines). Wikipedia says there has been an 87% increase in airline emissions from 1990 to 2006.

But it's complicated by (1) other emissions, and (2) the altitude at which planes fly, and the total forcing from aviation may be as much as 5% of net anthropogenic forcing. A source in Wikipedia says

...per passenger a typical economy-class New York to Los Angeles round trip produces about 715 kg (1574 lb) of CO2, but is equivalent to 1,917 kg (4,230 lb) of CO2 when the high altitude “climatic forcing” effect is taken into account.

That's a lot--"more than nine times the annual emissions of an average denizen of Haiti." The average American now emits about 19,000 kg CO2 per year, so one round trip flight across the country is about 10% of that.

Delta Air Lines has already started a $3 surcharge to flights between the US and Europe (which is cheap for 2 metric tons of CO2). Singapore Airlines says they're going to try to reduce their emissions via better fuel efficiency (but might impose a surcharge later). Hey, that's just what a Pigovian tax is supposed to do!

So what's going to happen? I sure don't know, but my guess is that China and the US will continue to piss and moan about it, Europe will stick to their guns, and then the airlines will start quietly paying the fees and in time everyone will find something else to be outraged about. That worked with the Australian carbon tax, didn't it?

Brad Johnson Does It Again

2012-01-07T20:31:00.000-08:00

Brad Johnson of Think Progress Green has done it again:

July 25, 2011: "As the Arctic ice collapses, global weather patterns are changing in unpredictable ways. The jet stream is being pushed 'further south and bringing arctic cold to much of Eurasia and Japan' and 'increased precipitation and colder temperatures in the winter' in North America...."

January 6, 2012: "Fueled by billions of tons of greenhouse pollution, a surge of record warmth has flooded the United States, shattering records from southern California to North Dakota."

Reminder: The think tank who runs Think Progress refuses to reveal its funders. You can be sure Consistency Inc. isn't one of them.

Steve Goddard Bullshit Alert

2012-01-04T14:49:00.000-08:00

Steve Goddard tells us there has been no warming in the Arctic in the last 7 years according to RSS data. And why might he have chosen the number "7"?

As if anyone has to ask anymore:

Entertaining Roy Spencer's Fit to His Temperature Data

2012-01-03T16:36:00.000-08:00

The UAH temperature anomaly for the lower troposphere is +0.127°C, the 12th-warmest December in the 33 years of their records. The year 2011 is the 9th-warmest year, and the coldest year since 2004.

The last 10 years (120 months) are 0.21°C warmer than the preceding 10 years (120 months).

As he does every month, Roy Spencer includes a 3rd-order polynomial fit for the data, "for entertainment purposes only":

Why 3rd-order? Perhaps because here's what the 6th-order fit looks like:

Notice that little hike upward there at the end.... And actually a 6th-order fit has a better correlation coefficient than does the 3rd-order fit:

R²(3rd-order fit) = 0.3901

R²(6th-order fit) = 0.3951

What does Spencer's fit "predict" for the future?

Jan 2050: -5.8°C

Jan 2100: -50.2°C

Those are some entertaining "predictions" -- the "planet" at the end of this century "will have" an average temperature of "-33°F." Naturally the commenters at WUWT are excited about Spencer's fit because they think it's starting to show a downward trend.

By the way, the 10-year slope of the UAH global LT data is 0.032 ± 0.049 °C/decade. Notice it's not negative.

Aren't statistics fun? They can say so many different things, all at the same time....

Two More Iraq War Deaths

2012-01-02T16:06:00.000-08:00

Shouldn't this count as Iraq War carnage? An Iraq veteran with probable PTSD fired shots at a house party in Seattle on New Year's day, then shot a ranger at Mount Rainier National Park, and then apparently took his own life by dying of exposure in a snowfield.

Wars don't end just because the troops pull out.

Presenting One of the Iowa Idiots Who Will Determine Our Next President

2012-01-01T18:59:00.000-08:00

I like to keep my rhetoric to a polite level here, so I'll only say that here is the kind of unthinking, blinkered, know-nothing idiot whose vote in Iowa will have an grossly disproportionate influence on who our next President is: Douglas Sarver of Oskaloose, Iowa. He's a serious conservative who's in favor of shrinking government because, he says, "I think government gets in the way too much, they get their hands in too many things and that's not what they were designed by our forefathers to do," while working at a wind farm owned by TIP Composites Inc that has received tax credits championed by the Obama administration.

TPI Composites is an Arizona-based company, and was so proud of being mentioned in President Obama's announcement of $2.3 billion in tax credits to American manufacturers of clean energy that they put a video of it on their Web site. In fact, Iowa companies have received $160 million in subsidies from the Department of Energy, and in August six Republican candidates for president made a show of signing their names to a wind turbine produced by TPI. Seems Iowa voters like wind power -- a poll last year found that 85 percent had a favorable image of wind energy companies, higher than companies in solar (76 percent), natural gas (68 percent), nuclear power (51 percent), coal (48 percent) and oil (30 percent) -- and Iowa gets 20% of its electricity from wind.

A GOP rep in Iowa said the tax credit generated 700 jobs at TPI. I wonder if Douglas Sarver's job is one of them.... I almost hope Sarver casts the winning vote for a small-government conservative who goes on to be elected President and passes a budget that reduces our big, nasty, bloated government and in so-doing eliminates this tax credit so that Sarver loses his job and he can sit downwind of a coal power plant and whine and bitch about the gummint without a single fucking clue what went on or how his own stupidity drew the across his own throat. Almost.

Really, let's stop playing around and just hand the keys to the Douglas Sarvers of our nation, so we can get our demise over with and reboot this place, OK?

Some Blame Hydraulic Fracturing for Earthquake Epidemic - NYTimes.com

2011-12-31T16:42:00.001-08:00

Earlier this month the NY TImes had an interesting article about earthquakes in the Youngstown, Ohio region:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/science/some-blame-hydraulic-fracturing-for-earthquake-epidemic.html

Before today there had been 9 minor quakes this year.... Today's 4.3 quake is fairly large as these things go, and is surely going to add fuel to the debate.

Ohio Earthquake Raised to M 4.3

2011-12-31T15:07:00.001-08:00

4.3 Ml - OHIO

Preliminary Earthquake Report

Magnitude 4.3 Ml

Date-Time

31 Dec 2011 20:05:01 UTC

31 Dec 2011 15:05:01 near epicenter

31 Dec 2011 12:05:01 standard time in your timezone

Location 41.121N 80.684W

Depth 5 km

Distances

4 km (2 miles) NW (314 degrees) of Youngstown, OH

4 km (3 miles) SSE (167 degrees) of Girard, OH

6 km (4 miles) NE (54 degrees) of Austintown, OH

70 km (44 miles) E (85 degrees) of Akron, OH

96 km (60 miles) NW (322 degrees) of Pittsburgh, PA

Location Uncertainty Horizontal: 0.5 km; Vertical 31.6 km

Parameters Nph = 18; Dmin = 61.0 km; Rmss = 0.23 seconds; Gp = 136°
M-type = Ml; Version = 1

Event ID LD 60029101 ***This event supersedes event USc0007f7s.

For updates, maps, and technical information, see:
Event Page
or
USGS Earthquake Hazards Program

Lamont-Doherty Cooperative Seismographic Network
Columbia University
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/LCSN/

Disclaimer

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Preliminary Earthquake Report
Magnitude	4.3 Ml
Date-Time	31 Dec 2011 20:05:01 UTC 31 Dec 2011 15:05:01 near epicenter 31 Dec 2011 12:05:01 standard time in your timezone
Location	41.121N 80.684W
Depth	5 km
Distances	4 km (2 miles) NW (314 degrees) of Youngstown, OH 4 km (3 miles) SSE (167 degrees) of Girard, OH 6 km (4 miles) NE (54 degrees) of Austintown, OH 70 km (44 miles) E (85 degrees) of Akron, OH 96 km (60 miles) NW (322 degrees) of Pittsburgh, PA
Location Uncertainty	Horizontal: 0.5 km; Vertical 31.6 km
Parameters	Nph = 18; Dmin = 61.0 km; Rmss = 0.23 seconds; Gp = 136° M-type = Ml; Version = 1
Event ID	LD 60029101 ***This event supersedes event USc0007f7s.

Ohio Earthquakes Not Especially Rare

2011-12-31T13:11:00.000-08:00

So how rare is a 4.0+ earthquake in Ohio? Roughly one a decade -- here's an interesting page from the USGS, with this chart.

Probably nothing to get excited about.

Here's a entire report on the subject, if you want to read more.

Earthquakes are a legitimate concern in Ohio and parts of adjacent States. Ohio has experienced more than 160 felt earthquakes since 1776. Most of these events caused no damage or injuries. However, 15 Ohio earthquakes resulted in property damage and some minor injuries. The largest historic earthquake in the state occurred in 1937. This event had an estimated magnitude of 5.4 and caused considerable damage in the town of Anna and in several other western Ohio communities.

4.0 Earthquake in Ohio (YOUNGSTOWN-WARREN URBAN AREA)

2011-12-31T12:54:00.001-08:00

This ought to give the anti-frackers something to talk about: Ohio just had a 4.0 earthquake:

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/usc0007f7s.php

UPDATE: Here's a notice in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. The EQ occurred at 3:04 pm Eastern Time.

America's Science Decline - Neil deGrasse Tyson

2011-12-30T13:15:00.000-08:00

An interesting little presentation:

I believe these statistics come from the report released this past March by The Royal Society (UK), especially page 43:

While this looks bad for the US, it's mostly a matter of other countries (especially China) catching up:

It's not a bad thing (for the US) just because China will soon publish the same number of papers as the US -- a rising tide lifts all boats -- or that other countries are 'catching up.'

Burton Richter Makes Sense

2011-12-29T16:18:00.000-08:00

Physicist Burton Richter (a Nobel Laureate) makes some sense:

Q: If you got one wish on international policy on climate change, what would it be?

Richter: That we would abandon the stupid notion of legally binding agreements on emissions. What are the fines for not meeting your agreements? Who levies the fine? Where does the money go? There are no sanctions, so what does "legally binding" mean?

Also, 15 countries are responsible for more than 80 percent of the world's emissions. Why are we trying to get a deal with 196 countries, most of which are spending all their time trying to figure out how to get the richer countries to pay them money? What we really need is to get these 15 countries, which includes some developed countries and some rapidly developing countries, to agree on a deal.

and

Richter: ...It's obvious to anyone that on national economic grounds we should shut down these coal plants as fast as we can replace them. However, you have a bunch of senators from coal-producing states and from states that are heavily dependent on coal, like those in the Southeast, that get most of their electricity from coal-fired power plants. So, you've got to get the politics of this right. I won't say it's easy, but you are just going to have to run right over West Virginia.

Yes, Kant Actually Wrote This

2011-12-29T09:55:00.000-08:00

This is from one of the fathers of the Enlightenment:

"The inhabitant of the temperate parts of the world, above all the central part, has a more beautiful body, works harder, is more jocular, more controlled in his passions, more intelligent than any other race of people in the world. That is why at all points in time these peoples have educated the others and controlled them with weapons."

-- Immanuel Kant, On the different races of Man, 1775

(via Hulme)

Just Stuff

2011-12-28T17:38:00.000-08:00

The Scientist named the Wegman plagarism incident one of the top 5 scientific scandals in 2010:

A controversial climate change paper was retracted when it was found to contain passages lifted from other sources, including Wikipedia. The paper, published by climate change skeptic Edward Wegman of George Mason University in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis in 2008, showed that climatology is an inbred field where most researchers collaborate with and review each other’s work. But a resourceful blogger uncovered evidence of plagiarism, and the journal retracted the paper, which was cited 8 times, in May.

(Via Deltoid)

---

Federal spending last year (FY 2010) actually dropped by $62 B, compared to the year earlier. (That's 1.2% of GDP.) The deficit dropped too, from $1.41 T to $1.29 T. It's still much higher than previous years, however, but some people would call that a recovery if it occurred in, say, Arctic sea ice.

---

Rick Santorum actually said this the other day:

"Let's look at colleges and universities," Santorum said in the ballroom of the restored Frank Lloyd Wright Park Inn Hotel on Mason City's town square. "They've become indoctrination centers for the left. Should we be subsidizing that?"

Santorum tossed out Harvard University's motto, "Veritas," Latin for truth. "They haven't seen truth at Harvard in 100 years."

Can you imagine a world where universities receive funding, or not, based on whether what they teach is the position of the Administration? Frightening -- at least as frightening as Gingrich's proposed Presidential Commission on Religious Freedom, which he says he would establish by Executive Order the first day he's in office.

---

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post has some laughs at his own expense. All pundits should write such a column.

---

Wait until Michelle Bachmann hears about this: the ban on incandescant light bulbs may kill the Easy-Bake Oven.

I Left GoDaddy Over Their SOPA Support

2011-12-28T14:36:00.000-08:00

I only had one domain with them, but I transferred it from GoDaddy due to their original support of SOPA, which is a very dangerous piece of legislation. (Their reversal is too little, too late, and too obvious.) They refunded me for the unused portion of my hosting plan, too.

Also, their CEO, Bob Parsons, is kind of a jerk.

Tomorrow is Dump GoDaddy Day. If you use them, think about it. There is, though, a legitimate question of what good it will do:

BetaNews reader Mark Haus shares similar sentiment: "Moving from GoDaddy won't change whether the legislation passes. It seems to me our energy could be better used fighting sopa itself. Registrar changes can be made anytime. Focus, people". Jeremy Brownstein disagrees: "The all mighty dollar on ether side of the road has more of an impact than any vote or the current democratic system".

The thing is, who really believes Congresspeople are going to listen to some Internet people, compared to the lobbyists who fund their campaigns. It's a big problem. But you can't cancel your account with Congress and deny them your monthly dollars; but you can with your domain's host. (Not so easy with your Internet provider -- if you have a choice at all -- which is probably why few are calling for a boycott of Comcast even though they are a SOPA supporter. Makes you wonder if they would be had they not bought a majority stake in NBC Universal this past January. There's the danger of the corporate consolidation issue that gets written whenever one happens, and that people ignore as boring or brush off as only theoretical.)

Back Before Havel Died

2011-12-27T16:36:00.000-08:00

Sure, Václav Havel denied manmade climate change, but on the other hand he earlier appointed Frank Zappa to be his government’s Cultural Adviser as well as “Special Ambassador to the West on Trade, Culture, and Tourism, which isn't quite a wash but closer to a rectification than your average contrarian ever gets. This was back when some obnoxious Washington wives like Tipper Gore and Susan Baker (wife of James Baker) made it their business to protect the yutes of America from all the naughty lyrics then being sung by the bands of the time.

In the process the "Washington Wives" formed the PMRC and got their hubbies to get Congress to hold a hearing, where Susan Baker said

"There certainly are many causes for these ills in our society, but it is our contention that the pervasive messages aimed at children which promote and glorify suicide, rape, sadomasochism, and so on, have to be numbered among the contributing factors."

Tipper Gore looked and sounded equally dismayed, and another witness said that heavy metal was different from earlier jazz and rock-n-roll because it was "mean-spirited," which probably doubled the record sales of several bands.

Testifying for the opposition were John Denver with straight hair, Dee Snider of the band Twisted Sister with a huge pile of long blond curls, and Frank Zappa. (Some kind soul has put Zappa's testimony on Youtube, in four parts: 1, 2, 3, 4 -- they're all worth watching.) Zappa called the PMRC "a group of bored Washington housewives" and said

"The major record labels need to have H.R. 2911 whiz through a few committees before anybody smells a rat. One of them is chaired by Senator Thurmond. Is it a coincidence that Mrs. Thurmond is affiliated with the PMRC?"

which was a great question and so naturally it went unanswered. Zappa also said

"...the PMRC proposal is an ill-conceived piece of nonsense which fails to deliver any real benefits to children, infringes the civil liberties of people who are not children, and promises to keep the courts busy for years dealing with the interpretation and enforcement problems inherent in the proposal's design."

But what really ticked some people off was when Zappa mimicked Susan Baker's southern accent. Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash. snapped at Zappa, calling him "boorish, incredibly and insensibly insulting," like that was supposed to hurt Zappa's feelings. Frank Zappa. Right.

Anyway when US Secretary of State James Baker learned of Havel's Zappa appointment he declared,

“You can do business with the United States of America or you can do business with Frank Zappa!”

which was all I really wanted to post about in the first place.

Oh yeah: Havel caved on the Zappa appointment, so perhaps he wasn't the big rebel skeptics made him out to be after his death . Zappa went on to sell memorabilia through a company named Barfko-Swill. (Ha.) And Tipper and her girlfriends managed to completely and forever clean up all the dirty and naughty lyrics in rock-n-roll, and American children have all lived happily forever after.

Merry Christmas

2011-12-24T22:22:00.000-08:00

Sometimes They Surprise You

2011-12-24T18:39:00.001-08:00

“Environmental pollution, believe it or not, is interstate commerce, too.”

-- Rick Santorum, while campaigning in Iowa

(My only wish is that someone -- a reporter, or one of the few Americans [those in Iowa or New Hampshire] who get to elect the party presidential candidates -- would simply ask him, "Mr. Santorum, what does 'All men are created equal' mean to you?")

Things Learned from Vonnegut's Timequake

2011-12-24T17:12:00.000-08:00

Kurt Vonnegut's book Timequake is characteristically good -- part story telling, part commentary -- and I learned a few interesting things too, including:

1) Our word "plumbing" comes from the Latin word plumbum, meaning lead. As in, what the Romans made their pipes from. (Whether these pipes killed them is another matter.) That's why the chemical symbol for lead is "Pb."

2) Kurt Vonnegut's maternal great-uncle was Carl Barus, a founder and president (in 1905) of the American Physical Society. Barus investigated the effect of ionizing radiation on condensation on a cloud chamber, by fogging up the inside of a wooden box, and concluded it was unimportant. About the same time the Scottish physicist Charles Thomson Rees Wilson did similar work, only his cloud chamber was made of glass. Wilson showed that X-rays and radioactivity did create condensation, and, Vonnegut writes

"He criticized Uncle Carl for ignoring contamination from the wood walls of his chamber, for his crude method of making clouds, and for not shielding his fog from the electrical field of his Xray apparatus.

Wilson went on to make paths of electrically charged particles visible to the naked eye by
means of his cloud chamber. In 1927, he shared a Nobel Prize for Physics for doing this.

Uncle Carl must have felt like something the cat drug in!

I guess there could be worse things for a scientist. KV writes in the book:

Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

Warm, Cold, Doesn't Matter -- Brad Johnson is on the Case

2011-12-24T16:23:00.000-08:00

Warm, cold...it doesn't matter to Brad Johnson of Thinkprogress Green -- he has a hammer, and he's determined to find some nails. 12 months ago he wrote:

Meanwhile, the building heat trapped by billions of tons of fossil fuel pollution is fueling catastrophic changes in the world’s climate system predicted years ago by scientists:
...Dynamic winter-storm systems driven by the rapidly warming Arctic have plunged much of Europe into killer cold weather for the second year in a row, months after a summer of record heat and precipitation. Up to 30 people have frozen to death in Poland, and thirty more killed in the rest of Europe. (emphasis mine)

Yesterday he wrote this:

This winter has been unusually warm, crippling ski resorts, ruining holiday traditions, and dashing hopes of a white Christmas across the northern hemisphere. While the billions of tons of greenhouse pollution in our atmosphere sometimes encourage freak snowstorms, the primary effect of global warming on winter is, well, warmer temperatures — making white Christmases less likely.

In this post from December 2010, he flat-out states that nearly ever instance of serious weather on the planet is, all at the same time, due to fossil fuel emissions: wildfires, droughts, extreme cold, floods, thunderstorms, tornadoes, and heavy rain.

Brad Johnson may be the worst climate blogger out there. People like him are actually doing damage to resolving the issue of fossil fuel emissions, and to environmentalism in general -- providing fodder to the contrarians, aiding those who want to find laughingstocks, and generally satisfying all the stereotypes some have of a know-nothing left.

And a reminder: Thin Progress refuses to say who its funders are. (Despite what you might guess, I doubt the Barnum & Bailey Clown College is one of them.) Despite this, they have the temerity to complain about other's lack of disclosure (scroll down to the Update on this post).

Santa's Climate Problems

2011-12-24T08:07:00.000-08:00

“I’m sorry, Mr. Claus,” said the U.N. Assistant Deputy Undersecretary for Planetary Climate Affairs. “But your credentials for future climate changes conferences has been permanently revoked.”

“Now see here, young man,” said Santa in his best stern voice. But he was cut off abruptly.

“Sir, you may appeal to the Deputy Associate Arctic Office for Indigenous Member Appeals.” Santa grimaced, and not just from the familiar pain in his back. “Good day to you, Sir.” The call ended.

Good day, Santa grumbled as Skype asked him to rate the call. Idiot--we've got 24 hours of darkness up here. Santa turned to the elf sitting across his desk.

“Well, Eugene, you’ve gone and done it again.”

“All I did in Durban was point out that the world continues to ignore this problem,” protested Eugene, pushing his glasses up the slope of his nose. “This place isn’t getting any colder, you know.”

“But did you have to get Vixen involved?” said Santa. “You know how she is since she became a grandmother.”

“Besides, credentials are the least of our problems,” said the elf, glancing down at his iPad. “The sea ice volume is down again this year. They do know we live and work on this stuff, right?”

“Of course, Eugene, of course,” said Santa with a sigh. But Eugene was just getting started—again.

“Arctic sea ice volume is down 48 percent since 1979,” said the elf. “And the National Snow and Ice Data Center says area—excuse me, extent—is decreasing at 4.7 percent a decade.”

Santa had been hearing this for years. “But Gordon says it’s increased since 2007.” Frankly, he just wanted to get back to his list, which this year was longer than ever.

“Gordon,” smirked Eugene. “Gordon won’t admit the climate is changing until he’s ankle-deep in sea water. This is about the long-term trend, as Gordon well knows.”

“Well, what do you want me to do about it?” said Santa, exasperated. “I’m not the one emitting all this carbon dioxide.”

“We do our share,” said Eugene, smugly. “Sure, reindeer power the sleigh, but do you know how much oil is burned shipping their straw up here? Not to mention the wood that goes for toy construction.”

“No, but I’m sure you can tell me,” said Santa. He had no head for figures, and besides his shoulder ached.

“Per-capita, and including reduced sequestration from tree harvesting for the toys, plus the enteric fermentation from that ground beef you like…”

Santa cut him off. “Eugene! For crying out loud.”

The elf stopped. He pushed his glasses up and sniffed his ever-runny nose. Chastened, he said, softly, “Well, carbon dioxide warms planets, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” said Santa with a humpft.

“It’s only a trace gas,” Eugene said, “but without that small amount the world would be about 12 degrees colder. Fahrenheit. So it’s no surprise that our carbon dioxide emissions will cause more warming.” Santa simply looked at him.

“And satellite measurements show less heat escaping the planet since 1979,” said Eugene, “and that it’s being blocked just where CO2 and methane absorb heat.”

His peace said, the elf pushed at his eyeglasses and sat quietly. The fire in the hearth crackled. A blast of wind battered the window. Neither the man nor the elf spoke for a long time.

Finally, Santa said, softly, “Eugene, let’s just do what we can, OK? Insulate, turn off the lights, run those numbers for a wind turbine again. But for now, my friend, we have toys to get delivered.”

“Yes Sir,” said the elf, turning off his iPad. “Thank you.” He bowed his head and left.

Santa sat alone for ten minutes, then twenty, staring into the fire. Advil, he thought. I need Advil. Finally he picked up his own iPad, cringing when he saw there were 16,217 new messages in just the last half-hour. Soon we’ll need a bigger server, he thought to himself.

He would revisit the problem in the new year. Taking a deep breath Santa sat up, and, with a few taps, opened the file named “List.” He scrolled through it, checking it for the second time today, looking again to see who had been naughty, and who had been nice.

---
by David Appell

Benjamin Franklin on Plate Tectonics

2011-12-22T19:07:00.000-08:00

Plate tectonics was discovered in 1967. But Benjamin Franklin wrote this in 1782:

Cost of a Space Elevator: $350 Billion (?)

2011-12-22T16:26:00.000-08:00

NIST carbon nanotubes for sale

How much will it cost to build a space elevator? Here's one estimate for the raw material alone: $350 billion.

At least, that's the current cost of the carbon nanotubes, if you want ones free of impurities. NIST has started selling single-walled carbon nanotubes, certified to be free of certain contaminants: $865 for 250 mg of the stuff.

That's 61 times the price of gold, per ounce.

As I wrote in my recent Physics World article, a carbon nanotube is the only existing material that is both strong enough and light enough to satisfy the demanding engineering requirements of a space elevator. (Basically, you need a material that can hold up about ten thousand kilometers of itself without breaking.) It remains to be discovered how to combine something that basically looks like a pile of soot into something durable like you'd need for a space elevator ribbon, but let's assume the SmartPeople (maybe these guys) work that out. What's the price of just the CNTs?

Well, the mass of the elevator will depend on its length (which, in turn, depends on how much of a counterweight you can manage to attach its space-end), and on its shape (which would be some kind of taper, widest at geosynchronous orbit). You can play with these (and here is a great spreadsheet by Maurice Franklin that lets you do just that), but the length is likely to be about 100,000 km, and the GEO-to-end taper ratio about 2-4, so the mass is going to be somewhere around 10⁵ kg.

At the NIST list price that will run you about $350 billion, or 0.5% of world GDP. Pricey even for Google.

Of course, this is just NIST's introductory price for uncontaminated CNTs -- it will likely drop by the time the elevator ribbon construction facility gets going.

And NIST will surely give you a big discount if you show up with a checkbook and say you want to buy in bulk.

Comet Lovejoy As Seen From the ISS

2011-12-22T14:00:00.000-08:00

NASA has some nice images of Comet Lovejoy, taken yesterday from the International Space Station. More here. (This was the comet that was not expected to survive its passage through the Sun's corona, but did.)

Frozen Fog Here This Morning

2011-12-22T10:07:00.000-08:00

"I knew Christopher Hitchens better than you"

2011-12-20T11:43:00.000-08:00

Wonderful satire by Neal Pollack, in Salon:

Christopher Hitchens and I were friends for 40 years, plus another five when we were enemies. He took ideas so seriously that if he disagreed with you on a matter that he deemed important, he’d literally throw you in a ditch. It was 1972, the height of our mutual virility. He and I went to a pub to celebrate his most recent intellectual victory over the establishment press. I intimated that sometimes women could be funny on purpose. Even back then, the thought enraged him. Hitchens threw a drink in my face, pressed a lit cigarette into my neck, and hit me over the head with a barstool. The next thing I knew, it was two days later and I was lying hogtied and naked beside the M5. Hitch had already severely damaged my reputation in a vicious essay in the Guardian. But that’s how he operated, and that’s why we loved him.

The rest is here.

Environmental Problems of Days of Yore

2011-12-19T15:11:00.000-08:00

And you think we have environmental problems.... from Scientific American, June 1860:

"Last year during three months of very dry weather, old father Thames, that once-classic stream, became a huge sewer sending forth fetid odors over all the British metropolis. A report recently presented on the subject contains the statement that about $88,000 worth of deodorizing materials, $88,000 worth of deodorizing material was thrown into the Thames during the months of June, July and August, chiefly chloride of lime, of which 478 tons were used, and chalk lime, of which 4,280 tons were used. These were chiefly thrown into the sewers [and while] the temperature of the river remained high, from 69 to 74 degrees, the river remained proof against all efforts of deodorization. Great preparations have been made this year to provide a sufficient supply of the perchloride of iron in order to modify the pungent powers of father Thames's snuffbox."

£88,000 then is either £6 million or £53 million today, depending on how you calculate it. In either case, the stink must have been an extremely urgent problem.

(Source)

Sunday Night Stuff

2011-12-18T19:43:00.000-08:00

Here's a perfect example of how climate change serves as a proxy for larger issues of contention, as Mike Hulme writes in Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Tidewater Virginia residents who oppose their town planners' efforts to prepare for sea-level rise, in one of the most vulnerable parts of the US to the problem. Ostensibly they disagree with climate change science, but, if you read closely, their concerns are really about distant and unelected technocrats who they think are making rules for their property and their town's. Sure, maybe they have misinterpreted the UN's "Agenda 21" -- but then, what do any of us know about what the UN is really up to, and what could you do about it anyhow? Or, for that matter, the town planners of small towns, who have certainly been known to pull a few shenanigans. So I don't think you can dismiss these kind of things as just more denialist tea partiers.

A tidy example of a negative climate feedback(*): In the face of a record breaking climate event Texas farmers have reduced the number of cows raised by 600,000, or about 12%. That's like taking 750,000 cars off the road, if this article is correct -- a reduction of 2 million metric tons of CO2 this year. Less cows, less GHGs, less warming, less drought -- negative feedback.

(*) admittedly glossing over all details of attribution.

I missed this last month, but the WMO-GAW GHG Monitoring Network released their annual report last month. Global atmospheric methane levels are indeed rising again: up 5 ppb in 2010, continuing the increase that resumed in 2006. (Past reports here.) Nobody seems to really know why.

Last week the NIH said it would no longer fund research on chimpanzees. This is a very good thing. This picture immediately sprang to my mind when I heard about this ban:

Don't tell me these animals don't deserve the same consideration as humans, unless you are OK with being caged, exploited, and butchered if and when a higher intelligence shows up (or is developed) here.

That Amazing Silent Protest at UC Davis

2011-12-18T10:35:00.000-08:00

I knew UC Davis students had protested their Chancellor's defense of the police pepper-spraying incident, but I didn't pay attention to the details and I missed their amazingly powerful silent witness on November 19th. It's so impressive I got goosebumps watching it.

Here's an account of that day:

A pretty remarkable thing just happened. A press conference, scheduled for 2:00pm between the UC Davis Chancellor and police on campus, did not end at 2:30. Instead, a mass of Occupy Davis students and sympathizers mobilized outside, demanding to have their voice heard. After some initial confusion, UC Chancellor Linda Katehi refused to leave the building, attempting to give the media the impression that the students were somehow holding her hostage.

A group of highly organized students formed large gap for the chancellor to leave. They chanted “we are peaceful” and “just walk home,” but nothing changed for several hours. Eventually student representatives convinced the chancellor to leave after telling their fellow students to sit down and lock arms.

Here are two videos showing the students simply quietly, with linked arms, simply observing Linda Katehi as she left. The protest was organized by one of the students who was pepper-sprayed. Extremely effective. I heard Thom Hartmann say that Quaker women used to do this, and it's a form of protest I hope is revived.

Sometimes It Seems They Don't Even Try

2011-12-18T10:09:00.000-08:00

Christopher Booker in the The Telegraph, yesterday: "I was criticised for pointing this out last week, but as anyone can see, from satellite-based charts on the Cryosphere Today website, the extent of polar sea ice was last year 1.6 million square kilometres greater than its average over the last 30 years – something which could never have been guessed from Attenborough’s dramatic film sequences, carefully chosen to convey the very different message the BBC wanted us to believe."

Actual current data from Cryosphere Today:

Methane Time Bomb in Arctic Seas - Apocalypse Not - NYTimes.com

2011-12-15T21:24:00.001-08:00

But Andrew Revkin has much better reporting on the Arctic methane issue than The Independent:

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/methane-time-bomb-in-arctic-seas-apocalypse-not/

Kilometer-sized Methane Bubbles Seen in Arctic Ocean

2011-12-15T20:16:00.001-08:00

Russian scientists have reported sighting large amounts of methane coming to the surface out in the Arctic Ocean:

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/shock-as-retreat-of-arctic-sea-ice-releases-deadly-greenhouse-gas-6276134.html

In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Igor Semiletov, of the Far Eastern branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that he has never before witnessed the scale and force of the methane being released from beneath the Arctic seabed.

"Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that we've found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures, more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It's amazing," Dr Semiletov said. "I was most impressed by the sheer scale and high density of the plumes. Over a relatively small area we found more than 100, but over a wider area there should be thousands of them."

Semiletov spoke at this year's AGU meeting earlier this month, but here's an AGU blog posting from almost two years ago where he also reported surprising rates of methane emissions. It includes this interview of his colleague Natalia Shakhova:

Last month I blogged about a paper that found a resumed increase in atmospheric methane levels at two sites in Europe.

Roy Spencer's Minimalized Government

2011-12-15T17:07:00.000-08:00

Roy Spencer, July 5, 2011:

"I view my job a little like a legislator, supported by the taxpayer, to protect the interests of the taxpayer and to minimize the role of government."

Roy Spencer, today:

It’s true that the “golden age” of state-of-the-art Earth-observation science missions is gradually ending. There is currently a real problem that no government agency has been specifically funded to carry on climate observations into the future....

Perhaps, as Spencer advocates for "poor people," the private sector can coordinate charity for a new satellite.

Inhofe's Inhofeian Statement

2011-12-15T11:33:00.000-08:00

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) solidly reassured the Tulsa Metro Chamber of Commerce that ending Don't Ask Don't Tell hasn't "legalized bestiality" in the military:

Inhofe also reassured his audience that the lifting of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding gay service members has not “legalized bestiality” in the military.

He explained that, although gay people may now “go in the military, go wide open and use that for their agenda,” sex with animals is still outlawed by military code.

“When you go out and talk to people on the street, they’ll tell you, ‘Oh, they’ve legalized bestiality,’ … but that hasn’t changed.”

What can you possibly say about such an comment -- that it's monstrous? Depraved? Evil? I don't think the word has been invented yet, so I'll go with "Inhofeian."

To their credit the Tulsa Metro Chamber issued a statement that paid appropriate homage to...him...while distancing themselves from his statement: "...while the chamber often supports Senator Inhofe's policy stances related to business matters as mentioned above, his comments at the Dec. 12 forum do not reflect the chamber's view on diversity and inclusion.... The chamber is committed to the belief that an inclusive community improves the economic and social climate in the Tulsa region."

Inhofe has also found another hoax: he said that concerns about side effects of fracking are "a phony issue that's been invented." A peer-reviewed study in PNAS disagrees. (To be clear, this PNAS study found significant contamination by methane that increased the closer one got to the well head -- but no contamination by fracturing fluids. An MIT study and a University of Texas study found no contamination, but the latter found some pollution from above-ground spills. None of these studies qualify as "phony.")

I am still holding to my position that the real hoax is Inhofe himself. It's the simplest explanation that fits all the observations.

Movement on Climategate Investigation

2011-12-14T20:52:00.000-08:00

It looks like CG2 has gotten someone to tell the US & UK authorities to get off their butts and see where the hack came from.... But what good does it do to seize home computers? Surely they ought to be seizing servers, or doing some detailed forensics in routing records.

Here's the US DOJ (Criminal Division) notice received last Friday by Tallbloke and Jeff Id.

Big Picture's Series on Homelessness

2011-12-14T18:56:00.000-08:00

This is a rather shocking picture, from The Big Picture Blog's series on homeless around the world. They have more.

Another Way Science Writers Have Ruined Science

2011-12-14T17:28:00.000-08:00

I wish I could read just one article about the Higgs boson without the phrase "the God particle," but it's probably too late. Is any editor ever going to publish an article without it, now, even if the writer wanted to (and most probably don't)?

The phrase comes from Leon Lederman's 1993 book (written with Dick Teresi) The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?, and that came from Lederman, who had been using it as a joke. This is from the preface to the 2006 edition of the book:

Teresi is a former editor at Omni who has a penchant for titles that try a little bit too hard, such as Would the Buddha Wear a Walkman? A Catalogue of Revolutionary Tools for Higher Consciousness and "Hungarians Think The Darnedest Things," etc. I know writers don't usually have final say on their titles, and I guess someone knew what they were doing since the book has sold over 100,000 copies. Eck, maybe I'm just jealous. But it's an awkward, unnecessary, and misleading conflation of science and religion, as if science gives credence for any of that.

I was wondering how Peter Higgs feels about the name, and found this article from today in LiveScience. It seems a lot of scientists don't like the name:

Vivek Sharma (UC-San Diego), leader of the Higgs search at LHC's CMS experiment: "I detest the name 'God particle.' I am not particularly religious, but I find the term an 'in your face' affront to those who [are]. I do experimental physics not GOD."

Michio Kaku (CCNY) : "It's an awful name. It does not convey the particle's true role, that it is the last missing piece of the Standard Model, and that it gives mass to the other particles."

Matt Strassler (Rutgers): "I feel the term 'God particle,' invented by a publisher to sell books and make money, insultingly misrepresents both science and religion."

Kyle Cranmer (NYU): "[It] carries almost no information about why the Higgs particle is important, it makes physicists sound pompous and arrogant, and it reinforces a very harmful presumption that physicists are trying to replace or compete with 'God,'...."

Gordon Kane (Univ Michigan): "'God particle' is a bad name, in every way. It has nothing to do with the physics. Most (all?) physicists dislike it."

More here.

The article also says:

The story goes that Lederman originally wanted to name the tome "The Goddamn Particle" because of how difficult it was to detect, but was persuaded by his publisher, Delta, to shorten it.

which seems to contradict the preface above, but oh well it's a good little story.

Why Energy Efficiency Isn't Enough

2011-12-13T20:38:00.000-08:00

Can energy efficiency and conservation alone solve the CO2 problem? An op-ed in today's Oregonian by Kumar Venkat discusses this and other aspects of the problem.

Can we rely primarily on energy efficiencies in the meantime? Up to a point, yes; but efficiencies are not a panacea for all our energy problems. Energy efficiencies are known to cause rebounds, which can reduce potential energy savings by stimulating additional energy use.

This is Jevons Paradox, and you can see it in gasoline consumption in the US over decades.

Here's a back of the envelope calculation:
Take CO2 and population data from the World Bank, for 2009. Assume that

OECD countries cut their per-capita CO2 emissions by 30%.
the per-capita emissions of the non-OECD countries reach a factor F of the OECD countries (currently F=0.29).
the world's population increases to 10 billion, with all the increase in the non-OECD countries.

Then this would be the world's total CO2 emissions, as a function of F, as a factor of 2009's CO2 emissions:

In other words, even if we cut our emissions by 30% and everyone in the world attains this standard of living, emissions would be 2.5 times today's.

You can't even get to today's (already unacceptable) levels of emissions, and F=1, unless the cutback = 72%

I don't see how you can possibly get enough cutback in emissions with conservation and increased efficiency, unless most of the world stays poor. The demographics swamp everything.

And if we have to reduce emissions by 80% of today's, it's impossible without new technologies (at least in energy storage, if not renewable energy). Impossible. You can't even get close.

You must either (1) invent new ways to store energy, or (2) new ways to generate noncarbon energy. Lots of it, on demand. R&D is the only answer.

Note: the only data I used is (2009):

OECD population: 1.225 B
non-OECD population: 5.536 B

OECD per-capita emissions: 9.83 mt
non-OECD per-capita emissions: 2.88 mt

(Remember, US per-capita emissions in 2009 were 16.9 mt.)

Intel warns that fourth-quarter results will be below previous forecasts because of hard-drive supply shortages.

2011-12-12T19:54:00.001-08:00

Speaking of the economic impact of the Thailand floods....

-------- Original Message --------

Subject:	Intel warns that fourth-quarter results will be below previous forecasts because of hard-drive supply shortages.
Date:	Mon, 12 Dec 2011 09:20:08 -0500
From:	CNNMoney.com Breaking News <BreakingNews@mail.cnn.com>

-- Intel warns that fourth-quarter results will be below previous forecasts because of hard-drive supply shortages.

Log on to http://money.cnn.com/bn for the latest news.

Lacrosse Bleg

2011-12-12T11:22:00.000-08:00

Has anyone here played lacrosse? I want to buy my 7-yr old nephew a stick for Christmas. He's never played before or used a stick, but is interested. Would something like this be appropriate for him?

Thanks.

Where the Billion$ from Durban Should Be Going Instead

2011-12-11T19:16:00.000-08:00

In the Washington Post's article on the agreement in Durban, they write:

Last week, researchers from the Wilhelm Bjerknes Centre in Bergen, Norway, gave a presentation in Durban projecting that the Arctic will experience a 2-degree temperature increase within one to two decades. The only way to limit the global increase to 2 degrees, the researchers said, was to have global emissions peak by 2020 and fall between 40 percent and 50 percent between 2040 and 2050.

“That’s the real missing element here,” said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “There’s nothing that’s going to get the world to lift its game and close that gap.”

It seems to me there is one way, and only one way, that global CO2 emissions will be 1/2 of 2020 levels by 2050: if there is a cheaper alternative than burning fossil fuels. That's it. People want to be warm and comfortable and fly to SoCal in the winter and overseas to climate change conferences, and the heck with those living a hundred years from now.

So instead of establishing bodies to collect and distribute tens of billions of dollars a year to poor countries -- which we should be doing anyway, not because the climate is changing but because they're, you know, poor -- we should take those 10s B/yr and make a massive R&D effort to find ways to generate cheaper energy. Take 1% of it and hire the world's best PR agencies so they'll make it like going to the moon or defeating the Nazis. Build a few CERN-scale laboratories around the world, give the world's smart nuclear engineers and fusion scientists and nanotechnologists healthy grants, and have a yearly conference (run by technical people, not the UN) that reports on their progress. Include energy efficiency experts too, of course, and other smart people with ideas worth pursuing like wave energy and tidal power and more solar. Cut them loose.

That's what's going to work, isn't it, not hammering on people to reduce emissions when it can only make relatively small changes at best, and having the rich pay for the impact of their profligate lifestyle on the poor. It didn't work 20 years ago and it didn't work now, because after China develops India is going to develop, and after that will come the rest of south Asia, and then (hopefully) Africa, and the population is going to keep increasing in all of them. You can't stop people from wanting to live better. So you have to provide a less impactful way for them to do that.

Durban Wrap-Up in Two Easy Pieces

2011-12-11T12:36:00.000-08:00

The climate conference has wrapped up in Durban, and the results surprised no one. They can be summed up with two short items: one, the prayer of the teen aged boy who said,

"Lord, let me be good, just not yet."

and the following graph -- which applied equally before the conference, during it, and after it -- and predicted the result with perfection:

This chart will predict the result again in three years, when the world has agreed it will agree on what it might someday again agree to as a token effort to solve the CO2 problem.

More on the Tsunami of Junk

2011-12-11T12:09:00.000-08:00

For some reason I can't stop thinking about the coming tsunami of Japanese junk that will start washing up on west coast shores in about 2 years. It's 5 M metric tons, or 5.5 M tons. Looking at the simulation, it will impact from about Los Angles to Vancouver(*), a distance of about 1500 miles, so we're talking about

4200 lbs/yard -- one car every yard

or

1400 lbs/ft -- two refrigerators every foot

or

5 lbs/mm -- a toaster over every millimeter

As a commenter pointed out yesterday, at least one group in Oregon, SOLV, is already on the case.

(*) Yes, I know some of the stuff will sink, or currents will take it down or up the coast, or back out to sea, etc, and it's not going to be cars or refrigerators but smaller, more floatable stuff. Stop being such a fussbucket and play with me here.

The Coming Surge of Japanese Junk

2011-12-10T09:27:00.000-08:00

The Harper's Index also has this item:

Estimated tons of debris from the Japanese earthquake headed for the West Coast of the United States: 5,000,000
Date by which the debris is expected to begin reaching shore: 10/1/2013

That came from this story from the University of Hawaii, which includes this nice animation of the expected debris track.

Another story gives a report from a Russian ship near the Midway Islands: “On September 22, in position 31042,21 N and 174045,21 E, we picked up on board the Japanese fishing boat. Radioactivity level – normal, we’ve measured it with the Geiger counter,” wrote Natalia Borodina, information and education mate of the Pallada. “At the approaches to the mentioned position (maybe 10 – 15 minutes before) we also sighted a TV set, fridge and a couple of other home appliances.”

A few days later they added, "we keep sighting everyday things like wooden boards, plastic bottles, buoys from fishing nets (small and big ones), an object resembling wash basin, drums, boots, other wastes. All these objects are floating by the ship.”

Free stuff! If a bit waterlogged.

The Good and Bad from the Harper's Index

2011-12-10T09:20:00.000-08:00

Here are some of the best items from this month's Harper's Index in Harper's Magazine, which I've ordered from most- to least-heartening:

Amount employees of private-equity firm Bain Capital have donated to the campaign of its co-founder Mitt Romney: $69,500
To the Obama campaign: $119,900

Percentage of all Americans who consider themselves part of the top 1 percent of U.S. earners: 13
Percentage of Hispanic Americans who do: 28

Percentage of workers with only a high school diploma who received employer-based health insurance in 1979: 70
Percentage of workers with a bachelor's degree or higher who receive it today: 66

Newt Gingrich's Stupid Idea

2011-12-09T17:34:00.000-08:00

According to David Brooks, Newt Gingrich has suggested that “a mirror system in space could provide the light equivalent of many full moons so that there would be no need for nighttime lighting of the highways.”

This is an idiotic idea that immediately qualifies him for President, if the other ten thousand reasons didn't already convince you that he is the devil incarnate. (I mean that with a level of seriousness greater than zero.) It might save, what, 1-2% off our national electricity bill? On the other hand, it's going to light up whole counties like two yokels with a spotlight looking for deer in a Pennsylvania hay field, and who can possibly sleep through that? (Really, people -- sleep is important.) You can't aim a space mirror so it just illuminates the 50 meter-wide slice of Interstate 70, and sleeping with your blinds down every night can get creepy real fast. What if you're camping? What about all the animals -- they need to sleep too. (Just ask my cats.) What about astronomy, for Christ's sake? You can't cut the James Webb telescope and ruin optical astronomy -- are we supposed to look at our feet all day long? The stars fascinate us, inspire us, even give some of us hope. Take that away and you might well stick a hose up our ass and drain the life out, which I sometimes think is the true goal of the Republican party anyway.

Just leave the night sky alone, OK? That isn't too much to ask from a presidential candidate, even if he is an irreducible representation of the end days of civilization. Jeez.

Research study shows link between earthquakes and tropical cyclones

2011-12-09T00:38:00.001-08:00

Maybe here's a reason to think earthquakes might have a multi-stage link to climate change:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-12/uomr-rss120711.php

If AGW means more cyclones, and those mean more heavy rain events, and those mean more saturated hillsides, which means more landslides, which means (this paper says) more earthquakes.... Is there time series data for earthquakes somewhere? What's the EQ anomaly trend?

How Air Pollution Has Cut PC Production

2011-12-08T21:11:00.000-08:00

Here's another effect of an extreme weather event: The world will be short about 3.8 million hard-disk drives next quarter, because of flooding in Thailand (where many of the components are made).

That many are expected to be missing from an earlier forecast of 88 M. Another way to put it is that while the usual 4Q to 1Q end-of-year decline in such drives is 6%, this time it will be 11.5%.

And so growth in 2012 will only be an estimated 6.8% higher than 2011, instead of 9.5%.

2012 PC shipments will be down by 23 million units. (399 M were expected to be shipped.)

This may impact companies like Intel (and you if your 401K is invested there) which will affect Oregon. (Intel employs 15,000 in the state.)

The situation won't return to normal until the end of 3Q12. The World Bank has estimated the cost of the flooding in Thailand at $45 B, the 4th costliest disaster of all time. Rainfall in northern Thailand was 344% above average.

Scientists recently "linked the increase in the intensity of tropical cyclones over the Arabian Sea between 1979 and 2010 with a rise in soot and aerosol emissions over the Indian subcontinent."

I trust you can connect the dots here. But (apparently) until some super-duper fancy-schmancy climate model can predict the decline in hard-disk drives to the nearest 0.001 percent from hourly worldwide aerosol emissions, and a coupled economic model can forecast the impact on the price of butter in U.S. supermarkets to the nearest nanodime, there's just nothing we can do about it.

There's always the abacus to fall back on.

SoCal Trip

2011-12-08T10:33:00.000-08:00

I was in southern California for the last several days -- an entirely different universe, as far as the weather goes. Beautiful sunny days with blue skies....

Best part of the trip was a Segway tour of the Gaslamp Quarter of San Diego, and seeing friends I hadn't seen for too long.

Pasadena had a huge windstorm the night before I landed, with winds up to 97 miles-per-hour. There were trees down on the streets and the NY Times said up to 40 buildings will need to be torn down. I took a few pictures of the mess at the Huntington Botanical Gardens:

Some pictures from the plane, of clear cuts in southern Oregon:

And some unusual ground features in southern Oregon or northern California, that I haven't yet figured out:

Why the Climategate 2.0 Emails are Devastating

2011-12-08T09:38:00.000-08:00

I've started reading Mike Hulme's 2009 book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Hulme is, of course, a well-known climate scientist, founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, and now a professor of climate change at the University of East Anglia. I can't recommend this book highly enough.

Hulme has what seems a more balanced point-of-view than most, and recognizes that the debate over climate change is largely a proxy in the timeless war of larger ideas: about our values, about how society could/should/will be governed and the economy regulated. Hulme is a firm believer in man's influence on climate, but you can tell he's coming from a different place by his book's dedication on its very first page: "To my father, Ralph Hulme (1924-1989), who taught me that disagreeing was a form of learning," and by the quotation before the Table of Contents: "A good place to look for wisdom...is where you least expect to find it: in the minds of your opponents." (Jonathan Haidt, 2006)

In particular, the following passage struck me as a succinct summary of why I think the recently released batch of UEA emails are, as I first wrote, "devastating." It's from Hulme's sum-up of his chapter on "The Performance of Science" -- what I've highlighted in blue seems most relevant here (emphasis mine):

There are three limits to science that we must recognise. First, scientific knowledge about climate change will always be incomplete, and it will always be uncertain. Science always speaks with a conditional voice, or at least good science always does. Belief in the power of science requires a simultaneous doubt about the final and ultimate adequacy of any scientific knowledge claim. We must recognise that uncertainty and humility should always be essential features of any public policy debate which involves science, not least climate change-Certainty is the anomalous condition for humanity, not uncertainty

Second, we must recognise that beyond such 'normal' scientific uncertainty, knowledge as a public commodity will always have been shaped to some degree by the processes by which it emerges into the social world and through which it subsequently circulates. What will in the end count as scientific knowledge for public decision making is not necessarily the same knowledge that first emerged in the laboratory. In the production, or better still the co-production, of climate change knowledge for public policy, trust in the processes of science and participation in the social processes of co-production are essential. Without trust and/or participation, scientific knowledge about climate change is unlikely to prove robust enough to be put to good use. The separation of knowledge about climate change from the politics of climate change – a process that has been described as 'purification’ – is no longer possible, even if it ever was. The more widely this is recognised the better.

Third, we must be more honest and transparent about what science can tell us and what it can't. We should not hide behind science when difficult ethical choices are called for. We must not always defer to ‘science' or to the 'voices of scientists' when we need to make decisions about what to do. These are decisions that in relation to climate change will always entail judgements beyond the reach of science.

-- Mike Hulme, Chapter 3, Why We Disagree About Climate Change

So, the claims last month that 'the science is settled,' like this essay by John Abrahams and one by Scott Mandia, miss the point, I think. It would be great if humans were strictly rational animals who make decisions on nothing but the analytics, but that is not true, for any of us. This is no longer only about the science. To an extent this is unfair to climate scientists -- they should not have to operate in an environment like that of politicians, where every remark might be deeply scrutinized and exploited by enemies. Surely this is new territory for the enterprise of science, as is the climate change problem in general. One thing Hulme's book makes clear is that we will never attain a solution to this problem by somehow finally getting a thumbs-up or thumbs-down from "Science." And we should stop expecting one.

"Science Never Cheered Up Anyone"

2011-12-07T09:09:00.000-08:00

"Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful."

-- Kurt Vonnegut (as his alter-ego Kilgore Trout), Timequake

Gorgeous Picture of a Rocket Launch

2011-11-30T22:01:00.000-08:00

This gorgeous picture is of a rocket launch this week from northern Sweden by the European Space Agency, for a propellant test. (Click to enlarge.)

My Article on Space Elevators

2011-11-30T19:34:00.000-08:00

I have a feature article on space elevators in the December issue of Physics World -- here's a PDF:

http://home.comcast.net/~davidappell/PWDec11appell-space_elevators.pdf

Also, I'm taking a week off to go get some sunshine. Be good (more or less).

How Not to Report on Climate Change

2011-11-30T11:43:00.000-08:00

This article might win an award for Worst Reporting on Climate Change (So Far): "Here’s A Reason to Care About Climate Change: It Could Ruin Texas Football," Matthew van Dusen, Txchnologist.

Who thinks football players -- Texan football players -- are going to be thwarted by more heat waves? These guys are into suffering. The game is about suffering. I went to the hospital twice during a football game, and I never played past 9th grade. Strap it up and bring it on.

With the popularity of football in Texas they will built domed air-conditioned practice facilities for even the 6-man squads out on the dry barren plains of West Texas before they will give up their football.

Catastrophists are going to have to try harder than this. Here's a suggestion:

Here's a Reason to to Care About Climate Change:

Your Guns Might Jam

That might be taken as a warning--to buy bigger guns.

On Open Minds

2011-11-29T22:59:00.000-08:00

"You must keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out."

-- James Oberg, NASA engineer and science writer

When Elephants Fight

2011-11-29T14:34:00.000-08:00

There is a African proverb that says, "When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers." The Wall Street Journal does some reporting on the grass.

Climate Panel Cancelled For Lack of Balance

2011-11-29T13:59:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I noted that an upcoming (tonight) panel on climate change lacked balance, heavily skewed towards the denialist position. Today the panel was cancelled for... lack of balance.

It was a presentation of the Oregon chapter of the American Meterological Society, to be held at OMSI (Oregon Museum of Science and History). OMSI said no.

...Mark Patel, OMSI's vice president of marketing, said the museum told organizers in early November that they needed a balanced panel and offered to move the meeting to its "science pub" event at the Bagdad Theater, picking up half the cost of the move. With no progress made, the museum cancelled the event last week.

"By the very fact that we're holding it here, people are going to assume it's OMSI's point of view," Patel said. "Our intention is far from trying to shut anybody up. We're trying to encourage proper debate, and not allow OMSI to be used as a mouthpiece for one group or another."

Last month Steve Pierce, a local meteorologist and president of OR-AMS, told me the group "takes no position on the subject of climate change" and they had hosted panels on the anthropogenic side in the past and wanted to provide "equal time for all."

Tonight's panel was to consist of:

George Taylor, a former manager of the Oregon Climate Service at OSU whom Oregon governor Ted Kulongowski asked that he stop using the title "state climatologist."
Chuck Wiese, a former TV weatherman who says he writes "papers" for Watts Up With That. I debated Wiese a few years ago at the Multnomah Athletic Club, where he presented this graph as proof of a cooling trend. (The graph is apparently generated by fitting 1980-2007 temperatures with a 6th-order polynomial, and screams JUST BECAUSE EXCEL LETS YOU DO IT DOESN'T MAKE IT RIGHT.)
Gordon Fulks, a man who insists even his postman know he has a PhD and who writes inanities for the Oregonian like "All plants and animals owe their very existence to carbon dioxide." It has been alleged that he has connections to Americans for Prosperity, funded by the Koch Brothers. Fulks says he is part of something called "Gordon Fulks and Associates," but strangely the only place that organization seems to appear is next to his signature on his climate denialism.

OMSI was right to cancel this event -- they have a great place there (especially for kids), and a reputation to maintain. This panel would have been an insult to science and the true skepticism it honors and practices.

Who Knows How Deep This Goes?

2011-11-28T17:40:00.000-08:00

Several months ago Christopher Monckton wrote:

I suspect that the Muller project - precisely because it will indeed be properly conducted and will produce results as fair as the group can make them, and precisely because it has obtained funding not only from the ClimateWorks Foundation etc. but also from the Koch Brothers – has been brought into being so that its results, broadly confirming the official record, can be trumpeted as showing how wrong the skeptics are, how pure the IPCC’s science is, how clear all the official conclusions are. This is a classic diversionary tactic: for, although Jones and his crooked crew were indeed remiss in trying to withhold and destroy data about the temperature record to prevent other scientists from coming to realize what a mess the record was in, the most revealing aspect of Climategate had nothing to do with the temperature record itself.

Surely no one is going to fall for that. I mean, Monckton has to be in on this too. His inane comments and unsupported speculations are clearly intended to divert attention away from the Muller diversion. Judith Curry has a role in this too, to occupy bloggers and readers as they try to figure out her role. (That was a clever choice.) I think it's clear what role Michael Mann and Christopher Horner are playing in all this, and surely Marc Morano is just playing Inhofe's monkey to take heat off Inhofe. When you think about it, Inhofe has to be at the center of this whole thing -- HAS to be -- because his belief that global warming is all a hoax is just too crazy to be anything but true. No one would believe it if it appeared in a novel. HE'S THE HOAX -- Inhofe is. Get it?

You can't make this stuff up. Who knows how deep this goes.

WHO Injected Politics into Science under Bush??

2011-11-28T15:59:00.000-08:00

There's an interesting letter from writer Mark Bowen in the most recent issue of Science, where he calls b.s. on Ray Orbach for writing, in an obit of John Marburger, that it was the scientifically civilized people who "injected politics" into the Bush administration. Orbach was Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. DOE from 2006 to 2009.

Bowen wrote the book Censoring Science.

More on Tuvalu

2011-11-27T18:51:00.000-08:00

By the way, that Harper's article on Tuvalu doesn't come to any firm conclusion--and certainly not the conclusion that Tuvalu is necessarily doomed. Actually the author seems to suspect Tuvalu might be playing the issue for all the foreign aid they can get, even as they might be going under. Or maybe not going under.

Reading it online requires a subscription (there's always the newsstand), but here are a few more excerpts:

The basic facts are these: Tuvalu’s average elevation is about three feet above sea level, and water expands as it gets warmer. If current global-warming trends continue, the National Research Council predicts, the sea will rise by at least two feet in the next ninety years. Even if industrialized countries drastically reduce carbon emissions in the near future—and there is little reason to think they will—Tuvalu is in serious trouble.

This is the story Tuvaluan officials like to tell. But as with any scientific story, even where there is broad consensus, the details are debatable. Global sea levels are rising, but not homogeneously. The fluid dynamics are too complex to model, but it’s theoretically possible that, as in a sloshing bathtub, some parts of the Pacific will rise sharply while others will fall. And even where waters do rise, some scientists think islands will adapt and accrete. In fact, the only study to measure Funafuti’s shoreline over time, published in June 2010, found that the atoll’s area has grown, not shrunk, over the past twenty years. Even the environmentalists who sounded the alarm—-Tuvalu will sink in fifty years!—-admit that fifty is, at best, a guess.

The author meets some foreign administrators of the Tuvalu Trust Fund, having dinner while on the island:

I asked them whether they thought global warming posed an imminent threat, and Abbott made a sour face. “Don’t ask me that,” he said. “I’m not going to give you the answer you’re looking for.”

“He’s a skeptic about that stuff,” Wrighton explained. “Me, I think global warming is real, but I do believe you can find science to support either side. And if you're one of these tiny countries, and this is the one issue that can get you traction internationally—‘We’re vulnerable, we’re sinking’—wouldn’t you use that to your advantage?”

“I agree with that,” Abbott said, “in the sense that it’s in the self-interest of Tuvalu to seem as pathetic as possible.”

“But isn’t there a contradiction?” I asked. “If you’re asking for money to build a new school, yet the claim is that your land will be submerged in fifty years—”

"You can't have it both ways," the American consultant agreed.

and

Most development consultants I spoke to sounded comparably cynical. Why shouldn’t the Tuvaluan government be complacent? Donors rewarded them for drawing attention to problems, not for finding solutions. Never mind that Tuvalu was staking its economic future on the claim that it had no future, or that Tuvaluans themselves did not seem truly convinced they were sinking. International aid was a marketing competition, and with sea-level rise, Tuvalu had found its niche."

Fred Singer's Silence on Request for Data

2011-11-27T18:03:00.000-08:00

After Fred Singer's Nov. 4th op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled "Why I Remain a Global-Warming Skeptic," I emailed him with two questions:

1) You wrote that "data from weather satellites show no atmospheric temperature increase over this period," which you defined as "the period between 1978 and 1997." What data (exactly) are you using, and what calculation (exactly) have you done?

2) You also wrote that "the Super El Niño of 1998 that had nothing to do with greenhouse gases or other human influences." What is your basis for this claim?

I never received a reply. I asked again on Nov 16th and didn't get a reply to that either.

Maybe openness and transparency only go in certain directions.

(By the way, the linear trend for UAH data over the period Jan-79 to Dec-96 is +0.034 ± 0.021 °C/decade, r²=0.012.)

In that vein, The Guardian reports that Benny Peiser isn't too keen on providing information either:

"The Guardian has also seen documents showing that GWPF director, Benny Peiser, declined to provide emails requested by at least four freedom of information requests, despite the GWPF's previous calls for openness from climate scientists.

"Until July 2010, Peiser was on staff at Liverpool John Moores University, which received several FoI requests for emails relating to the GWPF, which was founded in November 2009. The GWPF contracted high-profile law firm Farrers & Co to reply to the university and Peiser told a university official in March 2010: "We are concerned to avoid the disclosure of private foundation affairs."

"All the FoI requests to date have been rejected and there is no suggestion Peiser failed to comply with FoI rules. The university found that a number of emails had been deleted by Peiser, and that none remaining contain the phrase "global warming", according to the Information Commissioner's Office.

"Peiser told the Guardian: 'The Freedom of Information Act is clear. Both I and the GWPF have complied fully with the law, and I expect others to do the same.'"

Tuvalu Plans to Bring in a Mountain

2011-11-27T15:15:00.000-08:00

This is from the delightful opening to a great article by Andrew Marantz on the threat to the Pacific island of Tuvalu due to rising seas from global warming. It's titled "A Rising Tide" and is in the December 2011 issue of Harper's Magazine (sub. req.). The author is talking to Maatia Toafa, Tuvalu's prime minister.

I asked what solutions he [Toafa] proposed to the issue that his entire country might be underwater in fifty years.

He said he would consider “bringing in some mountains from somewhere, so we can have a higher elevation.”

“Mountains?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said.

Where would the mountains come from?"

"Well," he said. "We'll ask around."

The rest of the article is just as good. It's in Harper's, after all.

Is This Climate Science’s Thermidorian Reaction?

2011-11-26T19:34:00.000-08:00

In historical analysis, a Thermidorian Reaction is the point in a revolt or revolution where the mob says: Hey, wait a minute, what exactly are we doing here? We have to live here after we smash this place up, so maybe we’d better take a deep breath and think this over again.

To me, at least, this past week feels like a Thermidorian Reaction in the climate change scene.

Obviously the first was the release of a new batch of emails. It doesn't show anything nefarious, but I think it does raise questions about how much purported unanimity has been artificially created by IPCC reports, and whether the full state of uncertainty is being communicated. And why are people talking about deleting emails? Why is Ms Kathryn Humphrey from UK's Defra saying the government wants a strong message? She wrote (email 2445):

"I cannot overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the government can give on climate change to help them tell their story.

"They want their story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish."

I don't think they're trying to enslave their citizens under a New World Order, but why is a bureaucrat telling scientists what kind of message "they" want? And how are government-funded scientists not supposed to feel pressured by that?

The other thing that gives pause was the Schmittner et al Science paper that finds a lower value for climate sensitivity (2.3 K instead of 3.0 K), and, more importantly, a smaller range of possible warming, especially at the top end.

I'm also tired of the whipsaws. One month one side is buoyed because a journal editor resigns, then the next week the UAH anomaly is lower than last year and if you fit it with a 3rd-order polynomial is shows warming flattening out but don't take it seriously its for your entertainment only. Then climate sensitivity gets lowered and people who routinely disclaim the legitimacy of climate models suddenly find maybe now they're OK. And on and on.

I understand about the scientific difficulty of the problem and its scientific uncertainties. So let them exist and let the researchers keep chipping away at them. It's the world's problem about how to deal with that uncertainty, not theirs.

And I'm really fed-up with dishonest reporting everywhere, especially among bloggers. Some people are very wrapped up in this and, indeed, now have careers and a modicum of fame that depend on their extreme views. I'm not going to even mention some prominent deniers because they're clearly fools who say they will accept the results of a study but then find any reason, however slight, to change their mind. But, for example, Climate Progress didn't even mention this week's Science study, even though commenters there are asking for a reaction. That's just bullshit, particularly from someone who says we could get 10 F warming (5.6 C) by the end of the century and writes completely alarmist crap like this and this.

And from an organization who refuses to reveal who signs their paychecks.

Yesterday a cross-post on Romm's blog by NRDC president Frances Beinecke, about a study on medical costs due to global warming, simply asserts that the six climate events being studied were "climate-change related." There's no proof given. And the study was able to pin down the number of patients affected by these climate-change related events to the nearest integer!

"This group of events resulted in an estimated 1,689 premature deaths, 8,992 hospitalizations, 21,113 emergency room visits, and 734,398 outpatient visits...."

Not 21,114 ER visits, or 21,112 ER visits -- an estimate of exactly 21,113.

If it's an estimate why are you giving numbers to five significant digits? And can we please see the error bars on this?

The other thing I'm fed up with are the routine announcements like the IEA's recent 'unless we solve this problem in 5 years we can't avoid dangerous warming.' Who decided 5 C is "dangerous" but 1.9 isn't? Or that if we cut them in 7 years instead of 5 we're screwed? Come on.

Come back to me when you find the 30 thousand billion billion Joules that go missing every year. (And, no, I'm not blaming any scientist for this, because it's a very difficult problem and people are working hard on it and the energy accounting they've already done is amazing. The would-be policy makers need to stop getting ahead of the science.)

Look, we are not going to be cutting much CO2 anything soon. We should, but we won't. We all want to be warm and drive to the coast on the weekends and fly across the country to give talks. And if any of us finds a big pot of oil in our backyard we're going to cash in on it, even if the angel on your shoulder tells you you shouldn't because you will pay later. That's human nature. When I was a kid in western PA there was an abandoned strip mine, and then someone discovered new seams of coal on a nearby neighbor's property, and they sold the mining rights for a lot of money. Millions, it was said. Beautiful woods were stripped off their land and the coal dug up. They smoothed the land back over when they were done, but still it is huge fields where the woods won't return for a hundred years. And back then the first thing my grandfather did was invite the coal company onto his 80-acre farm to look for coal there. He would have sold it too, even though it would have leveled the fantastic woods on his property, too. Who wouldn't?

Anyway, this 2008 email by Jagadish Shukla nailed it pretty well:

It is inconceivable that policymakers will be willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability. Of course, even a hypothetical, perfect model does not guarantee accurate prediction of the future regional climate, but at the very least, our suggestion for action will be based on the best possible
science.

It is urgently required that the climate modeling community arrive at a consensus on the required accuracy of the climate models to meet the "greater demand for a higher level of policy relevance".

But it shouldn't be just the modeling community that decides on the necessary accuracy, but the policymakers as well. And maybe everyone.

Andrew Revkin wrote a wise thing the other day:

Do I trust climate science? As a living body of intellectual inquiry exploring profoundly complex questions, yes.

Do I trust all climate scientists, research institutions, funding sources, journals and others involved in this arena to convey the full context of findings and to avoid sometimes stepping beyond the data? I wouldn’t be a journalist if I answered yes.

At the moment I don't know who I trust.

200,000 More Emails??

2011-11-25T22:57:00.001-08:00

The Economist says the UEA hacker has another 200,000 emails in his possession:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/11/leaked-climate-change-e-mails

If he's finding what he's releasing piecemeal by searching for keywords, there are liable to be just as many of the same types in there as have already been released. Whatever all this, it could go on for years.