Vaccinated

Ronald Bailey Still Gets It Wrong!

I see that Ronald Bailey of Reason tried to correct his recent long article on climate change, after what I wrote here. But he still gets it wrong, and still shows he doesn't understand the basics.

His correction says:

The problem isn't with the thickness number! It's with the whole concept of acceleration!

His correction is very fuzzy and doesn't address the problem in any way.

The problem is that acceleration isn't measured in millimeters, or feet, or any unit of length. It's measured in units of length per time-squared (say, mm per year-squared).

Did Bailey take basic physics? Or did he forget it all?

How come people who don't know science get jobs writing for a place for decades, and I'm still struggling as a freelancer? Must be my noxious personality.

The First Big Pollution Event

I like this cartoon from Stoat:

If you don't get it, it refers to the "Great Oxidation Event" of about 2.3 B years ago, a situation sort of like 'your terrorist is my freedom fighter.'

Key West's Sea Level Rise

Perhaps you read the NYT article on sea level rise in Key West, Florida. (Or, as Esquire put it, "The Great Chinese Climate Hoax Is Recreating Venice in the Florida Key.") People there have been dealing with sea level for almost three months now. I looked for the sea level data for Key West, and October had the highest value ever.

click to enlarge

Sea level there is about 210 mm (8 inches) higher than last October. Another view is

click to enlarge

Right now I'm not in the mood to calculate the error bars. Calculation of error bars is left as an exercise for the reader.

Residents there want their roads raised:

Monroe County, Florida

Elevating a third of the county’s 300 miles of roads could cost $1 billion, Ms. Haag said. “We are the most vulnerable county in the state, if not the nation.”

That works out to $1,900 per foot. Monroe County, Florida has about 78,000 residents, but Key West is only 25,000. So a billion dollars to raise roads is $40,000 per resident. It seems to me difficult to justify that, for a place that is going under anyway. (If the roads don't, beaches and yards and parking lots will. What about freshwater? What about insurance? Who would write a mortgage on any building there put up for sale?) But I don't expect that would stop the federal government, who is going to face a lot of these situations and will want to look like they're doing something, at least to stop the clamor. And there'll be a lot of sympathy for vulnerable residents -- at least until the costs get too high. It's a difficult situation and will be ever more dire. In a hundred years the thing most remembered about Trump will be his idiocy and (by then) criminality on climate change.

What do you think?

PS: In 2016 Monroe County voted 51.0% for Trump, 44.1% for HClinton.

Mann Lawsuit Update: Supreme Court Declines to Hear

From Bloomberg Environment:

The Supreme Court won’t step into a legal dispute between a prominent climate scientist and a pair of conservative organizations that questioned his work and compared him to a convicted child molester.

The justices on Nov. 25 declined to review an appeal from the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the National Review, which want to stop climate scientist Michael E. Mann from pursuing defamation claims against them.

Mann is quoted:

“We are pleased with this nearly unanimous decision by the Supreme Court to deny the appeal” in the defamation case, he said in an email. “We are looking forward to the trial.”

From here:

The case goes back to the local-level Superior Court of the District of Columbia... The proceedings are currently in the discovery phase, with both sides collecting documents to support their arguments.

One Ton of TNT

100 t TNT

Did you know that "one ton of TNT" = 1 billion calories, by definition?

I just stumbled on this when I used the Hiroshima bomb strength of 63 TJ = 15 kt TNT and found 1 t TNT = 4,184,000,000 J and I recognized the "4184" from converting joules to calories. Sure enough it's true.

And it seems this is a metric ton -- I always thought "ton of TNT" meant a British ton (2000 lbs).

Also, 1 t TNT = 1,162 kWh. I would have guessed it was a lot bigger. I used 0.75 t TNT of electricity last month. (Electric heat, unfortunately.)

Huh.

Ronald Bailey Can't Get the Simple Stuff Right

Ron Bailey at Reason wrote a long essay about global warming in which he saw fit to cite Tony Heller (aka Steve Goddard), the Washington Examiner and other drips who have no intersection with the scientific realm. Maybe he's been a denier at-heart so long he just can't help it.

Even still he couldn't get the most simple part of the science right:

A February 2018 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences based on satellite altimeter data reported that sea-level rise at 3 millimeters per year has accelerated at a rate of +0.084 millimeters (about half the thickness of a penny) since 1993.

This isn't just a typo -- Bailey clearly does not understand what acceleration means. (It's not a length, i.e. acceleration isn't measured in units of length [millimeters]. It can't be compared to a penny, anymore than a quart can be compared to an hour.)

I'm a firm believer that if a science writer (or anyone) can't understand the most basic parts of the science, he/she gets no say on the more complicated stuff -- regardless of his/her ultimate conclusion.

The 9s Math Wall Clock

You can order here. (I don't get any money if you do -- just through this was a cool idea.) All 9s in base 10. All square roots taken as positive.

Another Community Grappling with Sea Level Rise

I think the press has caught on, because I'm seeing more and more stories about east coast towns and cities dealing with sea level rise. The other day was this NYT story about Virginia Beach saying no to developers that wanted to build new homes in more frequently flooding wetlands. Today is this well crafted story and video by Tom Horton at Yale e360 about a community, Money Island, on the Delaware Bay in southern New Jersey.

The video isn't embeddable, so you'll have to go there to watch it. But it's worth the 15 minutes. It's a very visceral portrait of real people dealing with the economic and emotional consequences of the rising sea level that is slowly drowning their much loved community. Trump should watch it.

New Jersey's Blue Acres program has been buying out homes there, about 300 of 1500 in five years, after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. This is going to happen along coasts everywhere -- it will be taxpayers who make home owners whole, because the homeowners can't be expected to just write off the value of their largest asset. It also shows how the demise of these communities will accelerate once it begins, as their tax base erodes as people begin leaving and the land left behind turns into tax-exempt open spaces. (Money Island has lost $15 million off their tax base so far.) That leaves less money to deal with the effects of rising tides on roads and other infrastructure. It's a downward spiral.

The operative word is "undevelopment." We're going to be seeing a lot more of that as time goes by.

What If You Removed All Greenhouse Gases*

This animation by Chris Colose of NASA GISS shows what would happen to the Earth if all noncondensing greenhouse gases* (CO2, CH4, N2O...but not water vapor) were removed from the atmosphere: most of the planet would freeze over:

What would happen if you suddenly removed all the greenhouse gases from the atmosphere?

This animation by @CColose shows that icy regions would expand to cover large parts of the planet and global temperature would drop by about 30°C. pic.twitter.com/vB0ckLpezZ

— Ed Hawkins (@ed_hawkins) November 19, 2019

Raymond Pierrehumbert has a nice paragraph in his textbook that explains more:

"One sometimes hears it remarked cavalierly that water vapor is the 'most important' greenhouse gas in the Earth's atmosphere. The misleading nature of such statements can be inferred directly from Fig 4.31.... If water vapor were the only greenhouse gas in the Earth's atmosphere, the temperature would be a chilly 268 K [< 0°C], and that's even before taking ice-albedo feedback into account, which would most likely cause the Earth to fall into a frigid Snowball state.... With regard to Earth's habitability, it takes two [water vapor and CO2] to tango."

- Raymond Pierrehumbert, Principles of Planetary Climate, (2011) p. 271

What Bothered Serge Lang

Besides being a great mathematician in (but not limited to) number theory, Serge Lang was an activist who spoke out on a great many topics. For example, in 1971 he resigned his position at Columbia University to protest their treatment of anti-war protestors without having another job lined up. (A year later Yale offered him a position). He also disliked the use of sloppy mathematics in the social sciences -- for example, he successfully lobbied (twice) against a membership in the National Academy of Scientists for Harvard political scientist Samuel P Huntington, who used pseudo-mathematical arguments to prove that 1960s South Africa was a "satisfied society." In an earlier protest (1981) of the 1979 book The 1977 Survey of the American Professoriate, he wrote this, which is not just very elegant but unfortunately seems exponentially more relevant today in all areas of society:

I don't like the nonsense that passes for rational discourse so often in our society. I am very much bothered by the inaccuracies, ambiguities, code words, slogans, catch phrases, public relation devices, sweeping generalizations, and stereotypes, which are used (consciously or otherwise) to influence people.

I am bothered by the inability of many to recognize these for what they are. I am bothered by the way people fudge issues, or are unable to clarify them, sometimes because they are inhibited by "collegiality" and other forms of intimidation (sometimes subtle, sometimes not). Most people put up with the nonsense without doing anything about it (unable or unwilling, for whatever reason - inertia, lack, of energy, lack of interest, lack of time, etc.), often falling into cynicism and despair.

I am bothered by the misinformation which gets disseminated uncritically through the media and by the obstructions which prevent correct information from being disseminated. These obstructions come about in many ways - personal, institutional, through self-imposed inhibitions, through external inhibitions, through outright dishonesty, through incompetence - the list is a long one.

I am bothered by the way misinformation, disguised as scholarship, is used in social, political, and educational contexts to affect policy decisions.

I am bothered by the way misinformation is accepted uncritically, and by the way people are unable to recognize it or reject it.

GISS: Temperature Rise Accelerating?

NASA GISS reported their surface temperature numbers for October.

globally: 2nd warmest October (1.04°C)
Northern Hemisphere: warmest October (1.34°C)
Southern Hemisphere: 3rd warmest October (0.75°C)
land-only: warmest October (1.34°C)

The graphs are looking alarming. For the globe:

That sure looks like an acceleration.... So does this, also for the globe:

Land-only warming is now 1.33°C (2.39°F). It's 30-yr trend is +0.28°C. It also looks to be accelerating:

Climategate Retrospective

Tempus fugit. It's been 10 years since the hacked emails of Climategate were released. (Wikileaks has the files.)

It was an interesting chapter, and it may have scuttled anything meaningful coming out of the 2009 Copenhagen Summit, which was held only a few weeks after the hack, which was its apparent goal. IFIRC there was a lot of hope going into that conference, and maybe the world was ready then to follow Al Gore and do something meaningful to address climate change. Would it have mattered? I don't know, but given that it's 10 years later and we're still struggling to do anything meaningful about climate might indicate a solid agreement at Copenhagen wouldn't have mattered much -- or, at least, not more than the Kyoto Protocol, whose targets were blown right past. I think the world would still be doing as little as it is today to address climate change even if the hacked emails hadn't been released -- the people making the big decisions aren't motivated by the science or what scientists wrote to each other about the science, they're motivated by (it seems to me) keeping the fossil fuel industry happy. (Even Obama, who wanted it both ways.) But maybe I'm wrong.

I was mentioned four times, I think, in the Climategate emails. They were very minor and I'm not going to pretend I mattered and I only got a couple of harassing emails from it. (Who know what it would be like if it happened in today's Internet environment.)

From: "Chris de Freitas" <c.defreitas@auckland.ac.nz>
To: Inter-Research Science Publisher <ir@int-res.com>
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 13:45:56 +1200
Subject: Re: Climate Research
Reply-to: c.defreitas@auckland.ac.nz
CC: m.hulme@uea.ac.uk
Priority: normal
X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12c)
Otto (and copied to Mike Hulme)
I have spent a considerable amount of my time on this matter and had my integrity attacked in the process. I want to emphasize that the people leading this attack are hardly impartial observers. Mike himself refers to "politics" and political incitement involved. Both Hulme and Goodess are from the Climate Research Unit of UEA that is not particularly well known for impartial views on the climate change; The CRU has a large stake in climate change research funding as I understand it pays the salaries of most of its staff.  I understand too the journalist David Appell was leaked information to fuel a public attack.

Presumably this pertains to an article I was reporting for Scientific American about the 2003 Soon and Baliunas paper that came out 6 days after De Freitas's email. But his claim was untrue -- I was never leaked any information. (If only I was so fortunate.) Any information I had I received by simple reporting -- making phone calls and sending emails. I don't consider that article an "attack," just journalism. You can see that in another email, by Ross McKitrick:

From: Tim Osborn <t.osborn@uea.ac.uk>
To: "Phil Jones" <p.jones@uea.ac.uk>,"Keith Briffa" <k.briffa@uea.ac.uk>
Subject: Fwd: Re: McIntyre-McKitrick and Mann-Bradley-Hughes
Date: Fri, 07 Nov 2003 16:12:53 +0000
<x-flowed>
>From: "Sonja.B-C" <Sonja.B-C@hull.ac.uk>
>Date: Fri, 7 Nov 2003 15:58:06 +0000
>To: Steve McIntyre <smcintyre@cgxenergy.com>
>Subject: Re: McIntyre-McKitrick and Mann-Bradley-Hughes
>Cc: L.A.Love@hull.ac.uk, Tim Osborn <t.osborn@uea.ac.uk>,
>         Ross McKitrick <rmckitri@uoguelph.ca>
>Priority: NORMAL
>X-Mailer: Execmail for Win32 5.1.1 Build (10)
>
>Dear Steve
>Please send your material for comment direct to Tim, Osborne.I
>would like to publish the whole debate early next year, but
>'respectful' comments in the meantime can only help and the CRU people
>seem genuinely interested and have integrity. I have never heard of
>such bad behaviour here as appears to have been the case between
>Sallie and Soon and the rest..the US adversarial system and too many
>egos??
>As you know ,the  contact is Tim Osborn <t.osborn@uea.ac.uk> and I take
>the liberty to forward this to him now. You seem to suggest that this
>is welcome and are making make direct comments on his remarks to me
>concerning your paper.
>
>We shall get the printed proof, as a  single electronic file today, and
>shall look through it early next week. I am sure you do not want to see
>your paper again?  I think that adding anymore now (the exchanges
>between you and Mann/Bradley and perhaps now Tim as well)  is  premature
>and we shall wait until the next issue. Mann is said to be writing
>something, but he has not yet contacted me, though I just hang up on
>that journalist Appell who keeps on ringing. I told him that I will
>deal only directly with Mann. What cheek, after threatening me with
>litigation...Just keep me in the loop. Thanks.

The other mention was something I'm proud of:

From: Keith Briffa To: "Michael E. Mann" , Tom Wigley , Phil Jones

, rbradley@geo.umass.edu
Subject: Re: Soon et al. paper
Date: Tue May 20 16:07:41 2003
Cc: Jerry Meehl , Caspar Ammann , mann@virginia.edu

Mike and Tom and others
My silence to do with the specific issue of the Soon and Baliunas conveys general strong agreement with all the general remarks (and restatement of many in various forms ) by Tom Crowley, Mike Mann, Neville Nichols and now Tom Wigley regarding the scientific value of the paper and its obvious methodological flaws. I have to say that I tended towards the "who cares" camp , in as much as those who are concerned about the science should see through it anyway . I also admit to thinking that some of you seem a little paranoid (especially in the implication that Climate Research is a pro sceptic journal) but I am changing my mind regarding the way the "meaning" of the BS paper is being presented to the wider public - in response to some very poor recent reporting in the British press and several requests from the US that indicate that those of you who work there can not simply rely on the weight of good science eventually showing through as regards the public perception . As Tom W. states , there are uncertainties and "difficulties" with our current knowledge of Hemispheric temperature histories and valid criticisms or shortcomings in much of our work. This is the nature of the beast - and I have been loathe to become embroiled in polarised debates that force too simplistic a presentation of the state of the art or "consensus view". Having read Tom W's and Mike's latest statements I now agree about the need to make some public comment on BS . (I too have given my personal view of the work to David Appell who I assume is writing a balanced view of this paper for Scientific American).

I'm proud that a good scientist like Briffa assumed I would be writing a balanced article, because that's what I always try to do. ("Balanced" doesn't mean a 50-50, he-said she-said article type.)

--

Finally, when Climategate v2.0 broke in November 2011, I wrote some things that were way wrong and I don't mind admitting it. I regret not taking more time to think about things. I wrote:

On a second reading of the stolen UAE UEA emails leaked today, and just reading the README file emails, these sound worse than I thought at first – their impact will be devastating.

Their impact wasn't anything like "devastating." I should have known better.

Andrew Yang's Statistics(?)

Andrew Yang isn't going to win the Democratic presidential primary and probably not even be asked to be run as vice-president on the ticket. (Alas.) But he is doing a good job of pointing out the risks of automation.

But I can't follow some of his statistics. In an opinion piece in today's NY Times he wrote

Our economic numbers need to measure what matters. We know stock market prices don’t mean much to the 78 percent of workers in this country who are living paycheck to paycheck or the 40 percent of workers who are a $400 bill away from financial crisis.

But if 40% of workers are $400 away from a bill that will put them in a financial crisis, then 60% of workers aren't in that position -- they apparently have at least $400 in savings, so are not living paycheck to paycheck.

How then can 78% of workers be living paycheck to paycheck, if 60% of workers aren't?

Am I missing something?

PS: I sympathize greatly with anyone who can't afford the health care they need. This is just a technical question.

Movie Recommendations

I watched a couple of good sci-fi movies recently that are worth recommending.

Anymore it seems like sci-fi movies are the only movies I'm interested in. (But not books, so far.) I'm not sure why, since I didn't grow up steeped in sci-fi. I watched and liked Star Trek (the original series), and read books like 1984 and Animal Farm and Brave New World, but not Asimov's fiction or Heinlein or pulp sci fi. (I did read a lot of Asimov's nonfiction during my teens.) I never got into comic books or superheroes or such. I still can't get into them. The harder the sci-fi, the more I like it.

I did read a lot of Heinlein's fiction later in my 20s. Saw Asimov at a sci-fi con in Stony Brook. Looked kinda like a sad gig for him.

The two films I saw recently that I'll recommend are Apollo 18 and Automata.

Apollo 18 (2011) is about a last, secret Apollo mission to the Moon -- "found footage" (like the Blair Witch Trial) -- that tells the story of one last Moon landing on behalf of the Department of Defense. It's a little cliched in terms of (...spoiler alert...) what the astronauts find there, which are extraterrestrials but not an especially interesting kind. (They creep and crawl, and can exist in a vacuum. Boo.) But it's a good story with a great deal of verisimilitude, which is what these recovered footage films live or die on. This one lives. 7.5 of 10.

Automata (2014) is a film I saw a while back but forgot about, so watching it again was a pleasant surprise. It's really quite innovative with a hard, realistic edge, about (...spoiler alert...) an insurance adjuster who must find out why a robot in his dystopian era of manmade robots has started to self-repair. Such repairs and improvements are a violation of the "second protocol" of the robot's programming (similar to Asimov's laws of robotics, but with only two). But the automata have been learning and growing and evolving and getting rather creepy, with, in the end, nothing humans can do to stop them. Antonio Banderas is really excellent in this movie, and so unlike what I remember seeing of him in the '90s. He carries the entire movie, which is set in a novel environment, with some great minor characters played by pre lip job Melanie Griffith and by Dylan McDermott from The Practice. 8.5 out of 10.

Other than these, you can always watch another episode of Firefly. They never get old. Afterward you can cry (again) that so few episodes were ever made.

Ocean Acidification is Accelerating...

...in the western north Pacific. Not a surprise:

In the Subtropical Frontal zone, we found that the mean rate of acidification tracked the acceleration of the atmospheric CO2 increase; during 2008–2017 the rate of acidification was 30% faster than during 1983–2017.

However, using the monthly Mauna Loa CO2 readings, I find its average from 2008-2017 was 395.5 ppm, while its average from 1983-2017 was 371.6 ppm. An increase of only 6.4%.

Hmm.

An El Nino This Winter?

It was a very cold October here in Oregon -- the statewide average was 4th-lowest since 1895, according to NOAA's data. 2019's average temperature will very likely be below the 1980-2010 baseline, which hasn't happened since 2011.

In other news, German organizations are forecasting an El Nino this winter by the end of 2020 and spring. This is the first I've seen of such a call.

Early warning: Physicists from Giessen, Potsdam and Tel Aviv forecast "El Niño" for 2020

Researchers at Justus Liebig University Giessen (JLU), the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, find that there will probably be another "El Niño" by the end of 2020. The prediction models commonly used do not yet see any signs of this.

Take that for what it's worth. The NINO 3.4 region has been all over the place in recent months, but not above 0.5 C, the threshold for El Nino events:

My Apology to Nic Lewis

Today I sent the following email to Nicolas (Nic) Lewis. I'm posting it here with his permission. Also, I've amended my Nov 15th post of last year to note this apology.

Dear Mr. Lewis,

I'd like to apologize to you for a comment I made after you critiqued Resplandy et al. I wrote a blog post on Nov 15th titled "Nic Lewis Owes Resplandy et al an Apology." I thought you were quick to criticize them for a lack of a quick response, and somewhat still do, but that now seems minor in light of their retraction. I regret my blog post and extend an apology to you.

With your permission I'll post this email to on my blog, and also point to it right under the title of my Nov 15th post, so Google searches see it.

Sincerely,

David

He has kindly accepted my apology.