The Reality of Handguns

Number of handgun-related killings by private U.S. citizens that were deemed justifiable homicides: 

-- less than 2.5% over the years 2004-2008.

Source: Julie Cantor, New England Journal of Medicine, June 30, 2010, in turn taken from Crime in the United States, 2008. Washington, DC: Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2009. (Accessed June 30, 2010, at http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/offenses/expanded_information/homicide.html.)

On Auditors

Bart Verheggen (http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com) wrote:
>> Citizen science as the new skepticism?
> Over at Keith’s, I got engaged in a discussion with Judith Curry and
> others about the well educated skeptics who self identify as ”auditors”
> of climate science. She claims that

this group is definitely interested in moving the science forward.

I don't agree with this at all. When Steve McIntyre and other "auditors" spend as much time (or even any time) "auditing" the many fallacious claims in climate science as they do those of Mann (esp) et al, then I'll begin to believe it. But I don't see it at all.

Eli, 1999-2010

Standing Up to Power

Some video technician/nerd is having himself some fun at the World Cup:

"The video operators are under strict instructions from FIFA not to replay controversial calls on the stadium screens, but they have done so on numerous occasions during this tournament."
-- NY Times

How About More Officials?

In the wake of the horrendous call in today's England-Germany match, everyone is talking about instituting "goal-line technology," by which they mean (I think) some kind of video camera/computer setup similar to that at Wimbledon. But how about this: have more officials on the field!

There are only two referees on the field, which is huge (64 m x 100 m). By contrast, an American football field is  53 1/3 yd x 100 yd (48.8 m x 91.4 m), or only 70% as big. For important matches why doesn't FIFA include a couple of extra referees, especially one positioned near each goal?

It must be very difficult to be a soccer referee and be running up and down the field, expected to make important calls while you're doing it. Even the Americans put two extra umpires on the field for playoff and World Series games.

Flight Through a Mandelbox

A Mandelbox is a particular kind of fractal.

You probably have heard about fractals -- "self-similar" objects where, no matter how closely you look at it, it still looks the same. The simplest is perhaps the Koch curve (although this picture is only 3-rd order and how not been divided infinitely many times, as a real fractal is):



Fractals were discovered by Benoit Mandelbrot sometime in the 1970s, and they have truly become useful in science. (I heard Mandelbrot speak a few times, and he is one of the most arrogant people I've ever encountered. Maybe only Lubos Motl tops him.)

Anyway, a famous fractal is the "Mandelbox" - the generation instructions are here


2d Mandelbox fold from Tom Lowe on Vimeo.

Some clever people have created various videos form the point of view of somone flying through a 3-dimensional Mandelbox, and they're pretty amazing:




This one might be the best:




Via: Wimp.com

Hell

From coverage of the Evolution 2010 conference in Portland:

A reception featuring local wine and beer preceded a public lecture by Sean B. Carroll, winner of the second annual Stephen Jay Gould Prize.

Acknowledging the embattled times evolution faces, Carroll got big laughs when, asking non-biologists to raise their hands, he quipped, “You’re all going to hell.”

“The good news,” he continued, “is hell is full of smart, interesting people."

Ghana 2-1 US

US goes home.

It was fun while it lasted.

The Stupid DC Pundits

Do all the young little Journolist writers realize that all their self-protective, self-indulgent ego-stroking is viewed by the rest of the country as just as tawdry as the corruption of our government by corporations and lobbyists?

That, indeed, the rest of the country recognizes that all these little worms are doing is lining up to try and get their little slice of the power pie, with all its compromises and shenanigans, via mentions in a few local power blogs? To be the next Charles Krauthammer or George Will, as if these guys -- who supposedly have it made -- matter?

It's difficult to see how many words have now been expended on the terrible story of Dave Wiegel, who as far as I can tell has not ever contributed one meaningful idea to the national debate -- or, really, has done more than danced at some other poseur's wedding.

Small wonder that the intellectual foundations of our country are collapsing....

What Evidence Would Support AGW?

A few days ago I asked Roy Spencer, the well-known AGW-skeptical scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville who keeps the UAH their satellite records on temperature, what would convince him of a human influence on climate.

Here's his response -- quoted with permission -- not exactly reassuring:

There is no unique fingerprint of AGW. Since it is a "radiative forcing" (radiative energy imbalance of the climate system), it cannot be distinguished from circulation-induced changes such as a decrease in albedo of the Earth (e.g. a decrease in cloud cover) or an increase in atmospheric water vapor or high cloud cover

The AGW crowd either do not believe these changes occur, or they do not know enough to realize that is what they are implicitly assuming.

Some will claim stratospheric cooling IS a signature of increasing CO2, which indeed is possible, but the stratosphere is much simpler in behavior than the troposphere, where clouds and other moist processes have such a huge influence.

So, I do not believe there is any way to recognize AGW...short of global temperatures increasing another 5 deg. C. That would probably make even me a believer. :-)

It has occurred to me that it is possible this debate -- and all the ancillary junk that goes along with it -- will never end. Think about it: suppose we drastically refurbish society and get all of our future energy from renewable, non-carbon sources. It's the year 2080 and temperatures are the same as they are today.

Advocates will argue that it was the switch to non-C energy sources that saved the day. Skeptics will argue that CO2 was not such a big problem all along and we spend $5T for nothing.

Hopefully 2080's science will be advanced enough to distinguish between these two scenarios. But I'm not sure that's a given.

(PS: If you're reading this in the year 2080 AD, PLEASE leave a comment.)

Stuff

Some stuff too small for their own post:

• there is a Cat 5 hurricane loose in the Pacific Ocean -- Hurricane Celia. The National Hurricane Center calls it a "very impressive hurricane," but it's expected to significantly weaken soon. Besides, it's very unlikely to hit the U.S., so the media here won't care about it at all.
• but don't worry, there is a tropical storm that could add drama to the story in the Gulf
• a financial analyst has estimated the cost of cleaning up the Gulf spill at $63B. Unfortunately, most of that cost will be eaten by sea birds and other aquatic life.
• Recommended movie: The Savages (just try not to fall in love with Laura Linney)
• Unrecommended movie: The Quiet Earth (means well, tries hard, but is boring)

Too Good Not to Link To

Via: Andrew Sullivan

The "Blacklist" Paper

Two years ago I heard Stephen Schneider give a talk at a journalism seminar in Portland. He was clearly frustrated at the state of the climate debate, and was essentially dismissive of any notion that AGW wasn't true.

I think I can understand some of where he's coming from. If you read his 1990 book Global Warming: Are We Entering the Greenhouse Century? (and I recommend it, if you can find it in paperback), you'll be astonished to see how much was already known about man's influence on the climate in the 1980s -- clearly enough to even then take the subject very seriously, viz., enough knowledge to take action.

And in 20 years no action at all has been taken. Not only that, but now the entire debate has devolved into a nasty pit unlike anything ever seen in science, and all kinds of clowns and professional prevaricators have come out to openly mock honest, hard-working scientists and even threaten them (as Morano implicitedly does by publishing their email addresses). I hate to say it but you can almost look down this trend and see something truly tragic happening at some point.

I'm sure lots of scientists are frustrated. But this PNAS paper seems unnecessary. Science and scientists have done very well over the centuries by taking the high road, and while I know scientists are human and naturally express their frustration in private, it doesn't belong in a scientific journal, especially one like PNAS. You can't simply chalk up expertise based on number of publications, and who is to say what the science will ultimately be, and analyses like this one never capture all the subtleties of people's positions on a diverse, complex subject, and you just end up making things worse. Now there is one more ancillary topic to argue about instead of the science, which is the very nutrient the pro prevs exist upon.

The Police Reports on Al Gore

You know you want to read them. Here they are.

Gore apparently went by the name "Mr. Stone" when he checked into the Hotel Lucia in Portland. I guess that's better than "Mr. Earth."

Kip Thorne and the Twin Paradox

Here is a beautiful little calculation by Kip Thorne that I just can't resist.

First of all, let me thank Thorne for his massive tomb, Gravitation, which all physicists know as "Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler." Is it the big black book that all physicists tote around for the rest of their lives -- you can often see it behind them when they do on-camera interviews. It's heavy enough to nearly form a black hole of its own.

If  you're a graduate student physics, you have to buy it. It now costs $123, at least on Amazon. I think I got mine for $40, and I still read it a few times a year. Someday I hope to even understand it.

In any case, you all know about the twin paradox: if your twin were to fly away from Earth, while you remained here, he/she would experience time differently than you -- in particular, they would record the length of their trip as much less than yours.

How much less?

Good question. And a complicated one. In particular, your twin would not leave Earth at a constant velocity, but would accelerate (and then decelerate on the turnaround) and so calculations based on special relativity (with that ubiquitous factor of gamma) do not apply.

But here Thorne gives the results of a nice little calculation that is probably on the qualifying exams of his graduate students:

This assumes your twin accelerates away from Earth at g, then (at the midpoint of her journey) switches to a deceleration of -g. Then they turn around and do the same on the way home.

Here, the twin's age is T_M. Your age is T_F.

Thorne gives a nice plot of this calculation here. Here's the bottom line, where "Florence" is your twin and "Methuselah" is you, remaining on Earth:

If Florence's clocks and aging report a round trip time of 10 years, Methuselah will have aged by 25 years. If Florence aged 30 years, Methuselah will have aged 4,500 years. If Florence aged 88 years, Methuselah will have aged 14 billion years, which is the current age of our Universe! Unfortunately, no known rocket fuel, not even thermonuclear fusion, is capable of producing the sustained multi-year-long acceleration required for such a trip.

Isn't physics beautiful?

Romm's Horrible Advice

I'm still not sure what I think of yesterday's controversial Schneider et al PNAS paper, but I am sure about Joseph Romm's remark that

...it is time for the media to stop listening to, quoting, and enabling those who spread anti-science and anti-scientist disinformation.

Romm can stuff it.

While there is little doubt that humans are influencing today's climate -- even Lindzen, Spencer, Lomborg, and others admit that -- and that our methods of generating energy are, over the time-scale of decades, a huge future crisis -- there are still some very important and legitimate questions about climate science and rational skeptics have a role to play in answering them.

For example: just how much of recent temperature increases are due to man's influence (GHGs + land use changes) and how much a natural or random fluctuation -- is it 2/3rds, or 1/3rd, or what?

In the ten years or so that I've been following and covering climate science, there have been a lot of changes in the state of various questions, in both directions. The overall case for AGW seems stronger (compare the IPCC 4AR to the 2AR), and the Arctic is melting faster than was predicted ten years ago, but there are also issues that have been dialed back as further study was done, such as:

• concerns about the potential overturning of the AMOC and its potential to lead to deep cooling in Europe have been lessened
• the Medievel Warm Period may have been more global than first thought
• AGW's ability to strenghten hurricanes seems to have been dialed back (Emanual, et al)
• what about the impact of decreases in cloud cover? Roy Spencer says today's climate can be explained by a mere 2% decrease in global cloud cover
• it's becoming increasingly clear that nations and societies can't cut CO2 emissions without sacrifices in lifestyle, which no one (understandably) wants to do

These are just a few of the issues that immediately pop into my mind. Skeptics -- again, reasonable, thinking, scientific skeptics -- have a role in answering them, and journalists are right to ask for their opinions. That is not "anti-science." There are certainly anti-science forces about (more about that some other time), but dogmatic adherence to a list is anti-journalistic and just as dangerous as wanton skepticism.

US Advances in World Cup

I know I complained about the vuvuzelas, but I think the TV feed has found a way to minimize them. In any case, the US just advanced in the World Cup on a dramatic goal (in extra time!) by Landon Donavan. Pretty exciting.

In fact, the US won their group (ahead even of England).

In Other Sea Level News....

Here's an interesting paper that raises an issue many people haven't thought about: how much water are dams holding back from the sea?

Humans have been building a lot of dams over the last century or so, holding back water that would otherwise be going to the sea (and raising sea levels beyond what's measured).

How much? The authors calculate that dams hold back about 10,800 km3 from running into the sea. As a means of comparison, that's just a bit less than is in Lake Superior (12,000 km3), the world's 3rd largest freshwater lake. (If a cube, it would be 14 miles on each side.)

This dammed water has reduced sea level by 3.0 cm. But, here's where it gets interesting: the weight of the water behind dams lowers land levels near it, which in effect raises the local sea level, by about 0.2 mm/yr, or about 10%.

Source: Fiedler, J. W., and C. P. Conrad, Spatial variability of sea level rise due to water impoundment behind dams, Geophys. Res. Lett. 37, L12603, doi:10.1029/2010GL043462.

Joe Romm and the Deep End

Yet again Joe Romm resorts to extreme catastrophism due to global warming, in Salon:

...sea level rise could hit 4 to 6 feet by century's end and then continue rising a foot or more a decade, until all the land-based ice on the planet is gone and seas are more than 200 feet higher. How will our children's children and their descendants adapt to that?

A foot a decade? For 2 millenia? Where does he possibly get that?

These kind of claims don't help. At all. Except to get you on Fox News (as the liberal target). Which sometimes I think is his major goal.

Goldberg's Skeptical Platitudes

Of all the arguments against dealing with anthropogenic climate change, Jonah Goldberg chooses one of the cheapest:

Of course you can put aside the climate change argument — even if you believe in climate change, America could be in full compliance with Kyoto and then some, and it wouldn't make much of a difference in the amount of CO2 pumped into the world's atmosphere, because the rest of the world won't be switching from fossil fuels any time soon. Meanwhile, as Bjørn Lomborg and others have long argued, there are some far more pressing environmental problems that could use the trillions of dollars that would be thrown away on slightly reducing CO2 emissions by the end of the century (and delaying computer modeled predictions of warming by a few years).

This is an extremely weak argument -- a mere recitation of the age-old Tragedy of the Commons.

First of all, it assumes that the 1997 Kyoto Treaty was intended to be the final word on fixing the climate problem. Of course, it was not, but just a beginning.

Secondly, it assumes the world and its citizens and governments cannot deal with more than more than one problem at once. You never make that assumption in your own life. If you have a heart problem and your roof leaks, you deal with them both -- medications, diet, exercise, and you hire someone to patch the roof.

By Goldberg's argument, one need never pay one's taxes, since it's only a few thousand dollars and the government would  never miss it. You don't need to get vaccinated, as you're just a single individual and won't make any difference among the vast number of others who also aren't getting vaccinated.

And, of course, if the US were to cut their GHG emissions, it would serve as a strong example to the world. We also have plenty of political clout to "encourage" other countries to do the same.

Goldberg's arguments are trivial rather disappointing (not to say embarrassing). Real, intelligent arguments against action on AGW are welcome, but merely repeating age-old platitudes that obviously make no sense serve no purpose.