Dave Werth

I have been avoiding some text messages on my phone for over nine months.

They were from Dave Werth, who lived here in Salem. He commented here on this blog, and elsewhere, as "Riverrat."

He liked to travel down rivers on inflatable rafts -- hence his nickname. Dave got in touch because he read my blog, and after I moved to Salem, where he lived, we had beers several times, and once went to Portland together to see James Hansen speak.

He was a software programmer for Garvin, who makes GPS devices. Later he invited me on a rafting trip down the Snake River, but I couldn't make -slash- was afraid I couldn't make it.

We didn't know each other well. My fault mostly. I do not make new friends easily, a bane of mine, a painful difficulty.

The last time I saw him, sometime in spring 2018, we met at a McMenamins -- a pub -- in suburban Salem. We commiserated about our various ailments -- being two lonely single guys in our 50s -- and he told me he had cancer, and it was consuming his insides, and it was pretty serious. Sadly, I'm not really sure I knew him well enough to understand its full extent.

And then, just before Christmas last year, December 18th, I was in my bathroom trimming my pathetic little beard to go somewhere and I received this text message:

(1/3) David, we haven't been in contact much lately but I want to let you know they found a big cancerous tumor in my liver and it's not likely I'll survive much past Christmas. But we had a few interesting times together like the Hansen lecture and I felt like I owe you something before I just disappeared. Thanks for some good memories, Dave Werth.

I called him immediately. I didn't know what to say. He was surprisingly forthright about it all. We talked, about the few times we had together, and also about global warming, something we had often talked about, because we knew each other through my blog. I remember us agreeing that global warming had turned a corner due to Hurricanes Garvey in Houston and Maria in Puerto Rico the previous year.

We only talked for a few minutes. Our friendship wasn't deep. Perhaps that was my failing. What do you say in such a situation? I said I was thankful I knew him and I had fond memories and I regretted I wasn't able to raft with him down the Snake River.

Then it seemed his illness lingered and he was going to live past Christmas. A few days later he send a group text:

(1/2) Folks, turns out things are not quite as dire as I was making out earlier today and I'm not going to die tonight or not likely in the next several days.

(2/2) I'm making this generic message so I can copy and paste and save some energy.

He was so open and direct.... He lived until the new year. Dave died on January 12th in the presence of both of his sisters. I think, from what I can tell, that that was a happy situation for him.

I didn't know him well enough to go to his funeral, I thought, but now I think I did and I made a mistake by not going and I'm kicking myself. Knowing me, I will kick forever.

I haven't been able to fully look at Dave's text messages until today -- I've been carrying them on my phone since December.

But today I was able. Again I didn't know him well. But Dave was special because he was astonishingly willing and able to look his death straight in the face and accept it. I didn't know a lot about him, but wish I did. He had a lot of dignity and bravery in his final weeks. He didn't have a wife or kids but he had his sisters and he had courage. He really impressed me. He moved me. No one else in that situation has ever done exactly the same.

And I've been thinking about it, and about him, ever since, with his text messages on my phone. Until today. Today I was able to read them. Today I was finally able to write this.

The Greta Thunberg Helpline

If you’re a grown adult enraged by 16-year-old activist @GretaThunberg, satirist @markhumphries and his co-writer @evanwilliams have created a new service that could help. #abc730 pic.twitter.com/vkbuSpwa9U

— abc730 (@abc730) September 26, 2019

Fox News Apologizes

	Ken Rice (@theresphysics)
9/24/19, 8:02 AM Fox News apologises to Greta Thunberg for pundit's 'disgraceful' remark theguardian.com/media/2019/sep…

The Acceleration

Or, "the surge."

Back during the 1998-2012 14-year warming "pause" everyone was fixated on it; now we are in the midst a 2005-2019 14-year warming "acceleration" that is just as far above the long term trend as the "pause" was below it. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/bAplhf4GIn

— Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) September 22, 2019

but:

Drawing conclusions about the long-term trend from a selected 14 year period is not very meaningful. At the same time, I can't help noticing there are relatively few academic papers or misguided breathless articles trying to explain the "acceleration"!

— Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) September 22, 2019

"How Dare You."

Maybe she tried just a little too hard to appear angry here, or maybe the rest of us aren't angry enough. I honestly don't know.

Economics as if People Mattered

“What is the meaning of democracy, freedom, human dignity, standard of living, self-realization, fulfillment? Is it a matter of goods, or of people? Of course it is a matter of people. But people can be themselves only in small comprehensible groups. Therefore we must learn to think in terms of an articulated structure that can cope with a multiplicity of small scale units. If economic thinking cannot grasp this it is useless. If it cannot get beyond its vast abstractions, the national income, the rate of growth, capital/output ratio, input-output analysis, labour mobility, capital accumulation; if it cannot get beyond all this and make contact with the human realities of poverty, frustration, alienation, despair, breakdown, crime, escapism, stress, congestion, ugliness, and spiritual death, then let us scrap economics and start afresh.

“Are there not indeed enough ‘signs of the times’ to indicate that a new start is needed?”

-- E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973)

I read this book ages ago, but picked it up recently for a second go at it. It's a bit dated in that some of the defining issues of that age were pollution and nuclear weapons and overpopulation (all still problems, just submersed in lieu of larger problems), but its underlying philosophy is still relevant, and even more relevant.

Here are a few more quotes from Small is Beautiful.

The Heartland Institute's Boycotted "Debate"

Tomorrow the Heartland Institute is having a "debate" in Times Square, NY at 7 pm EDT, 4 pm PDT: "Realists vs. Alarmists."

It will be livestreamed on Youtube.

It looks like no real scientists have agreed to participate.

The "debate" is the same day the Climate Summit begins at the UN begins. HI writes:

The Heartland Institute will host a debate on what is happening to our climate and what we can do about it. That's a debate long-delayed, but never more important than now.

We've cordially invited some of the country's most-prominent advocates for taking immediate action on climate change: Kevin Trenberth, Michael Mann, Don Wuebbles, Katharine Hayhoe, Brenda Ekwurzel, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They blame human activity for global warming,  insist it will be catastrophic to life on Earth, and demand big changes to the way Americans live, work, eat, travel, and build.

Despite listing all these scientists in order to project the appearance of a two-sided debate, none of these invitations have been excepted, as far as I know. Mann said on Twitter that the rejected them, and Alan Robock, though not on the list above, was asked and said no on Twitter and on a geoengineering list I read, writing "I also don't debate gravity." (Here's the emailed invitation the Heartland Institute sent him.) Mann also wrote that Hayhoe and Ekwurzel turned them down.

[Brenda Ekwurzel is senior climate scientist and the director of climate science for the Climate & Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.]

For the deniers: Patrick Michaels, David Legates, and Willie Soon. Ho hum.

I certainly hope the boycott holds until tomorrow night. They deserve it.

Date of the Arctic Sea Ice Extent's Annual Minimum

Here's a plot of the date of the annual Arctic sea ice extent minimum, using NSIDC's data:

There does seem to be a tendency toward later dates as the years go by.

[Numerology alert] If you buy the trendline and its R², the trend is +2 hr 16 min per year, for a total of 3.8 days later in 40 years.

Tim Ball's Video

Tim Ball put up a video that I hadn't seen until now.

Curiously, he seems to think he won his case against Mann on merits -- that his criticisms, never expressed in scientific language, never published anywhere, were somehow meaningful and are what swung the case.

After reading the final judgement, I don't see how that can be true in any sense at all. There was nothing whatsoever in the termination judgement that said anything at all about the hockey stick or its validity. Ball is delusional. That's exactly as Mann's lawyer said, and it shows that all the denying bloggers who claimed so were flat-out wrong. I'm sure they are too cowardly to apologize, but if they had any integrity they would.

Arctic SIE Minimum: 2nd Lowest

Now it's clear that this year's minimum of Arctic sea ice extent will be the 2nd-lowest in the satellite era, after 2012. But still nothing close to 2012's storm-aided plunge.

There's no real competition either from above or from below, according to both JAXA v2 and NSIDC v3 datasets.

To-date 2019's average SIE is on track to be second lowest to, not 2012, but to 2016.

That is, even though 2012 has so far had the lowest daily minimum, it hasn't had the lowest annual daily average. That seems significant. It's not at all impossible that 2019 won't break that number.

My projected annual daily average for 2019 is currently 0.09 Mkm² above 2016's annual daily average, or +0.9%. With about 1/3rd of the year to go.

Dunes on Oregon Coast

North of North Bend, Oregon:

WHITE HOUSE: Adviser who applauded rise in CO2 to leave administration -- September 11, 2019 at 10:58 AM -- www.eenews.net

Yeah.

https://www.eenews.net/stories/1061113085

India's Moon Landing (Today)

India is about to land a craft on the moon, in an hour or two. (4-5 pm EDT, 1-2 pm PDT). You can watch it here. The New York Times has other options.

Added 1:39 pm - it looks like the landing has failed.

US Oil Exports Increasing Exponentially

Or, at least, it looks close to exponential.

I wonder if oil companies aren't looking for one last hurrah $10 trillion before carbon is regulated and/or taxed.

Data from EIA's This Week in Petroleum.

Wishlist

I wish I was a messenger and all the news was good
I wish I was the full moon shining off a Camaro's hood.

Pearl Jam, Wishlist

Brazil's Geography Problem

This video gave me a better understanding of Brazil and its issues with the Amazon rainforest -- most of the big cities in Brazil are near the coast, there's little farmland there, Brazil is a net food importer and they need agricultural land.


I've watched several geography videos from Wendover Productions and they've all been worth it.

Follow-up Statement From Mann's Lawyer

Since some people seem to have reading comprehension issues, here's a followup statement by my lawyer Roger McConchie with regard to the Tim Ball libel suit: pic.twitter.com/mgcho5j3aK

— Michael E. Mann (@MichaelEMann) August 28, 2019

But Tim Ball Didn't Need Mann's Files To Accuse Him

This is such a good point, made in the comments of the last post, that I'm making it a post of its own.

Marco wrote:

Perhaps also of relevance to this point: according to one of my lawyer-friends (disclaimer: not knowledgeable on the Canadian system, but he would be surprised if it were that different there), you cannot use the argument that one's defamatory statements were truthful (or fair based on available knowledge at the time) if one needs information from the aggrieved party in order to find out whether they were indeed truthful.

In short: Ball didn't need Mann's files to accuse him of skullduggery. So why does he need them now?

Statement from Mann's Lawyer

A very different view of what happened in the BC court Friday in Mann v Ball.

Added: I believe Ball was awarded legal costs, but haven't officially confirmed this yet.

BC Court never made any finding that I failed to produce any data. Anyone claiming otherwise is lying or facilitating a lie.
Ball got case dismissed based on:
1. Complaints about his age and poor health
2. Arguing his attacks on me were impotent anyway.

My lawyer's statement: pic.twitter.com/I48leyGxjm

— Michael E. Mann (@MichaelEMann) August 25, 2019

A Decision in Mann v Ball

There has apparently been a decision in Michael Mann's court case against Tim Ball.

I've yet to see anything that's even semi-official, but the two sides are posting their own versions of what happened.

Tim Ball, a prominent climate denier, says

“Michael Mann’s Case Against Me Was Dismissed This Morning By The BC Supreme Court And They Awarded Me [Court] Costs.”

Ball was sue by Mann in a Canadian court on March 25, 2011, for Ball’s allegedly libelous statement that Mann “belongs in the state pen, not Penn State.”

I've never seen any papers by Ball that supported his claim, or any evidence from him that the hockey stick is fraudulent or in any way false. (Indeed, it has been verified a few dozen times by how, most recently by PAGES 2K last month.) Ball isn't a scientist or an expert, which was admitted in an earlier court case by The Calgary Herald, who had contracted for his writing. (Their admissions were pretty brutal.)

Mann seems to have a completely different version of events, which he published on Facebook: