Obama's Birth Certificate

Now that President Obama has released the long form of his birth certificate, the country can focus on more important issues: why wasn't this released before? How do we know the file wasn't digitally manipulated, or created digitally out of thin air? Where is the paper copy? Is the paper on which it's supposedly printed age-appropriate? The ink? Did the fonts on the document exist when the President was born? Is the spacing right? Why is the document number out of sequence? When role did mainstream climate scientists play in this fraud?

Finally, how do we know that the nonnative baby Obama wasn't exchanged for some legitimate American baby who has been kept hidden all these years in a sea cave on the far side of Oahu?

This only proves that the conspiracy is larger than we ever suspected.

--

PS: Or, as Amanda Marcotte notes, "you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into." I wonder where else that might apply....

Wise Words

Marty Hoffert has an excellent opinion piece in the April 14th issue of Nature, with a very high ratio of wisdom-to-words.

In "Governments must pay for clean-energy innovation" he writes:

Some assert that government investment in transformative energy technology is code for tax and spend, and that suitable technologies already exist, or will be delivered by market forces. Others argue that government incentives such as feed-in tariffs for solar and wind energy are unnecessary, and that clean energy should compete in the market from the beginning. But the idea that private sector entrepreneurship can do the job alone is based on a myth. It took 30 years of government funding of the Internet by the military research
agency DARPA and the National Science Foundation before Wall Street discovered that there was money to be made out of it.

and

No money? US debt now is a comparable per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) to what it was in the Great Depression before the Second World War. By massively borrowing from ourselves to finance President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s miracles of war production and technology development, we saw aircraft morph from biplanes to jets, and nuclear power become a reality, even as the US debt-to-GDP ratio increased to more than 100% by the end of the war. We bet the farm on a stimulus package on steroids — and we won. The United States emerged as the strongest economy on the planet.

and

In the latter part of the ‘American century’, the United States somehow lost its way. No longer ‘makers’, we became a nation of rustbelts, Ponzi schemes and subprime mortgage risk, myopically focused on quarterly earnings and consumerism. What a tragedy it would be to lose America’s talent for innovation after 200 years. Mr President and Congress: open your minds to a civilization powered by wind turbines in harmony with our landscape and continental shelves; solar electricity from deserts and Earth orbit powering our cites; safe, proliferation resistant nuclear reactors; coal gasifiers driving efficient electric power plants with CO2 stored underground; along with energy-efficient homes and public buildings, smart power grids, high-speed rail, electric and biofuelled cars, even carbon-neutral fuels made from sunlight, water and CO2 in the atmosphere more efficiently than nature does by photosynthesis. These are no longer impossible dreams, but realities of new US industries revitalized by American entrepreneurs and a high-tech workforce, much like the one Roosevelt created to fight the Second World War.

and he finishes with:

This is a dream worth rededicating the American experiment to: visionary, and yet science-based, that goal will lift the spirit of our children and grandchildren with passion and the tenacity to make it so. Say it, Barack, shout it from the rooftops, dedicate your presidency to it, and you will stand immortal in the pantheon of American leaders who changed everything.

Nobel Laureate Loners

Krugman’s wife, Robin Wells, an academic economist herself, was recently reading the Ian McEwan novel Solar, whose protagonist is a Nobel Prize–winning physicist who has been married five times, and she found the scenario implausible. "You could never win the Nobel Prize with that kind of personal life," she says. "It’s too distracting."

-- from a profile of Paul Krugman in New York magazine

Price of Gas

Now that gas prices are high people are complaining again, but the thing is, relative to the price of oil it's cheaper than it used to be:

(click to enlarge)

Energy Use By Data Centers

LA Times:

Each month, electricity used to power searches on Google produces 260,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide and is enough to power a freezer for 5,400 years, according to WordStream. The searches use up 3.9 million kilowatt-hours -– the equivalent of 5 million loads of laundry.

A single spam email of the 62 trillion sent each year creates 0.3 grams of carbon dioxide. A Google search for “Soylent Green” spawns the same amount as driving a car three inches.

So spam is responsible for about 20M mt of CO2 each year, or that of about 4 million cars.

Trump, Then, On Universal Health Care

King Combover:

“We must have universal healthcare. I’m a conservative on most issues but a liberal on this one. We should not hear so many stories of families ruined by healthcare expenses.... [The goal of health care reform, wrote Trump, should be a system that looks a lot like Canada.] “Doctors might be paid less than they are now, as is the case in Canada, but they would be able to treat more patients because of the reduction in their paperwork,” he writes.

The Canadian plan also helps Canadians live longer and healthier than Americans. There are fewer medical lawsuits, less loss of labor to sickness, and lower costs to companies paying for the medical care of their employees. If the program were in place in Massachusetts in 1999 it would have reduced administrative costs by $2.5 million. We need, as a nation, to reexamine the single-payer plan, as many individual states are doing.

-- Donald Trump, The America We Deserve (published 2000)

[Via]

Happy Earth Day

On Trump

With a wink and a smile, Muhammad Ali showed that self-promoting obnoxiousness could be charming. Trump shows that it can be merely vulgar.

-- Charles Krauthammer, actually writing something reasonable.

Progress in Climate Models

Here's an image that Phil Mote showed yesterday that I'd never seen before. It's a good illustration of the progress in computer modeling over the 17 years during which four IPCC reports have been issued:




from: IPCC AR4 WG 1 Chapter 1 Fig 1.4 page 113.

UN Blew It on Predictions of Climate Refugees

Six years ago the UN Environmental Program said there would be 50M climate refugees by 2010. Oops. Turns out there are now even more people living in the areas they considered at-risk.

der Spiegel reports:

It was a dramatic prediction that was widely picked up by the world's media. In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the United Nations University declared that 50 million people could become environmental refugees by 2010, fleeing the effects of climate change.

But now the UN is distancing itself from the forecast: "It is not a UNEP prediction," a UNEP spokesman told SPIEGEL ONLINE. The forecast has since been removed from UNEP's website.

Official statistics show that the population in areas threatened by global warming is actually rising. The expected environmental disasters have yet to materialize.

More:

In October 2005, UNU said: "Amid predictions that by 2010 the world will need to cope with as many as 50 million people escaping the effects of creeping environmental deterioration, United Nations University experts say the international community urgently needs to define, recognize and extend support to this new category of 'refugee.'"

It added that "such problems as sea level rise, expanding deserts and catastrophic weather-induced flooding have already contributed to large permanent migrations and could eventually displace hundreds of millions."

In 2008, Srgjan Kerim, president of the UN General Assembly, said it had been estimated that there would be between 50 million and 200 million environmental migrants by 2010. A UNEP web page showed a map of regions where people were likely to be displaced by the ravages of global warming. It has recently been taken offline but is still visible in a Google cache.

The rest of the article is worth reading. It ends:

Meanwhile a new forecast is doing the rounds. At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in February, Cristina Tirado, an environment researcher at the University of California in Los Angeles, warned of 50 million environmental refugees in the future. That figure was a UN projection she said -- for 2020.

I think lots of people need to realize that climate change, excepting the possibility of some kind of climate regime shift, is a problem that unfolds over decades, not years, though the solution cannot (but probably will not, if it does at all). In fact, in some way that's a big part of the problem. And to assign definite years to definite numbers, though that's what governments and policy makers are always going to want, is just going to get you in trouble -- at least at this state of the science. Error bars, people!

PS: der Spiegel has a nice photo gallery that goes along with their article.

Trump

If Donald Trump can't be honest about the top of his head, how can he possibly be honest with America?

America

Via: someecards.com

Climate Seminar Marred by Skeptics

Yesterday I went to a climate change seminar at Portland State University, where OCCRI Director Phil Mote spoke about regional climate models. Mote is always interesting and it was a good talk, but there were some awkward moments where some Portland area climate skeptics tried to use the seminar as an opportunity to score points instead of understand and question Mote's research.

Chuck Wiese, who was once a TV weatherman around here, asked a question about water vapor, but it was basically a lead-in to ask why Oregon should try to cut its '68 metric tons of CO2' when the world emits '3T mt' (I think he said) and so Oregon's contribution would only lower global temperatures some miniscule fraction of a degree. He blitzed Mote with all kinds of numbers (which someone in the audience, who said he worked in exactly this field, say were way off), and finished up with "You guys always say..." to which Mote responded "sounds like an inquisition" and brought the talk back to the his intended topic.

[By the way, that "miniscule fraction of a degree" number that skeptics always throw around comes from the very models they otherwise denigrate.] I debated Wiese in Portland about two years ago, and he actually presented this graph as an example of a valid forecast. It uses, believe it or not, a simple Excel sixth-order polynomial fit, which would predict a temperature below absolute zero in just a few years.

(Naturally, the Portland radio conservative Lars Larson considers Wiese an expert and frequently has him on his program.)

But worse was self-styled climate expert Gordon Fulks, who, after making sure everyone knew he had a Ph.D., asked a question that turned into a rant against Mote that essentially asked 'how is this even science?' He kept interrupting Mote's trying to answer the question and called Mote's work 'calibration.' It was ugly and embarrassing and Mote rightly refused to fall for the bait.

Fulks, by the way, writes op-eds like this one in the Oregonian that needed some serious corrections. Another accused climate scientists of not being honest, and finished with this gem: "All plants and animals owe their very existence to carbon dioxide." An earlier piece he wrote actually heralded the notorious Oregon Global Warming Petition Project, while making sure (again) that everyone knew he had a Ph.D. (Isn't it strange how skeptics always claim there is no such thing as consensus in science, yet point to the Oregon petition to demonstrate a supposed consensus?)

Anyway it was kind of ugly. Hard questions are a good thing at seminars, and I've seen a few heated debates in them about various technical points, but I've never seen people try to simply score points at one.

Followup on the UCS Clean Air Act Ticker

Because, you know, you can never ask too many questions, I contacted the Union of Concerned Scientists to ask about their Clean Air Act Ticker.

As you might recall, my question was: how can the UCS ticker suggest savings of $1.9T from the Clean Air Act when our GDP is only about $15T/yr?

The short answer is: you can't compare the two.

I talked to climate ecologist Rachel Cleetus at the UCS. She explained that avoided costs do not equate to creating GDP, which makes sense.

It is not easy to put an economic figure on the value that people put on life. You can estimate how much people would spend to avoid certain social and environmental negatives, which is what the EPA's report on air pollution does, and then you can extrapolate.

But, how much would you spend to save your life? All that you have, surely, if you really had to.

So these numbers require some interpretation and thought.

Americans Drive Half a Light-Year Annually

Here's an interesting little factoid: Americans collectively drive 3 million million miles a year, which is just over half a light-year.

March GISS Temperature Anomaly is Fairly Large

This is sure to generate some controversy (and no doubt, vitriol thrown in GISS's direction): they've posted their global temperature anomaly for March 2011 as +0.57°C, which is akin to last decade's temperatures and not indicative of a recent worldwide cooling trend (probably due to La Nina and the NAO). UAH pegged it at +0.10°C, though they recently changed their baseline and I don't have time to figure out the conversion right now.

It would be really nice if all those who measured temperatures used the same baseline period.

from "The Two Kinds of Decay"

“This is suffering’s lesson: pay attention. The important parts might come in a form you do not recognize.

You might not know to love it.

But to pay attention is to love everything.”

-- Sarah Manguso, The Two Kinds of Decay

Cat and Dolphins Playing Together

Interesting stuff

Things I've come across lately:

• Some scientists are saying it could be a decade until the aftershocks in Japan subside. (There have been over 200 so far.)
• "...the northern portion of the main island of Honshu lurched more than three feet to the east. Global Positioning System measurements showed places where the surface moved more than 16 feet."
  
• Some climate modelers are starting to conclude that limiting average global warming to 2°C is probably impossible. Meanwhile, climate negotiators continue to dither. And journalists continue to write silly things like this: "When the world temperature reaches 2 degrees Celsius catastrophic impact of climate change like more extreme typhoons, hurricanes, rising sea levels and drought will be beyond control [sic]," as if there's some kind of switch that will be flipped.  
• The Pioneer anomaly -- the unexpected extra deceleration of the Pioneer spacecraft -- may have been solved by a closer examination of how the craft emits and reflects heat.

Clean Air Act Ticker

The Union of Concerned Scientists has an embeddable widget that putatively lists the human and economic savings of the Clean Air Act:






It claims an economic savings of $50T (trillion) since the Act was established in 1970, in 2010 dollars. That number comes from a peer-reviewed EPA report -- they list their methodology here.

The tally comes to a savings of $1M every 17 seconds, or $1.9T/yr. Can that possibly be right in a $15T economy? I don't think so.

Europe's Heat Waves

A paper (sub. req.) in this week's Science gives some estimates of the damage from last year's heat wave in Russia:

Preliminary estimates for Russia referred a death toll of 55,000, an annual crop failure of ~25%, more than 1 million ha of burned areas, and ~US$15 billion (~1% gross domestic product) of total economic loss (15).

from "The Hot Summer of 2010: Redrawing the Temperature Record Map of Europe," David Barriopedro, et al, Science, April 8, 2011, v 332, pp 220-224.

Here's a distribution plot from the paper, with the five hottest (red) and coolest (blue) years marked:

and here's the frequency per-decade:

(here the dotted line is the 95th percentile of the distribution of maximum decadal values that would be expected by random chance.)

Nothing suspicious about this, is there? (Though I'm sure we'll learn by next week that this is suspect because one of the authors stole a pack of gum when he was 8-years old and another sometimes fails to wipe his shoes when he comes into the house.)

Book Review: How to Live on Mars

How to Live on Mars gives you the straight dope about surviving and prospering on Mars -- finding the cheapest flights there, what to do when your rover breaks down and you're still hours from your inflatable habitat, and learning to hustle, connive and bribe your way to wealth, fame, love and happiness.

I wasn't able to find a venue to review this book when it came out, and so set it aside. But now that I'm almost through Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars, I pulled it off my bookshelf. It's a surprising, delightful book.

Zubrin (who in real-life is founder and president of the Mars Society) writes as a future ancestor, "Robert Zubrin," who lives in the early decades of the human colonization of the red planet. This future Zubrin is a character in the best Heinlein tradition -- a smart, hard-working, cynical, money-loving, lusty jack-of-all trades who isn't afraid to bend the rules (or even break them) when they get in his way. He's a survivor who sees development on Mars as the best business opportunity in the solar system, a place for the freedom-loving man (or woman) to stake their claim and then flip it profitably to the to the whoever comes after him, a way for misfits to begin anew and create a world that, this time, avoids all the crap that has come to contaminate living on Earth. He makes his own way, learns what he needs to, accepts his mistakes, and hates government, while always keep an eye open for some potential nookie.

OK, you get the picture. Anyway, Zubrin has clearly thought about all the practical necessities of life on a planet where there is no apparent oxygen, water, food, or building materials. He shows how founders might extract whatever they need, and gives a host of back-of-the-envelope calculations that demonstrate the simple physics, chemistry, biology and geology you'd need to know. So you learn a lot along the way.

This book wasn't at all what I expected. What other reason is there to sit down and read it?

For Muller Before They Were Against Him

ClimateDepot.com is in full bully mode after Richard Muller went off-script. Marc Morano is furious and has Muller's email address on his front page at least four times, in case his readers don't get his intention.

Like Watts (I assume you're read Krugman today), Morano was all in support of Muller when he thought Muller was useful to him:

Prof. Richard A. Muller slams 'hide the decline': 'What was their justification for erasing it? The fact that it went down' (March 18, 2011)

Warmist trashes fellow Warmists: Climategate's 'hide the decline' explained by Berkeley professor Richard A. Muller -- 'They are not allowed to do this in science. It isn't up to our standards' (March 17, 2011)

Now Muller must be trashed by all available means -- he's only in it for the money, by association, by where he's employed, or scientifically.

This is some really, really ugly business, and nothing could be more telling about the these people's true motives and methods. It is reaching new lows all the time, as well as being part and parcel of destroying intellectualism in America. I hope the BEST scientists can withstand the pressure.

 

Of Course Obama Owns a Computer

The NY Times Paywall

I am disappointed with the subscription plan recently announced by the New York Times.

Don't get me wrong -- I love the NYT. If I had to subscribe to only one newspaper, it would be the NYT.

But in this day and age I don't have to subscribe to any single news source. That's what's great about this age, and that's the problem.

When I was in graduate school at Stony Brook I used to love, during warm weather, walking across the railroad tracks to the local deli, buying a chicken salad sandwich and a knish and a copy of the New York Times, and walking over to the track of the local private school and sitting up in the bleachers reading the paper and eating dinner by myself. I guess I was a bit of a loner then. I guess I still am.

But these days I don't get my news from any single source -- I get it from all over, via the Web. This is a great thing.

But the Times disgital subscription doesn't recognize that. At several hundred dollars a year, it acts like my newspaper is still tossed onto my driveway every morning.

Those days are past.

Yes, I want to read Krugman and Douthat and Alessandra Stanley. I want to read their sports columinsts.

But I want to read lots of other people, too. And the NYT people aren't that great (except for maybe Krugman) that I want to read them at the exclusion of all other people on the Web, especially when all these other people put up paywalls as well.

I want good journalists to get paid. I want good newspapers to survive. But I also want to read all over the place. I'd pay about $30-40/month to read newspapers across the Web, but not to read just one of them. Those days are over in the era of the hyperlink.

I will miss clicking thoughtlessly on the NYT button in my bookmarks. I hope that in some fashion they succeed. But not, perhaps, in this fashion.

Japan = 10% of Chernobyl?

According to der Spiegel, a French model calculates that the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan has already released one-tenth of the amount of radiation that was released at Chernobyl in 1986 -- and that was as of last Tuesday.

This site says that the total radiation release from Chernobyl was 100 megaCuries, and that the total release from Three Mile Island was 15 Curies. Thus Chernobyl = 7M x TMI, and if the French model is correct Fukushima = 700,000 x TMI.

We have been very lucky that no one lives immediately east of Japan. (But I wouldn't want to be immediately west of Fukushima either.)

Stuff

Some interesting things I’ve come across recently:

• over 28,000 species of nematodes are known, and there may be as many as a million.
• The freshwater content of the upper Arctic Ocean has increased by about 20 percent since the 1990s.
  
• The scariest path in the world.
• This week's Science magazine says Peak Oil is most probably here: "Despite a near tripling of world oil prices, non-OPEC production, which accounts for 60% of world output, hasn't increased significantly since 2004. And many of those same experts, as well as some major oil companies, don't see it increasing again— ever. In their view, it's stuck on a flat-topped peak or plateau at present levels of production for another decade or so before starting to decline. “Stable [non-OPEC] production is the best we can hope for,” says energy economist Robert Kaufmann of Boston University. “I have trouble seeing it increase more. It’s a wake-up call.”
  

Will this mean less oil consumption, or more war for OPEC's oil?

Intriguing formulas from Randell Mills

I know that Randell Mills' ideas about "hydrinos" (a purported energy state of the hydrogen atom below the canonical ground state predicted by standard quantum mechanics) are not accepted and considered to be cranky, but you have to admit these formulas for the mass ratios of the basic (non-neutrino) leptons (the electron, muon, and tau particles) and the neutron-electron mass ratio are pretty intriguing:

Here alpha is, of course, the dimensionless fine-structure constant, the most famous number in all of physics (approximately equal to 1/137):

Mills' book, The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Physics, is available for free here.

Arizona Caves

Arizona -- who has acted Oh-so-tough against "illegal" immigrants (as if a mere line on a map should tell people where they can and can't go) -- caves because it is costing them too much money!

Here's the letter.

Congrats to all of you who have declined to travel to Arizona or do business with them. Perhaps now the other states who want to be hard-asses will get the message.

And the message is: America is changing.

Decline in Arctic Sea Ice Extent

Arctic sea ice extent has peaked, and it's not especially good news.

According to the JAXA satellite, Arctic sea ice extent peaked on March 8, 2011 at 13.89 M km².

First, let's note that sea ice extent (akin to area) is not the absolute best measure of Arctic melting. That would be, of course, sea ice volume, which is modeled by PIOMASS.

But PIOMASS relies on modeling and is not a direct measurement, so some purists talk about ice extent.

This year, Arctic sea ice extent was lower than last year, and in fact, lower than any year since 2006:

Here the y-axis is in units of millions of square kilometers.

This is one way to look at the data. Here's another:

Which is best? Don't ask me -- deciding that is your job.

Incident on 57th Street

"He tried sellin' his heart to the hard girls over on Easy Street
But they sighed 'Johnny it
falls apart so easy, and you know hearts these days
are cheap'"

Battle of LA Aliens

From Roger Ebert's review of Battle: Los Angeles:

The aliens are hilarious.... They seem to be animal/machine hybrids with automatic weapons growing from their arms, which must make it hard to change the baby.

Actually this isn't so bad of a movie if you aren't expecting an original plot, great character development or sparkling dialog. But it does have great action, gung-ho Marines and some nice helicopter scenes. Any movie with gangs of helicopters is alright in my book.

(PS: Did you know there actually was a "Battle of Los Angeles," during World War II?)

Japanese Radiation Hits the US (at minuscule values)

The EPA announced today that radiation from the stricken Japanese nuclear reactor complex has hit the west coast of the U.S., though at extremely small values, far below natural background levels.

Today in Sacramento, radioactive xenon-133 was detected at approximately 0.1 disintegrations per second per cubic meter of air (0.1 Bq/m³; Bq is a becquerel), the EPA says, "which results in a dose rate approximately one-millionth of the dose rate that a person normally receives from rocks, bricks, the sun and other natural background sources. This validates a similar reading of 0.1 Bq/m3, taken from March 16 through 17 in Washington State."

They continue:

These types of readings remain consistent with our expectations since the onset of this tragedy, and are to be expected in the coming days.... Following the explosion of the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine in 1986 – the worst nuclear accident in world history – air monitoring in the United States also picked up trace amounts of radioactive particles, less than one thousandth of the estimated annual dose from natural sources for a typical person.

I don't know about you, but I feel better about all this when they give the actual numbers instead of vague qualifiers like "low."

So how small is a becquerel? According to Wikipedia: "...natural potassium (K40) in a typical human body produces 4,000 disintegrations per second, 4 kBq of activity. The nuclear explosion in Hiroshima (14 kt or 59 TJ) is estimated to have produced 8×10²⁴ Bq (8 YBq, 8 yottabecquerel).

New Data on Arctic Sea Ice Volume

PIOMASS has new data on Arctic sea ice volume:



(The gray bands are one- and two-standard deviations.) They don't give actual numbers, so it's difficult to tell how this point in time compares to last year. But overall the data is clearly nothing to cheer about, especially the change in the trend that occurred around 2001. (That is to say, the melting is accelerating.)

Of course, Congress has already decided there is no warming taking place, so just move along, OK?

Republicans and the Value of Pi

Some day this vote ("Committee Republicans Unanimously Reject Measures Reaffirming Science Behind Global Warming") is going to look just as asinine as this one.

For the sake of future historians, here are those who voted against moving an Amendment to H.R. 910 out of House Energy and Commerce Committee, which said

SEC. 4. CONGRESSIONAL ACCEPTANCE OF THE SCIENTIFIC FINDINGS OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY. Congress accepts the scientific finding of the Environmental Protection Agency that ‘‘Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.’’.

Note that the bill didn't even say why these changes are taking place -- only that they are.

An A.T Journey

6 months on the Appalachian Trail -- I miss it:


Green Tunnel from Kevin Gallagher on Vimeo.

About Paper

Via: someecards

Quote on Cosmology

A radio interviewer once asked me why anyone should care about cosmology. I was about to launch into the usual "origins of everything we know" answer, but then stopped and said "You know, if you don't think it's just totally cool, I can't really help you out." 

-- Michael Lemonick, Time science correspondent

Picture from Japan

The most impressive picture I've seen so far, from Japan (via Al Jazerra):

More on the West Coast Tsunami

This SF Chronicle article says the tsunami hit Crescent City, CA about 7:30 am yesterday morning, with waves at least 8.1 ft high, destroying 6 docks and 35 boats.

Here's an impressive video from Santa Cruz, via CNN:

Aftershocks

There are an amazingly large number of very strong aftershocks from the Honshu earthquake -- here's a list.

Speed of the Tsunami

The Honshu earthquake traveled about 350 mi/hr across the Pacific ocean to reach Brookings, OR.

--

Earthquake time/lat/long: 

3/10/11 9:46 pm PST

38.322°N   142.369°E

Brookings, OR tsunami arrival (appx):
3/11/11 11:00 am PST
42°3′27″N   124°17′11″W

Then it's some spherical trigonometry (or you can use this handy site) to find the surface distance traveled was about 4,633 miles in 13 hrs 14 minutes.

Videos of Oregon Tsunami

Tsunami Hits Oregon Coast

A tsunami from the Japanese earthquake hit the southern coast in Oregon, causing $10M in damage. The waves were less than 3 ft high, but powerful in places (especially Brookings). One man taking pictures was swept out to sea. Here's a photo gallery from the Oregonian.


The tsunami struck about 11 am PST yesterday

Art Robinson and His Children

Probably by now you know about Art Robinson's op-ed in World News Daily. 

Robinson, who founded the somewhat mysterious Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine (responsible for the infamous Oregon Petition against man-made global warming) published an article in WND claiming that Oregon State University was mistreating three of his children.

(Re OISM -- who funds them? Do they have any students? Any classrooms? Lectures? I have never been able to figure this out.)

Well, Robinson said more than that. He used all kinds of inflammatory and charged language, making ad hominem attacks on several members of the Nuclear Engineering Department at OSU, where these "kids" of his are students.

I put 'kids' in quotes, because these are 'kids' are grown-ups in their 20s, and it's a little strange for a parent to be interceding in the graduate education of their children.

Curiously (and tellingly), Robinson didn't say what OSU's problems were with his children's graduate programs. You might have expected at least that from any reasonable complaint.

But no, Robinson encouraged criticism of OSU and its Nuclear Engineering faculty, yet wasn't willing to share any of the true facts behind the issue, instead choosing to claim that it was all due to political payback because he had the temerity to run for Congress.

(Which he lost handily to Peter DeFazio, 54% to 43%.)

I wrote Art Robinson on 3/7 when this story appeared, but he has not responded.

Naturally, many unthinking right-wing bloggers repeated his accusations without once bothering to ask for the other side of the story.

OSU says they can't comment due to federal privacy laws. But they have said:

“It is regrettable,” the university said in a statement, “that Mr. Robinson continues to spread these false claims, causing concern where none is due. Despite the significant and ongoing attention that the university has given these matters, he has engaged in a pattern of inflammatory and reckless communication riddled with inaccuracies.”

But the Corvallis Gazette-Times has done some digging, and interviewed one of Art Robinson's children, Joshua, yesterday.

Joshua Robinson is 29 years old, with three children, which raises the question of why his father is standing up for his rights instead of him doing so himself. The needed facts are sketchy, but Joshua Robinson (and his twin sister Bertha) have apparently been masters students for 4.5 yrs now.

Which is long time. When I was in graduate school at Stony Brook, most of us got our Master's degree in three semesters. Our graduate careers were only funded for five years -- you were expected to get your PhD by then, or pay your own way. (I took 5.7 yrs, and survived on basically nothing for the last 0.7 years, living with my girlfriend. Curiously, it was the best semester I spent there in terms of my personal and social life.)

I don't know if Robinson's children are part-time or full-time. But clearly the department has an incentive to move their students along, both to weed out those who don't make the grade (for their own sake if nothing else) and to make room for new students.

4.5 years is a very long time to be a Master's student. To me it indicates a problem, either in commitment or competence or both.

Quote

"Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form."

-- Nabokov

(Via)

The Google Paradox

New Level of Limbaugh Inanity

Today in History: Rush Limbaugh reached a new level of inanity, questioning whether NASA sabatoged today's lost climate data satellite:






Of course, this is theater, as is most talk radio. This scene deserves some kind of award, though.

Cat Science

On the Repeating JAXA Data

It turns out there is a perfectly rational explanation for the repeating numbers in the JAXA data for Arctic sea ice extent. The area is calculated by counting pixels in a satellite photograph, and each pixel has an area of 156.25 km². So the total extent is going to be an integer multiple of that amount: 0156, 0312, 0468, etc.

Corporate Tax Revenues Near Historical Lows

Kevin Drum presents an astonishing image:



Let's be clear: the difference between 6% of GDP and 1% of GDP is now about $750B/yr. That's about half of our federal deficit. And that doesn't even include the Bush tax cuts.

People: your government, your society, your very livelihood is being stolen out from under you. By corporations and by the super-rich.

Why are the only revolts occurring in the Middle East?

What is so scary is that many Americans are apparently now too stupid to understand this. Literally. The high-school graduation rate in Texas is 61%. For high school.

America is being chewed up and swallowed by the rich and powerful unlike any country that has ever existed. And what is worse -- and incredibly, incredibly sad -- is that ordinary Americans like those in the Tea Party Movement are abetting this process.

I almost wish I was living 150 yrs in the future so I could begin to make a really objective historical study and accounting of this era. It is going to make for some very fascinating reading.

I have a 6-yr old nephew and a 3-yr old niece. My advice to them, if they ask, will definitely be: seek your fortunes elsewhere. For we are a rapidly sinking ship.

Jacoby's Lack of Logic

Only a blinkered conservative Apparatchik could possibly write this:

Average federal wages far outstrip those in the private economy. When benefits are included, federal worker compensation averages $123,000 — more than double the private-sector average of $61,000. Federal employees don’t need collective bargaining to be treated well, and the lack of bargaining rights has not busted federal-employee unions.

This is Jeff Jacoby, the Boston Globe's token conservative.

Uh, Jeff: the very reason that these workers are outstripping the private sector (and more power to them) is because they are organized.

And more power to them.

Do we really want federal and state employees -- i.e. our neighbors, if not our spouses and ourselves -- to take pay and benefit cuts? If so, who do you suppose will be next?

Who has been next, in the great economic mess we've been experiencing since the mid-70s?

Where I grew up -- southwestern Pennsylvania -- most of the people I knew, my father and my grandpap and my uncles and my aunt (who bravely went to college in her 30s, with three kids, to become a teacher and a union activist) -- belonged to unions, mostly as steelworkers or machinists, and they did OK by them. They bought houses and cars and supported their families.

As their unions were busted, as the oil crisis of the '70s ruined the post-war environment, inflation and stagflation and all that, these men lost their jobs and their careers and their health and their aim. Men in their 50s were playing golf at the local course in the mornings, and tending bar in the evenings. Is this really the America we want for anyone?

Did February Sea Ice Extent Set a Record Low?

Joseph Romm writes that February 2011 Arctic Sea Ice Extent tied for a record low, but this isn't true according the Japanese JAXA satellite data.

According to JAXA, the average sea ice extent for Feb 2011 was in second place (according to my calculations):

avg for Feb 2006: 13.44 Mkm²

avg for Feb 2011: 13.52 Mkm²

Of course, sea ice extent isn't the best measure of Arctic melting -- that would be volume, which (as far as I know) is only calculated by PIOMASS (based, yes, partly on a model). That data isn't publicly available, so we don't know.

If extent was high I'm sure people like Romm would point out that it's really volume that matters. But since extent is low, they are OK with quoting it -- at least, according to someone.

Granted, it is strange that (as of March 1st) this year's sea ice extent is 2.6% below last year's value, what with the current phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation and all the northern hemisphere cold and all that.

Krugman on The Median Income Question

"Medieval theologians debated how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. Modern economists debate whether American median income has risen or fallen since the early 1970s. What’s really telling is the fact that we’re even having this debate. America is a far more productive and hence far richer country than it was a generation ago. The value of the output an average worker produces in an hour, even after you adjust for inflation, has risen almost 50 percent since 1973. Yet the growing concentration of income in the hands of a small minority has proceeded so rapidly that we’re not sure whether the typical American has gained anything from rising productivity."

-- Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal, p 124.

(Definitely a book worth reading.)

Why the Repetition in Sea Ice Data?

Here's something strange that I'm surprised no nitpicking skeptic (you know, the ones who snidely imply that every little error in every little thing anywhere refutes standard climate science): repetition in the JAXA data for Arctic sea ice extent.

Specifically the last 4 digits in the 7 and 8 digit numbers repeat far more often than expected by chance. For example, the extent numbers end in "0156" 59 times (as of today). "0938" comes up 54 times. Etc. These all occur much, much higher than chance (which is less than once in a data set this size), and suggest there might be a small systematic error in the data.

Weird. I've asked JAXA about it.

Letter

"Thoughtful National Academy documents have no impact when ideology is the rule of the land."

-- Andrew D. Leavitt, Science, Feb 25, 2011, letter to the editor

More KSR

     "What political parties do we support?" Sax asked.
     "I don't know. The usual array I guess."
     "No party gets much support. Whatever works, you know."
     Sax knew. That was the old tech position, held ever since scientists had become a class in society, a priest caste almost, intervening between the people and their power. They were apolitical, supposedly, like civil servants-empiricists, who only wanted things managed in a rational scientific style, the greatest good for the greatest number, which ought to be fairly simple to arrange, if people were not so trapped in emotions, religions, governments, and other mass delusional systems of that sort.
     The standard scientist politics, in other words. Sax had once tried to explain this outlook to Desmond, causing his friend for some reason to laugh prodigiously, even though it made perfect sense. Well, it was a bit naive, therefore a bit comical, he supposed; and like a lot of funny things, it could be that it was hilarious right up to the moment it turned horrible. Because it was an attitude that had kept scientists from going at politics in any useful way for centuries now; and dismal centuries they had been.

     -- Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars

The Mean Kitty Song

Gaddafi

If you were dictator of your own country, wouldn't you promote yourself from Colonel to at least, say, General?

(Officially, his title seems to be Brotherly Leader and Guide of the First of September Revolution of the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.)

PS: The world has definitely changed.

KSR Quote

"It was amazing how floridly elaborated a pseudoscience could get. A compensation technique, perhaps; a desperate attempt to be more like physics. But what they did not understand was that physics, while admittedly complicated, was always trying very hard to become simpler."

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars

Hadley Says....

... Jan 2011 was the coldest Jan in (only) the last four years, at 0.204°C...., a bit surprising given the strong NAO now in place.

Fanaticism (and Christina Wilson)

"Members of the fanatic group are taught to have a common hatred, a single foe, a devil." 

-- Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

And here is Christina Wilson, Development Officer of CFACT at the recent CPAC:

The True Believers

My recent post on Mark Haartsgaard was picked up on dailycaller.com, so I'm now getting unindated with all kinds of rude people. Almost all of them are afraid to use their real identity, of course, like "bigc" who won't even show a Blogger profile. He writes:

Let's face it - the whole man-made global warming movement has been thoroughly discredited, and is in the final stages of its lifecycle.

I honestly don't know how anyone reaches such a conclusion, except that they must only read web sites that agree with their preconceived notions and avoid all discussions of the science. Because the truth is that there is absolutely no doubt in scientific circles about the reality of a human influence on climate, for anyone who reads science journals or follows science journalism, and this is getting stronger all the time (and has been for at least two decades now).

There is something going on here beyond science and beyond advocacy and far beyond politics. It is a denial of rationality itself, of the scientific method that has so benefited our civilization for the last 400 years, and of intellectualism.

I think Paul Krugman had a good point the other day: many people now think that to be a "conservative" they must now adhere to certain beliefs no matter what supports them. It's gotten to the point where it might really be a matter of mass delusion, something like Eric Hoffer wrote about in The True Believer -- Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, which you should read if you haven't. Because we are beyond logical thinking here, and that is very, very dangerous territory.

For example, why would any intelligent group of leaders vote to deny the ability of a government agency (who is using the best science of its time) to protect its present and (esp) future citizens. It defies sense. It's almost suicidal. But that's where now at.

Who Is This Girl?

You may have seen this charming photograph from the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, where this cute little girl decided to mock one of the major scientists of our time:

So who is this little chickie?

Anyone know? I'd like to call her up and ask her what she knows about climate change.

Anyone? Someone out there must know.... Please ask around -- she must have some incredible knowledge about paleoclimate that we all need to know about....

Write me:
david.appell@gmail.com
Twitter: @davidappell

The Thing With Zombies

I have never really understood the world's fascination with zombies (or, for that matter, vampires), though I have glimpsed it in films like 28 Days Later, Omega Man (maybe -- just maybe), and I am Legend.... but this game trailer is so amazing I think I might have had a revelation:



via: AndrewSullivan.com

PS: This is apparently one hell of an amazing game. Scary, even.

Prequels for Famous Movies

This is too funny not to post: David Pogue (NY Times) on his book containing replies from his Twitter readers to his posted questions:

To this day, I can’t stop laughing at some of the replies to, “Make up a prequel for a famous movie.” The responses included “Young Yeller,” “Flirts With Wolves,” “Conceived on the Fourth of October,” “Mr. Smith MapQuests Washington,” “There Goes Private Ryan—I Hope He’ll Be O.K.,” and my personal favorite, “We’re Running Low on Mohicans.”

A Republican in Texas

It must be really, really difficult to be a politician -- especially a Republican politician in Texas:

“Abstinence works,” said Governor Perry during a televised interview with Evan Smith of The Texas Tribune.
“But we have the third highest teen pregnancy rate among all states in the country,” Smith responded.
“It works,” insisted Perry.
“Can you give me a statistic suggesting it works?” asked Smith.
“I’m just going to tell you from my own personal life. Abstinence works,” said Perry, doggedly.

Crisis! More Americans Will Have Health Care

"Up to two-thirds of California's 7 million uninsured residents will become eligible for health insurance coverage when health care reform is implemented in 2014, according to a new policy brief from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research." (Eurekalert)


Clearly Obama's Health Care Plan must be destroyed -- we can't have almost 5 million new people with access to health care! What is this country coming to?


--


(Why can't Washington reporters covering Congress simply ask Senators and Representatives about such straightforward numbers?)


PPS: And what are the other 2.3M Californians supposed to do for health care?


What a wonderful country we are, huh?

Where did the Cool Computer Font Go?

A NY Times article about IBM's Watson computer on the game show Jeopardy gives this image:



The computer's name is, what, Times New Roman?

OK. But whatever happened to this font?



As a kid I loved this font. I used to try and draw it all the time in Junior high school when I was bored. It was the font at the time for any SF movie that came out, like Rollerball or Colussus: The Forbin Project.

So where did this font go? And why did computers stop using it? Too easy to make "normal" fonts? Then how did this font originate? Where did it come from? Where did it go?

Andrew J. Robinson

One of the first "restricted" films my dad ever took me to see was Dirty Harry -- I must have been about 11 years old. Anyway, did you know that the actor who played the psychotic killer in that movie also played the role of the deliciously witty Cardassian exile Elim Garik in Deep Space Nine?

Mark Haartsgard Confronts James Inhofe

For some reason Mark Hertsgaard has decided he must confront climate change denialists, on camera. Do you find these as uncomfortable to watch as I do?

What does Hertsgaard think he is going to accomplish by such guerrilla journalism? I know he's trying to sell a new book, and has decided his daughter should help him do that....But these kind of tactics won't convince anyone who isn't already in the choir.

Most people, I suspect, find it a real turn-off. I do.

Look, crazy people like Inhofe aren't going to be discouraged by being ambushed by someone with a little video camera. He moved beyond that point many, many years ago. Now, he just considers it proof of his "cause," as do climate bullies like Marc Morano, who has been gleefully sending out emails in the last few days with every detail of Hertsgaard's actions.

Journalists and writers should make their point via the facts, not by ambushing those who will never, ever be convinced and will only decline from relevance when they retire or die.

As Planck said, science advances one funeral at a time. So does politics.

Nature

Obama's NSF Request

Today the Obama administration presented its budget, and it included $7.767B for the National Scientific Foundation (FY 2012).

That's an increase of $894.5 million, or +13 percent, over NSF's current operating level.

How does this compare to the Republicans? Rand Paul wants to cut 62% from the NSF budget.

Look, I know that "winning the future" is just a political catch phrase. And I know that Obama is not what he campaigned on. And I know that right now he is determined to be relected and is willing to do that on the backs of the poor. That seriously, seriously degrades his status, in my opinion.

But, at the least, we ought to really pay attention to research, if that's going to be the catch phrase (and it should be). Paul, on the other hand, does not seem to have a clue what makes a country prosper.

Besides, would you really rather have Romney in the White House. Or Huckabee?

Koch Brothers Sponsoring PBS's Nova

Does it bother you that the Koch Inc. brothers are among the major sponsors of PBS's NOVA science program?

If so, why? If not, why not?

(Another major Nova underwriter is ExxonMobil.)

We've all criticized such sponsorship in the past when it supported "right-wing" positions.

Why shouldn't we care just as much now?

Has Nova's programming been influenced?

Here is what Nova says. But, of course, ALL organizations would claim that there is no link between their editorial positions and those who fund them. Do we believe them -- or only when they're on the "right" side?

Robinson on Kuhn on Priestley

…he recalled something that Kuhn had written about Priestley – that a scientist who continued to resist after his whole profession had been converted to a new paradigm might be perfectly logical and reasonable, but had ipso facto ceased to be a scientist.

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars, p. 147

PS: I am 2/3rds of the way through Robinson's Mars trilogy, and it's some of the best science fiction I've ever read. It is thoroughly grounded in science (as far as I can tell), but imaginative and believable. In other words, the best kind of SF.

January Temperatures

How warm (or cold) was last month?

NASA GISS says it was +0.46°C above their baseline average, which is a bit "cold," but not as cold as Jan 2008 (+0.17°C).

Other than 2008, it tied with 2006, and was warmer than 2001.

Measuring by satellite, UAH says January was quite cold:  right at their baseline, or an anomaly of 0.00 °C, or the coldest month in one and a half years.

But then, they just changed their baseline.

I wish these people could all get on the same program.

And frankly, I'd feel better about their data if their primary analyst, Roy Spencer of UAH, didn't seem determined to find against AGW everywhere he can.

So, Jan 2011 was "cold." But then, we're in a La Nina and a strong negative phase of the NAO.

Keep you eye on the ball, which is the long-term trend -- decadal, at least.

Twitter account change

I have changed my Twitter account name from @qsoup to @davidappell. Hope you will follow me there.

A Stunning Image

Via AndrewSullivan.com:

Cloud Cult - Pretty Voice

"...Strike up the band
Here comes the storyline
About the usual struggle
Between fear and love
This is the lifelong song
That we're all singing
It's been so long
Since I've heard your pretty voice"

Are All the Scientific Facts Really In?

Joshua Lehrer writes in the WSJ:

While we’re certainly not close to the end of science – so many profound mysteries remain – we should be prepared to work harder for what we learn next. All the low-hanging facts have been found.

Lehrer writes primarily about medicine and neuroscience, and certainly we're unlikely to discover a new component of a cell or even of the brain. But that's a very short-sighted point of view.

In particular, we don't even know the facts about the simpliest question you could ask: what is the world made of? We have essentially no idea. Physicists have determined that about 70% of it is made up of "dark energy" and about 25% of it "dark matter," but they have absolutely no idea what these quantities are made of. None (especially dark energy).

You simply can't say that "all the low-hanging facts have been found" when you have no idea what 95% of the universe is made of.

Best Science Blog

Here is a big reason why I get fed up with blogging and feel like quitting every six months: no matter how hard you try to be truthful and accurate and do due diligence, asshats like Antony Watts, who do everything they can to dismiss real science and even mock it, get nominated again and again for "best science blog."

Call it sour grapes if you want -- I don't really care. But it does make me wonder why I should even care or continue, and not just write two assinine skeptical articles a week for National Review and Accuracy in Media for $150 a pop. It'd be so easy.

JR Minkel Had Died

Wow. JR Minkel, a freelance science writer who wrote frequently for Scientific American, recently died by his own hand. He was only 31 years old.

Tragic....

Deepak Chopra Answers a Question

Via: Wimp.com

Egypt's Revolution and Climate Change

I guess one of the current climate disputes (who can keep up?) is about whether the Egyptian Revolution is inspired, or at least partly inspired, by (anthropogenic) climate change.

Joseph Romm says yes. Keith Kloor says no.

I vote: Yes.

Look: all revolutions, and all of history, have complex reasons. People are complex. Life is complex. Nothing is every all due to this or all due to that.

From what I understand, Egypt eats a lot of pasta. And its price has risen greatly in recent months. Why? Well, wheat prices are way up:

Why? In significant part because of the Russian heat wave of last summer. Note when the jump in wheat prices occurred: last June, about the same time as the anomalous Russian heat wave.

Look, these things are never going to be a direct, 1-1 relationship. But it's suspicious. It has to make you think.

So Then, Where Did God Come From?

Bill O'Reilly is still all up-in-arms about where the moon came from, even though we have a pretty good idea.

"How did the Moon get there?"

Of course, he wants to think it came from "God." But he's not asking: where did "God" come from, especially a God who is supposed to be all-powerful and omniscient?

 

via: Huffington Post