Europe Bans X-ray Scanners

This past week Europe banned the x-ray scanners used in U.S. airports. (Here's the EU's press release announcing the ban.) Their reason is that their use on hundreds of millions of passengers a year would lead to a "small number" (Nature's words) of cancer cases a year.

The radiation received by an individual in one scan is equivalent to a few minutes of flying at typical altitudes.

Here's an excellent, interesting report on x-ray scanners by ProPublica that came out a few weeks ago. It gives a lot of good information:

• The science says from 6 to 100 passengers a year will get cancer from U.S. scanners (of 100 million people who fly every year) -- which means an additional 6 to 100 people will get cancer if they are scanned compared to if they weren't. Without such scans these 100 M people will develop abut 40 M cases of cancer.  
• In 1998 the inventor of the scanning machine thought it highly unlikely it would ever be widely used in the near future, and the FDA had serious reservations about them then. The FDA has never approved the machines because they're not classified as a medical device.
• TSA says no one will get cancer from the machines.
• the TSA...
  

  "...skipped a public comment period required before deploying the scanners. Then, in defending them, it relied on a small body of unpublished [non peer-reviewed] research to insist the machines were safe, and ignored contrary opinions from U.S. and European authorities that recommended precautions, especially for pregnant women. Finally, the manufacturer, Rapiscan Systems, unleashed an intense and sophisticated lobbying campaign, ultimately winning large contracts."

• The radiation received from one scan is 10 microREMs, equivalent to about 0.001 chest x-rays.
  
• A 2006 study from the National Academy of Sciences found “no compelling evidence” that there is any radiation level with zero cancer risk.
  

The entire ProPublica article is enlightening and well-worth reading.

So what to do? It's easy to resent anyone who makes you take an x-ray, and get all truculent at the airport. I wonder if the anti-floridation people are as opposed to these scanners as they are to THE GOVERNMENT putting fluoride in the water -- one of their arguments is that governments have no right to add a substance to something like the water supply. (Aside: I wonder how they feel about chlorine.)

On the other hand, I've had more x-rays than I can remember, especially in the last two years before and after my neck surgery. When my doctor ordered an x-ray I didn't think twice about it and got several of them, each time, over multiple visits.

On the third hand, at the hospital they at least protect your private parts with a lead apron.

On the fourth hand, which snowflake is it that finally breaks the branch?

Perhaps it it worth declining a scan at the airport, though, just to add weight to the argument that no one can expose you to ionizing radiation without your consent.

NASA's Gutsy Rover Landing

Here is a nice explanation on the landing procedure on Mars for the rover Curiosity, schedule to launch next week and land next August. Seems like quite a complicated procedure -- pretty gutsy on NASA's part.

The rover is "sedan-sized": 10 ft long, 9 ft wide, 7 ft high. Here's a good picture. It even has a cup holder!

2/3rds of missions to Mars have failed.




PS: Just kidding about the cup holder.

No Title Could Do This Justice

OWS and N17

Wow, yesterday 30,000 people rallied in New York City as part of Occupy Wall Street -- that's not a fringe protest by any stretch of the imagination. In Portland protesters went around downtown targeting banks -- here's an image you don't see everyday (and here's more about that photo, and a video of the woman hit directly in the face with pepper spray). My old apartment in downtown Portland was right in the middle of the goings-on, and I wish I was there for that (except rents seem to be up by about 30% in the 3 years since I left), but probably not the late-night drumming in the park 2 blocks away (it was dismantled by police last Sunday).

Of course, those opposed to the protests are trying to paint the protesters as dirty hippies who mooch off society, but here are some interesting statistics:

Tea Party members currently employed: 56% (April 2010)

OWS protesters currently employed: 70%

You know, I think the world, and especially the future, must look very different to people under 30 than those over, say, 40. The former see (in the US) a huge debt being handed to them after the oldsters ran up bills without paying for them, a environment predicted to get much worse, a country clearly going downhill whose bickering politicians can't agree even on the simplest things and who are all completely corrupted by big money, and an economy where they and their friends can't get jobs and where, for the first time in American history they may well not do as well as their parents. That's got to be a heavy psychological weight looming somewhere over their heads. When I was in my 20s my biggest macroscopic worry was global nuclear war -- for a few years I woke up screaming in my sleep (apologies, again, to my girlfriends-at-the-time), which I don't think compares at all. I don't think a lot of old people who are now whining about OWS realize this difference.  

++ Click to Enlarge Image ++

Image Source: Accelerated Degree Programs

Arthur C. Clarke Quote

"Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the non-existence of Zeus or Thor - but they have few followers now."

-- Arthur C. Clarke

The Constitution's Common Sense Clause

A comment to the op-ed piece in the New York Times on the constitutionality of the individual mandate to buy health insurance:

"It seems silly to me that some would argue that it is unconstitutional to force people to buy health insurance (my state forces me to buy auto insurance). After all, our government can and has drafted people to fight wars that can be detrimental to their health, indeed kill them by the thousands. If the government can legally force you to do something that may kill you, surely it can do something that might preserve your health, whether it's under the necessary and proper clause, the promote the general welfare clause, the commerce clause, or the common sense clause."

Mann to receive Hans Oeschger Medal from EGU

Michael Mann has been awarded the Hans Oeschger Medal from the European Geosciences Union:

http://live.psu.edu/story/56383

It recognizes scientists for "outstanding achievements in ice research and/or short term climatic changes (past, present, future)."

Adding Up the Uninsured

"America’s 50 million uninsured haven’t gotten any airtime in the presidential campaign thus far, because we’ve been listening only to Republicans. Yet the number of uninsured are now equal to the combined populations of Oklahoma, Connecticut, Iowa, Mississippi, Kansas, Kentucky, Arkansas, Utah, Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico, West Virginia, Nebraska, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Vermont and Wyoming."

          -- Matt Miller, "My Supreme Court health-care brief," Washington Post

Methane Levels May Be Increasing Again

Atmospheric methane levels have been mostly flat since the late-1990s, but they may be on the increase again. A discussion paper in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics finds that, for two sites in Germany, methane levels are increasing at a persistent rate of about 5 parts per billion (ppb) per year since 2006.

The authors write:

"This is either the longest and largest positive trend anomaly since >25 yr when systematic observations began or the onset of a new period of strongly increasing CH4 levels in the atmosphere."

The cause isn't clear, but there are some indications it may be due to natural wetland emissions, perhaps due to precipitation from recent La Ninas.

A renewed increase would not be good news for the climate, since since methane is a strong greenhouse gas (23 times stronger than carbon dioxide, though it resides in the atmosphere for a much shorter time). Some scientists are worried that the warmer temperatures in the northern latitudes may lead to higher methane emissions from melting permafrost and marine hydrates, an example of the kind of positive feedback that amplifies anthropogenic CO2 warming.

Global data for methane levels comes out in a few months, I think.

Deforestation causes cooling, study shows

Cutting down trees can cause cooling, not warming as has been thought:

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-deforestation-cooling.html

A paper in tomorrow's issue of Nature says cutting down trees north of 45 degrees latitude has a net cooling effect.

Trees sequester carbon, so cutting them down releases that carbon back into the atmosphere. But this study finds that the open area thus created is cooler, because it reflects more heat back into space, especially when there is snow on the ground.

Most temperature stations are in open grassy areas, so using them might lead to a slight underestimate of average global temperature.

On the other hand, climate models might be slightly overestimating future warming.

I have some questions into the researchers to try to sort these numbers out.

Health Insurance and the Broccoli Test

An op-ed in the New York Times argues that the mandate that individuals buy health insurance is clearly not unconstitutional:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/opinion/health-insurance-and-the-broccoli-test.html

If government can require automobile drivers to buy auto insurance, why can't they require individuals to buy health insurance, because what are people but navigators down the highway of life?

The Constitution was a great achievement, and a great advancement, but it seems to me it contains a few fundamental flaws deep within it. One arises when freedom of speech implies political spending cannot be restricted for corporations, and maybe another is the implication that things must be protected but people not. Or maybe the founders just thought people ought to be smart enough to vote out scoundrels who do not serve the people's interests. I'm currently reading James Madison by Richard Brookhiser, which isn't as good as I hoped (it's mostly just a running annotation of excerpts from letters of the time), but it's clear that even back then those guys committed a lot of politics. George Washington owned land where he advocated that the government should build a canal, Alexander Hamilton worked his colleagues to get friends and family appointed to posts, and Madison often played one guy off another or made sure he was on the right string of committees to get his favored ideas passed. I guess that's just life. So far the only one who seems clean is Thomas Jefferson, who spent many of those early years in France and otherwise seemed to just want to be at Monticello away from all the sturm und drang.

By the way, did you know Jefferson had a lisp?

Oodles of Energy Data

If you're into data you'll like Enerdata's Global Energy Statistical Yearbook 2011, with country-by-country numbers on energy production and consumption by type, CO2 emissions, and more. And it's free. (But do we really know world energy consumption to 6 significant figures? I'm skeptical.)

Enerdata's data shows that world energy production has increased by 45% since 1990, and 29% since 2000. The same numbers for the US are 5% and 4%, and for Europe they're -1% and -9%. For China they are 154% and 119%, and China's energy production has increased 34% in only the last 5 years. Heck, I'll just give the entire table, below.

In 2010 the world generated an average power of 17.1 TW -- that's terawatts, or 1.71 x 10¹³ W. That works out to over 2,400 W per person, though of course it's very unevenly distributed. For the US it's about 7,400 W per person; for India it's 560 W per person. Africa averages almost 1,500 W per person, but Enerdata doesn't break it there down by country.

To the rest of the world, we are the 96%.

Vaclav Havil gives Americans crap, here in Foreign Policy, for our wasteful ways:

"The United States doesn't need exotic biofuels or balloon-borne wind turbines. Its real problems are wasteful private energy use and the near-total absence of effective, down-to-earth, long-term policies.

"...The United States consumes nearly twice as much energy per capita as the richest countries of the European Union, which raises the question: What has it gotten in return? Are Americans twice as rich as the French? Are they twice as educated as the Germans? Do they live twice as long as the Swedes? Are they twice as happy as the Danes or twice as safe as the Dutch? The obvious answer for all of the above is no; indeed, many of America's quality-of-life indicators -- including infant mortality, longevity, and educational achievement -- do not even rank among the world's top 10!"

	increase since 1990	increase since 2000	increase since 2006
World	45%	29%	9%
OECD	14%	2%	1%
Europe	-1%	-9%	-3%
EU-27	-12%	-12%	-5%
Belgium	23%	17%	16%
Spain	1%	9%	11%
Finland	50%	19%	-1%
France	21%	3%	-1%
United Kingdom	-27%	-45%	-19%
Italy	7%	-3%	0%
Netherlands	15%	21%	14%
Norway	80%	-5%	-1%
Poland	-36%	-17%	-15%
Portugal	83%	61%	44%
Czech Republic	-22%	7%	-5%
Germany	-31%	-3%	-3%
Romania	-32%	-1%	-1%
Sweden	8%	5%	-2%
Turkey	23%	21%	20%
North America	11%	5%	3%
Canada	45%	6%	-3%
United States	5%	4%	5%
CIS	1%	34%	5%
Kazakhstan	78%	101%	23%
Russia	-3%	29%	3%
Ukraine	-40%	6%	-8%
Uzbekistan	54%	8%	2%
Latin America	55%	15%	0%
Mexico	13%	0%	-12%
Brazil	137%	66%	20%
Argentina	65%	-3%	-7%
Venezuela	13%	-24%	-14%
Chile	21%	10%	-2%
Colombia	121%	45%	26%
Asia	124%	80%	25%
China	154%	119%	34%
Japan	30%	-8%	-4%
India	82%	42%	17%
South Korea	107%	38%	3%
Taiwan	22%	10%	5%
Thailand	174%	66%	29%
Indonesia	121%	60%	23%
Malaysia	80%	16%	-2%
Australasia	95%	36%	15%
Australia	105%	38%	15%
New Zealand	36%	14%	24%
Africa	68%	30%	4%
South Africa	43%	13%	4%
Nigeria	61%	20%	4%
Egypt	60%	56%	10%
Algeria	39%	-1%	-15%
Middle-East	72%	21%	4%
Saudi Arabia	45%	11%	-6%
Iran	90%	41%	9%
United Arab Emirates	53%	11%	-5%
Kuwait	175%	21%	-8%

Source: Enerdata Global Energy Statistical Yearbook 2011

Two Instances of Surprising Animal Intelligence

Here are two instances of surprising animal intelligence.

The more we learn about animals, the more it seems our way of treating them is immoral. (But then, that's true about gaining knowledge of pretty much everything.)

A crow that used multiple tools to accomplish a task:



And here's a surprising reaction from a dolphin. There may be some anthropromorphization in this interpretation, but what if there's not?

Let me tell you a story. One of the first dolphins I ever worked with was Circe. I’d bring her a fish when I wanted her to do certain things. If she didn’t do them, I did a “time-out” where I turned my back and walked away. Well, there was a certain type of fish that Circe loathed because it had a spiny tail. So I accommodated her by cutting the spines off of the tail. One day, I forgot to do that. Circe spit it out, swam to the other side of the pool and placed herself into a vertical position that mimicked my time-out. I wanted to test this. I gave her untrimmed fish on four different days. Whenever I gave her fish with spiny tails, she gave me a time-out. What that suggested was that she saw time out as a correction and used it back on me. Well, that’s how we learn to communicate.

-- Diana Reiss, interview in the New York Times

Bickmore Video on Avoiding the Truth About Climate Change

Barry Bickmore, a geochemist at Brigham Young University who was a climate skeptic until he became convinced by the evidence, gave an interesting talk titled "How to Avoid the Truth About Climate Change." It's well-worth watching. (He also has a good blog, here.)

Via Stoat.

Quote

"There's no principle built into the laws of nature that says theoretical physicists have to be happy."

     -- Steven Weinberg, Nova “The Fabric of the Cosmos”

Wind money for an Oregon County's Residents

Every resident of Sherman County, Oregon will receive a $590 check for their share of this year's wind-energy revenues. And four small towns there will each receive $100,000.

They have 550 wind turbines, and the payments will continue until 2025. Property owners there receive up to $6,000 per turbine per year, and some have as many as 30 on their wheat farms. The county's population is only 1,753, 3/4ths of whom are over 60.

Oregon as a whole generates 2305 MW of wind energy, and this one small county generates 43% of it. Wind generates about 7% of Oregon's total electricity generation.

Review of 2010 Russian Heat Wave

BAMS has a good article that reviews the 2010 heat wave in central Russia, by Richard Grumm of the National Weather Service. Moscow was +18°F above normal for July 2010, and +16°F normal for August, which are incredible numbers. They translate to +32°F and +29°F, which seem unbelievable. Where I live in northwestern Oregon the maximum daily high temperature is 81°F, occurring over the last week in July and the first two weeks in August. I can't even imagine a month of days where the daily high was 112°F. Note: There is a typo in the second paragraph of Grumm's paper -- the departures from normal temperatures there should be in Fahrenheit, not Celsius.

In Moscow the average daily high for July is 24°C (75°F), so I would guess few people there have air conditioning. That summer had to be brutal. (I don't have A/C where I live, and would rarely need it anyway, which is good because I hate being in an air-conditioned building all day. I lived in Tempe, Arizona for a year and a half, and even with A/C the summers there are tough, with high temps around 115°F. You go outside at 10 at night and it's still 103 or so. One day it hit 122°F and they closed the Phoenix airport because planes aren't tested above 120°F. On the other hand, November through April there is idyllic.)

Grumm reviews that summer's blocking ridge in central Russia, but doesn't go into attribution. It's interesting reading.

By the way, wheat prices still haven't come down for that heat-wave induced spike. (Last year I estimated this rise cost the world $67B per year, and the U.S. $2.1B per year.)

Jerry Sandusky's High School

So it turns out that Jerry Sandusky, the alleged child rapist at Penn State University, is from the town where I went to high school. To my relief, he went to the high school for the townies, not the one for those of us who lived in the suburbs, and was about 20 years ahead of me. (There was a graffito on a bathroom stall in my h.s. that read, "Flush twice--it's a long way to Wash High.") I'm not a rah-rah type and don't identify much with my school, but was still a small relief to know Sandusky went elsewhere. My brother-in-law studied physics at Penn State, but he's not a rah-rah type either. (Science majors usually aren't, IMO.)

Uninsured Increasing Rapidly

The percentage of Americans who get their health insurance from an employer is falling rapidly: about 1.5 percentage points a year since the beginning of 2008. That works out to about 3.7M people a year who lose their employer-paid insurance and must find it elsewhere or go without.

According to the results of this poll, there are now 54M Americans without health insurance, and it's increasing at a rate of about 225,000 a month (2.7M/yr) -- a Reno, Nevada or Durham, North Carolina every month. So roughly only 27% of those who lose employer-paid health insurance find a replacement for it.

When do we arrive at the tipping point where something must be done?

With the PPACA ("Obamacare") phasing in over the next few years, employers will probably continue to drop insurance policies for their workers, especially if the economy continues to sputter (or worse). If they're going to do that, shouldn't their taxes be raised to compensate for the socialization of these costs? A health insurance policy for a family of four now costs about $19,000/yr, so employers are saving an additional $18B every year in employee health costs.  

Investment Opportunity in Greece

Wow: the cost for the Greek government to borrow money for a year is now an interest rate of 249%.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/quote?ticker=GGGB1YR:IND

GISS's Latest Anomaly, and Decade-over-Decade warming

GISS put up their number for the October global temperature anomaly: +0.54°C.

It's the 8th warmest October in their records (132 years), the year-to-date is the 9th warmest, etc.

What's interesting is that, with the recent trash talk about the large negative 10-yr trend in a small subset of the globe, the last 120 months are still the warmest in GISS's records. In fact, they're 0.23°C warmer than the previous 120 months.

What's more, this decade-over-decade difference -- a measure of the increase in the rate of warming -- has been positive for years now:

The globe isn't just getting warmer; it's getting warmer faster.

Pew Center on CC Changes Funders

At first glance this looks like a mistake: The reputable Pew Center on Global Climate Change now has different funders, and they include Shell Oil, Entergy, and the notorious Duke Energy.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jGZN1CrEdVFa1pIAt0eyAEnqQO1Q

They will now be known as the "Center for Climate and Energy Solutions," a name that suggests a significantly different approach and which indicates the new funding has already had an influence. Ok, maybe you can argue that Climate Change is now a fact and it's time to focus on solutions. But you could have argued that before the funding change, too.

You just can't escape the perception that funding has consequences, whether it actually does or not. (And who really believes it doesn't?) And that organizations value their survival above all else, especially the inside-the-Beltway types.

It will be interesting to see if they get the WGFTGIGFTG* treatment.


* derived from the proposition that gender should not be a factor in the handling of geese.

This Week in Falling Satellites

With all these satellites coming down and asteroids whizzing by, someone is going to get hurt one of these days.

Our next adventure with falling satellites could be a wicked one: a Russian Mars probe is stranded in orbit, and unless the problem is fixed it will fall to Earth within weeks. Perhaps there is the usual 1-in-3500 chance a piece of it will hit a human, but the bigger problem is that it contains 7 metric tons (15,400 lbs) of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide -- both highly toxic substances.

In fact, in 2008 the US shot down a spy satellite that contained hydrazine rather than let it fall back to Earth. And that one only contained about 1,000 lbs of hydrazine -- although some people thought the military exaggerated the threat just so they could protect its spy technology or just to get in some rare target practice.

Still, 15 times as much of the stuff has the possibility to cause some problems if it falls in the wrong place. With the 2008 satellite:

Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman Gen. James Cartwright cast the threat from the satellite in much less dire terms. Even if the hydrazine were released, he noted, the effects would likely be mild — akin to chlorine gas poisoning, which can cause burning in the lungs, and elsewhere. The area affected would be "roughly the size of two football fields [where you might] incur something that would make you go to the doctor."

(Today I received a press release from someone about "Long Beach Moms Organize Stroller Brigade on the Boardwalk to Demand Protections from Toxic Chemicals," but I think that's just a coincidence.)

The site russianspaceweb.com says they will have updates on this latest situation, but if you see a satellite coming your way you should probably take cover.

Sea Level Tics Up

Skeptics/Deniers ("skepniers?") who live and die by every little tic in the graphs can explain away this one: the 60-day moving average in sea level is up. Just a short-term fluctuation in the overall cooling trend, I guess.... Seriously though, the recent "pothole" looks to have been due to the 2010 El Nino and La Nina.

Australia Carbon Tax is Passed

While the US is distracted by Herman Cain's peccadilloes and I've been distracted by Mississippi's personhood initiative, the really big news is that the Australian Senate passed the carbon tax, 36-32. (Thanks Steve.) It goes into effect next July. 

A $23 a tonne carbon tax will now be paid by about 500 high-emitting companies from next July, with about half the revenue to be returned to households in the form of tax cuts and increases in pensions and family payments, to compensate them as electricity generators pass through the cost of the new tax.

Another $9.2 billion over the first four years of the carbon pricing scheme will be paid to high-emitting industries with overseas competitors not subject to a tax. They will receive up to 94.5 per cent of their emission permits for free.

The carbon price is designed to meet the emissions reduction target endorsed by both major parties of at least 5 per cent by 2020, compared with 2000 levels. Labor is now promising to cut Australia's emissions by 80 per cent by 2050.

The accounting looks pretty complicated and revenue-neutral for most folks, though naturally some groups are predicting big costs:

• the government predicts the cost to the average household will be A$9.90/week, but will receive A$10.10/week in compensation. (Currently A$1 = US$1.04)
• Master Builders Australia: predicts A$5,000/new home
• National Farmers' Federation: predicts up to A$10,000/farmer/yr
• domestic flights will go up A$2-4 per flight.
• "All low-income households will be fully compensated for the expected rise in their cost of living, the government says, and most will be better off. Two thirds of middle-income households will be fully compensated, along with about one in five high-income households." (The Sydney Morning Herald)
  

This is a big deal for those who back climate change legislation, it seems to me, and it will be interesting to see how this pans out in Australia. Julia Gillard deserves a huge amount of praise (and maybe even a Nobel Peace Prize). Australia now become the world's test bed for pricing carbon.

PS: Here is a good picture of Australia's carbon emissions. Here's a more succinct summary: in 2008 Australia emitted 18.9 mt per person, ahead even of the US's 17.5 mt/person.

Mississippi defeats life-at-fertilization ballot prop

Huh. Voters in Mississippi rejected the "personhood initiative," 55% - 45%. That's surprising, to me at least. And encouraging.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/healthcare/mississippi-voters-reject-personhood-initiative-20111108

With rationality like this, perhaps more reasonable initiatives are to come. Say, a carbon tax? (Ha.) 

Is Ron Paul Blind?

Ron Paul doesn't seem stupid, but deep down I'm not so sure, based on what he told The Hill:

"...governments are always destructive in the creation of wealth."

All you really have to do is think about the world for maybe 3 seconds to realize that the affluence and freedom resides in those countries that have strong democrat-ish governments that enforce laws provide the essential infrastructure on which commerce, education, and enterprise depend. Or, as Niall Ferguson put it in a recent TED talk, "the six killer apps of prosperity," none of which are seen in lawless states or where people spend half the day just walking to get water:





Thom Hartmann, the progressive radio host, calls libertarianism a "cult." Ron Paul doesn't do much to convince a person otherwise.

How Skeptics View Global Warming

This is good, from Skeptical Science:

"If you cut off my reproductive rights, can I cut off yours?"

"If you cut off my reproductive rights, can I cut off yours?"

Commenter, NY Times

As Andrew Rosenthal notes at the NY Times, half of all fertilized eggs fail to implant.

It’s hard to imagine personhooders claiming that a woman whose body fails to implant a fertilized egg is a criminal. But their nutty amendment does seem to rule out abortion under all circumstances, including rape or incest, or in the case of an ectopic pregnancy that could kill the pregnant woman, along of course, with the implanted egg.

If a nonresident woman travels to Mississippi and has a miscarriage there, would she be liable?

Progress in Mississippi? (Re: 'Personhood' Law)

Mississippi votes tomorrow on an initiative to declare a fertilized egg a legal person under the state Constitution.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/07/mississippi-personhood-la_n_1079710.html

I guess that would be progress, in a way -- it's better than the 3/5ths the founding fathers gave slaves, and 5/5ths better than Mississippi gave them for along time.

Laura Bassett writes: "The amendment could subject both women and doctors to an array of criminal and civil suits. For instance, a doctor could be prosecuted for trying to save a woman with ectopic pregnancy, an abnormal pregnancy which occurs outside the uterus and is the leading cause of pregnancy-related deaths. It could require coroners to investigate miscarriages, which are reported to occur in at least a quarter of pregnancies, and it could make it possible for someone to sue on behalf of the egg that didn't implant because the woman used birth control."

This is something even the Taliban wouldn't do.

 

The Laughable Result They Call "Cooling"

So I have a better handle on how Anthony Watts et al are claiming some kind of "cooling." You have to dig really, really deep to find something that looks it.

They take the annual contiguous U.S. surface average from NCDC from here. Here it is (in Fahrenheit):

1991	53.90
1992	53.34
1993	52.00
1994	53.64
1995	53.45
1996	52.62
1997	53.02
1998	55.08
1999	54.67
2000	54.00
2001	54.41
2002	53.94
2003	54.02
2004	53.83
2005	54.36
2006	55.04
2007	54.38
2008	53.00
2009	53.07
2010	53.71

Now, the 10-yr change in the 10-yr moving average of this data is 0.40 °F (for 2010). That's a significant warming from one decade to the next.

But if you cherry-pick the time interval to something that isn't climatologically significant and just look at the annual data for the last 10 years, you get a linear trend of -0.92 ± 0.65 °F/decade. That's not even statistically significant to 1.5 sigma. And the interval ends in a strong La Nina. And USA48 is only 5.4% of the Earth's land area, and 1.6% of the Earth's total area. And using temperatures in F make them look 1.8 times bigger than those in C.

In other words, you have to look extremely hard and do some wild slicing and dicing to find something you can call "cooling." It's laughable to consider it a counterargument to AGW.

Has the US Been Cooling? (No.)

Anthony Watts tells us that the continental US is cooling on alternate Tuesdays in months that have two full moons.

OK, the cherry-picking isn't quite that bad, but almost. He tells us that Burt Rutan tells him that winters are cooling in the USA-48 at vast rates of up to 8°F per decade! (At that rate we'll disprove the Third Law in about 600 years -- yet again proving the consensus wrong!) And that the whole USA-48 is cooling at -0.87°F/decade for the last 10 years.





People, let's get a grip.

First of all, the USA-48 is only 5.4% of the Earth's land area, and 1.6% of its total area. We aren't the world, as the song (doesn't) go.

Second, a 10-yr time span is meaningless. There are too many natural fluctuations of order 0.2-0.3°C to pick out a manmade trend. Deniers keep ignoring this because the last 10-yrs is about all they have left to bitch about. Santer et al found that at least a 17-yr time interval is needed to pick out an anthropogenic component from global average surface temperature:


Santer, B. D., et al. (2011), “Separating Signal and Noise in Atmospheric Temperature Changes: The Importance of Timescale,” J. Geophys. Res., doi:10.1029/2011JD016263, in press.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/pip/2011JD016263.shtml

Third, other data and other simple calculations don't find these results. I'm using the USA48 data from UAH, because it's what I have handy in a spreadsheet. (It's in the last column.) You can slice the data up in all kinds of ways; here are three:

• The change in the 10-year moving average over the last 10 years is +0.10°C.
• The 10-year change in the 12-month moving average is +0.24°C.
• The slope of the last 10-years/120-months is -0.007 ± 0.008°C/decade. That is, it's not statistically significant.

I'm sure you can cherry-pick something out of the BEST or UAH data that finds cooling for some temperature-like aggregation of some 10 year set of the data, but you need to try rather hard. It will probably help if you first stand on your head.

PS: Notice how they have all suddenly switched to Fahrenheit, because it makes the numbers 1.8 times larger?

Supreme Court Tells You How To Feel

I was reading the US Supreme Court's ruling on Citizens United, where they decided there can be no limits on political spending by corporations, and it includes this:

"...this Court now concludes that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.  That speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials. And the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy."

So there you have it--the Supremes not only make a ruling about what is legal, but also told you that such money isn't corrupting and that you can't feel otherwise.

In dissent John Paul Stevens wrote:

"At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics."

I haven't read it yet, but I've heard Lawrence Lessig's new book on this subject, Republic Lost, is good. Here's an excerpt.

Friday stuff

I almost wish I was a neurobiologist so I could use the word "metabolomic," which I saw in this week's editorial in Science on "Understanding the Human Brain." It begins:

LIKE MOST FIELDS IN BIOLOGY, NEUROSCIENCE IS SUCCUMBING TO AN “EPIDOMIC” OF DATA
collecting. There are major projects under way to completely characterize the proteomic,
metabolomic, genomic, and methylomic signatures for all of the different types of neurons
and glial cells in the human brain. In addition, “connectomics” plans to provide the com-
plete network structure of brains, and “synaptomics” aims to uncover all molecules and their
interactions at synapses. This is a good time to pause and ask ourselves what we expect to
find at the end of this immense omic brainbow.

&

If you haven't read the statement of Diederik Stapel, the social psychologist who was found to have committed massive fraud in his studies and publications, you should -- it's rather heart-breaking. All I've been able to find is his version in Dutch, which I let Google translate, so it's probably not a perfect translation. That version ends:

Social psychology is a big, interesting, beautiful and strong discipline, provides unique insights into human behavior and therefore still a lot of attention. I made the mistake that I see the truth in my hand I want to put the world and just wanted to make something more beautiful than it is. I have used improper means to the results attractive. In modern science is the ambition level is high and the competition for scarce resources is enormous. In recent years, these pressures become too much for me. I have the pressure to score, to publish, the pressure to always be better, not have faced. I wanted too much too soon. In a system where there is little control, where people often work alone, I am wrong repulsed. I would stress that the mistakes I've made, not born of self-interest.

I realize that there are many questions. My current state constitution does not permit me to answer. I will still have to dig deep to find out why all this happened, what has moved me to do so. I need help I have now also been given.

By the way, it's worth noting who initially suspected the problems and reported them: junior researchers from his department. (An interim report, in English, is here.) Remember that the next time someone tries to claim that global warming is a "massive conspiracy." The "Whistle Blowers" section of the report says:

Three young researchers from the department concerned voiced their suspicions about the forgery of data by Mr Stapel to the head of department at the end of August 2011. After months of observation, sufficient details had been gathered to demonstrate that something was not right. The researchers all deserve praise for reporting these abuses. It is noted that they were in a dependent position and had much to lose....

The Committee has learned that there were other whistle blowers at an earlier stage. A
total of three young researchers had previously raised the alarm regarding datasets
provided by Mr Stapel, and the risks for them were no less severe. Furthermore, two
professors had previously observed data that were ‘too good to be true’. However, none
of these earlier reports were acted upon. There were various reasons for inaction, which
we will return to in Section 3.3.

&

A result published this week finds that the fine-structure constant, "alpha," may not be constant. (Here's the preprint.) The results suggest it is larger at vast distances from Earth. It's only about a 10 ppm difference, but could still be a lot of fun.

&

Speaking of the fine-structure constant, I recently read Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung (2009) by Arthur I. Miller. I never knew that Pauli had a mystical side, that came out (or was created?) in his 30s after the suicide of his mother. Also, that early in his career (the married) Jung was a womanizer who sometimes had sex with his patients.

I also liked this story: when Pauli was 21 years-old he published a famous review of relativity that impressed everyone. About this time Einstein gave a well-attended lecture (as you might imagine) on relativity at the University of Berlin, which Pauli, still a student, attended in Tyrolean leather pants. After the lecture there was silence as everyone waited to see who should have the honor of the first question, when Pauli stood up and said, "What Professor Einstein has just said is not really as stupid as it may have sounded."

Michele Bachmann's Source for Advice

"The former Iowa frontrunner, Rep. Michele Bachmann, thinks the poor should pay more taxes, and that vaccines against cervical cancer may cause mental retardation. I think she gets her information from a guy living in a van down by the river. On the eve of the last Republican debate, Politifact, the nonpartisan referee, rated 14 of her 36 major policy statements as false. And 9 of those 14 were given the “pants on fire” lie designation."

-- Timothy Egan, "Political Class Clowns", today's New York Times

Read the rest, too, especially the ending:

More than ever, the public feels disconnected from the political process. They feel like it’s an inside game, and money always wins. They despise a Congress that fiddles with votes to keep “In God We Trust” as a national motto and rails against a nonexistent rule to regulate dust, but will do nothing to forward funds to repair a bridge....

The public already knows the real scandal: our broken politics. On Sunday, in case we need reminding, the disgraced criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff will be on “60 Minutes” giving a little tutorial about life in the nation’s capital. He had 100 congressmen in his pocket, he explains. “We owned them.”

And as long as the political class focuses on the happy-hour antics of a pizza man, nothing will change but the name of the lobbyist counting congressmen in his corral.

Michael Mann's Book Available for Pre-order

You can now pre-order Michael Mann's forthcoming book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. Amazon says it's coming out on March 6th, but elsewhere I've seen January. I expect it will be more pugilistic than your usual book on climate change.  

Congress Finally Gets Something Done

With all the problems facing the U.S., yesterday the House of Representatives took time to reaffirm that "In God We Trust" is the National Motto. Really. It passed 396-9.

H CON RES 13 2/3 YEA-AND-NAY 1-Nov-2011 6:55 PM
QUESTION: On Motion to Suspend the Rules and Agree
BILL TITLE: Reaffirming “In God We Trust” as the official motto of the United States and supporting and encouraging the public display of the national motto in all public buildings, public schools, and other government institutions.

It reads:

"Whereas if religion and morality are taken out of the marketplace of ideas, the very freedom on which the United States was founded cannot be secured."

Obama chided them for ignoring more pressing issues, Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) said "Nobody is threatening the national motto," and there was this:

"I think we know by now that this Congress likes God. Can we move on?" said the Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Who were the nine brave representatives who voted no? Two Republicans and 7 Democrats:

Gary Ackerman (D-NY)
Justin Amash (R-MI)
Judy Chu (D-CA)
Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO)
Michael Honda (D-CA)
Hank Johnson (D-GA)
Jerrold Nadler (D-NY)
Austin Scott (R-VA)
Pete Stark (D-CA)

As Rick Perry found out, "God" (whatever that is) doesn't pay much attention to these kind of things--at last report she was quite busy in Somalia and Cambodia. Also, she is busy helping some viruses invade a species of small, snail-like creatures on a planet in galaxy NGC 3370.

Joke

After watching sales falling off for three straight months at Kentucky Fried Chicken, the Colonel calls up the Pope to ask for a favor.

The Pope says, "What can I do?"

The Colonel says, "I need you to change the daily prayer from, 'Give us this day our daily bread' to 'Give us this day our daily chicken'. If you do it, I'll donate 10 Million Dollars to the Vatican."

The Pope replies, "I am sorry. That is the Lord's Prayer and I can not change the words."

So the Colonel hangs up. After another month of dismal sales, the Colonel panics, and calls again.

Listen your Excellency, I really need your help. I'll give you $50 million dollars if you change the words of the daily prayer from 'Give us this day our daily bread' to 'Give us this day our daily chicken.'"

"It is very tempting, Colonel Sanders. The church could do a lot of good with that much money. It would help us support many charities. But, again, I must decline. It is the Lord's Prayer, and I can't change the words." So the Colonel gives up again.

After two more months of terrible sales the Colonel gets desperate.

"This is my final offer, your Excellency. If you change the words of the daily prayer from, 'Give us this day our daily bread' to 'Give us this day our daily chicken' I will donate $100 million to the Vatican."

"Let me get back to you." Says the Pope.

So the next day, the Pope calls together all of his bishops and he says, "I have some good news and I have some bad news. The good news is that KFC is going to donate $100 million to the Vatican." The bishops rejoice at the news. Then one asks about the bad news.

The Pope replies, "The bad news is that we lost the Wonder Bread account."

The Being-a-Jerk Part

Incredible Pollution in China

The BBC has some video of the terrible smog currently in Beijing -- they say hundreds of flights have had to be cancelled, and hospital admissions are up by 1/3rd.

And here's a site I came across of a exhibit on "Pollution in China" by photographer Lu Guang. The picture below is just one of them -- click through for several others that are equally as scary. This one looks like 1890s Pittsburgh (and I'm not sure it was ever this bad).



The interview with Guang is equally eye-opening.

A New Way to Display Warming Projections

Here's an interesting new way to show future warming: as the year when specific temperature thresholds are projected to be reached:

This is from the paper "Projections of when temperature change will exceed 2 °C above pre-industrial levels," Manoj Joshi et al, Nature Climate Change (Oct 16, 2011) p. 1-6 (Sub. req.)

Here's another chart from the same paper:

Notice how much faster the warming is projected to hit central Africa -- a region that can hardly afford it. And that warming of 2°C is projected to hit the US and Australia just about last. That, coupled with the fact that they're two of the countries wealthy enough to best adapt to the changes, surely won't help them overcome their reluctance to tackle the issue.

The Rich Getting Richer

“I’ve been recommending to all my colleagues here in the wine district that they should also go for a Nobel Prize, because I promise, it does a lot for your business.”

— Winemaker Brian Schmidt, who also won the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics for discovering that the expansion of the universe is speeding up.

As quoted in Science magazine, Oct 29, 2011, p, 439.

An Average American Discusses

Via David Horsey at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Almond Slices Make Great Fingernails

Also, my sister throws great parties.

More on the BEST infighting

To add yet more confusion to my earlier post on the confusion emanating from the BEST camp, note that the blog Curry Quotes gives this sentence from one of BEST's papers:

Though it is sometimes argued that global warming has abated since the 1998 El Nino event (e.g. Easterling and Wehner 2009, Meehl et al. 2011), we find no evidence of this in the GHCN land data. Applying our analysis over the interval 1998 to 2010, we find the land temperature trend to be 2.84 ± 0.73 C / century, consistent with prior decades.

-- Robert Rohde, Judith Curry, Donald Groom, Robert Jacobsen, Richard A. Muller, Saul Perlmutter, Arthur Rosenfeld, Charlotte Wickham, Jonathan Wurtele, “Berkeley Earth Temperature Averaging Process”

If I was a member of the BEST team, I would be very angry at the way some of my colleagues are being taken advantage of by media looking for yet another climate scrum, aiding those media in that quest, and airing their dirty laundry in public. I would also suspect some of them like seeing their name in the newspaper a little too much.