Watts Still Denying the Death Threats

Incredibly, Anthony Watts is still denying that some climate scientists have received death threats:

...when will you be posting that list of death threats you took us to task over Appell? SO far you have not responded AFAIK and the offensive condescending holier than thou posts are still up on that little blog of yours. Man up. – Anthony

These threats and harassments have been widely acknowledged by several scientists and reported on by many journalists (see below). The Guardian, in particular, has seen them and excerpted them. One scientist had a dead animal dumped on their doorstep, according to ABC News. Some of the threats have been reported to the FBI.

These denials are pernicious, obnoxious, and dangerous. They are of a kind, and only a step from being complicit. Commenters here too have played the same game.

It's worse even than the birthers, because denying that the threats exist is itself a kind of threat.

And then, when you point this out to them and give the links below, they censor your comment because it used the word "deny" (not the word "denier," and not used as a label).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/06/hacked-climate-science-emails-sceptics-abuse
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/climate-scientists-receive-death-threats-10729457
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/08/hacked-climate-emails-death-threats
http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t694484/
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7017922.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/05/hate-mail-climategate
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/oct/12/democrat-obama-climate-change-agenda

Americans Use Spam for Cheaper Prescription Drugs

Nice -- US customers who responded to spam email for no-prescription-necessary drugs were 4 times more likely to buy needed prescriptions (as opposed to "lifestyle" drugs like Viagra) than Canadians and Europeans.

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/38023

The study concludes "...a subset of uninsured or underinsured customers in the U.S. may view spam-advertised, no-prescription-required pharmacies as a competitive market for meeting their medical needs."

At least they're not burdening the emergency rooms!

Isn't our health system wonderful?

Planting Trees in Cities Won't Stop Climate Change

This BBC article, "Urban plants' role as carbon sinks 'underestimated,'" is about a study showing that the amount of carbon stored in the vegetation in Leicester, UK has been underestimated. OK. But then they jump into fantasy land about ways to reduce the country's carbon footprint.

Leicester, UK

The study finds that vegetation (mostly trees) in the city holds 3.16 kg Carbon/m², which is about 7 times that of Britain as a whole (the country being mostly grassland). But then the study, and the BBC article, suggests that it would be worthwhile to plant more trees in the cities as a reduce Britain's carbon footprint. (The UK has pledged to reduce its 1990 carbon emissions by 80% by 2050.)

The BBC writes,

"If just 10% of this was planted with trees, the existing carbon pool across the city could be increased by 12%"

quoting the lead author of the paper, Zoe Davies of the University of Kent. But they don't look at the actual numbers. The study says (pg 8):

"If community initiatives were put in place by policy makers to encourage tree planting, resulting in 10% of the existing 159 789 urban gardens containing one more tree, there would be 927 tonnes more carbon (assuming they grew to an average size for a garden tree) stored in above-ground vegetation across the city.

But the UK's total emissions are 685 megatonnes! (2005 est), or about 9 mt CO2 per person per year. (For urban residents it's usually a little less.) Or applying the famous 12/44 factor between carbon and carbon dioxide, about 2.5 mt C per person per year. Leicester has an urban population of about 450,000, so its total carbon emissions are roughly 1 megatonne per year.

So the study is talking about the possibility of reducing 1 kt, or 0.1% of these emissions. Even if you put one more tree in all the city's gardens, you're only reducing the city's emissions by 1%. Plus, you have to keep replanting the trees as they die. Then some idiot will come along with a leaf blower (I hate leaf blowers, especially in cities) and blow away all the leaves dropped by all these trees -- how much carbon is that going to emit?

This seems like starting a new exercise program and insisting that you keep track of the two steps on and off your porch. OK, but what's really matters is how many times you walk around the block.

I like trees, but we cannot stop climate change by planting more of them in cities. The focus needs to stay on the big picture and the big possible picture-changers.

So the conclusion is: leaf-blowers are indeed the work of the Devil.

US Temperature Records Tool

Here's a neat tool I just learned of: NOAA's US Records lookup tool:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/records/

I'm not about to get into the game of "it's really hot today in Pittsburgh so global warming must be here," or its inverse (which is really only about manufacturing doubt, anyway). It's just a fun tool, OK?

It's hard for me to imagine that much of the country is so hot lately, because here in Oregon it's been an unseasonably cool summer. I think we've only had one day above 80 and no days above 90, and it feels like summer hasn't yet arrived. Today it even rained, which hardly ever happens here in the summer. Right now it's 62 F, and it's been too cold to sleep with the windows open.

Republicans Fail to Annul New Light Bulb Law

Their preference for energy inefficiency is defeated:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/business/energy-environment/republicans-fail-to-annul-new-light-bulb-law.html

Neptune Was Discovered One "Year" Ago

It's now been one year exactly -- one of Neptune's years -- since it was discovered in 1846.

Actually Galileo first observed Neptune in 1612, but he thought it was a star because he happened to see it exactly when it was turning retrograde (changing its apparent direction when seen from Earth). How's that for bad luck?

It was finally discovered after a couple of smart people did some impressive number crunching of Uranus's orbit and found that it was doing something wonky. They guessed that another planet was perturbing its orbit, and told people exactly where to look, but couldn't get any astronomers interested. It took three more years before Neptune was spotted, just about where it was predicted to be. The British and French then fought over who had the rightful claim to the discovered.

This is akin to how they find exoplanets -- planets circling other stars -- today, although they look for wobbles in a star's position, not another planet's. The perturbation predictions don't always pan out -- a planet named "Vulcan" was proposed to exist between the Sun and Mercury in order to account for the unexplained piece of Mercury's orbit, whose ellipse "precesses," or rotates, by 574 arcseconds per century. Astronomers could account for all but 43 of those arcseconds, but never did find Vulcan. Instead Einstein found the missing amount exactly from his theory of general relativity, showing it was due to the slight curvature of spacetime through which Mercury travels. Einstein experienced heart palpitations when he finished his arithmetic and got 43 arcseconds/century, and was "for several days beside myself with joyous excitement."

Is Gott Wrong?

Is Gott wrong with his longevity predictions? Is his entire method wrong?

After my previous post John Fleck wrote to tell me about a physicist at the University of New Mexico, Carl Caves, who says Gott is wrong. Here are two papers he wrote about it, and here's an article John wrote about Caves and his claims for the Albuquerque Journal.

I don't have time to read Cave's articles now, and probably won't for a few days, but I'll come back to this.

Are Humans Finished in Space?

The Space Shuttle is in orbit right now, on its last flight. The United States has no plan to replace it or build upon it, and isn't even talking about what's next. The Apollo program seems like ancient history. Other nations aren't making much progress either, despite their talk.

Is this the end of our space-faring days?

Every time I wonder this I think about a quirky 1993 paper by J.Richard Gott III of Princeton. Titled "Implications of the Copernican Principle for Our Future Prospects," it draws sweeping conclusions from seemingly nothing. In particular he predicted then that, to within 95%, the lifetime of the human spaceflight program (then 32 years old) was greater than 10 months but less than 1248 years. In 2006 he updated his prediction, stating that there is a 50% chance that the human spaceflight program will not last another 45 years.

Gott might be right. He's been right on some other interesting predictions.

All Gott did was apply the Temporal Copernican Principle -- there is nothing special about the time we live in -- and the obvious fact that there is a 95% chance that a random number in [0,1] lies between 0.025 and 0.975. That's it.

This method predicts, with 95% certainty, that humans have a future longevity of 5,100 - 7.8 million years. In 1993 he predicted that Canada would last between 3 and 4,914 years. (You update that using the latest figures -- that is, only that Canada still exists -- to predict, with 95% certainty, that Canada will  last another 4 to 5,616 years.)  He predicted the closure of many Broadway plays and musicals. Etc.

In 2006 he wrote:

If we fail to establish a self-supporting colony on Mars in the next 45 years while we have the chance, it would be a tragedy. The dimensions of that tragedy may not be apparent to us until such a time, perhaps many thousands of years from now, when we find ourselves trapped on earth with no space program and our extinction as a species looms near. If we spend on the human spaceflight program over the next 45 years as much money in real terms (and send as much weight into low earth orbit) as in the last 45 years and still fail to establish a self-supporting Mars colony, it would be a double tragedy. I do not say this would be easy, but it is what we should be doing. No project we could attempt in the next 45 years would be likely to be as challenging or as important for the future history and survival prospects of our species. Because the human spaceflight program is not very old relative to our species and because our species is not very old relative to the universe, and because our habitat is tiny relative to the universe, we should be colonizing off the earth as soon as possible, while we still can.

I can never figure out if Gott says these with tongue-in-cheek or if he's serious. Or both. Or something entirely else. In any case, he's quite interesting.

High Melt Rate of US Working Class

Which is melting away fastest: Arctic sea ice or the American working class?

Since 1990:

• US corporate profits: +200%
• corporate employee compensation: +20%
• median family income: +2%

Since 2000:

• US corporate profits: +80%
• corporate employee compensation: +8%
• median family income: -5%

(All figures are inflation-adjusted.)

Source: Sacramento Bee

Slapping Back

A bold tell-it-like-it-is letter in the Oregonian:

In his July 2 letter, Karl Rohde opines that "to give gays unions and to call them 'marriages' is a slap in the face to billions of religious people around the world."

And who, I would ask Rohde, is more deserving of a resounding, global slap in the face than the billions of religious people around the world whose belief systems are the very cause of the intolerance, hatred and human rights abuses heaped upon gays (among many others they disapprove of) since their beginnings? America endured a bloody civil war to end biblically sanctioned human slavery. 

It seems to me a slap in the face to end marriage inequality is the least we can do.

BURL ROSS
Lake Oswego

An Astonishing Arctic Warming Rate

UAH published their value for the global June temperature anomaly: +0.314°C, which is rather warm for the end of a La Nina. This keeps the rate of warming for their entire record, going back to 1979, at 0.14 ± 0.1 °C/decade.

The really amazing number is the rate of warming at the North Pole, which they also measure. It comes out to 0.42 ± 0.03 °C/decade since 1979. (r² = 0.28, but it is statistically significant.) That's one degree Fahrenheit every 13 years, though these temperatures too have been basically flat for the last several years.

Here is a nice paper that explains how to calculate slope uncertainties and statistical significance: "Statistical significance of trends and trend differences in layer-average atmospheric temperature time series," B. D. Santer et al, Journal of Geophysical Research (2000) v 105 n D6 pp 7337-7356. [PDF] You can accomplish it in Excel with the LINEST function.

The YikeBike

The YikeBike, made in New Zealand, is touted as a Segway Killer. But to me it looks too undignified to ride -- and maybe a bit too wobbly -- for such ambitions....

A Very Curious Statement By Roy Spencer

"I view my job a little like a legislator, 

supported by the taxpayer, to protect the 

interests of the taxpayer and to minimize 

the role of government."

-- Roy Spencer

This is what Roy Spencer wrote in a reply to a comment on his blog. Note what Spencer--a climatologist and Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, keeper of one of the world's four major temperature datasets, and a noted climate skeptic--did not say: that his job is to provide the best science he can for the taxpayers who pay his salary.

Spencer's scientific research is, ironically, supported solely by government. But it seems his motivation is something more than just science.

Arctic Ice is at a Record Low

PIOMASS has an updated figure for Arctic ice volume (from a new model version), and it continues to shrink rapidly:



Here's another way to look at it, which shows that even though ice extent is currently about the same as 2010 and the record-setting year 2007, ice volume is noticeably lower now:



The new model has a slightly lower anomaly trend: -2.9 ± 1.0 Kkm³/decade, although 2011 started the year about 2.3 Kkm³ lower than 2007 and has maintained that difference. At that rate, and using 7.0 Kkm³ for the 2007 minimum, the Arctic would be ice-free (at its lowest point in the yearly cycle) in just 12 years.

And it looks like the downward trend is accelerating in the last decade, so it could be ice-free before that.

Atheists Up Above

The group American Atheists is flying banners behind airplanes this holiday weekend (as if that's going to convince anyone). I don't understand how atheism is, or is not, patriotic per se, or how belief in a supreme being is patriotic either. Anyway, they had trouble just to find a pilot to fly the plane in conservative states:

Blair Scott, the group's communications director, tells Seattle Weekly that in larger cities and more liberal areas, he had no trouble finding pilots to take the banners to the sky. But in Southern states like Georgia, South Carolina, Arkansas and other conservative states like Montana, Kansas, and Utah, there apparently wasn't a single pilot to be found who would fly a banner promoting atheism.

This strikes me as being more about annoying people than presenting an classy and intelligent image of the subject. But I guess that wouldn't have fit on an airplane banner.

One Angelic Dog

The best part is the sigh about 35 seconds in:

Hilarious

Timothy Egan in the New York Times:

When pressed this week on her unique view of American origins — that “the very same founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more” — Bachmann doubled-down, citing as her only proof the abolitionist John Quincy Adams. Given that Adams was just 8 years old when the Declaration of Independence was approved by the Continental Congress, 10-year-old Sasha Obama should be remembered for killing the world’s top terrorist.

All of the above only fortifies Bachmann’s position with a Republican base that would eat dog food for breakfast if the government said you should not.

The rest, on Bachmann's shameless hypocrisy, is good too.

The Dangers of Wind Power

From, of course, The Onion:


In The Know: Coal Lobby Warns Wind Farms May Blow Earth Off Orbit

My favorite is the old guy on the right.

Did NOAA Exaggerate?

I think Steve Goddard did (sort of) catch NOAA in a mistake or (?) exaggeration on sea level, though it seems to have come from their Communications department and not the actual report. In their press release on the just-released 2010 State of the Climate report they write "...sea level continued to rise," and that's what made it into the Washington Post. (Though the Post reporter should have questioned that; if his beat is climate science, he should have been aware that sea-level has been flat, at best, for the last few years.) But nothing in the report or the media briefing says that, at least that I've found. On the contrary, the report contains this graph (Figure 3.29, pg S100), which clearly shows that overall sea level (mass + steric) has not risen for about three years:

As usual, though, people like Goddard allow no room for simple mistakes, immediately calling them "clowns or criminals?" Sometimes people just make mistakes (and if it is found to be more than that it'd be troubling) but this is a bad one because, as media people should know, one mistake like this can distract from the message of the big picture. I've written them to ask.

PS: "steric" sea-level rise is that due to thermal expansion of water; the mass component, called "eustatic," is from an increase in ocean mass from glacier and (nonfloating) ice melt, dam releases, etc.

Excel Bleg

In MS Excel, if you enter a formula like =A1/1e9 into a cell, Excel displays it in the formula bar as =A1/1000000000 . Is there a way to force Excel to keep the scientific notation in the formula bar? I haven't been able to find one, and the large amount of zeros make such things difficult to proofread. Thanks.

Note added 7/18/12: I have found a partial solution, as I explain here.