Sigh.
The comment spammers are back already. It seems as though I'll have to try something a little more industrial in strength.
After all the talk about Richard Clarke based largely on the political positioning associated with his arguments, it's useful to read his underlying argument about the U.S. response to terrorism in his own words.
My story on climate change and national security ran in this morning's paper. It gave me a chance to take a stab at explaining the idea of "no regrets" policies - climate change responses that are robust to the endless and apparently unsettleable argument in our political arena over the nature and causes of climate change:
One governmental response, favored by many, is to reduce the risk of climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.But another response, the Sandia group found, could be policies aimed at reducing the vulnerability of societies around the world to climate change.
That could have the advantage of helping regardless of whether the change is natural or human-caused. It could also include policies that would help in the absence of any climate change at all— sometimes called "no regrets" policies.
Helping poor, arid nations ensure adequate water supplies, for example, could help them respond to drought, whether it was natural or a response to greenhouse warming. But it could also help even if there isn't a drought.
It's that magic time of year when the garden offers new surprises every day. Today it was one of our tulips, a little gem on the mound in the back yard.
The wisteria is starting to leaf out, and the first iris - a lovely little white thing - is blooming in the front yard.
Lissa got the irrigation system in our back yard running this afternoon, and most of the work is done on the front irrigation. I've been pretty diligent about weeding every day during my vacation, so that's largely under control.
It cooled off nicely as the sun went down, so Lissa and I took a long walk down through the neighborhood to Central, past the high-end folks waiting for a table at Scalo to Flying Star, which is low-rent enough for us without being unapproachably hip. I had shrimp pasta with corn and poblano chiles. L had a patty melt, minus the cheese, which I think is an odd concept (what exactly is left to melt?) but she seemed to thoroughly enjoy.
I feel unbelievably relaxed, like I can really sleep now. And so to bed.
It was one of those annoying little things that I figured out how to do once, but couldn't remember how when it came up this morning on the libxml mailing list: how to dump a document from its native DocPtr structure into a regular old char buffer.
So when Lucas Brasilino pointed out the answer I jotted down a working example and added it to the libxml2 examples (not there at the moment, should show up when the web site syncs).
See, I'm on vacation.
My friend Dave Thomas and a number of other contributors have set up The Panda's Thumb, a blog "dedicated to explaining the theory of evolution, critiquing the claims of the anti-evolution movement, and defending the integrity of science and science education in America and around the world."
Check it out.
Elise.com has a thorough discussion of techniques for fighting comment spam. What seems to be the most widely used is Jay Allen's mt-blacklist. But since that would have required an MT upgrade, I opted to first try this simple hack. It is based on the assumption that there is brainless automation on the other end of line.
Step 1
Rename the "mt-comments.cgi" script in your mt directory.
Step 2
Find all references to "mt-comments.cgi" in all of your templates and rename them to match the new name you gave the file.
Step 3
When people send you email saying they tried to post a comment and got a "couldn't find mt-comments.cgi" error message, go back and find the templates you missed.
Update March 30, 2004: This didn't work. After five days, two different spammers, including one of my old regulars, were back.
Aaron yesterday suggested children may be an expensive luxury. Dude, there's good science backed up by badass mathematical analysis to support that suggestion.
One of the puzzles of demography has long been that as societies get richer, they tend to have lower birth rates. This seems evolutionarily counter-intuitive. As you get richer, you ought to be able to support more offspring. But it turns out that as we get richer, we end up needing to shower the younguns with more stuff, so as we get richer it gets paradoxically more expensive to add offspring. So as societies industrialize, their birth rates go down. The math involves allometric scaling laws that also match energy flow-body size patterns in critters. Turns out that the economics here can also be modelled as energy flow through the societal system.
One day into my little hack and I am comment spam free. I also am free of other comments, which either means I've also inadvertently disabled all comments (my testing suggests that is not the case) or that I'm just exceedingly boring, that whatever it is I have to say is not worthy of comment.
Feels kinda weird to be in the middle of a GNOME release cycle with no major role to play, but I"ve been making a quick editing pass through the release notes this afternoon just to feel useful. Murray Cumming and Colin Charles have done a great job, and there's been very little need for me to touch anything. Mainly it's fun seeing how much has been accomplished. The code monkeys have been busy.
Assuming the blog comment spammers are stupid, lazy or both (reasonable assumptions, at least for starters), I've added a simple hack to keep their automated instruments of vile torture at bay. We'll see how long this works.
(A thought: Is there any kind of torture that isn't vile?)
I did some smart things, made a couple of big mistakes, and made, for about an hour and forty seven minutes, the hardest physical effort of my life. About an hour and a half into it, on a long gentle climb on a clean, clear road with the wind at my back, I had a moment of transcendental euphoria. And, as I suspected, I was the only one in my race without those cool wraparound sunglasses.
The First Mistake
We were the last to go, a small group of inexperienced riders, and the group fell apart right off of the line. My mistake was to expect a cruise up the first hill, but five of the youngsters jumped right from the start, leaving me hanging in no-man's land between the fast people and the slow people. I wanted to be fast.
The course climbed a long, gentle hill for its first five miles, and the sudden break left me all alone up the first half of the hill, trying to get back on to the rabbits in front.
I'm a heart rate junkie, and my plan had been to avoid going anaerobic early, knowing I'd pay the price later for every minute above my threshold early in the race. But looking down at the monitor on my handlebar, I knew I was screwed. I've had this problem a couple of times recently with my heart monitor where it just goes haywire when I'm riding hard, reading in the 200s (my maximum heart rate is really about 190, and I rarely get into the 170s).
It's funny how dependent I've become on the heart rate number to judge my level of effort, but for better or worse the malfunction left me to go by feel. I watched up the road, and saw one of the rabbits also by himself and in reach.
The First Smart Thing
I had the feeling Rabbit 1 was suffering and that's why I was able to catch him, though I realize in retrospect he knew I was back there and knew we'd be better off working together. When I passed him I told him to get on back, thinking I was doing him a favor, but the favor in fact got returned in spades.
Neither of us were particularly experienced, but he showed me the hand signal and we got a good paceline rhythm going over the top of the hill across the mesa and into a long and gorgeous descent down into the Rio Puerco.
This is Rt. 6 west out of Los Lunas, New Mexico, along the route of the old pre-1937 Route 66. It's sort of a road to nowhere, sometimes used by big rigs making a shortcut but otherwise only used by tourists savoring the view and local ranchers. On the back of our little paceline I did nothing but stare at my partner's wheel (we exchanged names - Stefan), but on the front I could look up occasionally and gulp in the scenery.
We made great time, and started picking off stragglers from the "D" group, the race that had started five minutes ahead of us. But it wasn't until the bottom, where the road crossed the Rio Puerco, that we finally picked up someone from our own race, another of the rabbits.
"Do you want to do the honors?" Stefan asked as we got near him and he waved me to the front.
The guy looked, and tacked on to the back, so we now had a three-person line and a good rhythm and we were flying. I'm not a particularly fast bicyclist, but with three people working together into the wind on rolling terrain we were easily holding in the low 20's, which is damn fast for me, and I felt for the first time in my life like I was in a bike race.
Mistakes Two and Three
Right before the turnaround, at mile 19, there was a little hill. I'd driven the course, so I knew to expect it, a steep quarter mile or so, not really much of a problem. My mistake was to let myself end up on the back of the paceline at the bottom. On previous little kicks, I'd seen Stefan get out of the saddle and pull away from me, so I knew I wasn't as good of a climber as he was. The same thing happened here, and in that quarter mile I dropped maybe 15 seconds behind the other two guys. Not far, but a disastrous distance ultimately.
Then at the top of the hill, I made my second mistake. I'd brought some of my food bars, broken up into little pieces, and I grabbed and stuffed it into my mouth. This had been my plan - a little food at the midpoint to avoid a bonk later. The problem was that I couldn't choke it down. My mouth was a dry film, and I ended up unable to chew or swallow, choking the food down with water, and I had to slow down to get myself together. So by the time we made the turn, I was probably thirty seconds down on my former partners. As he passed me going the opposite way, Stefan motioned me to get back on.
The Second Smart Thing
I tried to hammer to back. I tried like hell. I closed part of the gap. But they were two working well together, and I was just little old me, working at the edge of my abilities. I also knew that when we got back across the river, the road kicked back up again, and even if I caught them they were likely to drop me again on the climb.
So when we crossed the river, I finally gave up on the idea of catching them and settled into my own rhythm. Everything changed. I passed a couple of more riders from the "D" race (hoping each time they'd latch on behind me so we could work together, but they didn't), I had this incredible rhythm. My heart rate monitor was still giving squirrelly readings, but as near as I can tell it settled down here right at the top of my anaerobic zone. The pavement was smooth - odd how that mattered so very much, how very pleasant it felt. My legs didn't stop screaming - man they were screaming by this point! But this sense of impossible euphoria swept over me, like I could climb that hill forever, like I wanted to climb that hill forever.
And then it was over - the finish line in sight, the 1 km mark taped to the road, Bill (the race promoter and finish line judge and my neighbor who gave me my first real road bike - thanks, Bill) saying to me as I crossed the line, "Keep going, John, they're right behind you," and a wave from the"B" race sprinting to the line over my shoulder (they'd done a full 50, not the 33 the "D's" and "E's" do).
The Coda
I rode up and down the finish area a few times, chatting briefly with a couple of people I know, then rolled the five miles back down the hill to my car. On the way, a couple of riders from the New Mexico Velosport team passed me, and for a minute, just for fun, I tried to get on their back wheels.
Lissa nailed it when she observed that I hate to go to parties where there are going to be a bunch of people I don't know. Add to that the fact that I don't have those cool wraparound sunglasses and you'll understand why I woke up with a nervous stomach this morning, an hour before my alarm clock was set to go off. It's not so much that I'm worried about how well I'll place in my first cycling road race this morning. I'm not really even worried about the pain of two hours of hard riding (in an ugly wind, I might add). No, pathetic as this may sound, I'm mostly worried about fitting in.
USA Today yesterday published a remarkable package of stories documenting its internal investigation of the work of Jack Kelley, the paper's star foreign correspondent. They found:
... strong evidence that Kelley fabricated substantial portions of at least eight major stories, lifted nearly two dozen quotes or other material from competing publications, lied in speeches he gave for the newspaper and conspired to mislead those investigating his work.Perhaps Kelley's most egregious misdeed occurred in 2000, when he used a snapshot he took of a Cuban hotel worker to authenticate a story he made up about a woman who died fleeing Cuba by boat. The woman in the photo neither fled by boat nor died, and a USA TODAY reporter located her this month. If Cuban authorities had learned she was the woman in the picture, she says, she could have lost her job and her chance to emigrate.
There was a moment Friday afternoon when the cosmos aligned with my pantry.
Teetering on the edge of the equinox, the sun was setting perfectly due west. A broad shaft of light shot through the open back door, through the big family room and the open window between family room and kitchen, straight into the pantry.
This is good, as the pantry is not well lit. It was as if, for one shining moment, some ancient architect had conspired with the heavens to help me find canned peaches.
Bjorn Reese's answer to what seemed to me a profoundly obscure question.
Environmental science is not a journalistic specialty of mine, so I'll tread into this terrain gingerly, and leave the heavy lifting to Carl Zimmer in the discussion of a paper that came out today in Science about the loss of butterfiles, birds and plants in Britain over the last 20 to 40 years.
The science, in a nutshell:
There is growing concern about increased population, regional, and global extinctions of species. A key question is whether extinction rates for one group of organisms are representative of other taxa. We present a comparison at the national scale of population and regional extinctions of birds, butterflies, and vascular plants from Britain in recent decades. Butterflies experienced the greatest net losses, disappearing on average from 13% of their previously occupied 10-kilometer squares. If insects elsewhere in the world are similarly sensitive, the known global extinction rates of vertebrate and plant species have an unrecorded parallel among the invertebrates, strengthening the hypothesis that the natural world is experiencing the sixth major extinction event in its history.
And the conclusion:
If insects elsewhere are similarly sensitive, we tentatively agree with the suggestion that the known global extinction rates of vertebrate and plant species may have an unrecorded parallel among the insects, strengthening the hypothesis derived from plant, vertebrate, and certain mollusk declines, that the biological world is approaching the sixth major extinction event in its history.
Zimmer's explanation of the science is worth a read - the body of data, collected over the years by tens of thousands of volunteers, is amazing. But the importance now will be how that final line - the sixth major extinction event - is received.
More stuff I wrote elsewhere, from today's Albuquerque Journal, one of those straightforward pieces of climate change research that has the potential to narrow the uncertainty in the models:
A New Mexico researcher hunting for water vapor in the upper atmosphere has found less than expected, suggesting global warming may be less than some predictions.The research, by atmospheric physicist Ken Minschwaner of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, also undercuts an argument made by global warming skeptics— that a lack of water vapor could cool the planet.
That puts Minschwaner and co-author Andrew Dessler of the University of Maryland in a comfortable middle ground between global warming skeptics and those who make extreme estimates of warming caused by human burning of fossil fuels.
"It's kind of a nice place to be," Minschwaner said.
NASA's PR machine is gearing up to announce today the discovery of Sedna, a Pluto-like object way the hell out in the Kuiper belt, the farthest solar system object yet found, etc.
This will of course spark the usual debates over whether Sedna is really a "planet", whatever that means. The definitional problem, as expressed in terms of Pluto, has generated undless debate. My suggestion is that we stipulate that Sedna is a planet, given that its characteristics are as planet-like as Pluto's, but primarily because that makes the whole thing a lot more fun. A tenth planet! How cool is that?
Kudos to Cornell University for the launch of the Open Access University Press. University press-type books will be made freely available on line, and can be purchased through on-demand publishing. This leverages technology to perform the function university presses were always intended to achieve - making high-quality academic information available to the people who need it. Unlike commercial publishing, most university press publishing is primarily about getting the work out there to the tiny, non-profitable audience that needs it. This has the potential to do that.
Books published by academic university presses tend to have a narrow audience. Interestingly, in the Internet-First model, authors do not receive advance royalties, but are paid when each print on- demand copy is ordered. "Faculty members value having their scholarship read, and the Open Access approach provides immediate, worldwide access," says Cooke. "Our first authors are all distinguished faculty with no need to build up their résumés. They have no pressing financial need or were smart enough to know they weren't going to get much money anyway."
It's hard to imagine a very large audience for the Cornell Guide to Growing Fruit at Home, but that's the whole point, eh?
When I've written in the past about RS 2477, it's been primarily about private property issues. Here's an interesting RS 2477 site that deals with the issue as relates to public lands.
A group of teenagers in the house for a self-assembled "pi party". Their plan - to bake pies. First choice for the recipe - Google. Second choice - a cookbook.
Happy Pi Day. Do something special at 1:59 this afternoon (if you didn't already at 1:59 this morning).
I now think Lance Armstrong has a good chance of winning this year's Tour de France. I was not so sure. The machine no longer looked invincible last year. He looked good, but it did not look like fun. This year? If there's a moment, a clue, it perhaps is the third stage of the Tour of Murcia a week ago, when Armstrong moves to the front, the super domestique leading out Postal sprinter Max van Heeswijk. Let's let Max tell it:
"Lance pulled very hard the last few hundred meters and provided me with a very good lead out. He said it had been a long time since he last did a lead out but it was perfect. He went really hard into the last corner. He's a great champion."
Or Michael Barry:
With just over a kilometer to go, Pavel was on the front stringing the peloton out into a single line. Next I did a hard effort on the front and then Lance took Max to the line. Lance went through the last corner without touching his brakes at full speed. At the line Max won by a good bike length over Zabel with the next riders coming across the line in single file.It is rare the team does a lead out and very rare Lance is even close to the front in a final sprint. It was an extreme adrenalin rush and everybody on the team gave everything they had to get Max to the line in position to win.
The Texan doesn't have to mix it up. He's not being paid to lead out a sprint. That's just fun.
Pikas, pygmy possums and tiny flowers in the high Swiss Alps are climate changes "canary in the coal mine," signalling changes underway, according to a news piece in today's Science by Kevin Krajick (sub. req.):
Alpine ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to climate change, and recent studies suggest that mountain dwellers--from delicate flowers in the Swiss Alps to pygmy possums in Australia--are in trouble. Although it can be difficult to tease out other factors, including fire suppression and livestock grazing, a growing number of researchers fear that if the heat keeps rising, many alpine plants and animals will face quick declines or extinction."People always thought the whole world could go to hell, and pikas would be fine. Actually, they may be canaries in the coal mine," says wildlife biologist Andrew Smith of Arizona State University in Tempe.
The basic problem is that the critters up on the top of a mountain are trapped. You see these "island ecosystem" effects all the time, little isolated populations in high country. Where flatland plants and animals can in many cases drift north, south, east or west as their ecosystem home moves, high country critters can only go up. And if they're already at the top of the mountain?
High-mountain biota are trapped, however, and those living in the alpine are in the tightest corner of all. Comprising just 3% of the vegetated terrestrial surface, these islands of tundra are Noah's ark refuges where whole ecosystems, often left over from glacial times, are now stranded amid uncrossable seas of warm lowlands.These islands are shrinking. The lowest elevation at which freezing occurs in mid-latitude mountains has climbed 150 meters since 1970. (On average, each rise of 100 meters in altitude corresponds to a 0.5ºC drop in mean temperature.) This appears to be hastening local extinctions that have been proceeding slowly since the last glacial age. Fossils show that pikas, for example, once ranged widely over North America but have contracted to a dwindling number of high peaks during warm periods of the last 12,000 years, says U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) ecologist Erik Beever.
One of the media lists I'm on posted a link yesterday to the transcript of Edward R. Murrow's March 9, 1954 trashing of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Fifty years out it's a tour de force, a thoughtful reminder of the dangers of those who intentionally obscure, for political ends, the distinction between dissent and disloyalty.
So it occurs to me in this new category RSS feed concept, that it might be useful at times to include my entries in multiple categories. For example, if I were to write about the snow storm that cancelled stage 4 of Paris-Nice this week, I might think that would be both cycling and, uh, "climate". Can I do this?
Update: Yup, seems I can.
Abe Fettig helpfully pointed me to instructions on creating topic-based RSS feeds in Movable Type, allowing a solution to the Planet Malkovich problem. So with Abe's help, I herewith am now able (if I cut and pasted correctly - man I love the commons that is free/open software) to offer category-based RSS feeds.
It's rather hard to imagine anyone but the Planet GNOME crowd caring about any of these feeds. Is there a Planet Cycling? If there is, why would they give a hoot about my feeble drabblings? Planet Fleck Family? Nobody but Mom cares about that, and she doesn't need an RSS feed. No doubt Planet Birds would have a burning interest in entries about the ornithology of my suburban back yard. Anyway, here they are:
- birds
- climate
- cycling
- the calendar
- my family
- free software
- what, for lack of better, I call "mind"
- music
- science
Bobby Julich gives it one more shot:
"It's not about winning races or being on the podium of the Tour, winning the money or becoming famous," Julich said. "For me it was one thing: For those three weeks in 1998, I was in the zone. That was the most amazing feeling. If there's anything I want to experience again before I retire, it would be to feel that again, that sensation."
(From Velonews' excellent profile of Bobby as he take one more shot at the pinnacle of the European peleton.)
"I can eat pretty much anything. I ride bikes--I'm a bike-sexual. I ride hard, I ride long. I go long distances on a bike. I'm sponsored by Viagra, which means I don't need a kickstand."
- Robin Williams' pre-Oscar slim-down tip
Andrew Sullivan suggests, in response to yesterday's CDC report on obesity, that if one wants to be fat, that's a personal choice:
What's to be done on a collective basis? I have an idea: nothing. If people want to eat themselves into misery and early death, it really isn't anyone else's business.
Well, perhaps. Or perhaps in the sort of commons we've built for ourselves, where we all share one another's health care costs, either through pooled insurance or tax-funded care, one's obligations spread a bit farther than the end of one's fork.
In commenting on Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Truman Capote is said to have offered, "That's not writing. That's typing." Perhaps that's my problem, Christian. I just type real fast.
Keep scrolling. Nothing else to see here.
So it's been suggested that I don't write enough about gnomes or something, but that's weird, because sometimes they're all I think about, and it's all I can do to not write about them. I'm sort of embarassed to admit it, but sometimes I'll lie in bed at night, in the dark, and imagine my gnomes, talking to me.
I just wanna say that I'm so happy to be part of a community that loves gnomes as much as I do.
It raises all sorts of philosophical questions about the nature of self, about the existence of the soul. Am I me? Is Malkovich Malkovich? Was the Buddha right, is duality an illusion? Do you see what a can of worms this portal is? I don't think I can go on living my life as I have lived it. There's only one thing to do. Let's get married right away.
The thing is, I've never seen the movie.
A British research group is suggesting a sort of localized version of Kyoto-style emissions trading, according to the BBC:
Every man and woman in the country could be issued with a fixed number of permits to pollute the atmosphere under an idea from government-sponsored researchers. It's been proposed by academics at the Tyndall Centre - one of Britain's top institutes for climate change policy.They say it's the best way of helping Britain hit its long-term target of cutting by 60% the emissions thought to be changing the climate. People living simple lifestyles could make money by selling their excess pollution permits to those wanting to live in the fast lane.
(Thanks to Mike Newman for the link.)
We drove Janis up Jemez Canyon today, a day that had that first-day-of-spring-emerging-from-hibernation feel to it.
You can see from the clothes that it's still got some chill to it, and if you looked in the opposite direction, toward the north-facing slopes, you'd have still seen snow. But it was warm enough to eat quite comfortably on the patio at the Laughing Lizard. The locals were emerging into the street, aggressively wearing shirtsleeves, with cheery hellos and big spring grins.
We drove Janis up to the soda dam, a big plug of travertine laid down by hot springs across a narrow point in the canyon. It's an odd tourist destination - it smells bad, and you've got to brave traffic to cut back and forth across the highway to see the dam and the most active little springs, which are across the road. But it's geology at a near-human time scale, worth the trip.
Mainly we just ogled the rock, which is at its best down the canyon in the Triassic redbeds of Jemez Pueblo, the reddest rocks it has been my privilege to see in my travels 'round the southwest.
Lissa's friend Janis - a deep old childhood sort of friend - is visiting for the weekend from California.
We hit a brief but thick snowstorm yesterday on the drive to Santa Fe, leaving the plaza (above) in picture postcard condition. Early lunch at the diner (I barely got in on the tale end of breakfast, which meant a breakfast burrito slathered in rich red chile) and then over to the Georgia O'Keefe.
O'Keefe has almost become a cliche, a pastiche of rich-toned southwestern landscapes, but the museum does a good job of reminding that she really stands square amid the sweep of 20th century art, more than cow skulls etc.
Janis wanted to see the folk art museum, which is another treasure, almost visual overload. To recuperate, we had coffee at the newsstand in my sister's old neighborhood off Canyon Road, where we stumbled into one of those classic Santa Fe moments - pony-tailed guru, speaking to eager disciples:
"The word is the vibration."
There also was some talk of prophecies and transformation, and real estate.
There's a new set of long-term climate change data out, this one for Europe over the last 500 years, and once again it's shaped like a hockey stick:
The authors, Jürg Luterbacher from the University of Bern and colleagues, in today's Science (sub. req.), have nailed down a proxy record that allows them to tease out seasonal variability in European temperature, rather than the usual annual numbers you see in some of the broader proxy records.
This is incredibly important for the research enterprise, where comparisons between the computer models and empirical record are critical for understanding the nature and extent of both natural and anthropogenic climate change. But the Luterbacher paper also ought to be relevant for the political debates over climate change, especially the argument triggered by last fall's reanalysis of Mann et. al.'s famous "hockey stick" by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick.
The Mann et. al. hockey stick is based on a paper Michael Mann and his colleagues published in Nature in 1998, which uses a millennium of climate proxies to argue that the last century's warming is unprecedented over the time scale under study. It's become iconic in the global warming debate, which makes it ripe for skeptics' attacks, which is what McIntyre and McKitrick did. Their reanalysis of Mann's data yielded the claim that the original hockey stick had a big upward bend in the middle that Mann and his colleagues missed, and that the 1500s were every bit as warm as things are today. If true, that would blast a hole in the claim that greenhouse gases are creating unprecedented global warming.
I've always thought that the M&M argument was something of a straw man, by setting up the original hockey stick as the thing to knock down, and arguing that they've therefore knocked the legs out from under the antropogenic warming argument. Even if one grants that their analysis is correct (a questionable assertion - Mann et. al. have argued that M&M left out some of the original data, biasing the result, and that argument remains unsettled), the new analysis ignores a host of confirmatory data, using other proxies, that shows the same sort of hockey stick. As Mann pointed out in a 2002 review paper (sub. req.), four other proxy records published since all look like hockey sticks too.
The search for confirmation, it seems, has been successful, and if M&M are to have any scientific impact (as opposed to political impact, which they've already had), they need to reach deeper and provide a more fundamental explanation of why all the published proxies are wrong. You can't just knock down Mann et. al.'s hockey stick. You've got to tackle them all.
That is the significance, in terms of the ongoing political debate, of the new Luterbacher paper. One more proxy data set, one more hockey stick. In terms of the science, the new paper, by providing seasonal resolution, gives the modelers a great new set of data against which to compare the results their computers spew out.
A new UN report may signal the death knell for the Kyoto treaty by giving Russian treaty opponents the ammunition they've been looking for, according to a piece today by Paul Webster in Science (subscription required). The problem, according to Webster, is that previous UN calculations that seemed to show the Russians would have carbon credits to sell may be wrong, having failed to take into account burgeoning new Russian economic activity. Russia is key, because Kyoto doesn't come into effect until countries representing 55 percent of the world's carbon emissions sign on. With the U.S. out, as Webster and others note, Russia is pretty much the key. But the only way the Russians can win the political support internally is if Russia can make money selling carbon credits - essentially selling off its reductions in carbon use to other countries that want to use more (this carbon credit market is a central feature of Kyoto). If Russia doesn't have any to sell, political support there will likely evaporate.
The insurance market seems to have noticed global climate change, according to this story:
The world's second-largest reinsurer, Swiss Re, warned on Wednesday that the costs of natural disasters, aggravated by global warming, threatened to spiral out of control, forcing the human race into a catastrophe of its own making.In a report revealing how climate change is rising on the corporate agenda, Swiss Re said the economic costs of such disasters threatened to double to $150 billion a year in 10 years, hitting insurers with $30-40 billion in claims, or the equivalent of one World Trade Center attack annually.
(Thanks to Greg Mello for pointing this out.)
Carl Zimmer has a thoughtful take on the issues raised by a New York Times story this week on the First Chapter for the History of Medicine.
The NYT story talks about a 3,500-year-old painting showing the medicinal use of a plant, saying the researchers have "pushed back by hundreds of years the earliest use of a medicinal plant." Says Zimmer, one of the most interesting writers on evolution these days (and thank heavens he's blogging!), "Whoa."
He suggests there is evidence that our hominid ancestors were using plants as medicines before we were human, before our brains got big. We did it, he argues, and only later had ideas about what it might mean. "Looking for the dawn of medicine in archaeology, rather than in human evolution, is like looking for stars through the wrong end of a telescope."
Dang but it's hard to keep up with the climate blogging thing without David Appell for inspiration. But one must soldier on, most recently with a new paper from Martin Beniston in the latest Geophysical Research Letters on the summer of 2003 in Europe.
Model results suggest that under enhanced atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations, summer temperatures are likely to increase by over 4°C on average, with a corresponding increase in the frequency of severe heat waves. Statistical features of the 2003 heat wave for the Swiss site of Basel are investigated and compared to both past, 20th century events and possible future extreme temperatures based on model simulations of climatic change. For many purposes, the 2003 event can be used as an analog of future summers in coming decades in climate impacts and policy studies.
2003 is "likely to have been the warmest summer since 1540", a year rivers ran dry and crops wilted.
It would be easy for the skeptics to taunt Beniston for the usual sin of linking every extreme event with global warming, were it not for the statistics underpinning his rather ominous paper title: "The 2003 heat wave in Europe: A shape of things to come?"
Quite simply, as I mentioned last month in talking about a similar paper in Nature by Schär et al, the summer of 2003 was an extreme outlier in the context of the normal (gaussian) distribution of temperatures for the period for which we have a record. So either the climate is slipping into a new regime, for which the old normal distribution doesn't apply, or you lot in Europe were one unlucky bunch of sumbitches last summer, eh?
In other words, to borrow a phrase I've been slammed elsewhere for using in connection with climate change, what happened in Europe in the summer of 2003 is "not inconsistent with" the greenhouse climate change hypothesis.
These shall ye eat of all that are in the waters: whatsoever hath fins and scales in the waters, in the seas, and in the rivers, them shall ye eat.And all that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you:
They shall be even an abomination unto you; ye shall not eat of their flesh, but ye shall have their carcases in abomination.
Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you.
Leviticus 11:9-12
As an aside on a topic I've mentioned before - information on the Mile-Hi Jeep Club.