In the course of building GNOME 2.8, I happened to see some DocBook errors flying past in the terminal window, and I thought, "Well, there's something I know how to fix." So today I sat down and banged out a patch to the Rhythmbox docs so they're now valid DocBook. I was pretty rusty - the details of DocBook are thankfully not something that I'd committed to memory - there's only so much room in my brain.
Inspired and with nothing else pressing to do this afternoon (I'd already cleaned the stove), I found a couple of other places where docs fixes were in order in 2.8. The dictionary docs got a necessary tweak, and shaunm pointed me to a new contribution from the Sun team - docs for the vino thingie - that had yet to be integrated. Integrated they now are, at least in CVS.
For those of you reading this in Albuquerque, the Albuquerque High School theater kids are doing The Laramie Project over the next two weekends. It is the story of Laramie, Wyoming, in the aftermath of what happened to Matthew Shepard. My daughter, Nora, is in it, and I'm really proud of her and her theater colleagues for doing something important. You should go see it if you happen to live here.
Thurs. - Sat., this weekend (Sept. 30 - Oct. 2) and next (Oct. 7 - 10), 7 p.m., at the Albuquerque High School theater, 800 Odelia Rd NE. (Odelia is Indian School west of Interstate 25, enter the theater on the school's east side entrance.)
No, the U.S. television network that carries cycling spent all its money on the Giro and Le Tour, and decided not to air the Vuelta. Sucks, as it looks like this was a far better race than Le Tour this year, in terms of suspense and fan excitement offered. I've been reduced to reading the daily Velonews coverage.
I've written before about my interest in A.E. Douglass, a turn-of-the-last-century astronomer and all-around scientist (the disciplines were so less clearly defined a hundred years ago) who almost accidentally developed dendrochronology.
In the process, Douglass revolutionized two sciences - archaeology and paleoclimate studies - but he was after something entirely different. He was studying the sun, and wanted to know whether the 11-year sunspot cycle was a permanent feature. He figured that trees, by putting on fat rings in wet years and thin ones in dry years, might show signs of a periodicity linked to the solar cycle. The archaeology was nowhere near his mind when he got started, and the climate stuff was only a means to his astronomical end.
It didn't take him long to grasp the significance of what he was up to, though, once he realized that he could statistically identify synchronicity in tree rings in sites some distance from one another. (His first sites were in Flagstaff, Ariz., and then a hundred or more miles away in Prescott, Ariz.) He eventually became convinced that, if he could just nail down the cycles, he'd have a tool that could be used to make climatological forecasts.
Douglass believed by the end of his career that he had found the solar cycle. I'm not clear enough on the statistical tools he used, the way he did the spectral analysis to pick the cycle out of the quite noisy data, to understand whether he was right. It's not one of those things that's immediately obvious, like "every 11th year is wet" or something, relying instead on more sophisticated statistical analysis to pick signal out of a lot of noise.
But in the years since, other people with more modern tools have continued to poke at the question, and there are now clear signs that there is a climate signal caused by solar variability. It's not strong enough to be useful in telling us whether this winter will be wet or dry, but it's there.
I've been reading some of Douglass's old papers from the early 20th century, but until this weekend I hadn't spent much time in the contemporary literature. Following a troll down a rabbit hole for the last couple of days over at Quark Soup, however, has yielded some really interesting stuff I didn't know about the question. I know, it's better to let trolls be trolls, but this one was raising some interesting questions about the role of solar irradiance in global climate change.
Turns out the troll was full of crap, misquoting the literature to try to argue that changes in solar output were sufficient to explain 20th century warming. The literature he was citing didn't support the assertion, arguing instead that there was some solar warming over the 20th century, but that it was insufficient to explain the warming we've actually seen. Even this point clearly remains controversial, but whatever. The literature was nevertheless pretty interesting.
There's a great summary of the state of the science done earlier this year by John Eddy of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson. Eddy chaired a NASA-sponsored panel looking at what we know and don't know about this stuff.
My favorite bit from Eddy's paper is how Sir William Herschel thought he'd found a correlation between the sunspot cycle and the price of wheat. Herschel argued that fewer sunspots was linked to climatological changes that included poor growing conditions. (The link to the markets is a dicey one: "Demographic pressures, civil unrest and other social changes all played a significant part in cereal prices at the time," notes William James Burroughs in his book Weather Cycles: Real Or Imaginary. Burroughs is talking about a different attempt to make the connection, but the point's the same.)
It's really only been since 1978 that, using newly launched satellites, we've been able to measure the solar irradiance - how much energy the sun is actually dumping into our atmsophere. There's still some debate, apparently, over whether the data collected over that relatively brief interval (a little more than two solar cycles so far, not much to go on) shows a long-term warming trend.
If it does, it doesn't appear sufficient to explain the warming measured over the 20th century (this was at the heart of the argument with the troll). But there are some clearly measurable connections between the solar cycle and temperatures here on Earth. According to Eddy, it's found in measurements of both ocean and air temperature, though the details of the mechanisms involved are still a bit murky. The timing of the ocean numbers, for example, is a bit of a puzzle because of the damping and feedbacks involved. But whatever those details, the 11-year cycle can definitely be seen.
Which means Douglass, and all the other early pioners looking for sun-climate connections, were right.
(Hat tip to Henri Grissino-Mayer, whose Ultimate Tree Ring site is a web treasure, the work of a smart and dedicated and very generous guy.)
With Jeanne bearing down, Luis sits in Florida and thinks about this.
Climate buddy and cycling enthusiast Dano offered this advice for the off-season: "Never go into your big ring."
Easier said than done this morning down the hill into the valley with a howling tailwind, but I kept it on the small chain ring all day. The psychological trick was to set my bike computer on "cadence" rather than using it as a speedometer, so I didn't suffer the angst of riding slow. The trick worked. I'm so dumb.
I took most of the week off, but resting didn't set well with my newly remodelled metabolism, and by the end of the week I felt all edgy, so a decent ride was in order for this morning. I rode down Candelaria into the valley. (Albuquerque readers will ask why he rode down a light industrial corridor, along a major arterial with poor shoulders and bike lanes most of the way. What can I say? I was on a wander.)
I picked up the river trail at the Rio Grande Nature Center, and followed it south through the new pipeline construction project. (Albuquerque readers will ask why he rode on a lousy temporary bike trail through a construction project. What can I say? I was on a wander.)
Down along the river trail, the asters are in bloom, a delicate spray of purple from each plant that belies their remarkable desert durability.
The howllng tailwind headed out of the heights was, of course, equivalent to a howling headwind climbing back up the hill, but I didn't mind. I was in my small chain ring, and I had no idea how slow I was going. I was on a wander. I think my training next season should include one wander per week.
Added Rich Burridge to my planet feed. The proximate cause was this this lovely bit about whales, but the ultimate cause is that Rich's blog reflects an incredibly eclectic mind, which amuses me.
Richard's contest done.
Much very strange poetry.
Now let us go ride.
An important paper today in Nature about carbon in the arctic, which I blog elsewhere.
When I wrote earlier this week about Archimedes, I didn't get into why I found the Nova piece so remarkable. I loved it in part because I remember the "aha" I had as a youngster when I got the notion of integration - of summing across a series of infinite slices.
Malcolm Tredinnick wrote to point out that this is in fact something that's been invented multiple times - Egyptian and Chinese methematicians had at least part of the insight as well:
.... Some of the ancient Egyptian scrolls (two
famous ones are the Rhind -- or Ames -- papyrus and the Moscow papyrus) included various mathematical algorithms and puzzles. These included things like computing the volume of a pyramid. My recollection is that historians are not completely sure *how* the Egyptians discovered some of their algorithsm; just that they did write them down.The Chinese, on the other hand, wrote down their working as well as the conclusions. They also knew how to compute things like the volume of a pyramid, which they did by repeated dissections and then taking the leap that the infinite series of dissections converged to something sensible (that was really Newton and Liebnizs' breakthrough: they realised both that there was a question to be settled about the convergence of such series and they provided reasonably rigorous answers). The Chinese also appear to have come up with an early version of approximating a circle with succesively more sided polygons and computing the area that way. Archimedes did it better than they did, though.
Malcolm's right when he points out that we should be careful not to "look through rose-colored historical glasses" and infer more about their early insight than is warranted. But it's still cool.
(More here.)
In Google mail, the price you pay for a cool interface and bazillions of free storage is these little context-sensitive ads at the bottom of each email (I know, this prolly creeps a lot of you out, but whatever, it's an experiment). So I just noticed this ad on the bottom of a gnome desktop-devel thread:
(Guess I just added to their googlejuice, didn't I?)
Saw a cool Nova episode this evening on the Archimedes Palimpsest, which had some fine storytelling leading us into the tale of how Archimedes, at something like 200 BC, prefigured the calculus.
He was using sums of infinite numbers of slices of non-trivial three-dimensional geometrical objects to calculate their volume. Smart guy. But the intriguing storyline of the Nova piece was how Archimedes' work was lost, wiith what appears to be the surviving copy of his "Methods" torn apart and copied over by some dumbass monk around 1200 AD who needed paper to write his prayers on. Imagine, the Nova people suggested, how Renaissance science would have been accelerated if they'd had Archimedes to draw on.
update: Reader Ryan points out the delicious accidental pun - "to draw on". I can't claim credit. I'm a terrible punster.
Ross Gelbspan is speaking in Albuquerque next week, so I picked up a copy of Boiling Point, and this morning I chased down the references associated with the little discussion of a couple of weeks ago over on Chris Mooney's blog about hurricanes and climate change.
Gelbspan's key reference for his assertions about a growth in extreme weather under greenhouse climate change is Trends in U.S. Climate during the Twentieth Century, by Tom Karl. The paper's relatively noncommittal on hurricanes ("Recent studies indicate that even if significant greenhouse induced warming were to occur, it is doubtful whether increases in tropical storms would be detectable due to the large natural variability in these storms.") but gives a good account of other issues related to variability, which is to me the really interesting climate change issue.
It's a bit dated - a lot's gone on since 1995 - but still an interesting read.
When we first moved to Albuquerque, the video store within walking distance of our apartment had a Hitchcock section. This was a perfect solution, because otherwise where do you file the Hitchcock movies? Horror? Mystery? Comedy? Romance? Over time, we trekked through most of what they had, but Hitchcock made a lot of films, so we've still not even come close to seeing them all.
When in doubt at the video store (there are so many bad movies, choices always pose such risk) one can always pick up a Hitchcock and rarely be disappointed. Saturday night: Stage Fright. Marlene Dietrich was delicious.
Got a working GNOME 2.8 built this weekend. Smart, efficient, beautiful. The boys and girls have once again done fine work.
It was a perfect way to end my season.
I'd planned to make the Moriarty time trial two weeks ago my last race, but then the Nob Hill Crit popped up as a late addition to the schedule, and I couldn't resist - a bike race in my own neighborhood, where I could just hop on the bike at home and ride over!
It was a lovely course, a triangle through the residential neighborhood on the north side of Albuquerque's Nob Hill, which is the best urban walking neighborhood in town. It's lovely little post-war bungalows, narrow tree-lined streets. Some folks watched from their front porches, lots of folks drifted over from the Nob Hill shopping district (they were having a chile cookoff there) to watch. They had a kids' race, which even had tykes on tricycles. There was a terrific "A" race, with some of the fastest racers in town.
Racing in a neighborhood was sweet. Per my usual crit performance, I got lapped twice in my race (the "B" race), but I pretty much expected it given that two women's national road racing champions were there at the start line, plus a lot of the guys who I know are faster than me. Once I got dropped by the main field, I picked up a workmate and we had fun. The last corner of the triangle course's turn, off a downhill into the front straightaway, was wide open and fast, and every time I headed into it I popped up into a higher gear and accelerated, getting lower and faster each time. It was fun.
I came in 10th this year in the beginners' division of the annual state road racing points series, third in my age group, which was pretty satisfying.
Mom and Dad and Lissa came to watch the crit. They'd never seen me race before. Having them perched in lawn chairs on the sidewalk clapping for me each time I came through the front straightaway was a gas.
It was a perfect way to end my season.
Daughter Nora, at sixteen, has raised the cheerful mockery of her parents to a high art.
"This is what happens when you don't have cable," she said after I explained that we were watching not one but two turltes in the backyard. See, we've got two turtles, but we hardly ever see them, and it's been since forever that we've seen both at the same time.
Lissa was still in bed this morning when Sadie raised the alarm. I though she was just barking at the back door to come in, but when I went out she was barking and dancing around two turtles scrunched inside their shells by the back door, trying to avoid Sadie's excess of enthusiasm. I brought Sadie inside, alerted Lissa, and an hour of amusing turtle watching began.
First one of the turtles (they are named Speedy and Olivia, though we are not entirely sure which is which - they look quite similar) bumped at the other one, crashing into its shell. Then they wandering began. Lissa took many pictures, referred to old photographic documentation to try to sort out the question of which was Speedy and which was Olivia. Olivia climbed up into one of the little bird baths that sit on the ground. She's a desert turtle. That seemed odd.
Nora mocked us, suggesting alternative names for the turtles and repeating variations of the cable TV joke. She even turned on her computer, that she could mock us in her blog. But she did have to venture outside to see for herself the turtle sitting in the pond.
"She thinks we're kooks," Lissa said, "but she did want to come out and see the turtle in the water."
An intriguing bit of research published on the letters page of Science today (sub. req.) about the effect of the "Day After Tomorrow" climate porn film on public attitudes toward, and knowledge of, climate change. Andrew Balmford and his Cambridge colleagus surveyed a bunch of movie patrons, some before and some after seeing the film.
This has all the usual problems and biases of this sort of a survey, including the fallacy of sell-reporting - "Say you've got $1,000. How much would you like to spend on...." But the results were nevertheless instructive in at least a qualitative way. After seeing the movie, folks were more likely to want to spend money on greenhouse mitigation. But they were less likely to correctly understand the science.
Overall, the data thus suggest that seeing an entertaining if exaggerated illustration of the possible effects of climate change succeeds, in just 125 minutes, in raising public concern--but at the price of reducing public understanding. It would be interesting to see if these divergent effects hold in other countries, and which, if either, persists over time. More generally, our findings confirm that intense dramatizations have real potential to shift public opinion. However, the question remains whether such portrayals can be made more accurate (and thereby less confusing) without losing their popular appeal.
A couple of months back, a friend loaned me a GPS gizmo, and I thought it was one sweet toy. I could slip it in the pocket of my bike shirt when I went riding, then plug it in when I got back and get a map of where I'd been, plus an elevation and speed profile.
Lissa and I went out walking around the neighborhood, tracing out a greeting to the world.
I coveted this toy. I love the concept of GPS art, and I imagined myself pocketing the little thing every time I rode, building up a rich map of my two-wheeled travels around the greater Albuquerque area.
And then I bought a map. (Click below to read more, this is kinda long for the aggregators.)
A couple of years ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece in the New Yorker that remains one of my favorite bits of writing, called The Social Life of Paper. It was a loving ode to what remains the finest technology for information storage and retrieval.
Computers offer extraordinary power. The ability to store vast amounts of data and quickly search through it is an important qualitative revolution. Google has quite literally changed my life. But when I need to get the information into my brain - when I need to usefully interact with it - there's still no substitute for paper.
Last year, I dropped by the local REI to pick up a topographical map. I needed a quadrant up in the Jemez Mountains for a story I was working on, and I remembered their lovely big cabinet of topos. Turns out they don't have it any more. Instead, it's been replaced by an exciting new "maps on demand" computer technology. I perched at a screen, trying to navigate my way around mapspace to find the quadrant I needed. It was a hopeless task. The screen resolution wasn't good enough, and there was no elbow room, that claustrophobic feeling you get when you're peering through the soda straw of computerspace and have no feel for what lies outside the frame.
This wouldn't have happened with the old paper maps. They had the big map on the wall, gridded up into quads, and you could move your eyes around it, run your finger over it, interact with it. If you thought you found the one you wanted, you could pull it out and look at it, hold it, move the information around in your three-dimensional cognitive world. A glance to the map's right edge would show you which quad was next to it, and you could grab that one.
Gladwell tells the story of the strips of paper air traffic controllers use to identify each aircraft in the sky - how they position then on clipboards, move then around, literally passing the paper from one controller to the next as responsibility for the aircraft is handed off. To modern computer systems types, this seems hopelessly archaic. But it works, because the information is allowed to inhabit their three-dimensional space, out where they can get their hands on it:
Those strips moving in and out of the peripheral view of the controller serve as cognitive cues, which the controller uses to help keep the "picture" of his sector clear in his head. When taking over a control position, controllers touch and rearrange the strips in front of them. When they are given a new strip, they are forced mentally to register a new flight and the new traffic situation. By writing on the strips, they can off-load information, keeping their minds free to attend to other matters.
At work today, I was wrestling with a complex Nuclear Regulatory Commission case. The NRC keeps a voluminous electronic database of all documents filed in each one of its regulatory actions. The interface leaves something to be desired, but it's functional and it's all there, powerfully searchable. I was chasing footnotes from one document to the next, and the computer made them accessible. (Not easily accessible - if the NRC wants to contract with interaction design folks at Google to get some help, I'd be a happy guy. But at least they're there.)
But once I found each one I wanted, I printed it out. I underlined the important bits in red pen, and put little sticky notes on the key pages, and stuck them all in a big sloppy messy file folder on my desk. Paper works.
So up on my wall, I've now got a 1 to 100,000 BLM topographical and land jurisdiction map of the greater Albuquerque area. And a green highlighter pen. I don't need to boot up a computer to create the trace of my latest ride. I don't need to boot up a computer to look at it.
Interesting letter in the September Physics Today (more catching up on the reading) from Sidney van den Bergh at Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in Vancouver about Edwin Hubble and Harlow Shapley, two huge dudes in early 20th century astronomy. (Hubble figured out that the there were other galaxies beyond our own, but he thought they were evenly distributed. Shapley noticed they were sorta clumpy, which turns out to matter a great deal.)
Van den Bergh tells us that Hubble originally trained as a lawyer, while Shapley "began his career as a journalist." Good to see he thought better of it.
Catching up on my reading last night (I get too many weekly science magazines*, all of them good), I curled up last night with a piece in the July 24 New Scientist (apparently not on line) by Fred Pearce about uncertainties in the climate models because of water vapor and clouds.
Pearce talks about relatively new model results suggesting that uncertainties over water vapor feedbacks are creating a big tail on the warm side of the curve of uncertainty over CO2 doubling - in other words, increasing the odds for Earth ending up on the warm side of the one to twelve degree C warming range.
The story gives a good accounting of what the uncertainties are, and why water vapor is hard for the modellers. But then Pearce concludes with these frankly astonishing comments:
Some climate scientists find these new figures disturbing not just for what they suggest about the atmosphere's sensitivity to greenhouse gases, but also because they undermine existing predictions. Uncertainty about those predictions is stopping politicians from acting to halt global warming. So, they argue, even suggesting that the model results are less certain could be politically dangerous.But other climate scientists fear creating a spurious certainty about climate change. Since we don't know what the future holds, they say, we shouldn't claim to know. These people see the predictions of climate models as less like a weather forecast and more like a bookmaker setting odds for a high-stakes horse race. There are no "dead certainties". They say that humanity has to act prudently and hedge its bets about future climate change in the absence of certainty. We will, they argue, never be able to see through the clouds, and politicians will just have to accept that.
I rather wish Pearce had named names here, especially the scientists described in the first paragraph above who seem to think that they ought not be sharing the truth with the public and policy makers lest we get all confused about what to do about greenhouse climate change. That "we're scientists and we know best" attitude is the sort of profound arrogance that has gotten scientists into trouble on the climate change debate.
* I'm getting New Scientist, Science, Nature and Science News right now - all terrific, but who has time to read it all?
OK, this is admittedly an odd blogger specialty, but I've become a total fan of Aaron Weber's observations on overpriced real estate.
I admit I'm crazy obsessed with watching the hurricanes come.
Part of it is the inherent drama. And part of it is the remarkable way in which internet distribution of information makes so much available that used to be solely the province of professional weather geeks.
My latest discovery is the Weather Underground Tropical Weather page. For each current storm, they assemble all the latest information, including maps where they overlay all the forecast tracks from all the major weather models. You can really get a feel for how hard hurricane forecasting must be. (You can see the big spread in the models after Ivan makes landfall, thought that seems to be slowly sorting itself out.)
On that subject, Andrew Revkin had a good piece in today's New York Times:
TALLAHASSEE, Fla., Sept. 13 - At the National Hurricane Center, a gray bunker bristling with satellite dishes on the outskirts of Miami, meteorologists scanned readings last weekend gleaned by aircraft plunging into the eye of Hurricane Ivan and they squinted at satellite images while preparing a fresh forecast for the track of the dangerous storm.After assessing the data and the output of half a dozen supercomputer storm simulations, Stacy R. Stewart sat in front of a map of the Atlantic and Caribbean with an eraser and colored pencils, drawing the storm track newly estimated for the next five days. The map was filled with erasures of older storm projections that had at one point been the best bet but now were off by hundreds of miles as the storm's northerly curve drifted west.
This is the state of hurricane science in the new century: a mix of growing skill and persistent uncertainty, of intuition and algorithms, satellites and erasers.
I too love the New Mexico State Fair.
But aren't saguaro cacti native to Arizona, not New Mexico (or Hawai'i)?
Things I saw today, all signs of fall:
- Kids running - an invitational cross country meet, my iconic autumn sport - at the UNM north golf course
- The first clumps of yellow leaves on the bosque cottonwoods
- A praying mantis on our screen door
- Lissa making cactus juice, a mess of the most lovely, deep rich shade of purple scattered all about the kitchen
Today we must go to the fair.
From the Voice of America:
A new study finds that technologies already exist to solve the problem of global warming. It says strategies employing these technologies over the next fifty years could put the brakes on rising levels of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the earth's atmosphere - a chief cause of global warming.
Whew. That's a relief. Problem solved just in time for football season! Honey, could you get me a beer? The game's about to start.
OK, that's a totally cheap quote. The lead paragraph I excerpted above goes on to cite critics pointing out that it's not quite that easy, on account of the "economic, social and political costs" of the plan.
The story's about a paper in Science last month by Steve Pacala at Princeton:
Humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical, and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problem for the next half-century. A portfolio of technologies now exists to meet the world's energy needs over the next 50 years and limit atmospheric CO2 to a trajectory that avoids a doubling of the preindustrial concentration. Every element in this portfolio has passed beyond the laboratory bench and demonstration project; many are already implemented somewhere at full industrial scale. Although no element is a credible candidate for doing the entire job (or even half the job) by itself, the portfolio as a whole is large enough that not every element has to be used.
This is one of those "it's not that simple" problems, involving the hubris of the technician. Roger Pielke Jr. had a great take on this last month when the Pacala paper came out:
What the technocrats fail to appreciate is that even as "solutions" such as increasing fuel economy, adding nuclear power, and eliminating tropical deforestation may be technologically feasible, seeing their actual implementation represents social and political challenges. Solving poverty, disease, and wars are also similarly "simple." Overcoming these sorts of challenges are in reality not so simple, irrespective of the state of technology.
My blog is clearly not drawing a crowd from the search engines nearly as interesting as Pika's. And yet there's some dry and boring glee to the search strings that are bringing the kids to Inkstain. My current favorites:
- hafnium bomb
- petrichor
- frank zappa moving to montana
Yippee tie-yo tie-yay.
When I first started paying attention to the climate wars in the 1990s, the political component of the science debate seemed fixed on the question - "Is it warming." That debate - the deniers at CO2Science notwithstanding - seems over. Among working scientists in the climate field, the interesting action now on the detection side involves how much it is warming - or, to be more precise, how much climate is changing - and what effect it is having.
In today's issue of the journal Science, a fascinating new analysis of a longstanding data set on plankton offers new evidence that the change is real, ongoing, and measurable. Anthony Richardson of the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science the U.K. and David Schoeman of the University of Port Elizabeth in South Africa used a powerful data set that has been collected by instruments hitched on the backs of North Atlantic freighters since the 1930s, collecting plankton. (Their abstract is free, subscription required for the full paper.) What they found was that as cool regionsof the ocean warm, the plankton population increases. But as warmer regions warm further, the population tends to decline.
"This impact propagates up the food web (bottom-up control) through copepod herbivores to zooplankton carnivores because of tight trophic coupling. Future warming is therefore likely to alter the spatial distribution of primary and secondary pelagic production, affecting ecosystem services and placing additional stress on already-depleted fish and mammal populations."
I've written at length in the past about the relationship between decadal-scale climate variability and our rapidly changing human societies. The basic argument is that the sort of climate change that matters happens when a human society becomes accustomed to one climate regime, and then it changes. This is the reason I think greenhouse climate change is worth paying attention to. But it's also the reason I think the climate's natural variability is important - whatever the cause, if you're not alert as a society on decadal scales, you're screwed.
Here in the desert southwest, for example, population exploded during the relatively wet period that lasted from the 1970s in the 1990s. Some sort of a fundamental modal shift in climate seems to have set in the late 1990s, and now all those people, who built all those houses etc. during wet times, are having to learn how to manage with a lot less precipitation.
Some of the more thoughtful analysis I've been reading suggests a similar thing may have happened in Florida. A bunch of folks built a bunch of stuff during a period of relatively few hurricanes, and now there's been a modal shift. Here's Timothy Appleby in the Globe and Mail:
Thus, from the early 1940s to the late 1960s, Atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes were relatively commonplace. Then came a period of relative tranquillity, (which was when much of Florida's coastal population took up residence).
The climate's clearly a slow-moving, unruly beast. We're clearly tampering with it, in ways we do not yet fully understand. But even without our "help," it can be a bugger if we don't pay attention on time scales rather longer than seems to have been our habit these last few decades.
And another thing I wrote. This was an amazingly fun piece, about an archaeological site on Albuquerque's west side that dates back to Folsom times. Marquee archaeology is all fancy ruins at places like Chaco, and that's fun for sure, but the old hunter gatherer cultures that didn't leave much stuff behind are pretty interesting too. (Unfortunately web readers miss the terrific graphic Carol Cooperrider made to go with this.)
Amid abandoned appliances on Albuquerque's West Mesa, archaeologists have found evidence of some of the earliest humans to live in the middle Rio Grande Valley.Some 10,000 years ago, these visitors set up a hunting camp on the edge of a tiny, shallow lake. They probably stayed no more than a few days, but when they departed, they left behind a bit of trash.
For that, Bruce Huckell is eternally grateful.
Picking through the West Mesa soil over the past four summers, a team lead by Huckell has found a window to a time, a place and a people that are very different from what we see here today.
(It's not that I've been extraordinarily busy, it's just that a bunch of stuff that piled up over the last month or more all got flushed out to fill newspapers for the long holiday weekend.)
My short take on some of the nuke issues in the fall campaign.
Something of mine that ran yesterday in the Albuquerque Journal:
Global warming could dramatically increase the extent of wildfires in New Mexico and across much of the West over the next century, new research suggests.
While unusually dry weather can play a role in big fire years, high temperatures seem more important, especially in New Mexico, according to Philip Mote, a climate researcher at the University of Washington and one of the authors of the new study.
Climate simulations done by Mote suggest significant warming in New Mexico over the next 70 to 100 years, with a resulting four-fold increase in the number of acres burned per year in forest and grass fires.
The study's authors cautioned against reading too much into the specific numbers generated by their analysis. They said the analysis should be viewed as a framework to help think about fire risks as climate changes rather than a specific prediction of what will happen.
"We're suggesting that this is just one way of looking at things," Donald McKenzie, another of the study's authors, said in a telephone interview.
The research by Mote and his colleagues, published in the current issue of the scientific journal Conservation Biology, is the latest work documenting the link between warm weather and fire and raising the possibility that global warming could make things worse.
"It's pretty much what we've been expecting," said Thomas Swetnam, a University of Arizona scientist who has been independently studying the fire-climate link. "The results seem to confirm what we are worried about with the warming, that is, more fire."
(Please let me know if the link above doesn't work. There have been issues.)
From Kenneth Chang in Sunday's New York Times:
Global warming is not a significant factor in this year's storminess, experts said. While some climate models predict that warming might eventually mean somewhat stronger hurricanes, that effect is expected to be very small compared to the natural hurricane cycle.
Or how 'bout this, from our friends in the UK:
Hurricane Frances - a vast storm the size of Texas - yesterday began to hit the Florida coastline, bringing 100mph winds and torrential tropical rain.But a US government body admits - despite President George Bush's refusal to join international action to combat global warming - that it is likely to be only a foretaste of things to come as the climate changes.
Now, I hate to harp, but it looks to me like Mr. Chang is being a bit more rigorous here. The Independent doesn't say, but when it refers to "a US government body" admitting that Frances "is likely to be only a foretaste of things to come as the climate changes," it could only be referring to the recently released USGCRP report. Here's what that report actually has to say about hurricanes:
Simulations with a new hurricane model suggest that tropical cyclone intensities may increase under conditions of warming of tropical sea surface temperatures. The model projects that this warming, representative of the average projected change during the 21st century as a result of human-induced changes in atmospheric composition, results in an increase of approximately 5-10 percent in peak hurricane winds. However, considerable controversy still exists with respect to the correctness of such simulations in light of our inability to assess the veracity of these models due to the lack of consideration of the full complement of climate system changes under a warming scenario and inadequate observational data on hurricanes – areas where continuing research is warranted.
That's a bit weaker than "likely," don't you think? Though I love the bit about a storm the size of Texas. That's epic. Texas is real big.
Just a reminder - friend of GNOME and friend of mine dcm is riding the MS 150 next weeked. Good guy, good reason, good cause, give if you can. details here.
What is it the black marketeer says in Casablanca to the man trying to round up some cash to make it to America? "Gmail accounts are a drug on the market. Everybody sells Gmail accounts. There are Gmail accounts everywhere." Oh wait, no, he was tallking about diamonds.
But, as dcm points out, "they just keep on coming." Check 'em out on ebay - their price has plummetted. Used to cost five bucks, now it looks like you can easily pick one up for under a dollar.
Anyway, I've got some, for free, if you're the one last person out there who wants one but doesn't have it yet.
update: All gone. Interesting geographic distribution of the people who contacted me, suggesting hypotheses involving graph theory and U.S. hegemony. More later when I've thought it through.
I had to stop and go back when I saw this little guy in the middle of the street:
I think if I hadn't gotten to him when I did, the outcome might have been much worse. I don't know his name. If you recognize him, let me know.
update: He's a Cobra infantryman (thanks, Vidar!)
There are two clear ways to look at today's bicycle race.
It was a terrific race, and pretty much sucked completely.
Bill McLain, the impresario, put on a great race. It's incredibly smooth and well organized, and Bill also throws in little touches that make it special - a catered picnic in the park after the race, a fun medal ceremony, nice-looking printed certificates for every rider who finishes (with your time emblazoned on the certificate down to the 100th of a second). This year he had a big cake in celebration of the race's 20th anniversary. There were folks from all over the country who came to race.
But I've got to be frank - the time emblazoned on my certificate was a profound disappointment. I could blame the wind, I suppose, but what really happened is that I choked.
It's a 40k time trial, straight out and back. The wind was light when I started, a cross/tailwind, mostly from the right (west) with a little behind. I couldn't really get a feel for it, though, and didn't realize how strong it was until I made the turn.
Wham. Right in my face. Over the first half of the course, I hadn't really realized how much the wind had picked up, and when I turned to head back into it, it just left me demoralized. My speed was 22.4 miles per hour at the turn, which was a bit slower than my target but reasonable. I'd kept my heart rate locked into my target range and was riding comfortably. But when that headwind hit me it took the spirit out of me.
I remember reading a description of the difference between running a good marathon and a bad one - the bad one hurts just as much, but lasts a lot longer. That's the way I felt today.
A provocative image: "beachfront roads littered with coconuts, avocados and tree limbs"
It's hard to imagine the intellectual and emotional pressure facing the person at the National Hurricane Center responsible for making the forecasts. Vast sums of money and lives literally hang on their words. So it's interesting to note that if you look at the bottom of each advisory, the forecasters always sign their name.
Since this has come up repeatedly in the recent discussions of hurricanes and global climate change, I think it's worth revisiting the issue of extreme events and the extent to which it's reasonable to attribute them to global climate change.
David Appell articulates this well over at Technology Review:
The right way to describe these kind of events seems to be that they "are consistent with" the consequences of global climate change, because no storm outside of The Day After Tomorrow can definitely be ascribed to a warmer world. It’s a peculiar phrase, but the best scientists are likely to ever be able to do.
As has been discussed here and elsewhere, hurricanes are not a terribly good example - the connection between greenhouse climate change and more or stronger hurricanes is tenuous at best.
But there are situations in which it's reasonable to make strong assertions about the connection between a single event and the predictions made by the greenhouse warming hypothesis. David's right on the epistemological point - the best science can do is assert consistency with the hypothesis. But there are situations in which the consistency, even in the case of a single event or cluster of events - can get mighty strong.
Europe's 2003 heat wave is a good case in point. I've written about this before (and also here), but it's worth revisiting.
Most weather and climate phenomena tend to be normally distributed, along a typical bell-shaped curve with most cases falling near the middle and fewer cases out along the more extreme tails.
When you have an extreme event, it's useful to not only look at how much it differs from the norm (say, for example, how many degrees warmer than average it is), but where it fits along that curve. If it's so far outside the curve that it doesn't make sense, then you're in all likelihood onto something interesting in statistical terms. (Well, to be careful, the most likely thing is that you've got bad data, but once you've ruled that out then things get interesting.)
That's what Christoph Schär and colleagues did with the European summer of 2003, publishing their data in January in Nature (Nature \ 427, 332 - 336 (22 January 2004); doi:10.1038/nature02300). They concluded that the only way to make sense of this single extreme event - the hot summer of 2003 - was in the context of greenhouse climate models that predict not only increased warming, but also a substanial widening of the bell curve.
We find that an event like that of summer 2003 is statistically extremely unlikely, even when the observed warming is taken into account. We propose that a regime with an increased variability of temperatures (in addition to increases in mean temperature) may be able to account for summer 2003. To test this proposal, we simulate possible future European climate with a regional climate model in a scenario with increased atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations, and find that temperature variability increases by up to 100%, with maximum changes in central and eastern Europe.
In other words, it not only could be expected to get warmer, but also more events at either extreme - a wider standard distribution - should be expected.
That makes the summer of 2003 a great example of a single climatological event that's, to paraphrase David's careful wording, "frighteningly consistent with the consequences of global climate change."
David Appell, whose Quark Soup is on my daily must-read list, is going to be doing some blogging over at Technology Review. Check it out.
Seth Borenstein at Knight-Ridder has, it seems to me, done this just about right. He's got a recap of hurricane data since 1995, which captures intense hurricane years subsequent to the IPCC data I cited earlier. He also notes with some care the plausible "natural variability" argument:
Hurricanes go through multidecade cycles of many storms and few storms, Gray said in his most recent forecast. In the 1950s and 1960s, there were a lot of storms, then few from 1970 to 1994. Gray theorized that it's based on changes of temperature and salinity in the ocean on a massive scale that then changes atmospheric conditions.
This is not some fringe climate contrarian he's quoting here, but William Gray, dean of the hurricane forecasters. The money line:
Why it's been so busy lately is widely debated. Some experts point to global warming; others say it's just part of natural cycles.
That seems like about the right way to pitch this one.
I stand corrected on my explanation of the U.S. electoral college, our wacky way of selecting a president in which we vote state-by-state for slates of electors, who then gather to actually choose a president.
A helpful reader points out that Maine and Nebraska do not use a winner-take-all format, choosing two electors statewide and the rest by congressional district. Colorado is also considering abandonng winner-take-all in favor of proportional selection.
Chris Mooney has sparked a bit of discussion about the media's coverage of hurricane Frances, and whether reporters ought to be pointing out to the public the linkage between hurricanes and greenhouse-induced climate change. Mooney, using Ross Gelbspan's words as something of a surrogate, seems to be suggesting that reporters, if they are being honest with the science, ought to be sketching out the connection. Implicit in this is the assumption, common currency in the initial post and the comments that follow, that there's a global warming->more and stronger hurricanes link.
Well, maybe. But maybe not. And I think this is an important point that should be handled with some care, lest Mooney, Gelbspan and their ilk leave themselves open to the same sort of accusations of manipulation of the science that they so frequently accuse the climate change contrarians of committing.
Let's look first at Gelbspan's words, as quoted by Mooney:
Given the dramatic increase in extreme weather events, one might think that journalists, in covering these stories, would include the line: "Scientists associate this pattern of violent weather with global warming." They don't.
It would be lovely if Gelbspan cited a source for this claim that there has been a "dramatic increase in extreme weather events." I'm not sure he does. But let's check out the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's dreaded summary for policymakers. On this crucial question of hurricanes, which is the whole raison d'etre for Mooney's post, the IPCC concludes that there is no evidence for increased hurricane intensity over the last half of the twentieth century. They go on to say that it's "likely" (a modestly strong assertion in the IPCC's lingo) that hurricanes will get stronger in the future under greenhouse climate change. On the question of hurricane frequency (here you have to burrow back into the detailed text of the full report) the IPCC concludes that there is no evidence of an increase in hurricane frequency in the past (one wonders where Gelbspan's "dramatic increase in extreme weather events" fits here) and , "there is some evidence that regional frequencies of tropical cyclones may change." (emphasis added)
This is not exactly the strong and vibrant consensus of the scientific community that Mooney seems to want the news media to be sharing as Frances does the lock-and-load thing off the Florida coast.
Don't get me wrong here. There is an important consensus that an array of climatological extremes is a clear likely consequence of greenhouse climate change, especially in the area of droughts, heat waves and more intense precipitation events. And that's important. The most significant climate-linked human problems come from swings - weather that's wetter than you expect, or drier. But Mooney seems to be wanting the news media to be doing something over the next few days that seems at best weakly supported by the science.
In which I marry my two passions: fluid dynamics and the bladed spoke
update: An alert readers points out that my attempts to link to my ABQJournal stories are apparently being thwarted in at least some cases. Call this "fair use":
If you have tried to ride a bicycle fast on a windy day, you likely have an intuitive understanding of the basic principles of fluid mechanics. A brisk wind in your face can make it feel as though you are climbing a steep hill.
The people who will line up at the start of the Record Challenge bicycle race south of Moriarty this weekend have thought the issue through in a little more detail.
On N.M. 41 this Sunday and Monday, you will see wheels made of solid disks rather than spokes, strange helmets that have been described as looking like something out of a 1960s science fiction cartoon, and handlebars that look as though they're pinning riders' arms down in some bizarre torture ritual.
It is all in the name of beating the wind, and riders from all over the country will converge on Moriarty this weekend to have another crack at the problem. The race is popular in the local bike racing community, but more than half of the 120 or so riders who typically show up come from out of state, said Bill McLain, the race's organizer.
A friend last week sent me, with some astonishment, a link to Iain Murray's Tech Central Station piece on obesity. I've been an, uh, "fan" of Murray's climate change writing, but I wasn't aware of the breathtaking scope of his intellect.
Murray has figured out something the rest of us have missed, a way of making lemonade out of some incredibly tart and nasty lemons, but in retrospect it's so obvious.
Obesity is a good thing. Follow me here. Obesity is a byproduct of affluence. Affluence is good. Therefore obesity is good. "Obesity," he writes, "is not a symptom of a sick society, but a sign of a very healthy one." Whew. That's a relief.
This gives me hope for a whole range of other problems that have been vexing me. Take traffic accidents. I've always thought it a tragedy that automobile accidents take more than 40,000 lives per year in this country. Turns out I've had it all wrong! Traffic accidents are a byproduct of our system of transportation, which allows me to get to work easily every day. Getting to work easily every day is a good thing. Therefore traffic accidents are good!
This line of argument can be applied problems large and small. Leaking roof? No problem! It's just a sign that I've got a house! AIDS in Africa? No problem! It's just a sign that all those Africans are getting laid!
Thanks, Iain. You've eased my mind. I think I'll go out for fast food.
Murray -
On reading polls for the U.S. election, the first thing you need to remember is to ignore the national polls. Because of our rather convoluted method of election, the overall national number is of only indirect importance. What matters is the state-by-state results. A good place to get a better feel for that is the electoral vote site, which tallies the most recent individual state polls.
Forgive me if this is overly pedantic, but for those outside the U.S., here's how our screwy election system works.
The actual election of a president doesn't happen via national popular election. Instead, each state sends a group of "electors" to an "electoral college" following the election. The candidate who wins a state's popular vote wins all of the state's electors. So when Al Gore, for example, won New Mexico in 2000 by the tiniest of fractions, he got all five our our electoral college votes. Totalled up across the country, this is how George W. Bush won the presidency despite getting fewer total votes nationwide than Al Gore.
I in general despise the gutter rants of talk radio, all propaganda rather than thoughtful discourse, but at least we're now being treated to a broader variety of same here in Albuquerque. (Thanks to Clandestino for pointing this out.)
Gene on my old home town:
What’s with the funny ass waitresses here? Second night in a row I’m in stitches from a waitress. It’s La-La…everyone is on.