There's a graph I've bumped into a couple of times recently that is absolutely breathtaking:
It's the death rate in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, from January 2002 through August 2003. You can see the clear annual pattern, with more deaths in winter and fewer in summer. There's a small spike in June 2002, which is apparently from a heat wave, and a larger peak in the late winter of 2003 - an influenza outbreak. And then there's that massive peak in the summer of 2003, which was what climate researchers have demonstrated was a statistical outlier of extreme proportions. It was real hot.
(click through for more)
The figure, originally published here, was included in Christoph Schär and Gerd Jendritzky's News and Views in the Dec. 2 Nature(1), which is where I first saw it.
I ran across it again last week in the slides from a presentation by British climate researcher Myles Allen at the COP 10 climate meeting in Buenos Aires earlier this month.
The International Federation of the Red Cross concluded that between 22,000 and 35,000 people died in Europe in the first two weeks of August 2003 because of the heat wave. The death rate in France was 54 percent higher during the heat wave. Those are daunting numbers, but I admit they didn't quite sink in until I saw the Baden-Württemberg graph. The annual periodicity is so clear, the flu spike so obvious, and the heat wave death peak is, as a result, unmistakable. It's obvious why people keep using the graph. It makes its point without a lot of fuss or ambiguity.
In the same way that it is hard to attribute a single heat wave to a particular cause - say, for example, greenhouse warming - it is hard to attribute a single death to heat. That is why it's important to think statistically about these things. And that's where a good graph can speak volumes.
It was Schär himself who offered a similarly power graph in a February paper(2) on the heat wave, showing where it fit in the long-term statistical distribution of temperature:
As you can see, in three of those four cases that's about as far as you get out on the tail of the bell curve and still be on the same piece of paper.
It's that sort of statistical thinking that the Baden-Württemberg graph offers.
1. Schär, C. & Jendritzky, G. (2004) Nature 432, 559-560.
2. Schär, C., Vidale, P. L., Lüthi, D., Frei, C., Häberli, C., Liniger, M. A. & Appenzeller, C. (2004) Nature 427, 332 - 336.
When a colleague asked me (they always ask me - I'm "Mr. Science") whether Sunday's earthquake was big enough to shift Earth's axis, I uttered an explitive related to equine excrement. I had visions of Velikovsky. But a seismologist disabused me of that notion, explaining that the effect, while small, is measurable. Now a team from JPL has done the calculations:
The change was caused by a shift of mass towards the planet's centre, as the Indian Ocean's heavy tectonic plate lurched underneath Indonesia's one, say researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. This caused the globe to rotate faster, in the same way that a spinning figure-skater accelerates by tucking in her arms.The blast literally rocked the world on its axis, add Richard Gross and his NASA colleagues. They estimate that Earth now tilts by an extra 2.5 centimetres in the wake of the jolt.
I don't think that's enough to trigger any Velikovskian Kraziness, but I don't stay up late enough any more to listen to the really good talk radio, so I could be wrong.
CO2Science, one of the most prominent of the rabidly skeptical global warming web sites, is no longer free:
For the past seven years, therefore, we have provided everything we produce free of charge to everyone, sustaining ourselves with grants and donations from numerous sources. Over the past three years, however, income from these sources has declined dramatically, and additional cuts are on the horizon.
The Idsos, who run CO2Science (and who in the past have received funding from ExxonMobile), have provided a major clearing house for information used by global warming skeptics. Googling a major climate research paper frequently brings up the Idso's analysis on the first page of hits. That seems to be all fenced off now, behind their paid subscription wall.
From Steve Reuland over at Panda's Thumb:
We should never allow fake "criticisms" that have been rejected by scientists to be taught in science class for religious reasons; if the subject were astrology or Velikovskian catastrophism, Schlafly would presumably agree. But when it comes to creationism… why that’s censorship! By the same logic, opposing the teaching of Holocaust denial, UFOlogy, or whatever nutty nonsense one can come up with would also be censorship. We can reframe Holocaust denial by saying that we want to teach the evidence both for and against the Holocaust. Shouldn’t we teach the controversy about the Holocaust?
Phil Spector was a very bad man.
Let's be clear here. The smothering wall of strings on The Long and Winding Road ranks well down on the list of history's great crimes against humanity. No one died. But a crime it is.
Daughter Nora was looking for "Please Please Me" for a Christmas present for me. When she couldn't find it, she asked me to suggest another record I'd like. I asked for "Let It Be."
When the "Let It Be -- Naked" was released a couple of years back, Paul McCartney said, "That was the thing about the Beatles, we were always a great little band." I agree, and I've always been fond of their music. I especially love the very early stuff, which is why I asked for "Please Please Me." It's fun. "Let It Be" is that way too, at least in part, a lot of the pretension pulled back off, a bunch of guys goofing in the basement with their guitars.
And then came Spector, creating something appropriate for background music while you're shopping for frozen peas.
I knew what I was getting into when I asked Nora for the album. When I was a teenager, my friend Danny Hogle had this fabulous collection of Beatles bootlegs, among them a bunch of stuff from the Let It Be sessions. There was Paul pecking out the chords for "Let It Be" for the band for the first time. And his naked version of the Long and Winding Road, sans Spector, sans the Wall of Sound.
It's a lovely little ballad, sad and sweet and pretty, just Paul and the piano.
The "Naked" re-release has it the way Paul sang it, but there are other problems with that album. The clowning on "Get Back," up on the Apple Studios roof with Billy Preston, has always been a favorite bit of business, and they cut it out of the version they included. So the original "Let It Be" is, on balance, my favorite of the two. But such a tradeoff. I suppose I'll have to acquire both, and make my own mix-and-match CD.
And I still need Please Please Me.
From Alan Schwarz's The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics:
To spread the gospel, Chadwick invented his own personal scoring form in the hope that it would become standard. The grid extended nine players deep and nine innings wide, each box housing a player's at-bat as he came up in turn. Each outcome was coded with either numbers, for the fielder who handled the ball, or letters, to denote a fly ball or the like. (Many of those letters were chosen as the last of the events they connoted, such as "D" for catch on bound, "L" for fouball and "K" for struck out, the last of which has survived to delight generations of kids as they first learn to score.)
The thing about the scoresheet, as I learned to do it (part from my Mom and part from my friend Jim Timmermann) is the way two things stand out in a glance at the complex hieroglyphics - the runs scored and the big bold K's. Obviously at the end of the day it is the former that matter. But I love good pitching, so I like it that the latter also stand out in a tradition dating to Henry Chadwick in the 1850s.
And no, "K" doesn't stand for Koufax.
When he wrote his name in capital letters in the record books, that "K" stands out even more than the O-U-F-A-X.
Bicycling as performance art (warning - big downloads ahead)
Could it be, at last, the evidence that the "evolutionists" are wrong?
Do these photos provide the necessary evidence that dinosaurs and humans coexisted in our recent ancient past?
Or could is it possible that all is not as it appears?
Someone much wiser and more bemused than most of us has written, in the Los Angeles Times, an inspired ode to dust.
(Hat tip Shireen Gonzaga on the National Association of Science Writers list.)
Mom and Dad came over to help set up the luminarias, and we went out for Chinese. It's quiet now in the neighborhood, and pretty.
Merry Christmas to you and yours.
I'm using Joel Friel's Cyclist's Training Bible to plan my training for the coming year, rather than my usual technique, which essentially involves riding whatever the hell I feel like today.
Friel's big on resting. For the over-40 set such as myself, his first step in mapping out a year of training is to set aside every third week for rest, so I've been doing that.
It's remarkable. This is a rest week, so I took Monday and Tuesday completely off, and have been doing light cycling and a little bit of lifting at the gym since. This morning, when I sat down on the bike at the gym, my legs felt so fresh and ready to go, they were like a dog straining at the leash. I let 'em go a few times, just for fun. They were happy.
A number of important developments in the area of inflatable promotional items....
Deflated Sponge Bob Found on Side of Road:
SpongeBob SquarePants, missing from a Beaver County Burger King since Thanksgiving, was found lying on the side of a Beaver County road earlier this month.He had been stabbed twice and was covered with dirt and mud, said Frank Bell, vice president of programming for Froggy radio stations in Pittsburgh.
And in Southern California, a jihad of some sort against der Weinerschnitzel's inflatable turkeys:
"Why else would they get me to take down my Halloween ghosts at Halloween and now the trees?" he said. "It's so bad, I didn't even put up my blow-up turkeys at Thanksgiving."
I don't know how much more clear the framers could have been when they wrote, "The right of the people to keep and bear Inflatable Promotional Items, shall not be infringed."
update: If we here in the United States don't deal with this problem, others are waiting in the wings.
One of my favorite blogs is David Appell's Quark Soup. I started reading it a year ago, when he was doing yeoman's work on Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick's effort to debunk Mann, Bradley and Hughes' "hockey stick" paleoclimatic reconstruction.
I'm hooked on the comments section of David's blog. But I'm beginning to think it's a less-than-useful addiction, in ways that may shed some light on the continuously unpleasant and ultimately unresolvable nature of what I (apparently somewhat unoriginally) have come to call "the climate wars." I think the climate comment wars in David's blog also may highlight an interesting problem that is endemic to the arena, which the climate scientists over at the new RealClimate blog already appear to be confronting.
(More below the fold.)
It generally goes something like this. David posts a bit of science news about climate change, one of the regular skeptic posters throws down some challenging gantlet, frequently based on either an element of natural variability or a trend over some carefully chosen period of time or place that makes it look like the planet's getting colder, one of the regular mainstream science defenders points out how the skeptic cherry-picked the data. Lather, rinse, repeat.
This has offered a useful exercise for me. I'm not a climate scientist, just a humble scribe, so time and again these arguments have sent me diving into the journals, trying to understand what's been published in the peer-reviewed literature. Time after time, of course, the literature supports the climate science against the skeptics' assaults. But nothing is ever settled. Ultimately, I've come to realize that the debates are more like time in the weight room than going out and riding the bike - they're useful in laying down a functional base, but ultimately not terribly satisfying. The reason is my new hobby horse, Sarewitz's scientization of political debate. Because these arguments aren't really about climate science at all. They're really political debates with science as stalking horse.
This is the hall of mirrors the climate scientists over at RealClimate have entered. They're clearly smart people, and I am certain they are not doing this naively. They argue in their introductory message that their purpose is provide quickly the sort of response to skeptic bunk that is ordinarily done in a more ponderous fashion:
Many scientists participate in efforts to educate the public and to rebut or debunk rather fanciful claims or outright mis-representations by writing in popular magazines such as EOS and New Scientist or in the Comments section of journals. However, this takes time to put together, and by the time it’s out, mainstream attention has often moved elsewhere. Since these rebuttals appear in the peer-reviewed literature, these efforts (in the long run) are useful. However, a faster response would sometimes be helpful in ensuring that the context of breaking stories is more widely distributed at the time.
As someone who has made a hobby doing this as a climate science amateur, it's good to see the professionals in the game. But I wonder to what end?
Here is what I hope: Today, when I Google a significant climate paper, one of the first hits is almost invariably a discussion of the paper's conclusions from CO2 Science Magazine, an ExxonMobile-funded operation. I think it would be terrific if a discussion on RealClimate was also there on the first page of Google. Then someone trying to understand could have ready access to the mainstream science side of the argument.
Here is what I fear: No one's really trying to understand. That's a corollary of the point Sarewitz is making, and that's what I've come to realize I'm seeing in the comments in David's blog.
If people want to learn about Mann's hockey stick, I think they should go here rather than some of the other places they might accidentally end up.
Jaime pointed out with some enthusiasm yesterday morning that the winter solstice - the shortest day of the year - comes Tuesday. (Specifically, it's at 5:42 a.m. our time if I've done the UT-MST calculation correctly.)
For everyday life in our secular society, this is of little import. We've got no celebration tied tightly to the day. But when Jaime made the observation, the sun had just popped over the mountains, and the temperature was still hovering in the high 20s, and we were on bikes. For the early morning cyclist, the notion that the day will start lengthening soon is cause for celebration.
(Update: That's the high 20s Fahrenheit. Apologies to my more progressive metric readers.)
From today's Journal, on Michael Crichton:
It is perhaps fitting that Crichton, whose "Jurassic Park" so informed (and uninformed) our public understanding of paleontology, would become our new public expositor on the complex and contentious issues of climate science.Fitting, but not necessarily helpful.
I'm a pundit!
Steven Milloy, proprietor of a site called JunkScience.com, has earned something of a reputation for tackling what he calls "Junk Science." Lately, you can find his work on the Fox News web site, including his latest climate change screed. What you won't find mentioned there is the remarkable tale laid out by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber about how Big Tobacco helped launch Milloy's career as a science debunker. And we all know about Big Tobacco's long-standing interest in ensuring that the best science is used to bolster public policy. More recently, Milloy has served as a registered lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, which might seem relevant for a news organization such as Fox to disclose to its readers.
In today's episode, we see Milloy plying his trade, using the work of Ohio State climate researcher Lonnie Thompson to argue, essentially, "Hey, climate change happens all the time. What's the big deal?"
Specifically, he quotes Thompson as follows, in an apparent attempt to use Thompson's words to bolster his argument that our understanding of climate is not good enough to support the claim that greenhouse gases are a bad thing:
“Any prudent person would agree that we don’t yet understand the complexities with the climate system,” said Thompson.
Now let's look at the entire quote, helpfully linked for us by Ray over at RealClimate:
"The climate system is remarkably sensitive to natural variability," he said. "It’s likely that it is equally sensitive to effects brought on by human activity, changes like increased greenhouse gases, altered land-use policies and fossil-fuel dependence."Any prudent person would agree that we don’t yet understand the complexities with the climate system and, since we don’t, we should be extremely cautious in how much we ‘tweak’ the system," he said.
Rather different, don' t you think?
(The RealClimate crew considers some of Milloy's other climate writing here.)
Lissa and I drove down to the Bosque del Apache today to see the birds.
We saw, in no particular order, Sandhill cranes, a sparrow hawk (now apparently to more correctly be called the American kestrel), a golden eagle, a bunch of American coots, a Northern Pintail duck, a few red-tailed hawks, and more than a few snow geese.
And a great blue heron.
That's a page from our old family heirloom copy of Roger Tory Peterson's Field Guide to Western Birds.
We are by no means serious birders, but we always take our Peterson on trips, and when we see a bird we can identify, we jot a note in the margin. It has thus become a sort of narrowly defined family diary.
The oldest entry seems to be under the great blue heron: "11/86 - sat on tiny island in Colorado River all morning, picking at its feathers." Lissa and I were camped on the Arizona side of the river down south, near the Mexican border. The "island," as I remember it, was little more than a rock big enough to snag some driftwood. The heron just sat.
We've since seen the big herons in Wyoming, near Thayne; on the San Juan River downstream from Sand Island where they kept following our boat; at the Bosque del Apache with Lissa's late sister Ginnie. That last is particularly precious now.
We have a couple of whooping crane listings (a handful used to winter in New Mexico with the sandhill crane flock), including the time my sister and I saw one in flight.
And then my favorite listing, under "mallard": "Coyote kills a female mallard at Bosque del Apache 11-3-97 N, L, J and Uncle Bill." The flock of ducks was at the edge of a field, and we watched as the coyote crept up on them. The ducks fluttered and moved away as the coyote moved toward them, uneasy. Finally the coyote bolted, the ducks took to the air in a flurry, and the coyote got the slowest one. Evolution in action.
We've got the new Sibley Guide to Birds now, which is a terrific book. We write in it now too. But we still tote along the Peterson's, and we still scrawl in the margins.
My climate science blogging brethren have been typing up a storm about Naomi Oreskes' Dec. 3 Science essay on the consensus about climate change, and amidst all the noise I missed Roger Pielke Jr.'s thoughtful take (he's quoting here in his blog from a 2001 Nature paper):
Consider once again global climate change. For many years, policy debate has centred on the degree of certainty that decision-makers ought to attach to competing visions of the future climate. Lost in this doomed enterprise is the point that climate will certainly have an increasingly strong effect on the environment and society, simply because of growing vulnerability related to factors such as population, wealth and use of land. If a goal of climate policy is to reduce the effects of climate on the environment and society, then effective action need not wait until we are more certain about details.Seen in this light, efforts to reduce uncertainty via 'consensus science' - such as scientific assessments - are misplaced. Consensus science can provide only an illusion of certainty. When consensus is substituted for a diversity of perspectives, it may in fact unnecessarily constrain decision-makers' options. Take for example weather forecasters, who are learning that the value to society of their forecasts is enhanced when decision-makers are provided with predictions in probabilistic rather than categorical fashion and decisions are made in full view of uncertainty. As a general principle, science and technology will contribute more effectively to society's needs when decision-makers base their expectations on a full distribution of outcomes, and then make choices in the face of the resulting - perhaps considerable - uncertainty.
Daughter Nora today made a print of this photograph of the first missing bowling ball. Label it Exhibit B:
If you have seen this bowling ball, please notify the authorities.
Another bowling ball suggestion:
I suggest adding a garden sprinkler system for further hilarity.(Obviously taking due care to protect loudspeaker, light and webcam in
the process)
No doubt the loudspeaker, light and webcam will have to be of the all-weather variety, so this shouldn't be a problem.
A reader suggests that continuing to replace the bowling balls as they are stolen would be wrong: "Noooo "they" will win then. John, there's principle at stake here!"
This reader's alternative suggestion:
1. Point webcam and light at 'crimescene'
2. Place loudspeaker near 'crimescene'.
3. Rig loud speaker and light to trigger when bowling ball is lifted from post.
4. Post hilarious pictures of thief having the living-be-jesuses scared out of him on your Blog site.
5. We laugh ourselves hoarse and you hopefully keep your bowling balls in future.
6. Thief is scarred for life and develops a Pavlovian fear-response whenever he thinks of stealing something in future. He gives up his now impossible life of crime and goes to college were he excels in medicine. He later develops a cure for cancer and in his Nobel prize acceptance speech credits YOU with changing his life.
I think we're on to something here. Rube Goldberg in the service of humanity.
Another promising suggestion to deal with the neighborhood epidemic of bowling ball theft:
Paint your name on the ball (possibly on the back
so it isn't visible), and a request to return it if lost.
Gavin Schmidt on RealClimate gives his take on Michael Crichton's new anti-global warming novel. Schmidt's discussion reads like a fundamental primer on the subject. My favorite bit:
The characters visit Punta Arenas (at the tip of South America), where (very pleasingly to my host institution) they have the GISTEMP station record posted on the wall which shows a long-term cooling trend (although slight warming since the 1970’s). "There’s your global warming" one of the good guys declares. I have to disagree. Global warming is defined by the global mean surface temperature. It does not imply that the whole globe is warming uniformly (which of course it isn’t). (But that doesn’t stop one character later on (p381) declaring that "..it’s effect is presumably the same everywhere in the world. That’s why it’s called global warming"). Had the characters visited the nearby station of Santa Barbara Aeropuerto, the poster on the wall would have shown a positive trend. Would that have been proof of global warming? No. Only by amalgamating all of the records we have (after correcting for known problems, such as discussed below) can we have an idea what the regional, hemispheric or global means are doing. That is what is meant by global warming.
David Appell has been trying to get to the bottom of the discrepancy between Naomi Oreskes' claim in her Science paper that she had reviewed 928 papers in the ISI database with the keyword "climate change" and Benny Peiser's claim that there are more than 11,000 such papers in ISI's "Web of Science."
Appell is making progress.
Readers offered several suggestions for dealing with our bowling ball problem:
- Some coarse chicken wire covering the bowling ball and your choice of weak or strong current. Might want to get a sparky (Australian: electrician) to suggest a non-fatal voltage... something like an electrice fence amount of unpleasantry : )
- Being in America you've got access to firecrackers right? Could one be rigged to 'go off' when the ball is lifted from the post?
- Goodwill has bowling balls for .75 to $1.25 here so it's cheap enough to replace them. I say, keep replacing them.
Wife Lissa, who is something of a goofball, installed a large post in the front yard - a 4x4 set in concrete - with a bowling ball as a finial. It is both amusingly decorative as well as functional: when she's thinning cactus or iris, the post serves to display her "Free Iris" or "Free Cactus" sign. (You can see it in the background in this June 2003 photo. Mark this Exhibit A.)
About a month ago, someone stole the bowling ball. She quickly replaced it. (Any thrift store worth the name has a big box of bowling balls for cheap.) This week, we were again bowling ballglarized.
It's a bit of a dilemma. One hates to give in to the forces of darkness, but how many times will she need to replace it? Are the thieves hoping to collect enough balls to start their own alley? If so, where will they get the shoes?
Nora suggested coating the next ball with itching powder. I suggested one of those bank robbery exploding dye packs, though the engineering details are a bit murky in my own mind, so perhaps that's not practical.
Suggestions are welcome.
On the "scientization," as Daniel Sarewitz calls it, of a political/policy debate:
Since 1988, Sandia has spent some $10 million of taxpayer money on study after study of its Mixed Waste Landfill, an unlined dump on the southern side of Kirtland Air Force Base. For more than three decades, it was filled with all manner of hazardous and radioactive waste.Each step of the way, Sandia officials have said the evidence was sufficient to support their argument that the landfill does not pose a risk and that the waste can safely be left where it is.
Each step of the way, activists have disagreed, saying the landfill could contaminate the aquifer and needs to be excavated.
And each step of the way, additional studies have failed to settle the issue, and instead become new subjects of contention.
More on Latenberg's Washington Post letter from Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt.
Frank Lautenberg, in a letter in today's Washington Post, takes Post writer Juliet Eilperin to task for the "he said-she said" treatment of the Stott et al. paper on European heat and climate change.
For a critical look at Stott's work, Eilperin turned to noted climate expert Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Wrote Lautenberg:
The last half of the article is squandered on the views of Myron Ebell, an economist -- not a climate scientist -- whose "studies" at the American Enterprise Institute are funded by Exxon Mobil. The article fails to mention this shameless conflict of interest.
(Hat tip to Scott.)
The response from climate change contrarians to last week's Science paper by Naomi Oreskes on climate change science has been instruction.
Oreskes, you may recall, reviewed all 928 papers in the ISI database with keyword "climate change," looking for ones that disagreed with the general consensus on anthropogenic climate change. She found nary a one.
There has been a great deal of sputtering from the climate change skeptics, but nothing substantive in the way of a refutation. As Chris Mooney points out, "If Oreskes is wrong, refuting her should be a piece of cake. Simple: Do your own ISI search, and find an article that explicitly disagrees with the consensus position as Oreskes describes it."
No one seems to have done that.
CNSNews has some lengthy quotations from a number of skeptics, including the cranky and beloved Benny Peiser. Peiser, on his email list (sorry, not on line) claims to have done his own ISI search and the terms "climate change" and found lots more than 928 papers, suggesting that Oreskes somehow unfairly limited the scope of the seach. I don't have access to ISI, so I can't check out who's right. But either way, he has not come up with the paper Mooney is asking for, the one that contests the consensus.
I just finished Jeremy Bernstein's Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma - a very odd book.
Consider this - a passage so strange I had to read it aloud to Lissa. (The setup: Bernstein, our author, in addition to being an acclaimed writer for the New Yorker, was also a physicist, and spent several years in the 1950s at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The occasion is an Institute party):
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Oppenheimer and his wife escorting a somewhat frail-looking man with thick glasses. I immediately recognized him as Godel. I had seen a great many pictures. He was one of my heroes. His theorem on the undecidability of mathematical truth was to me one of the most wonderful things I had ever learned and now, there he was, bearing down in my general direction. He was a notorious recluse, so it would never have occurred to me to have gone to his office. In any event, when the Oppenheimers stood within hailing distance they introduced me. Godel then said he had known my father in Vienna. Since my father had never been in Vienna, I attempted to explain. Godel then repeated that he had known my father in Vienna. I thanked him, and the Oppenheimers moved on.
Oppenheimer is intrinsically compelling, and Bernstein's book is of a type that I love, the literary biography that is less comprehensive historiography and more personal biographical essay. (One of my favorite books of this type is Wallace Stegner's biography of John Wesley Powell. It's as much Stegner's take on the West with Powell as the lens as it is anything else. Brendan Gill's Frank Lloyd Wright biography also comes to mind.)
Detangling Oppenheimer from the legend that surrounds him is hard. This is the guy who recites in his mind the Bhagavad-Gita as the Trinity blast changes our world forever, "I have become death: the destroyer of worlds." That's the stuff of legend, and stories told and retold to the point of losing their original truth. Bernstein is not offering us a detailed account of the man's life, so much as Bernstein's own observations of that which is important about that life. It's a helpful framework for looking at a very interesting character.
A group of climate scientists, including Michael Mann, have launched RealClimate, a bloggish site whose authors describe it as "a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists. We aim to provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary."
This is very promising.
Matthew Bohnsack has developed a new economic indicator. The Bohnsack Index is rising.
Via Kevin Drum, we find a survey suggesting a correlation between the browser and operating system people use and the blogs they read. (Hint: conservative blog readers seem a statistically significant tad more likely to be in the thrall of Redmond.)
Started a GNOME 2.9 build today. Here's the bit of business I had to overcome.
The evolution-data-server build was crapping out because it couldn't find "nspr.h," a file from Mozilla's Network Security Services. It was properly checking in the configure stage, and properly not finding it, but the appropriate compile flag wasn't being set for some reason, so the build died.
(On Luis' tinderbox it seems to be correctly not finding in and therefore not trying to use it.)
Solution: "--enable-nss=no" added to my jhbuild configure script. My 2.9 build rolls on.
Today we celebrate the feast day of Barbara of Nicomedia, patron saint of gunners.
If you're worried about being hit by lightning or burning up in a fire, Barbara's apparently also got your back. Versatile lass.
The story[1] is that Barbara was something of a beauty, but was uninterested in men, so her father did what apparently good Third Century dads did in such a situation - locked her up in a tower. (Today we try to amend the constitution, but those were simpler times.) I've found different versions of what eventually happened to her. Perhaps he handed her over to the Romans, who executed her. Perhaps it was her dad who lopped off her head. Whatever, apparently he got his comeuppance when he was struck dead by lightning.
In addition to being the patron saint of gunners, she appears to also offer the shelter of her piety to geologists, mathematicians and architects.
[1] Blackburn and Holford-Strevens, The Oxford Book of Days
My favorite search term of the month: someone who hit Inkstain after searching on 3.14159.
Naomi Oreskes, a historian and philosopher of science at the University of California San Diego, yesterday published in Science a remarkable literature review.
Her question: Through international efforts like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as well as professional societies like the American Geophysical Union, we've repeatedly seen the development and publication of consensus statements on the issue of climate change. Over and over, they say that greenhouse gases, emitted by humans, are changing the climate. But how does that reflect what's actually being published in the scientific literature? In other words, as measured by the act of scientific publishing, how strong is the consensus?
Oreskes used the ISI database - the standard bibliographic reference source for the scientific literature - to find every paper on "climate change" publlshed between 1993 and 2003. She found 928. Her question: how many reject the consensus position on anthropogenic climate change. The answer: "Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position."
The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility, and no one can be faulted for failing to act on what is not known. But our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it.Many details about climate interactions are not well understood, and there are ample grounds for continued research to provide a better basis for understanding climate dynamics. The question of what to do about climate change is also still open. But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen.
(via Chris Mooney and Crooked Timber, both excitedly awaiting the Tech Central Station response)
A new analysis in today's Nature by Stott, Stone and Allen[1] concludes that human-caused climate change doubles the odds of heat waves like the summer 2003 bender that killed at least 22,000 people:
Using a threshold for mean summer temperature that was exceeded in 2003, but in no other year since the start of the instrumental record in 1851, we estimate it is very likely (confidence level >90%) that human influence has at least doubled the risk of a heatwave exceeding this threshold magnitude.
Stott et al. make a very interesting point, which is worth quoting:
"It is an ill-posed question whether the 2003 heatwave was caused, in a simple deterministic sense, by a modification of the external influences on climate—for example, increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—because almost any such weather event might have occurred by chance in an unmodified climate."
In other words, you can't just say "global warming caused the heat wave." All you can do is look at ranges of statistical probabilities, and determine where this fits in. It's an important point to remember in understanding climate change science. I'm glad they said it so explicitly up front.
[1] Human contribution to the European heatwave of 2003, Peter A. Stott, D. A. Stone and M. R. Allen, Nature 432, 610 - 614 (02 December 2004); doi:10.1038/nature03089