Well, it's really an old bike, made new again:
It's my old road bike, converted to a fixed gear. It's old school.
I left both brakes on for now, because I'm new to this fixed-gear thing. And it's my town bike, so the rack stays on the back. I took it for a spin around the neighborhood this afternoon, its inaugural ride, stopped by to show Dad.
New toy = fun.
Last year, I wrote about why the assault on (and some of the defense of) the Mann Bradley and Hughes hockey stick was misplaced. With Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick coming out with a new paper, the subject is worth revisiting. But Stefan Rahmstorf has done a much more capable job than I could, so I'll just leave you in his capable hands:
So let’s assume for argument’s sake that Mann, Bradley and Hughes made some terrible mistake in their statistical analysis, so we need to discard their results altogether. This wouldn’t change our picture of the last millennium (or anything else) very much: independent groups, with different analysis methods, have arrived at similar results for the last millennium. The details differ (mostly within the uncertainty bounds given by Mann et al, so the difference is not significant), but all published reconstructions share the same basic features: they show relatively warm medieval times, a cooling by a few tenths of a degree Celsius after that, and a rapid warming since the 19th Century. Even without Mann et al, we’d still be stuck with a "hockey stick" type of curve – quite boring.
Would that it were boring, Stefan.
I'm with Clive on this one. He cites the new Pew study on search engine use, which finds: "Most say they could walk away from search engines tomorrow and return to the traditional ways of finding information." Not me, buddy. You'll have to pry my search engine from my cold, dead hands.
I spent some more time at work today on the ClimatePrediction.Net paper. It seems as though most of the coverage has missed the point entirely. This is about better understanding how the climate models work, rather than how the climate works. More thoughts here.
There's been a lot of noise today about a paper in today's Nature on the range of uncertainties of future climate change. It's a terrifically interesting and useful paper, but if you just read the press coverage that I've been reading, you may have a rather wrong idea about why.
The researchers, using a Seti@home-like distributed computing system, were able to perform a far larger number of climate model simulation runs than is normally done, and they found that, by using a reasonable but far larger range of the adjustable parameters used in the models, they saw a significantly larger range of possible temperature increase.
The 2,017 simulation runs showed a range of possible temperature increase under doubled atmospheric CO2 of from 2 degrees C to more than 11 degrees C. That's a bigger range, especially at the top end, than the 1.4 to 5.8 degrees cited by the IPCC. Note - and this is important - that the Oxford team that did the calculations did not say that the high end of the range was the most likely. Quite the opposite. The frequency distribution in their paper suggests the lower end, in the 2 to 4 degree range, is the most likely.
Now let's look at the press coverage.
First, from The Telegraph: Screen saver weather trial predicts 10 degree C rise in British temperatures
Or MSNBC: "Computer models for climate change allow for a global temperature rise of as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit (11 degrees Celsius), according to the first results from the world’s largest climate-modeling experiment." (This accompanied by a map color-coded with the extreme case.)
From The Scotsman: "THE biggest computer calculation of its kind has forecast a degree of global warming greater than previously predicted, with Britain becoming an unrecognisable tropical country in a few generations."
Even Nature itself, in the Web news story accompanying the paper, fell into the trap: "Biggest-ever climate simulation warns temperatures may rise by 11 C." (To be fair, Michael Hopkin's second paragraph gets to the meat: "But as well as a predicting a bigger maximum rise, the project has also increased the range of possible temperature changes.")
I could find no one who wrote a headline saying "Biggest-ever climate simulation finds temperatures may only rise 2 degrees C," though that would have been equally well supported by the data.
For a more useful take, without the big number alarmism, there is Newsday's Bryn Nelson, who did a good job of laying out where this fits and why it matters:
In formulating reasonable global warming predictions, researchers say they have long been stymied by the inherent uncertainty in their models. The climateprediction.net experiment, run by a British research consortium, is trying to address this frustration with a deceptively simple solution: unused computer space.Calling upon thousands of volunteers to run different versions of the same model with their computers' spare capacity, the team hopes to refine a long list of atmospheric and oceanic variables. Eventually, the researchers hope to produce a 21st-century forecast that neither over-hypes nor underestimates warming scenarios.
This is an important exercise in helping better understand and refine the range of possibilities, and it's pretty clear from the research that some of them are extreme and worthy of attention. But a lot of the press coverage I read today makes me think that some of the worst fears of the skeptics crowd about biased media coverage on this issue are not entirely unjustified.
For our anniversary, Lissa and I bought ourselves a present:
It's "Mountains and Rivers," from the 1862 Johnson and Ward Illustrated Family Atlas. It is a graphic assemblage of the world's mountains and rivers, arranged to show their relative sizes, from the mighty Mississippi/Missouri system to the lowly Merrimac.
The Rio Grande is there, flowing out of the Rocky Mountains, past our house and into the Gulf of Mexico. The Colorado River, strangely, is not. (1862 was before John Wesley Powell mapped the Grand Canyon, but by that time people had a pretty clear idea where the thing started and ended.)
The mountains are sadly only numbered, not labeled with names. There must have been a key that went with it which is sadly lost to history. But great passes are named, and high mountain cities, and ecosystems: "Lower limits of the growth of pines in the Torrid Zone, 6,000," and "Region of Lichens and Umbilicariae."
It's a wonderful exemplar of the time - the globe could, for the first time, be looked on as a whole, and the counting and mapping and categorizing of the entire planet could finally be done. There's such a sense of European optimism in it, as if naming and mapping gave dominion. Seems charmingly naive.
From James Wolcott:
His poise, his polish, his precision, were unsurpassed. I was dispatched to LA to catch one of his last shows for Vanity Fair and what struck me sitting in the audience--something that one didn't come through simply watching at home--was the power of his presence. He was taller than one expected, and when he popped through the curtain, he project a physical force that one didn't expect.
And let us not forget, Wolcott notes, that Carson "prized science and reason," bringing Carl Sagan to an audience that might not otherwise have seen him. It was Carson who called Uri Geller's bluff.
The repairman was by this morning to replace the motor in our dishwasher. He suggested we use Tang every once in a while to keep it clean. Yeah, that Tang. THe powdered drink mix. He said it's the citric acid.
Kraft doesn't quite endorse the idea. But they don't discourage it:
We have heard that some consumers have used TANG® Drink Mix to clean their dishwashers. TANG® does contain citric acid which can act as cleaning agent.TANG® Drink mix is intended to be a food product and Kraft Foods does not advocate its use for any other purpose.
I had the best intentions today on the bike. I was gonna take it easy. But when the people I was riding with suggested riding to the Rio Puerco (scroll down, you can see the old Rio Puerco bridge). How could I say no?
It's one of the most beautiful rides in town, climbing out of the Rio Grande Valley up old Route 66 west out of Albuquerque then along a freeway frontage road that rolls along the west mesa before dropping down to the Rio Puerco - the River of Pigs. From the top of the hill, looking down onto the Rio Puerco, you get this classic New Mexico, Georgia O'Keeffe vista, a layer of sandstones marking the far horizon, a dry desert riverbed threading the foreground, the tan slopes in front of you dotted with scraggly piñon.
It was a fun group today, folk I've not ridden with before. They go every Sunday. I think I'll tag along with them again.
I have always enjoyed watching someone who is good at what they do, who is confident and comfortable. I remember standing and talking with the super at my old apartment bulding while he was working on the boiler. He looked at a bolt and reached for the right wrench, without even thinking about which one would fit.
That's the way Johnny Carson was. I loved that show.
We have had March weather for the first three weeks of January here in Albuquerque.
Those are snowdrops, peaking up through the detritus of last year's iris.
When I say "March weather," I am speaking empirically, not rhetorically. The average overnight low for the first three weeks of January has been 31.3 F here (a tad less than O C). That's a normal March 1 temperature. Normal for now is more like 23.3 F (-5 C). Daytime highs have been well above normal too, though the gap is a little less. Overall, though, it's the warmest first three weeks of January in Albuquerque records going back to 1931.
Snowdrops are usually the garden's first bloomer. But this is ridiculous.
Since I know there are some climate weenies who read this blog, I will self-consciously point out here that I am not making any assertion about global warming having anything to do with my snowdrop. Chalk it up to a persistent ridge of high pressure over the intermountain west. But I would be remiss in not pointing out that the subtext of the numbers above - overnight low temperatures rising more than the daytime highs - is consistent with the anthropogenic hypothesis. This is the "diurnal temperature range", the gap between day and night temperatures that is one way of fingerprinting greenhouse warming.
Via the Hypothetical Wren comes a link to the recipe for garlic chapstick.
They installed a whole bunch of new exercise equipment at the Y. It's made by a company called Matrix Fitness. It's all sleek and very early 21st century, and leaves me with the uncomfortable feeling that I'm trapped in a bad episode of CSI.
To help manage my email life, I set up a separate account last week for all my GNOME lists and bugzilla mail. It took four days for it to receive its first spam.
SpongeBob's gay agenda:
On Wednesday however, Paul Batura, assistant to Mr. Dobson at Focus on the Family, said the group stood by its accusation."We see the video as an insidious means by which the organization is manipulating and potentially brainwashing kids," he said. "It is a classic bait and switch."
(from Secretly Ironic)
A cool tool for visualizing correlation coefficients.
Over in the comments at RealClimate, Dave of ClimateWarning.org pointed to some new research by Aiguo Dai and colleagues at NCAR on the detection of increased drought on a warming earth.
In the December issue of the Journal of Hydrometeorology, Dai et al. report"observational evidence for the increasing risk of droughts as anthropogenic warming progresses and produces both increased temperatures and increased drying." Then in a subsequent paper presented last week, Dai and his colleagues took the results further:
"This depiction of linear trends in the Palmer Drought Severity Index from 1948 to 2002 shows drying (reds and pinks) across much of Canada, Europe, Asia, and Africa and moistening (green) across parts of the United States, Argentina, Scandinavia, and western Australia. (Illustration courtesy Aiguo Dai and the American Meteorological Society.)"
The Palmer index is not the best measure of drought, but it's a good crude index, and the results in the Dai map shown above are striking: significant areas of the globe - especially areas, like Africa, with significantly vulnerable populations - are drying.
My long quest for a broccoli refrigerator magnet is over:
I found one today at Rainbow Man, in among the old Navajo rugs and jewelry and Santa Fe Railway memorabilia. It's the railway memorabilia I go in for - old placemats, and occasionally the lovelyMary Colter faux Mimbres dinnerware they used in the dining car on the Super Chief. I almost missed the metal tray of refrigerator magnets tucked in a corner, they just caught my eye on the way out the door. 50 cents each.
Score.
It was the tail end of a nice few days wandering Northern New Mexico with my beloved. L and I are a good team when it comes to wandering aimlessly. We shopped some, saw some art (if you're in New Mexico or headed this way, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum has a terrific show of Charles Sheeler, the modernist photographer) and added some new lines to the big map on the wall of my office on which we mark all of our New Mexico travels.
And I found a broccoli refrigerator magnet.
This whole "scientists used to think we were headed into an ice age" thing is one of those delicious examples of things I thought to be true that turn out to be wrong.
Over at RealClimate, William Connolley does a great job today of laying out a case he's been building for a long time. The bottom line is that, while there was some discussion in the scientific community in the 1970s of the possibility of a future ice age, the notion that scientists generally believed one was imminent, and now have changed their tune to say we should expect warming instead, is flat wrong.
I finally beat Elijah.
I noticed recently, looking at Bugzilla emails in my inbox, the remarkable speed with which Elijah Newren has been triaging incoming bugs, and I made a little game out of trying to get to one before he did. A couple of times I came close, only to hit the "submit" button some small bit of time after Elijah, because we'd been literally looking at the same bug at the same time.
This morning I finally did it. The trick seems to be to be up early in the morning while Elijah, I assume, is still sleeping.
Beautiful pictures by Matthew Bohnsack from the Bosque del Apache.
Pushing my passion for the sufficiently obscure, I now own three-legged pig chinese good luck. Now if I only owned more balloons.
My new favorite search string: Four users in January have arrived at Inkstain after searching on three-legged pig chinese good luck. Also problems in France, a search on which I inexplicably show up on the first Google page.
Tim Lambert awards the inestimable Michael Fumento the Golden Rake.
It is named in honor of Sideshow Bob, who in the Cape Feare episode of The Simpsons, steps on a rake whacking himself in the face. Then he does it again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.
Fumento, remarkably, has posted yet another witty riposte on his I Am Not A Blogger Web Site for what must be close to the ninth time, umm, erring in his description of last year's study in the Lancet on deaths in Iraq.
Here are the latest words from Michael "I Know So Much about the Study, I Don't Have to Read It" Fumento:
Moreover, the authors of the Lancet article CLAIMED to have re-calculated the number of deaths after excluding those in Fallujah, except that strangely enough they never bothered to say what those numbers were.
Thwack!
Just a reminder (and herein lies the rake - this language has been pointed out to Fumento too many times to count) here is what the study's authors actually said:
We estimate that 98 000 more deaths than expected (8000-194 000) happened after the invasion outside of Falluja and far more if the outlier Falluja cluster is included. (emphasis added)
In 1862 and '63, Peruvian slave merchants kidnapped some 1,500 people from Easter Island - half the people left after their society collapsed. They were sold into Peru's guano mines. Most died.
There was an international outcry, and the Peruvians were shamed into returning the small number of surviving Easter Islanders to their home. They brought smallpox back with them.
In the past, I've taken the insurance industry's recognition of the economic threat of greenhouse climate change as a sort of free market signal. My reasoning was that people who actually have an economic stake view the threat as real.
But in a couple of posts recently, Roger Pielke Jr. has argued that the insurance industry essentially has an economic motive to inflate the perception of risk:
It seems like pointing out the obvious that the reinsurance industry has a powerful vested interest in charging the highest rates that the market will bear for its products. And the prospect of more disasters means a basis for charging higher rates. Thus, for the moment setting aside whether or not recent disasters are caused by climate change, it seems pretty clear that when the reinsurance industry say that disasters will get worse in the future, they have a clear conflict in interest.
Luis links to Joel Spolsky's college advice, which includes a nugget likely of value for those beyond the confines of the computer science world Spolsky means to address. In short - if you can write well, which is really just to say communicate well, you'll end up big cheese:
Would Linux have succeeded if Linus Torvalds hadn't evangelized it? As brilliant a hacker as he is, it was Linus's ability to convey his ideas in written English via email and mailing lists that made Linux attract a worldwide brigade of volunteers.
Roger Pielke Jr. and Daniel Sarewitz argue in TNR that the way to reduce the damage from things like climate change and tsunamis is to, in essence, help people be less poor:
Disparities in disaster vulnerability between rich and poor will continue to grow. About 97 percent of population growth is occurring in the developing world. This growth, in turn, drives urbanization and coastal migration. The result is that, in the next two decades, the population of urban areas in the developing world will likely increase by two billion people. And this population is being added to cities that are mostly located on coastal or flood plains--or in earthquake zones--and are unable to provide the quality of housing, services, infrastructure, and environmental protection that can help reduce vulnerability.
Skipping around last night through the ubiquitous Jared Diamond's new book, Collapse(1), I found some good discussion about something I've been trying to understand better: the climatological component of the collapse of the Maya. What I've been wondering is the extent to which they're a case study similar to the Anasazi.
(click through for more)
Actually it's a bit of a cheat to suggest this was an accident. Diamond, whose work intrigues me, has been writing and talking for a while about this "how societies collapse" thing. I'd been reading about the Maya-climate link. When I realized Diamond talked about the Maya in his new book, I tooled over to the local Borders and picked up a copy last night.
The proximate cause of all of this is a paper in Science in spring 2003 by Gerald Haug and colleagues using a clever bit of analysis on sea floor cores to link drought to the Maya collapse.(2) Their sediments are from the Cariaco Basin, off the coast of Venezuela, an area in the climatological neighborhood of the Mayan country on the Yucatan Peninsula. (You've gotta trust them on that part, I know it's a bit far away. The line of argument connecting the two involves their shared fate along the Intertropical Convergence Zone.)
Drought had been linked to Maya collapse before. It's not like this is new. (See, for example, Dick Gill's The Great Maya Droughts(3), a book I haven't seen yet but which everybody writing about this seems to quote.) The remarkable bit in Haug was the precision with which the dates they found suggesting drought in the sea sediments matched the dates in Mayan history - a long dry spell "punctuated by more intense multiyear droughts centered at approximately 810, 860, and 910 A.D." Diamond quotes Gill as noting collapse at various sites around the Mayan world (they were a bunch of city-states, not a single empire) at around 810, 860 and 910. Gill wrote his book before Haug et al.'s seafloor data was available. Back to Haug:
These new data suggest that a century-scale decline in rainfall put a general strain on resources in the region, which was then exacerbated by abrupt drought events, contributing to the social stresses that led to the Maya demise.
Diamond suggests an explanation here much like what he and others have talked about in the Anasazi case - a population that maxed out its resources, losing the flexibility to respond in the face of changing climatic conditions.
1. Diamond, J. M. (2005) Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed (Viking, New York).
2. Haug, G. H., Gunther, D., Peterson, L. C., Sigman, D. M., Hughen, K. A. & Aeschlimann, B. (2003) Science 299, 1731-1735.
3. Gill, R. B. (2000) The great Maya droughts : water, life, and death (University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque).
Somebody set up us up the bomb. Really.
For our New Year's Day ride, we headed up Tijeras Canyon and into the Manzano Mountains up South 14. Until we had to stop, because there was a bomb in the road.
We were stopped by the ranger station at the foot of the hill when a pickup slowed and rolled down his window to say that the bomb squad had the road blocked off halfway up the hill. His purpose was to do us a favor, so we wouldn't waste our time riding that way. But the whole point of our bike rides is miles, time in the saddle, and amusement. What could be better. A bomb!
South 14 is a big wide-shouldered highway that climbs a relatively gentle grade up through piñon woods, through road cuts of a lovely tawny limestone. It was busy enough that two more helpful drivers stopped to tell us that the road was closed ahead.
When we got to the scene of the crime, there was a county sheriff blocking the road, turning all the drivers back, and the Albuquerque Police Department bomb squad doing whatever bomb squads do. This, wisely, seems to involve a great deal of patience and very slow movement.
The story we pieced together from the cops and the TV news guy on the scene involved a 250-pound military surplus bomb, with intact detonator (x-rays were somehow involved in determining this bit), chained to a stop sign and wrapped in an American flag with anti-Bush slogans scrawled on it.
Somebody set up us the bomb good.