One of the most elegant weavings I've ever read of an interesting character and an important issue: Dennis Roddy's profile of John Gilmore's fight.
There was a deck of clouds sitting low over the mountains when we left Jaime's house for this morning's bike ride, and my simple request was to find a way to ride up into them. Jaime lives at about 5,800 feet, in the foothils on the east edge of town, and as we picked our way north through the neighborhoods we could see the clouds, looking like they were a just a few hundred feet above us.
Our first ascent, up Sunset Canyon (we think it's the highest city street in Albuquerque) got us close, but the cloud deck was still maybe a hundred feet above us. So we headed to La Luz.
Up at the north end of town, the road to the La Luz trailhead is a short but epic little climb, the road winding through beautiful granite rock desert, kicking up at times terrificly steeply. My odometer/altimeter gizmo puts the road at 2.3 miles, 960 feet elevation gain, or about an 8 percent average grade, but the first mile is relatively gentle, meaning the last half of the road really bites.
About halfway up, we got into the mist, and it was beautiful - snowing lightly, a dusting along the roadsides, but warm enough (34 F by my thermometer/altimeter/odometer gizmo) that the road was just wet, not iced.
I have never before climbed all the way to the La Luz trailhead parking lot without stopping at least once. But Jaime and Steve conspired today, staying with me and encouraging me rather than dropping me (as they easily could have done). At the top, we were three bike-borne gorillas in a beautfil snowy mist.
My colleague Larry Calloway last weekend wrote a passionate elegy to Ernst Mayr.
"The Saudi Arabia of renewable energy." Make a guess where I'm talking about, then click through.
A googled trail of bread crumbs this morning lead me to the oddly named Friends of Science web page this morning, which includes this truly remarkable assertion:
The CO2 increase was only 0.4 percent over the last 50 years, rather than the 5 percent per 100 years quoted by Kyoto.
Let's just briefly take a virtual jaunt to Mauna Loa, where Charles Keeling and his crew have been measuring carbon dioxide since 1958, which would seem to cover most of "the last 50 years" mentioned by our Friends of Science:
The Mauna Loa record shows a 18.8 percent increase in the mean annual concentration, from 315.98 parts per million by volume (ppmv) of dry air in 1959 to 375.64 ppmv in 2003.
Perhaps they meant 0.4 percent per year?
Via the latest Tangled Bank, a thoughtful disquisition on the Universal Acid blog about the putative link between autism and the MMR vaccine:
This is a fairly long post, so quick summary: the MMR-autism link is bogus; the uncertainty that the MMR-autism claim has created has led to concrete harms in terms of public health; and the widespread acceptance of the claim is typical of modern skepticism about the "scientific establishment."
I use the MMR-autism issue in a talk I have given to scientific groups about science journalism and the issues that arise at the intersection of science and public policy controversies, one of a number of examples wherein people with strongly held views on a topic find scientific outliers to support their view, shrugging off a widely held mainstream consensus. No particular side of the traditional liberal-conservative spectrum is immune to this - the right does it on climate change, and the left does it on GM foods. Our Universal Acid author suggests that a strong thread of anti-intellectualism afoot today is one explanation:
It doesn't do any good to report that "the overwhelming majority of experts have concluded there is no link between the MMR vaccine and autism," because scientific "expertise" (and science itself) has lost at least some of the patina of authority it once commanded. The anti-vaccine movement is thus intimately connected (as an intellectual and social phenomenon) to quack medicine, conspiracy theories, and even (loosely) creationism.
Breaking news!
Rift valley opens in southwest U.S.
We had another incident last night. Around bedtime, Sadie was wandering aimlessly through the house, staring at me, unable or unwilling to settle down, like she was trying to tell me something.
This morning, I nervously opened the paper to see which pop culture icon was dead. Elton John? Neal Cassady? Paris Hilton? Could it be that Neal Cassady died long ago, and Sadie had finally noticed? Could it be that Sadie was upset about Paris Hilton's cell phone being hacked?
Then I realized I'd left my bike helmet, gloves and shoes on the floor in front of the chair Sadie likes to sleep under, blocking the entrance to her den. She was trying to tell me something.
After initial reports that January 2005 was the warmest globally on record, NASA's GISS project has revised the numbers. It's now only the second warmest on record.
I realize this is anthropomorphizing, but I could swear the geese I saw this morning poking around in the mud in the middle of the Rio Grande looked happy.
It's been astonishingly wet here since the first of the year, El Niño wet, record wet. This morning I rode up to the Alameda Bridge over the Rio Grande to look at the river. It's a particular spot I always go, an old road bridge that's closed to traffic. It crosses a couple of low islands in the middle of the river, and on the islands' edges this morning, a bunch of Canada geese were poking in the fresh mud. They seemed - I dunno - pleased. It's a desert, they're geese. I guess they grasp the essence of the thing more immediately than we do.
Toiling away at the day job this afternoon, I had a spare moment to pen this whine about the ruckus over the past several days about Tim Barnett's new work on ocean temperatures and climate change.
There's been a lot of arguing in the comments over on David Appell's blog (come to think of it, there's always a lot of arguing in the comments on David's blog) about the Barnett stuff, and it occurs to me that in this case no one knows what they're talking about because Barnett's stuff hasn't been published yet. It's not so much that, as David notes, it hasn't been peer-reviewed yet. It's that there simply is no paper to look at yet, only a news release and a bunch of news stories.
I'm not saying it was bad for Barnett to do a talk and news briefing at the AAAS meeting. That's what happens at meetings. And I'm not saying it was bad for the press to cover this (though the usual excess from The Independent is a tad predictable). But for any sort of public discussion of work's implications to move forward, any understanding of where this fits in, we need a little more than we've got right now.
But in the meantime, if you're looking for a little red meat on the subject, there's a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters on ocean temperatures:
In terms of the causes of the increase in ocean heat content we believe that the long-term trend as seen in these records is due to the increase of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. In fact, estimates of the net radiative forcing of the Earth system suggest the possibility that we may be underestimating ocean warming. This is possible since we do not have complete data coverage for the world ocean. However, the large decrease in ocean heat content starting around 1980 suggests that internal variability of the Earth system significantly affects Earth’s heat balance on decadal time-scales.
Actually the real heavy lifting here in the "blame the greenhouse" argument is an earlier paper by Levitus et al. in Science in 2001. Barnett's also got a related paper from the same issue. Here's how Richard Kerr explained what they'd found:
Are humans indeed warming the world? If so, will future warming be big enough to matter· Confident answers depend in large part on the credibility of climate models. Greenhouse critics claim modelers can get any answer they like about warming simply by adjusting any of the numerous inputs whose values in the real world remain uncertain. Climate model running on the warm side· Crank in a bit more pollutant haze to shade the planet and cool it down, they say, and everything will look fine. Modelers have long argued that constraints such as the need to simulate current climate and the history of atmospheric warming keep their models more honest than that. Now a new, independent reality check from the ocean has strengthened their case.On pages 267 and 270 of this issue, two groups of climate researchers report that two climate models have passed a new test: simulating the warming of the deep oceans during the past half- century. Their success "provides stronger evidence climate is changing," says climate modeler Simon Tett of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Bracknell, United Kingdom, "and it's likely due to human influence." However, a conflict between the two studies underscores the difficulties in gauging how bad greenhouse warming could be.
William Connolley takes a look at how what one might call "the left" propagandizes about climate change.
Last night, Sadie was behaving powerfully strangely. Lissa and I were reading in bed, and Sadie was moping around the bedroom, looking at us, sniffing at things, sometimes just standing there sadly, as if she was trying to tell us something.
When I opened this morning's paper, I understood. Hunter S. Thompson and Sandra Dee had died. It's like Sadie is some sort of pop culture doggie savant, like she knew.
I like this meme:
- Grab the nearest book.
- Open the book to page 123.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
- Don't search around and look for the "coolest" book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.
The book (really, I closed my eyes and reached left to the nearest shelf) is the IPCC's "Climate Change 1995." Page 123 is in the chapter on "Radiative Forcing of Climate Change":
It would be highly desirable to determine the indirect GWPs associated with the ozone production for these gases.
Phil Mote and colleagues have a paper in the latest Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society updating their work on western snowpack and climate change. Bottom line - the snow's melting:
The largest decreases have occurred where winter temperatures are mild, especially in the Cascade Mountains and northern California. In most mountain ranges, relative declines grow from minimal at ridgetop to substantial at snow line. Taken together, these results emphasize that the West's snow resources are already declining as earth's climate warms.
They don't have snow records back real far, so the results get a bit tangled up in the PDO and other decadal-scale patterns. But it seems pretty clear that as things get warmer, the snowpack patterns are changing. This is important in a region that depends on winter snowpack as a water storage mechanism to meet summer water usage needs.
More here.
Gavin and Caspar at RealClimate give the best explanation I've yet read about how principal components analysis works, and how it is applied in the discussion over Michael Mann's hockey stick.
David Appell in the March Scientific American on the hockey stick (only a bit is free, but Benny Peiser happily violated Scientific American's copyright via his mailing list, so I'll test the bounds of fair use and quote a bit more):
To construct the hockey-stick plot, Mann, Raymond S. Bradley of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Malcolm K. Hughes of the University of Arizona analyzed paleoclimatic data sets such as those from tree rings, ice cores and coral, joining historical data with thermometer readings from the recent past. In 1998 they obtained a "reconstruction" of Northern Hemisphere temperatures going back 600 years; by the next year they had extended their analysis to the past 11,000 years. In 2003 Mann and Philip D. Jones of the University of East Anglia in England used a different method to extend results back 2,000 years.In each case, the outcome was clear: global mean temperature began to rise dramatically in the early 20th century. That rise coincided with the unprecedented release of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into the earth's atmosphere, leading to the conclusion that industrial activity was boosting the world's mean temperature. Other researchers subsequently confirmed the plot.
The work of Mann and his colleagues achieved special prominence in 2001. That is when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international body of climate experts, placed the hockey-stick chart in the Summary for Policymakers section of the panel's Third Assessment Report. (Mann also co-authored one of the chapters in the report.) It thereby elevated the hockey stick to iconic status--as well as making it a bull's-eye. A community skeptical of human-induced warming argued that Mann's data points were too sparse to constitute a true picture, or that his raw data were numerically suspicious, or that they could not reproduce his results with the data he had used. Take down Mann, it seemed, and the rest of the IPCC's conclusions about anthropogenic climate change would follow.
That led to "unjustified attack after unjustified attack," complains climatologist Gavin A. Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Although questions in the field abound about how, for example, tree-ring data are compiled, many of those attacking Mann's work, Schmidt claims, have had a priori opinions that the work must be wrong.
"Most scientists would have left the field long ago, but Mike is fighting back with a tenacity I find admirable," Schmidt says. One of Mann's more public punch backs took place in July 2003, when he defended his views before a congressional committee led by Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, who has called global warming a "hoax." "I left that meeting having demonstrated what the mainstream views on climate science are," Mann asserts.
From this morning's paper:
There is talk of new power plants, with a push from the federal government and interest from private industry. Even some environmentalists are grudgingly beginning to support nuclear power as a potential antidote to global warming.
Plus: Lindsay Lovejoy could be forgiven for feeling outnumbered...
Certain evidence has emerged regarding the November-December bowling ball incidents, prompting decisive action:
It seems a reasonable request, eh? Jake?
I came home to find a bunch of pink rubber bands on the couch. I put one on:
A couple of months ago, a friend at work asked me how much longer I was going to wear the yellow. "I don't know," I said. The real answer is, "As long as Lissa does." I asked her if she was going to take off the yellow and switch to pink. She said no, she'll wear them both.
Then so will I.
Back in the realm of the living. Notes from my multi-faceted absence:
William Connolley has a good rundown on the Moberg et al. paper with the latest version of the hockey stick. Is it me, though, or is anyone else out there frustrated by the fact that most of the mental energy associated with the discussion of this fascinating paper involves its place in the climate wars rather than its abilty to shed light on climate? All of the most interesting science must be framed in terms of its place in the debate, rather than its place in our understanding of climate.
Sick, and lacking any good computer games to occupy my mind (my old Sim City 2000 just couldn't hack it), I turned to PyGTK and DV's libxml python bindings, and whacked together a little app to better keep track of a whole bunch of my writing.
When I don't exercise, I start to feel sickly. When I'm as sick as I was over the last week, I can't exercise. You see the problem. This morning I hauled the bike out of the garage, set it up on the trainer, and rode for half an hour, staring at the heart monitor the entire time. My lungs did not appreciate it, but the rest of my body seemed to be rejoicing under the load. I imagine these complex metabolic pathways that have been built over the years of training getting all stopped up like debris clogging a rain gutter. This morning I broke through the debris.
Laid out by the flu, made all the worse by the fact that I was on a work trip when it hit, leaving me not much choice but to sit off by myself, refuse to shake anyone's hand, and suck it up until I could get home.
Via BoingBoing, a fascinating hypothesis: could breast cancer be caused by artificial light?
The University of Connecticut cancer epidemiologist says there still is no scientific consensus about why the incidence of the disease is so much higher in the developed world.The literature on breast cancer is littered with discredited theories about environmental and lifestyle factors that may contribute to the onset of the disease.
"We knew more about the cause of breast cancer 20 years ago than we do today," Stevens said. "What we do know is that it must have something to do with industrialized society."
Only a few theories have withstood scientific scrutiny, and no single factor explains a great percentage of breast cancer cases.
But that hasn't stopped people from looking for new explanations.
Now, Stevens and a few other researchers are focusing on a little-known suspect - electric light.
Their theory that artificial light can cause breast cancer is simple. Prolonged periods of exposure to artificial light disrupt the body's circadian rhythms - the inner biological clocks honed over thousands of years of evolution to regulate behaviors such as sleep and wakefulness. The disruption affects levels of hormones such as melatonin and the workings of cellular machinery, which can trigger the onset of cancer, Stevens theorizes.
Alan Greenspan apparently has a healthy skepticism about the models:
The dramatic advances over the past decade in virtually all measures of globalization have resulted in an international economic environment with little relevant historical precedent.
I agree that a certain skepticism about the models' macroeconomic predictions is healthy.
Vanna White no longer turns the letters on Wheel of Fortune. She just sort of touches the blank squares, and the letter magically appears. Lissa told me this has been going on for about ten years.
A few months ago, blogging about drought in Ethiopia, I mentioned my definition of drought: "less precipitation than you've come to depend on."
This evening I realized where I'd gotten the idea.
In the August 2002 issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Kelly Redmond wrote a commentary on "The Depiction of Drought." In it, he wrote:
Most concepts of drought involve a water balance. This implies that both supply and demand must be considered, as well as the question of whether there is enough (and, enough for what?). Thus, through time I have come to favor a simple definition; that is, insufficient water to meet needs.
I'd not read the paper before. But I've talked with Kelly about this stuff at great length. So the idea must have come from him.
One of my favorite scientists, Carl Caves, was recently elected a fellow of the American Physical Society. It was a good excuse to give the general public a little introduction to what he's thinking about:
That strangeness, though difficult to grasp intuitively, turns out to have useful consequences, Caves said in an interview.By embracing the strangeness rather than fighting it, Caves and others in the vanguard have laid out a theoretical framework for computers vastly more powerful than anything conceivable today.
Los Angeles city councilman Eric Garcetti is proposing that the city convert to open source software, and divert the anticipated savings into hiring more police.
(BoingBoing via Politech)
For reasons that defy easy explanation, Inkstain is one of the top 10 hits when you search on gilligan's island life size cut-outs.
In which daughter Nora speaks sensibly to the grownups (scroll down to find it):
Sex education that opens a dialogue between students and teachers is the ideal. Though this isn't always possible - sex is an awkward subject - censoring information is probably the worst way to keep us safe and healthy.