Friday night observations

* Just Like Heaven is a very charming movie. Probably drives hospital doctors crazy; but very charming.

* There is no better dinner in winter than ox tail stew, with mashed potato and beans, and a glass of red. (It is also the reason you just have to have a pressure cooker, even if you never cook anything else in it.)

* Tony Martin really is very funny. Why have I forgotten to bookmark The Scriveners Fancy, even though I did read it once before? I enjoyed this recent article, particularly given that I have been reading through Andrew Bolt's blog threads lately.

* Watching Pirates of the Caribbean - At World's End on TV last weekend, I decided it's not so hard to follow after three viewings. Sure, it's bloated, but it's still a fantastic looking film, with some clever ideas and impressive sequences. The new movie - On Stranger Tides, has critics pretty divided whether it works as a "re-boot" of the series or not, but I'm not put off.

* I wouldn't mind seeing Thor, too. It has made a lot of money despite quite a few poor US reviews. Not sure what explains that (the bad reviews, when it is clearly a popular success - the takings did not drop off quickly, which indicates it does have good word of mouth.)

* This post is a lot like using Twitter, I suppose, but I refuse to get into social media beyond blogs. Twitter is the Fantales of social media, and barely worth the effort.

* Speaking of movies: oh dear, the first teaser trailer for Spielberg's Tin Tin movie is out; and I remain very uncertain as to whether the creepy "is that living mannequins doing the acting?" quality of motion capture movies has been overcome. Why do smart people, like Robert Zemeckis and Spielberg, think this is a good technology. I have never seen it used in a way in which I can get over the "uncanny valley", at least when it is humans being depicted. Still, I might be wrong, who knows.

* Why is there still not so much publicity about Anthony Watts being wrong about the key part of his pet project?

Look up this fact, Andrew

Andrew Bolt has a post this morning in which he complains that scientists should just explain the facts, instead of making humorous videos which target him. (As it happens, I don't think that either video is all that good or funny.)

Anyway, I have been posting comments at his blog this week about Anthony Watts' failure to come up with the goods, and about the specific estimate of warming bias that he made to Bolt's face only last June. I don't think yesterday's comment got through on his "tips" page, although maybe I just didn't click "submit" or something.

So here is my attempt today, posted as a comment to his video post:

Andrew, you seem to be showing a distinct lack of interest in the fact that Anthony Watts' own co-authored paper has shown he was completely wrong when you interviewed him in June last year.

Are you having trouble remembering? He estimated that warming bias due to poor weather station siting in the US could account for .5 degree C of increase in the US temperature record.

You said that meant that 2/3 of the increase of .7 degree could be from this. Watts did not disagree.

His actual paper shows what 2 other studies had predicted - cooling biases had balanced warming biases and the US mean temperature record was accurate.

This is the second major, major claim on which Watts has been shown wrong - the other being that international weather station "drop out" was removing cooler stations and biasing the world temperature record.

This was quickly shown to be wrong, and not even "lukewarmenist" Lucia of Lucia's Blackboard believes it. Watts, as far as I know, has never retracted or apologised.

Andrew, why do you show no skepticism towards Watts? He made a wildly inaccurate estimate to your face, disproved by his own paper which he said was days away from being completed.

Do the right thing - get him back on the radio and ask him how specifically how he was so wrong, and to retract his earlier estimate made to you 12 months ago.

End of the Tour

Tamar dreaming

Here’s another photo from the recent trip to Tasmania – looking at the ridiculously pretty Tamar River north of Launceston. Good wine, good views; a very nice part of the world.

I’m going to have to post more slowly here for a while – a series of family things are happening soon which will no doubt distract me, and I really need to stop worrying about how many people are wrong on the internet (there are so, so many) and concentrate more on finishing work.

One thing I will be looking out for, though, is Anthony Watts’ spin on his surfacestation.org paper. He has promised a post about it, and I can’t wait to hear his explanation as to why, a year ago, he was telling Andrew Bolt that bad siting warming bias could account for .5 degree C of warming in the US. There is also no excuse for Andrew Bolt to ignore Watts’ (and others) actual paper.

If you have time, drop over to Bolt’s blog and ask for him to look into this, until he does.

Anyhow, see you around.

UPDATE: I just realised that, when using Mercury browser on my iPad, it treats surfacestation.org as an address and you can link to one of those empty domain search pages. Maybe there's a setting I need to change on Mercury? Anyway, it doesn't seem to happen on Firefox on my PC, or even Safari. Rest assured it wasn't intended.

Mini black holes re-appear

Mini black holes that look like atoms could pass through Earth daily

It's been a while since I've read anything new about mini black holes, but the paper above suggesting the type that may comprise a large part of dark matter in the universe was interesting. They argue that maybe they don't evaporate in Hawking Radiation, but have matter orbiting them sort of in the way that atoms have electrons around them. They do not consider that they would be dangerous at all.

I also saw recently that Adam Helfer, who wrote a paper years ago in which he questioned whether Hawking Radiation really existed (thereby gaining some prominence in sites concerned about whether potential mini black holes from the LHC could be dangerous) has another paper out called Black Holes Reconsidered. He still questions our understanding of Hawking Radiation, and also notes that, while they seem possible in certain scenarios, no one really knows what a naked singularity would look like.

Uncertainties continue in physics, then.

For attention: Andrew Bolt

Well, the failure of the Anthony Watts surfacestation.org project to prove what Anthony Watts promised for years (that is, that poor siting of some US weather stations would be shown to give a misleadingly higher-than-it-should-be temperature trend) is getting some attention in the climate science blogosphere.

Notably, a site which I will soon book mark "Wotts up With That" has a couple of posts about it, as well as Deltoid (from whose hat tip I've been getting quite a few hits this weekend.)

I would hope that more climate science bloggers will specifically post on it - particularly Skeptical Science - and perhaps someone in the mainstream media (Andrew Revkin, George Monbiot: this is important!) Joe Romm should be able to have a (well deserved) field day too.

But for this post, I want to note what some Australian skeptic sites have said about this project over the years:

Jo Nova: I have never taken this blog seriously, in the sense of believing both the arguments used or that it is particularly influential (the latter because I suspect its slick appearance -which makes it look like a funded PR exercise, even if it isn't - actually works against it.)

Anyhow, her short "Skeptics Handbook", which is chock full of wrong arguments, devotes an entire page to claiming the location of weather stations is a major issue.

I await the amended version of the Handbook, containing appropriate acknowledgement of the reassuring findings of the surfacestation.org project that the adjustments and work of the climate scientists did result in an accurate mean temperature trend. (Ha.)

Andrew Bolt: Australia's most influential climate skeptic blogger by far, I reckon, has made repeated references to Anthony Watts' work:

May 2009: A post headed "No way these stations could measure warming" ends on this note:

But read Anthony’s full report here - an awesome testimony to the commitment to evidence and truth from volunteers that should shame the professional alarmists which relied on these stations for their warming scare.

July 2009: Post headed "How not to measure warming" contains many photos from Watts, repeats a Pielke Snr post which pooh-poohed the NCDC's claim that siting bias were likely to cancel each other out (a fact Pielke Snr now confirms - with nary a sign of embarrassment for being wrong before,) and ends with this:

Moral: If the US data on warming is so dodgy, how much can we rely on weather stations in vast countries such as China, Russia, Brazil and India? Or even in Italy (above)?

Answer to Andrew: Well, there you go. The US data wasn't so dodgy after all. (Or, to be more precise, the degree to which any US data was "dodgy," it did not, as expected by climate scientists looking at how to best assess it, have any significant consequences for judging temperature trend.)

June 2010: in a brief note of a radio interview, Andrew notes:

Anthony Watts of Watt’s Up With That tells us when dodgy siting of weather stations may explain two thirds of the warming measured last century. (Examples in the clip above.)

I have listened to the interview, and can confirm that Watts was claiming, only a year ago, that he was estimating, at that time, that it could account for .5 degree of bias. Bolt then said (to paraphrase): well, if the globe has warmed by .7 degree over the last century, it could be that 2/3 of that is not "real warming". To which Watts concurred.

June 2010: another reminder of Watts' tour of Australia, and extracts parts of the Counterpoint interview in which Watts says:

Michael Duffy: In which direction does the bias lie? Are you suggesting that the temperature has not got as hot as the American official historical record suggests?

Anthony Watts: That’s correct. It’s an interesting situation. The early arguments against this project said that all of these different biases are going to cancel themselves out and there would be cool biases as well as warm biases, but we discovered that that wasn’t the case.

My comment to Andrew Bolt: have you read the Pielke Snr post on Watts' blog yet? The one which notes that the warming and cooling bias did cancel each other out? The one which is consistent with earlier studies that said the siting is not the confounding issue for working out temperature trends that it seemed to be?

Andrew, I strongly disagree with your take on climate change, and your willingness over the years to seemingly accept anything a contrarian has said without (apparently) seeking the climate science response to the claim. (Have you ever had a detailed read of Skeptical Science?)

But, despite this, I find it hard to believe that you could not review what Watts has been saying about this pet project for years, and not now feel that you've been taken for a ride.

Care for another interview with Mr Watts where you put to him the very same things he was saying only a year ago in your studio?

I look forward to hearing it...

The Lego success

Lego: Bricks and flicks | The Economist

The Economist notes that Lego is riding high, at the moment:

After nearly going under eight years ago, Lego now has 5.9% of the global toy market, up from 4.8% at the end of 2009. That makes it the world’s fourth-largest toymaker. It is doing especially well in America, where sales last year surpassed $1 billion for the first time. Worldwide sales were up by 37% in 2010, to DKr16 billion ($2.8 billion). Net profit increased by 69% to DKr3.7 billion. Meanwhile, the world’s biggest toymakers, Hasbro and Mattel, are struggling.

The article notes the success is certainly helped by its very successful Lego video games. I don't play them, but my kids do on Nintendo DS, and they certainly seem designed to have a long life and exhibit much wit and creativity. Congratulations, Lego.

Future rainfall worries

2,300-year climate record suggests severe tropical droughts as northern temperatures rise

A 2,300-year climate record University of Pittsburgh researchers recovered from an Andes Mountains lake reveals that as temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rise, the planet's densely populated tropical regions will most likely experience severe water shortages as the crucial summer monsoons become drier. The Pitt team found that equatorial regions of South America already are receiving less rainfall than at any point in the past millennium.

Let the rubbishing begin....

Anthony Watts has devoted years to running a citizens project to identity poorly sited temperature stations in the US, all the while suggesting that such carelessness meant the temperature record there was unreliable.

Now he's had a paper published (worked on with Roger Pielke Snr, whose attitude towards climate change is to say it is very serious and CO2 production should be addressed, while simultaneously playing footsies with a "skeptic" like Watts who has run numerous wrong, misleading and deceptive arguments over the years to encourage popular belief that CO2 is not a serious problem).

Pielke has a guest post up at WUWT discussing the paper in which the exclamation marks are, I think, intended to hide the lack of importance [update: in the sense of anti-climatic failure] of their findings:

The Surface Stations project is truly an outstanding citizen scientist project under the leadership of Anthony Watts! The project did not involve federal funding. Indeed, these citizen scientists paid for the page charges for our article. This is truly an outstanding group of committed volunteers who donated their time and effort on this project!

Then we get this key point:

The inaccuracies of measurements from poorly sited stations are merged with the well sited stations in order to provide area average estimates of surface temperature trends including a global average. In the United States, where this study was conducted, the biases in maximum and minimum temperature trends are fortuitously of opposite sign, but about the same magnitude, so they cancel each other and the mean trends are not much different from siting class to siting class. This finding needs to be assessed globally to see if this also true more generally.

Yes: the world should be sure that they don't make the same mistake as the US has: errors that cancel each other out!

It gets better:

One critical question that needs to be answered now is; does this uncertainty extend to the worldwide surface temperature record? In our paper

Montandon, L.M., S. Fall, R.A. Pielke Sr., and D. Niyogi, 2011: Distribution of landscape types in the Global Historical Climatology Network. Earth Interactions, 15:6, doi: 10.1175/2010EI371

we found that the global average surface temperature may be higher than what has been reported by NCDC and others as a result in the bias in the landscape area where the observing sites are situated.

And here's a handy question and answer summary of his findings:

A: The minimum temperature rise appears to have been overestimated, but the maximum temperature rise appears to have been underestimated.

Q: Do the differing trend errors in maximum and minimum temperature matter?

A: They matter quite a bit. Wintertime minimum temperatures help determine plant hardiness, for example, and summertime minimum temperatures are very important for heat wave mortality. Moreover, maximum temperature trends are the better indicator of temperature changes in the rest of the atmosphere, since minimum temperature trends are much more a function of height near the ground and are of less value in diagnosing heat changes higher in the atmosphere;

So, the temperature which is most important for temperature in the rest of the atmosphere is the one that he thinks may be underestimated. Right. Got that.

With friends like these, the climate skeptic movement is really on a roll.

I've been saying for ages that I can't really make head nor tail of Pielke Snr's position. He just seems to like spending his time snarking at how other climate scientists are not looking at things in quite the right way (that is, his way.) The snark seems to lead to his willingness to work with anyone in an attempt to score points against the rest of the climate science community. You could say much the same of Judith Curry, although she seemingly likes to spend her time even more on the fence of the fundamental question: does she believe there is a serious need to start reducing CO2 now? She's just happy to carp on and on about uncertainty instead, but in a way which (as far as I can tell) fails completely to advance the question of how to assess or reduce the claimed uncertainty.

Watts and his supporters in comments are trying to paint this as an important contribution to the science of climate change. Well, it tells us nothing much that others hadn't already expected, but I suppose its good to have the confirmation. But it is impossible to believe that it has worked out in the way he would have hoped. All those posts of photos of weather stations too close to concrete, etc. Obviously he was encouraging belief that US temperature rise were all a silly, silly mistake that he had seen through.

Anthony Watts is already in defensive mood in the comments. He's fully expecting the snark, which so far has not been appearing at his blog in large numbers.

That should be rectified soon, I hope.

Expect much discussion of this around the climate blogs.

UPDATE: looking back through Watt's previous surfacestation posts, I see he was happy to promote a Orange County Register editorial in 2009 about his work:

These influences produce readings higher than actual ambient temperatures, Mr. Watts said. Moreover, the research revealed “major gaps in the data record that were filled in with data from nearby sites, a practice that propagates and compounds errors.”

These inflated, error-prone, tinkered-with temperature recordings are one of several measurements cited by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as evidence man-made global warming is a threat. But the Heartland study concluded, “The U.S. temperature record is unreliable. And since the U.S. record is thought to be ‘the best in the world,’ it follows that the global database is likely similarly compromised and unreliable.”

When will the apologies start?

Where space dreams and cross dressing intersect

It's that time of year in Brisbane when you can never be sure how cold it might get during the night, so it's not unusual that you can fall asleep under a quilt only to wake up too hot later.

I think it was this that led to last nights dream, in which I had arrived at a small lunar base with my own accommodation, which was actually just like a largish canvas tent, only airtight. But when I put it up (inside the existing base, so I was not in a spacesuit) I found there were lots of small pin prick hole in the fly, and I had to try to tape them up, while complaining about poor quality control at NASA.

Once satisfied with the tent, I was sitting inside it reading a book about the incredible extended isolation that the first Antarctic explorers often suffered, particularly those who had to wait out a winter. It suddenly occurred to me that this was not a good book to bring to the Moon, where I was going to be confined to my tent for about 7 months. The dream soon morphed away into something else (I was in Seattle and an elderly women seemed to think the government was controlling the weather, and then there was some sort of parody of Sex and the City going on, from which I was eventually saved by waking up feeling crushed under too many blankets.)

As it happens, I have been reading some stuff about Antarctic expeditions, but really, I would know better than to take it to the Moon in real life. One of the books (which I got in Hobart, which tends to have a lot of titles on Antarctica) is this:

Herbert Dyce Murphy inspired Patrick White's The Twyborn Affair; he appears as a woman in one of E. Phillips Fox's best-known paintings; he prevented Douglas Mawson's Antarctic expedition from imploding.

Lady Spy, Gentleman Explorer tells the story of one man's fascinating double life - a gentleman adventurer who also dressed in drag to spy for British Military Intelligence in pre-World War I Europe.

In 1911 Murphy sailed to the Antarctic with the Mawson expedition for a gruelling exploration of the frozen continent, a trip of terrible hardship which claimed lives - probably unnecessarily - as this controversial view of Mawson demonstrates.

We all love a story of cross dressing explorers, don't we?

It's not a bad read so far, although the author does seem almost too keen to make it clear that her relative did not enjoy being a pre War spy in drag. He certainly had an adventurous life, even apart from the lady spy period, which was fairly short anyway.

I must try to adjust the bedcovers better tonight.

For my own reference...

Second Glance: Appreciation of Pauline Kael

I always liked Pauline Kael's reviews, and in fact mentioned her in conversation last weekend, not realising that there was this article about her to be found on Arts and Letters Daily.

The fading voice

Christopher Hitchens: Unspoken Truths | Culture | Vanity Fair

Poor old Christopher is losing/has lost his voice and writes about it, quite movingly, in this piece.

Great moments in university advertising

I noticed an ad at the top of Rottentomatoes that I thought had an amusingly inappropriate picture on it, and followed the link to this page of Open Universities Australia, which even the link says is about their "terrorism" related courses.

The picture is there (top left, in case you need to have it pointed out):



That seems a particularly enthusiastic grope going on, doesn't it? I'm sure that's why most people get into Security and Counterterrorism as a career.

Then the page also includes this heading:


Sorry, I can't enlarge this without blurring it more, so you have to click on it to see it more clearly, and see whether it's just me, or do all those heavily armed counter-terrorists look like they're about 16? (I know, I know, you hit your 40's and all police officers start to look like kids, but really...)

But then the body of the article starts like this:

Yes, the writing is about starting your studies in Early Childhood Education, for which lessons in use of a submachine gun would, no doubt, come in very handy for class control. (Nothing gets the kids' attention better than a burst of gunfire into the air, I guess.)

Anyway, count me as officially amused. And is someone at Open Universities having a lend? Maybe it was a student's work on display? Or is it deliberately diversionary advertising? (So you thought you wanted to be a heavily armed policeman/security dude, but did you consider teaching primary school kids first?)

Roman urban myth

BBC News - Rome braces for 'prophet-predicted quake'

It can't be allowed to happen: mad Muslims would probably claim it as punishment for the death of bin Laden.

Pays to look up every now and then..

BBC News - Dubai: 'Suicide jump' from world's tallest skyscraper

A man has committed suicide by jumping from the world's tallest skyscraper in Dubai, according to its owner.

The man, in his 20s, fell from the 147th floor of the 2,717ft (828m) Burj Khalifa, landing on a deck on the 108th floor, local media reported.

I wonder who uses the deck on the 108th floor. It seems from a previous article that it is not the tourist observation deck.

The future of coccoliths

Ocean acidification: Carbon dioxide makes life difficult for algae

Here's some bad ocean acidification news for us all, about coccoliths (the calcium carbonate shells of some algae.)

"We know that the world's oceans are acidifying due to our emissions of CO₂ and that is why it is interesting for us to find out how the coccoliths are reacting to it. We have studied algae from both fossils and living coccoliths, and it appears that both are protected from dissolution by a very thin layer of organic material that the algae formed, even though the seawater is extremely unsaturated relative to calcite. The protection of the organic material is lost when the pH is lowered slightly. In fact, it turns out that the shell falls completely apart when we do experiments in water with a pH value that many researchers believe will be the found in the world oceans in the year 2100 due to the CO₂ levels," explains Tue Hassenkam, who is part of the NanoGeoScience research group at the Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen.

Professor of Biological Oceanography Katherine Richardson has followed research in the acidification of the oceans and climate change in general and she hopes that the results can help to bring the issue into public focus.

"These findings underscore that the acidification of the oceans is a serious problem. The acidification has enormous consequences not only for coccoliths, but also for many other marine organisms as well as the global carbon cycle.".....

And from the abstract of the PNAS paper itself:

However, ancient and modern coccoliths, that resist dissolution in Ca-free artificial seawater at pH > 8, all dissolve when pH is 7.8 or lower. Ocean pH is predicted to fall below 7.8 by the year 2100, in response to rising CO2 levels. Our results imply that at these conditions the advantages offered by the biogenic nature of calcite will disappear putting coccoliths on algae and in the calcareous bottom sediments at risk.

This is the worst sounding bit of ocean acidification research that has come out for quite some time.

Agreed

Club Troppo - In Praise of Gillard’s Malaysia Solution

I think Ken Parish's assessment of Gillard's "Malaysia solution" is pretty much spot on. Even Andrew Bolt was conceding on his show that it may well work to stop boats coming, and the trade off is not as bad as it seems.

Best almost flying toy ever?

I have seen something about this device before; maybe I even had a video here, but I can't be bothered checking. But this video seems new, and it's awe-some. (Did I sound like a cool dude just then? Oh well, must try harder.)

A bit more detail needed, but still..

Small Modular Reactors: Safer and Cheaper? | Climate Central

How come I've missed the Climate Central blog til now? It looks pretty good.

Anyhow, a few weeks ago they had the post linked above about small nuclear reactors, which I have speculated before might be the better route towards rapid roll out of nuclear power. But I did wonder about the wisdom of burying them.

The post does deal with some of their questionable aspects, but more detail is needed.

And I need to clean up my blog roll again.

Great heading

Spotted in the New York Times: Apart From The Vampires, Lincoln Film Seeks Accuracy