Monday, May 30, 2011
Licence to print money
The last one ended up at $963,000,000.
Regardless of the quality of this latest instalment (and I haven't seen it yet), we can rest assured another one is in the making.
An Indian on ice
Further to my recent interest in Tromsø, Norway (donations to fund my expedition there would be gratefully received - I'll blog all about it, I promise), I note the blog entry (linked above) by an Indian conservationist.
Yes, she likes the place very much, but I wanted to highlight the following comments she made about how Indians behave while travelling in their own country:
Its not easy getting to the Arctic, even though it may seem made easy by modern day travel. But even most sophisticated airjets get hit by volcanic ash. It has thrown flights at most European airports in a tizzy. But I am amazed by the almost zen like attitude with which the Europeans face such disasters even as their summer plans go for a toss. I can just imagine the pandemonium which would break out if flights were cancelled at any of our Indian airports. As Indians strangely we are the worst behaved in our own land. Passengers would be shouting at helpless airline staff, dropping names, threatening to call up some minister or VIP if they are not put on the plane. I was witness to a similar scene at Raipur airport. A rotund man walked up to the Kingfisher airlines counter and demanded: "I am retired DGP Punjab. Please give me the front seat, and give it fast else I will report you to the police." The poor girl asked him politely to wait, but he continued shouting. And this with a retired police office. Imagine the hell that would break if he was still in service! And hats off the our airline staff who have to put up with such tantrums!Now that an actual Indian has raised the issue of misbehaviour of Indians while travelling, it might be safe for me to note that on my last two holidays (in Australia and New Zealand last year,) I have encountered Indian tourists who, while not being spectacularly rude as they may be on the subcontinent, were clearly being very inconsiderate and showing a very selfish attitude.
How widespread do other travellers find this, I wonder? I had read before that there is nothing quite the dog eat dog nature of a queue to a travel counter in India, but I would have thought that when they were overseas they could live more to the standard of the country they find themselves in.
To be fair, while I'm not sure if it still exists, aggression in queues (blatant pushing in, really) also could be experienced in Paris amongst those from Eastern Europe. But it's been a long, long time since I was there, so maybe that has changed.
Where does the strong Indian sense of entitlement come from, I wonder. I thought all Eastern religions were philosophically inclined towards encouraging acceptance of your lot in life. Maybe that only works for those too poor to travel.
More carbon tax thoughts
Kenneth Davidson sounds pretty reasonable in this column. There is one major weakness in what he says, I reckon, but readers can work that out for themselves!
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Andrew Bolt and the 1 m sea level rise
It would seem unlikely that he would recall there was a lengthy assessment done a couple of years ago on the effect on the coast line of Australia of 1 m rise. From the executive summary:
Of the 711,000 existing residential buildings close to the water, between 157,000–247,600 properties are identified as potentially exposed to inundation with a sea-level rise scenario of 1.1 metres.
Nearly 39,000 buildings are located within 110 metres of ‘soft’ shorelines and at risk from accelerated - erosion due to sea-level rise and changing climate conditions.
The current value of existing residential buildings at risk from inundation ranges from $41 billion to $63 billion (2008 replacement value).
I presume replacement value does not include the loss of value of the land itself.
Anyway, what's $50 billion dollars in lost buildings between friends, Andrew?
It's about time he was more serious about the consequences of being wrong.
The amazing turnaround Curry
Bart Verheggen notes the amazing turnaround that Judith Curry made in the space of 3 years from being strongly against doing nothing re CO2, to being her current bleat of uncertainty, uncertainty, uncertainty.
It's astounding to read her Washington Post article of 2007 and compare it to her blog of today.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
A Saturday night observation
Please resume your normal activities....
Friday, May 27, 2011
What an odd man
Just a weird story of a man who really needs a wife, and a baby.
Watching the spinning top wobble
Of course, "lukewarmenists" are on one side of the fence, as demonstrated by Judith Curry, who ends a post which notes two sides of the argument this way:
Cumulative catastrophic weather events are being used to support the case for global warming action. Sorry Bill and Joe, but we need to look at each type of extreme event, in different regional locations, and then interpret them in the context of the local historical records, and then cumulatively in context with the teleconnection weather regimes and multi-decadal oscillations. Once we’ve done that and then find an upward trend in frequency and/or intensity that cannot be explained by problems with the data record or natural climate variability or weather roulette, THEN lets talk about the potential impact of global warming.Even for a scientist who loves to talk up uncertainty, I think this is being very disingenuous. She may as well say: we'll have to wait for another 30 or 40 years to see if tornado rate really is increasing, and can understand long term patterns in tornado rate, before we could call this one.
Both sides acknowledge the difficulty of assessing the long term tornado record, because of issues with reliability of reporting, population and housing changes which make simple "death rate" comparisons pretty meaningless, and technology issues to do with radar, etc.
My hunch is that there is quite a bit of record keeping uncertainty for other extreme events too. For example, after the recent Queensland floods, skeptics liked to point out that the 1893 Brisbane River flood was much higher (and there were a series of floods that year.) However, what struck many here about this year's floods was their vast and protracted extent - from Rockhampton in the North, many hundreds of kilometers inland, then right down to the coast. My guess is that a really detailed comparison of the extent of rainfall in the whole of south Queensland between 1893 and now might be a bit tricky, given what I presume would be much more widely spaced rainfall records in 1893 compared to what we have now. (That may not be a correct assumption, and I guess river heights may be a good way of comparing the two years as a proxy for the total rainfall and its extent; but on the other hand you have modern dams which complicate that comparison. I would like to know what meteorologists think about this.)
Of course, the other point to note about Australian weather records is that you have none at all going back more than a couple of hundred years. I would guess that you only have widespread, reliable records going back 150 years.
Apart from the record keeping issue, I am sure Judith Curry would argue that there is a lot of uncertainty with understanding multi-decadal oscillations, yet she wants them fully understood before we can even start looking at the AGW attribution question. Curry's approach is just another of her ways of suggesting no political action on climate is appropriate for the foreseeable future.
On the other hand, Michael Tobis has had a series of posts about the whole attribution question, and his take makes much more sense. In his first post about this, he ended with:
I think that we are seeing another instance of excessive attention to "attribution" in a statistical sense. The climate is changing with increasing rapidity. Some of the changes will be anticipated, some not. We shouldn't presume that changes will be locally monotonic. They won't be. Under the circumstances, we'll get extraordinary runs of just-the-sort-of-awfulness-we-get-around-here in various places as the system wobbles about. I mean, what did you expect?In a follow up post, he addressed this more broadly, using an analogy I like:
Now, this sort of outbreak event is not entirely unprecedented either, though it seems to be emerging as the single most severe instance in the satellite era.But it's a, forgive me, black swan of a sort. One thing about really really severe events is that you can't do statistics on them. They are too rare to form a large enough collection to draw conclusions.But you may have a flock of shouldn't-be-black stuff. Black doves. Black, um, pelicans. Black seagulls. Black other stuff. I'm not much on this bird business, but the thing is, although you know these things exist, and you know they are too rare to extract a trend, you shouldn't be seeing any of them very much.Hot summers in Moscow. Year after year of flooding on the Mississippi. Huge tornado outbreaks. At what point do we get to look at the collection of weird events and say something is going on?Let me admit, first of all, that there are all sorts of statistical warning signs associated with this question. Selection bias, observer bias, post hoc definitions. Our intuitions may well be misleading us.On the other hand, there is the question of rolling a thirteen. The more we disturb the climate, the more excursions it will make into unfamiliar territory. As we perturb the climate, as it wobbles around more and more, it will more and more often hit these weird peaks.Perhaps local events like tornados will show no trend, but tornado outbreaks, when they happen, will be more severe. The ocean, after all, is further from equilibrated with the atmosphere and with space. Air masses will encounter each other in unfamiliar ways. Perhaps strange things will happen. Perhaps (and I am not being Eli-style coy here, perhaps not) they already are happening.
Everyone knows that precise attribution is complicated and difficult - there have only been a couple of papers (one about the English floods, and I forget the other) which did dare to claim attribution of a couple of extreme events to global warming.
But that doesn't mean that it's not right to suspect that there is something to do with climate change if a number of extreme weather events start piling on top of each other, as they have in 2010 and (seemingly) 2011.
I don't know who first used the analogy, but while the long term predictions of climate change may be right about a warmer atmosphere having less tornadoes rather than more, the climate moving from one state to another may well be like a spinning top that has been given a big kick and wobbles back and forth for quite a while before eventually settling down into a new period of long term stability.
(Michael Tobis refers to that idea in his post, although he also makes the claim that people think of AGW and climate change in the wrong order, but I do find he gets a little confusing on that point.)
Anyway, while I don't wish death and mayhem on anyone, as far as I am concerned, if outbreaks of unusual extreme weather events continue for the next year or two, I would be happy to see them start to convince the public (and politicians) of the need to address CO2 production seriously and with urgency.
Update: I have been thinking how to summarise their respective positions. Is this fair?:
Curry: there's so much uncertainty about this, it's wrong for anyone to be referring to it having anything to do with AGW or climate change at all.
Tobis: the uncertainty as to how exactly climate change will play out means that the rapid accumulation of extreme weather events in the shorter term, even if they were not predicted as likely outcomes of global warming in the longer term, is consistent with climate change, even if you can't individually attribute events to climate change.
Me: Curry and all lukewarmenists like to play up uncertainty and must know that this is used for political purposes. As John Nielsen-Gammon's recent post (which I referred to recently) suggests, uncertainty as to being able to work out everything about past and current weather and climate is no killer reason for disputing AGW, which is likely to have major effects.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Strange bedfellows
At Deltoid and Rabett Run, the biggest climate change blogs so far which have spent time pointing out how Watts' paper had disproved his own claims about warming bias for the US mean temperatures, Nielsen-Gammon made some comments which seemed to be attempts to protect Watts from too much criticism. Some at Deltoid had a go at him about this: why shouldn't Watts be strongly criticised for the way he pre-empted (inaccurately, and for skeptic propaganda purposes) the results of his own project for years.
Anyway, I see that Nielsen-Gammon has a new post up at his own blog which does show how much of a non-skeptic he really is. It really does confirm that he and Watts make very strange bedfellows on any climate research paper.
So, here are the best parts from Nielsen-Gammon's post:
“If carbon dioxide supposedly causes global warming, then what caused the Roman Warm Period?”Wow.This question just floors me. I have a hard time figuring out why I’m supposed to fully understand the energy balance of the Earth 2,000 years ago, prior to the first thermometer or the second satellite,* before I’m allowed to examine data from comprehensive global observing systems to figure out what’s happening right here and now.
I’m pretty sure that what’s really being asked is the following: “The Earth’s climate has had warm and cold periods before. Why can’t this be the same old thing again?” This is a little easier to address, but still there’s the unspoken expectation that all possible natural explanations need to be understood and excluded before we should accept an anthropogenic explanation.
This does sound like a cautious choice, seemingly consistent with Sherlock Holmes the climate scientist, who would say that you should exclude all the plausible explanations before concluding that the remaining explanation, however implausible, is the correct one. The problem, though, is that the anthropogenic explanation is not the implausible one, it’s the obvious one.....
...at least one of the primary causes of the relatively warm decade of the 2000s is obvious: WE’VE MUCKED WITH THE ATMOSPHERE SO MUCH THAT IT HAD TO GET WARMER. Even just the direct effect of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases would be enough for a few tenths of a degree of warming, and the odds are overwhelming that climate feedbacks would further enhance the warming. Heck, we’ve probably done so much to the atmosphere that some of the natural processes are no longer in play. My guess is that we’ve fairly successfully prevented the next glacial period, for example....In my previous post, I discussed some of the things that affect the Earth’s climate. I need to know more about them to see how they affected the Roman Warm Period. How much brighter was the Sun during that time? Was there a lull in volcanic activity? How much did the Romans clear forests and alter the local climate? I need to know how the climate forcings changed before I can say which one (or which combination) caused the Roman Warm Period.
After all, the only reason we know that greenhouse gases have been a major contributor to the current warming is that we’ve got decent global measurements of them, we’ve got observations from space that show the reduced infrared emissions because of those gases, and we can calculate (with simple or complex models, it doesn’t matter) that the expected rise in temperature is in the right ballpark to be greenhouse-gas induced. Oh, and we can measure the other forcings, such as solar output and aerosols from volcanoes, and they’re nowhere near large enough. Many of them, in fact, would cause cooling!
And no, I’m not impressed by how much the Earth has cooled over the past decade.
I see that Anthony Watts has re-posted Nielsen-Gammon's post about the surfacestations.org results on diurnal temperature range (the significance of which remains unclear, but at least Watts can claim it as a useful result). I would not however, hold my breath waiting for Dr John's strongly pro-AGW post to turn up at Watts Up With That.
Noooooooo.....
They must be getting desperate for talk show host talent in the United States.
Today's news from Tromsø
The scientific organisation operates five Aurora borealis radars in the Nordic region, two of which are stationed beyond the reach of mobile phone networks in the remote Svalbard Islands that belong to Norway. The Kiruna scatter radar, in turn, is experiencing problems similar to those in Sodankylä.Well, I guess I'm a bit surprised that research into the Northern Lights is still active. They should just ban mobile phones.
An EISCAT radar situated in Tromsø, Norway, keeps sending a powerful radio signal into the upper atmosphere, less than a thousandth of which is then scattered back to the surface. These soft whispers are then caught by using 300-tonne, house-sized dish antennae of the scatter radars.
These “whispers” will provide scientists with information, for example, about the Northern Lights, as the upper atmosphere contains electrically charged particles, from which the radio signal scatters.
“These days, at times the mobile phone traffic blots out the quiet scattering”, explains Professor Markku Lehtinen from the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory, which is an independent department of the University of Oulu.
Gittens on Abbott
I don't like using the L-word, but Tony Abbott is setting new lows in the lightness with which he plays with the truth. He blatantly works both sides of the street, nodding happily in the company of climate-change deniers, but in more intellectually respectable company professing belief in human-caused global warming, his commitment to reducing carbon emissions by 5 per cent by 2020 and the efficacy of his no-offence policies to achieve it.He grossly exaggerates the costs involved in a carbon tax, telling business audiences they will have to pay the lot and be destroyed by it, while telling the punters business will pass all the costs on to them. He forgets to mention that most of the proceeds from the tax will be returned as compensation.
He repeats the half-truth that nothing we could do by ourselves would reduce global emissions, while failing to correct the punters' ignorant belief that Australia is the only country contemplating action. Last week's news that Britain's Conservative-led coalition government has pledged to cut emissions by half within 15 years is ignored. Economists call this mentality ''free-riding''; the old Australian word for it is ''bludging''.
Today's comment to Andrew Bolt
Andrew, you're big on pointing out carelessly worded statements by any "warmenist", yet won't dare mention that Anthony Watts, the person who runs the world's largest skeptic blog, recently disproved his own claim that the US mean temperature record had been inflated by weather station siting issues.We'll see if that makes it through his thread minders.
Be honest and admit your own fellow traveller made a major false claim for years, and you swallowed it all; helped promote it, in fact.
UPDATE: comment was let through. That's good. Someone asked for a link, I have tried to reply to provide it.
Keith, who seems to have been here and thinks I'm a nasty person, says Andrew did acknowledge the Watts result on his radio show. I would be curious to know when so I could listen. Is it too much to ask Bolt to acknowledge it on his blog too, given that he has previously given surfacestations.org lots of skeptic publicity? I don't think so...
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Cannabis madness - yet again
I always like to read comments by psychiatrists condemning the use of marijuana due to its mental health risks. There's a heap of such material it to be found in this article by journalist Quentin Dempster reporting on a symposium on cannabis and mental illness held last week.
Here are some examples:
Both the Mental Health Review Tribunal in NSW and the National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre have said publicly that if cannabis was removed from the chemistry of young brains, the incidence of schizophrenia in this country would be dramatically reduced. Adolescents who start to use cannabis at any time are considered particularly vulnerable because the human brain does not complete its development until the early to mid 20s....The comments are worth reading too, with, I think, many more people coming out than in years past to condemn marijuana for the mental health problems they have seen develop in someone they know.
Professor Jan Copeland, director of the NCPIC (www.ncpic.org.au) a government-backed preventative agency, told 7.30 NSW that if cannabis was taken out of the picture the incidence of schizophrenia in Australia could be reduced by 8 to 14 per cent. She could not be more specific. That guesstimate was based on overseas studies. There have been no studies in Australia. This is revealing....
The pharmaceutical and pain relief benefits of CBD (cannabidiols) in cannabis have been studied internationally but one experienced psychiatrist, Dr Andrew Campbell, told the symposium paracetamol would have just as beneficial analgesic effects.
The point is once again made that the problem seems to be higher concentration of THC in hydroponically grown cannabis. Some cannabis can be grown with more of the 'protective' component CBD, and the suggestion is made this "milder' form of cannabis could be legalised.
However, if it is the THC that many users like (for the quality of the high it gives them), and there is already a well established industry providing for that, is legalisation really going to have much effect on the illegal industry?
I have my doubts.
Multiversal
An interesting post on the suggestion by Susskind & Bousso that "the multiverse and the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics are formally equivalent." But this only holds if we are in a "supersymmetric multiverse with vanishing cosmological constant":
If the universe takes this form, then it is possible to carry out an infinite number of experiments within the causal horizon of each other.Clear? Well, no of course not, and its untestable. But still, of interest.Now here's the key point: this is exactly what happens in the many worlds interpretation. At each instant in time, an infinite (or very large) number of experiments take place within the causal horizon of each other. As observers, we are capable of seeing the outcome of any of these experiments but we actually follow only one.
Bousso and Susskind argue that since the many worlds interpretation is possible only in their supersymmetric multiverse, they must be equivalent. "We argue that the global multiverse is a representation of the many-worlds in a single geometry," they say.
They call this new idea the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics.
UPDATE: Mathematician Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong says that even he can't really make sense of this and other papers that try to draw similar multiverse/quantum theory connections, so don't feel so bad!
Interesting
Quite a few things I didn't know about homosexuality in modern history are mentioned in this review.
Speculative physics, again
The article suggests that maybe some gamma ray bursts are from white holes.
Well, if anything is up for grabs, how about naked singularities, I wonder?
Northern view
I should work out how such feeds are embedded.
Colebatch on carbon tax
My favourite economics writer has a good explanation of the Carmody suggestion to tax consumption of carbon instead of production.
I think his explanation of the problems with the idea is particularly worthwhile noting. As Colebatch himself has had a change of heart about this, it is clearly is not a case where it is obviously better than the alternative; just arguably better.
UPDATE: Alan Kohler's column about what Australia needs to do is also well worth reading, and makes considerable sense to me.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Arctic dreams
Before he was off to the Antarctic, he had several whaling and other trips through Arctic waters. No doubt, it's reading about this that has caused me to have dreams lately about visiting towns in spectacular Arctic settings.
Which has led me to releasing while awake that I know next to nothing about what's in the Arctic circle, and whether it does have any decent towns or cities in scenic locations.
So, first stop, to refresh my memory of how the Arctic Circle is even defined, it's off to Wikipedia. It's more complicated that I thought:
The Arctic Circle marks the southern extremity of the polar day (24-hour sunlit day, often referred to as the "midnight sun") and polar night (24-hour sunless night). North of the Arctic Circle, the sun is above the horizon for 24 continuous hours at least once per year and below the horizon for 24 continuous hours at least once per year. On the Arctic Circle those events occur, in principle, exactly once per year, at the June and December solstices, respectively....It's creeping away from me as I write.
The position of the Arctic Circle is not fixed, but directly depends on the Earth's axial tilt, which fluctuates within a margin of 2° over a 40,000 year period,[2] notably due to tidal forces resulting from the orbit of the Moon. The Arctic Circle is currently drifting northwards at a speed of about 15 m (49 ft) per year, see Circle of latitude for more information.
Anyhow, there is lot more land within the Arctic Circle than I would have guessed:
I didn't realise so much of Greenland was within it, or quite that much of Russia either.
So, how do I find a nice town inside the Arctic Circle? Googling around led me first to the Canadian town of Inuvik. However, this photo from the town's home page, indicates that it hardly counts as Paris of the North:
(And make sure you don't miss the Inuvik Petroleum Show that's on in June.)
What other towns or cities are up there? Yahoo Answers indicates that the three biggest cities inside the circle are Russian, and the largest is Murmansk. Yes, I've heard of it, but what's it look like?:
Well, no one holds high hopes for Russian cities looking good, do they? But maybe I am being unfair. That glossy magazine Monocle, which I've occasionally looked at in the newsagency and wondered who on Earth it is aimed at, has a short slideshow and commentary about the city, which is kind of interesting. A little sadly, you will also see that new shopping centres in far flung Arctic Circle Russia look exactly like what's been built down the road from you:
So, what about Norway? Yahoo Answers says Tromsø is pretty big - 62,000 people. And look - it's where Joanna Lumley went to see the Northern Lights in that nice documentary she made a couple of years ago. So, some photos please:
Wow. It looks a little bit like Hobart, but with more mountains, snow and wackier architecture. (OK, maybe it's just the bridge that reminds me of Hobart.)
According to Wikipedia:
In the 19th century, Tromsø was known as the "Paris of the North", probably because people in Tromsø appeared as far more civilized than expected to foreign tourists.Mind you, it's a very chilly Paris of the North. According to a table on the Wikipedia page, the average maximum temperatures in December, January, February and March are all below freezing. (-2.2 in January.) Despite this, the main street, when you can see not under snow, looks quite normal in a quaint European way:
But, once again, this post proves, if nothing else, that new shopping centres, even in the Arctic Circle, look like every other new shopping centre in the world:
(I am distressed to see that they suffer from Giant Face Poster syndrome, as do some of our shopping centres, as I have noted in the past.)
Well, that's it. I'd say for towns in the Arctic Circle, Norway, and Tromsø in particular, is the place to go. Especially in September this year, when Roxette will be touring there. (Isn't the internet grand? There's not much else to be found by Googling for blogs about Tromsø, except to learn that there was an Italian uni student who went there to study* in 2007, made 6 posts about the women, the nightclubs, the drinking, and the free condoms everywhere, and that's it for his blog. I wonder if ever left.)
Of course, winning Lotto is the only foreseeable way of actual making the trip within the next 8 years. Either that or sudden exotic benevolence of a secret billionaire from my vast readership. (OK, it's Lotto or nothing, I know.)
So, that's it for my Arctic dreams. I should go finish the book.
* This strikes me as a particularly unusual place to go to university, but indeed, it does have a large university:
The University of Tromsø with 6.500 students and 1.700 staff members is the northernmost university in the world and one of 6 universities in Norway. It offers a broad range of subject fields in six faculties/schools with studies in humanities, social sciences, natural sciences/mathematics/statistics/informatics, law, medical sciences and fisheries science. All the main subject areas are offered at Bachelor's, Master's and PhD level. The prioritised research subject fields are mainly related to the Arctic and subarctic regions; Northern Light and space research, fisheries research, biotechnology, multicultural societies, indigenous studies, community medicine, theoretical linguistics, among others.