The rate matters

New study indicates carbon release to atmosphere ten times faster than in the past

I think we already knew this, but this latest study estimates that the rate of CO2 release now is about ten times faster than the big release during the PETM event of 60 odd million years ago.

This is particularly important for the issue of ocean acidification, as the natural chemical buffering of the additional acid in the ocean from dissolved CO2 takes time.

Detecting primordial black holes

If A Primordial Black Hole Hits The Sun...� - Technology Review

Apparently, primordial black holes would pass through the sun and just cause it to wobble a bit; this may be detectable.

I think I have previously mentioned somewhere in this blog what might happen if a small black hole passed through the Earth.

Pirates, etc

I took the kids to see On Stranger Tides today. I would say it's a very solid "quite OK", but I don't really mean that to sound disparaging. The kids enjoyed it; I enjoyed it with them - it's one of the pleasures of parenthood to enjoy a film together with growing kids and be able to talk about it afterwards.

A few quibbles: too much of it is set at night or in gloom - I was missing the brightness of (I think) the second movie. I am also not sure that I prefer the direction of Rob Marshall over Gore Verbinski during action sequences. (I always find myself thinking "that's not how Spielberg would do it" during chases and action sequences that not done quite as well as they should.) But on the other hand, the script is pretty witty throughout - it certainly had more laughs in it than At World's End - and Penelope Cruz is good in her role.

I see from Wikipedia that a script for a 5th movie has already been finished. It did occur to me today, though, that as with the Indiana Jones movies, this series is fast running out of mythological ideas suitable to its period to be incorporated in the plot. The Flying Dutchman, kraken, voodoo, sea goddesses, zombies, mermaids and the fountain of youth have now all been covered. Oh well, I guess I'll find out in a couple of years time if there is something else mythological that has thus far been overlooked.

Speaking of the Flying Dutchman, I see that the Wikipedia entry about it is quite informative, and includes this interesting item which I think I may read years ago, but forgotten about:

There have been many reported sightings in the 19th and 20th centuries. One was by Prince George of Wales (b. 1865) (later King George V). During his late adolescence, in 1880, with his elder brother Prince Albert Victor of Wales (b. 1864) (sons of the future King Edward VII), he was on a three-year voyage with their tutor Dalton aboard the 4,000-tonne corvette Bacchante. Off the coast of Australia, between Melbourne and Sydney, Dalton records:

At 4 a.m. the Flying Dutchman crossed our bows. A strange red light as of a phantom ship all aglow, in the midst of which light the masts, spars, and sails of a brig 200 yards distant stood out in strong relief as she came up on the port bow, where also the officer of the watch from the bridge clearly saw her, as did the quarterdeck midshipman, who was sent forward at once to the forecastle; but on arriving there was no vestige nor any sign whatever of any material ship was to be seen either near or right away to the horizon, the night being clear and the sea calm. Thirteen persons altogether saw her ... At 10.45 a.m. the ordinary seaman who had this morning reported the Flying Dutchman fell from the foretopmast crosstrees on to the topgallant forecastle and was smashed to atoms.^[6]

Cool story, though not for the ordinary seaman.

For adults only - very silly adults

Californian porn industry's 'perfect storm' of troubles

A BBC report on the troubled porn industry in California notes:

Like the music industry, pornographers are struggling to persuade their audience to pay for what they watch.

DVD sales have collapsed. Online, a great deal of porn can be accessed for free.

And the economic downturn does not help.

"What with the recession and piracy, we call it the perfect storm," one leading producer observed wistfully

Yet, otherwise sensible, educated people still get into the business:

A college graduate, a former national standard swimmer and professional oboist, she seems to have packed a lot into her 27 years.

She turned to porn, she said, out of a sense of sexual adventure.

"It's just fun," she said, "and when everyone around you is having fun too, what's not to love?"

But what's really amazing is her attitude to the unprotected sex that is still the industry norm, despite government attempts to stop it due to HIV:

"And what about the health risks," I asked. "Have you had many infections?"

"Well, just chlamydia a couple of times, gonorrhoea - nothing much. Anyway, we test each month so, when you're diagnosed, you just take your medication and you're good to go. No problem."

In fact, the article goes on to note that some in the industry are attempting to argue that the right not to use a condom in the industry is a matter of free speech protected by the First Amendment!

"How can I express myself as an artist," one producer said to me, "if you're going to clothe my performers in rubber?"

Good grief. What a shame the industry is having hard times, hey?

Economic guesswork

'Discounting' The Future Cost Of Climate Change - Science News

Given that the economics of climate change are hot in the news again, I thought this explanation of discount rates was pretty good.

But still, my general attitude to all this is that it seems an absurd idea that economic modelling of the effects of climate change out to a century or so is anything other than pure guesswork.

The obvious reason is because of the uncertainties within climate science, even allowing that is basically right in its current estimate of likely global temperature increases. As the disruptive weather of the last 18 months is showing, it's not just heat waves to worry about, but floods, droughts, and possibly even unusually snowy winters at lower levels of the Northern Hemisphere. Everyone agrees that predicting regional effects is much less certain than the big picture, but this means we don't really know which population centres of particular economic importance are likely to be hit hard, and which get off relatively easily.

One of the largest consequences which I would have thought could be most important economically - sea level rise - is still very uncertain. If rate of sea level rise increases and it becomes clear that it will be at the top of the worst scenario forecasts, and thereby cause abandonment of major land areas and parts of some cities, how do you factor that into your economic forecasts now?

I guess this economic modelling is worth the exercise (and only attempted at all) as a way of trying to politically justify a certain level of current economic pain to offset future problems; but really, I find it hard to believe it can really be taken seriously as prediction if the actual effects of climate change are so difficult to predict.

It seems to me that using economics to work out the least costly method of getting to lower emissions is another matter, as that's comparing something that is relatively "here and now" and has aims which are in a more realistic time scale.

But the key point is, I think, average citizens wanting to see action on climate change should just be interested in serious movement to lower emissions done in a way that does not cripple the economy. Serious leadership on technological innovation that seems to be needed to achieve this will need to come as well.

All it took was an earthquake

LEDs make it cheaper to blind family and friends | Yen for Living

The price of LED bulbs has come down in Japan, just in time for the lower electricity use the government wants to see happen as a result of Fukushima.

What did you expect?

BBC News - Global war on drugs has 'failed' say former leaders

The Global Commission on Drug Policy report calls for the legalisation of some drugs and an end to the criminalisation of drug users.

The panel includes former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the former leaders of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, and the entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson.

Why not throw in Keith Richards for good measure?

Speaking of Branson, I quite like the new Virgin Australia ads where the flight crew are just walking around purposefully to a groovy beat. Maybe because it reminds me of the end credits of Buckaroo Banzai.

Great moments in engineering

Fukushima was certified tsunami-proof

TEPCO, the plant's operator, ruled out the possibility of tsunami damage in a one-page memo filed to the Japanese regulator a decade ago, the Associated Press has discovered.

What a way to treat women

Egyptians protest over 'virginity tests' on Tahrir Square women

From the report in The Guardian:

The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces had previously denied claims by Amnesty International that 18 women detained in March were subjected to virginity checks and threatened with prostitution charges.

But an Egyptian general told an American television network on Monday that tests were in fact conducted, and defended the practice.

"The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine," the general, who requested anonymity, told CNN. "These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square, and we found … molotov cocktails and [drugs]."

He said the tests were conducted so that the women would not be able to claim that they had been sexually abused while in custody.

"We didn't want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren't virgins in the first place," the general said. "None of them were [virgins]."

The far, far future

Cycles of Time � Not Even Wrong

Last year, I mentioned Roger Penrose's new book about how the end of the universe might become the start of a universe (sort of a cycling universe but not caused by the now pretty much discarded idea of a Big Crunch.)

Peter Woit now has a review of it out, and he discusses the whole idea in his blog. As someone who does not like wildly speculative physics, it is to be expected he may make an observation like this:

Attempts to get a Big Bang in our future as well as our past generally strike me as motivated by a very human desire to see in the global structure of the universe the same cyclic pattern of death and rebirth that govern human existence. To me though, deeper understanding of the universe leads to unexpected structures, fascinating precisely because of how alien they are to human concerns and experience. Just because we might find a cold, empty universe an unappealing future doesn’t mean that that’s not where things are headed.

People should remember that Tipler thinks advanced intelligence will make the universe contract, although I forget exactly how, and don't have time to check again right now.

Licence to print money

I find it hard to believe, but Pirates of the Caribbean On Stranger Tides has already taken $623,000,000 world wide, in 10 days of release.

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

IBNLive : Bahar Dutt's Blog : On the road to the Arctic

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

Gillard needs to sell a strong climate plan

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!

Andrew Bolt and the 1 m sea level rise

Andrew Bolt on his TV show today noted a map of Sydney Harbour showing minor changes to the coast line with a 1 metre sea level rise. Does that look so serious? he said.

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

Judith Curry 2007: We should not ignore the risks of global warming � My view on climate change

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.

A Saturday night observation

Spiderman 3 was a better film than Spiderman 2, in my opinion.

Please resume your normal activities....

What an odd man

Male lactation: Can a 33-year-old guy learn to breast-feed? - By Michael Thomsen

Just a weird story of a man who really needs a wife, and a baby.

Watching the spinning top wobble

Readers are no doubt aware that the question of whether or not the unusually large number of tornadoes in the US at the moment can be (partly?) attributed to climate change is the subject of much discussion in the media and blog-o-sphere.

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.

As I say, I find this intuitively pretty compelling, and very appropriate to keep in mind when you read something from some climate organisation (like NOAA, which has been doing a lot of this lately) that says "climates scientists say there is no attributing .......insert latest wild climate event....to global warming."

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.

Strange bedfellows

Anthony Watts' "long awaited surfacestations paper" had as one of its co-authors John Nielsen-Gammon. I hadn't heard of him before, but some commenters around the place noted that he was no skeptic, and said he ran a pretty good blog (Climate Abyss) on climate change. (Some said they couldn't understand why he would get involved in any project with Watts.)

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?”

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.

Wow.

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.....

gulfnews : Rosie to take over Oprah's show

They must be getting desperate for talk show host talent in the United States.