The skeptic glass 4/5 full

Readers might recall my annoyance that the surfacestation.org project paper co-authored by Anthony Watts received so little attention. It had, after all, contradicted claims of a serious bias in the US mean temperature record when Watts had been spending years saying that it surely must account for some of warming trend.

Last year, Watts had appeared on ABC's Counterpoint making these claims (although he did not go as far as claiming the bias might be as much as .5 degree as he did to Andrew Bolt - a claim I am sure Watts would be more than happy to see disappear into the mists of time.) So I wrote to Counterpoint and noted that they said they would follow up on the project, and now they could. I suggested that some hard questions be put to Watts about how wrong some of his claims, particularly to Bolt, had been.

Counterpoint responded and said they would follow up.

Maybe I am therefore at least partly responsible for the interview they ran yesterday with John Neilsen-Gammon, the Texas State climatologist who is one of the co-authors of the paper. He's in Australia at the moment for a conference in Melbourne.

The interview is available to listen to here; perhaps a transcript will follow soon.

Don't, however, expect either the interviewer or interviewee to express any interest at all in co-relating what Watts used to say about his project, and what it actually found.

As one might expect from the soft-sceptic Counterpoint, they are interested in emphasising the finding relating to diurnal temperature range, the importance of which still seems fairly unclear, even according to Neilsen-Gammon.

The finding about mean temperature trends not being artificially inflated by siting issues gets the briefest of mentions. Surrounding it is a sea of words from Paul Comrie-Thomson emphasising that the paper did find something interesting, that it was a worthy project, that it would be good if more science of this type could be done, etc.

And you know what? The completely un-skeptical Neilsen-Gammon goes along with this.

It is a strange performance by him. As with a couple of comments he made when the paper came out, he appears completely uninterested in the political use which Watts made of premature claims about his project, and is keen to defend Watts in setting up it up. He seems to think it is most unfair that anyone should point out the major way in which Watts' disproved his own central claim.

In this interview, Neilsen-Gammon also speaks in a way which provides much for climate skeptics to cherry pick; such as when he talks about the complexity of working out the effect of all of the forcings other than greenhouse gases.

Sure, he does manage to slip in that he thinks the clearest thing about climate is greenhouse forcing, and the sensitivity range for CO2 is 2 - 4 degrees, but this is almost glossed over. In another part of the interview he talks about how climate research is not only about warming, and he seems to think too much time is devoted to talking about AGW.

He certainly therefore makes for a puzzling figure in the climate science community. He seems to not care about how his message will be interpreted (skeptics will probably interpret it as 4/5 full in their favour, whereas his attitude to climate change seems to actually be the other way round.) He gives the impression of not caring at all about the political issues around climate science. If he did you would think he would try to throw in the occasional comment to the effect "now don't think that I am in any way a climate change skeptic or 'lukewarmener'. I think it crucially important to limit the range of possible temperature increases that we start to seriously reduce CO2."

I'll update this post when the transcript is available.

The Coalition and science

I didn't realise this:

While the scientists won't meet Opposition Leader Tony Abbott - who is on record as having questioned the science of climate change - they will meet with opposition science spokeswoman Sophie Mirabella.

Sophie was amongst the first to bail out on Turnbull because she just couldn't vote for Labor's ETS. Now she's attending the No Carbon Tax rallies along with Barnaby Joyce.

I'm trying to find some direct quotes she has made about the science, but they are hard to turn up. They must be there somewhere.

Somehow, I can't envisage the science community being happy working with a future Minister Mirabella.

Why do they do it?

London to New York in 90 minutes: is this the Concorde of the future? - Science, News - The Independent

Why is it that, about every 12 - 24 months, there is always some airline manufacturer, aerospace company, or university research group, that comes out with some vision for a super-super sonic (OK, hypersonic) jet rocket thingee of the future that will get people across the world in the space of a few hours?

No one seems to consider that these are at all very likely with current or near term technology, do they? This latest one, linked above, says that one stage of the process will involve liquid oxygen/hydrogen rockets, just like that remarkably (un) reliable space shuttle did.

As much as I like high technology, I find these announcements vaguely ludicrous.

For the moment, I would be much more impressed if they were devoting much more time to planes that have as high a fuel efficiency as you can achieve, even if they are a bit slower than current ones.

Bougainvillea, and choosing sides

I spent much of yesterday battling bougainvillea.

What an evil plant it is.

Not much blogworthy material came to my attention over the weekend, except I did briefly note two NYT Magazine articles that show some unusual takes on gay identity. The first, about a young man who was so far into the gay lifestyle that he worked for a gay youth magazine and lived in a 3 way relationship, decided suddenly that he was straight. Stories of married men deciding they really are gay or transexual late in life are rife, but people tend to forget that it can happen the other way too. (Maybe not often, but still.) As in this case of this American guy, though, if the conversion has a religious aspect to it, people tend not to believe it's genuine. Still, the article was interesting for some of the observations his gay friends make about him. Here the writer and "Ben" talk about ex-gay Michael:

As Ben and I reminisced, I couldn’t help wondering if Michael’s new philosophy might, in a strange way, be a logical extension of what he believed back then — that “gay” is a limiting category and that sexual identities can change. Ben nodded. “A radical queer activist and a fundamentalist Christian aren’t always as different as they might seem,” he said, adding that they’re ideologues who can railroad over nuance and claim a monopoly on the truth.

Ben went on. “To me, Michael is a victim of this insane society we live in, where we grow up with all these conflicting messages and pressures around sexuality and religion, and where we divide into these camps where we’re always right and the other side is always wrong. Some people are susceptible to buying into that, and I think Michael is one of them.”

Is that what "radical queer activists" believe? I also suspect that magazines for gay youth don't do much other than re-enforce the binary thinking of "gay or not gay" for nearly all readers (although I have not made a study of the source material!) so it's a little odd to hear "Ben" talk about how this is something to be regretted.

The other story, which I haven't even read past the first page, is about therapists who help gay people stay in the closet as being the most appropriate thing for them.

How helpful of them. As I'm sure I've alluded to before, the whole thing about modern treatment of sexuality which is to be regretted is that it has devalued all sense of privacy. Frankly, it just seems that people treat sexual identity and practices as worthy of attention in a way that they don't really deserve. Can't we go back to the likes of Noel Coward, who famously would claim he did not want to come out "Because there are still three old ladies in Brighton who don't know?" In the Australian context, I feel similarly well disposed towards John Michael Howson, who, apart from being pretty right wing politically, has always seemed to be homosexual while at the same time not wanting to be defined by his sexuality. (He is still a practising Roman Catholic, and refuses to believe he is sinning by having a stable gay relationship.) Of course, Gore Vidal is strongly against sexual identity politics; although I suppose people might say that it's easier for a genuine bisexual like him to take that line.

Look, I know this is a not a simple issue, and it's not as if the way homosexuality was treated in the West 50 years ago is something worth re-implementing. I'm just making the point that I certainly find it easier to like those who display the somewhat more stoic and privacy valuing attitude of men like them, compared to the bare cheeked exhibitionism of Gay MardiGras.

Nazi night was very good last night

Will SBS ever run out of World War Two documentaries to run on Friday nights, I wonder?

It's not like it's watchable every week, but last night I happened to catch episode 3 of The Last Nazis - Children of the Master Race, and found it very moving.

It was about Himmler's Lebensborn program, designed to help breed and propagate the so-called Aryan race, but concentrated on 3 adults who were children of the program and their sense of guilt and/or displacement because of what their parents did.

Although I had vaguely heard of Lebensborn before, I was not aware of the kidnapping of "right" type of blond/blue kid from the rest of Europe was carried out with casual and callous ruthlessness.

The whole show is still available for viewing on SBS, but it also appears to be permanently available here.

Do not discuss at the dinner table

A new study should finally convince parents to get their boys vaccinated against HPV

Slate talks about evidence regarding the connection between HPV and increasing oral cancers in men.

Although the idea sounds convincing, when they find HPV in the tumours, the second page of the article makes a good point about another puzzle:

It's easy to see why the notion that oral sex can give you cancer is so attractive. It makes for an irresistibly lurid headline, of course, and it appeals to the secret Victorian hidden less or more deeply in all of us. (Everything fun has a price—everything!) And to be fair, the circumstantial evidence is compelling. It's well understood that HPV is transmitted through other kinds of intimate contact, such as vaginal sex. HPV seems to grow quite well on mucous membranes, those nonskin tissues that line the mouth, nose, vagina, anus, and a few other anatomic areas, and which may touch quite a bit during oral sex.

As an explanation for the uptick in oropharyngeal cancers, though, oral sex has one glaring problem: HPV-positive head and neck cancer is, inexplicably, a guy's disease. If oral sex were driving the issue, wouldn't we see a commensurate rise in HPV-positive tumors among women?

Even if the explanation was an upswing in bisexual behaviour in men in the last few decades, you would think the rate should be higher in women than men if only one form of oral was the cause.

All a bit of a mystery.

Libertarian utopians

Free State Project: What happens if 20,000 libertarians move to New Hampshire? - Slate Magazine

Here's a slightly amusing article about some Ron Paul libertarian/voluntaryist (?) twits who have a grand idea of living free in strange kind of do-whatever-they-like utopia in New Hampshire.

They sound rather like right wing hippies, and is a very strange, peculiarly American, movement.

Masters of distraction

Only In It For The Gold: Two Empty Kerfuffles

Michael Tobis is right. Climate change "sceptics" are all about distraction.

Watts Up With That is positively gleeful that the sun is not exacting behaving in a very predictable way, and more evidence suggesting the equivalent of a Maunder Minimum is coming out.

What WUWT and it's followers don't know, or remember, or ignore, is that this possibility has been considered by climate scientist years ago and has been dismissed as reason to ignore CO2.

Skeptical Science provides an update on this issue, noting the conclusion:

For both the A1B and A2 emission scenario, the effect of a Maunder Minimum on global temperature is minimal. The most likely impact of a Maunder Minimum by 2100 would be a decrease in global temperature of 0.1°C with a maximum reduction of warming by 0.3°C. Compare this to global warming between 3.7°C (A1B scenario) to 4.5°C (A2 scenario).

However, Barry Brooks blog had dealt with it in a post in 2008, as I am sure did other places.

It would seem that magnetic effects of a solar minimum could also make European winters colder, but again this would not mask global warming.

So sorry skeptics, it's been dealt with as an issue.

UPDATE: Richard Black at the BBC makes the same points, although he does quote someone as saying that the biggest effect of a really major minimum could be 1 degree of global cooling. This still doesn't offset 2 -4 degrees by the end of the century (by which time any minimum may well be over anyway.)

Black notes the political use to which this is being put:

All the studies I'm referring to above are out there in the public domain - which immediately raises a question over why some accounts claim big things for the new research but fail to take into account the context afforded by the larger body of published work.

The battle for public opinion on climate change is largely fought with memes; and solar changes leading to a cooling planet is one of them.

On this battleground, where the bigger picture can be conveniently forgotten, it has proven remarkably persistent.

Part of its appeal is that it has some scientific grounding; but it melts away in the light of the bigger research picture, and that's why it has little credence in mainstream scientific circles as a major factor in modern-day temperature fluctuations.

Could it be that the professional disseminators of climate scepticism are actually dishonest in the way they promote their case? Surely not....

Keeping up with the designers

Libertarian types, being interested in preserving people's right to do themselves harm in any innovative way possible, seem to have a problem with governments making new designer drugs illegal, such as the recent fate of the "legal high" cannabis substitute Kronic. (Well, correct me if I wrong, libertarian inclined readers.) Never mind that no one knows quite what they are getting when they buy this product, and that we get statements from people who know such as this:

Professor Jon Currie, who directs the Department of Addiction Medicine at Melbourne's St Vincent's Hospital, says he is now seeing one or two cases each week in emergency from people seeking help because of Kronic.

Presumably, libertarian types think it reasonable that food manufacturers have to list ingredients and thereby warn of possible side effects, particularly for those unfortunate enough to have peanut allergies. If so, I wonder what grounds they use to justify a legal recreational drug manufacturer being able to sell its mystery ingredient product that seemingly has a good chance of sending a fair few of its users to the emergency department of the hospital.

The other argument I am guessing they would run against banning is to argue for legalisation for all recreational drugs that it is a substitute for, and then the market for Kronic would fall apart anyway. However, given that I have read somewhere that Kronic and its ilk are popular with outback miners, one has to bear in mind that there is a significant group of employers who have legitimate reason not to have their employees doing things like turn up for work to drive their (I'm guessing) 30 tonne trucks while still having last night's THC at high levels in their bloodstream. In other words, there is reason to suspect that there would still be a market for a legal alternative to cannabis, at least for one which would not test positive for cannabinoids.

Anyway, this is all a bit of a preamble to an interesting short article at Nature by a UK forensic scientist arguing that other designer drugs - ones related to amphetamines - also deserve legal banning, simply because they are too dangerous.

He acknowledges that this is not without complications. As he notes, making a drug illegal often makes it more dangerous, because illegal drug manufacturers tend not to worry too much about quality control (to put it mildly.)

Of course, you could argue that the market for new dangerous drugs eventually sorts itself out. If enough users end up in hospital, eventually it will become unpopular within the drug taking community anyway. But do we really want such Darwinian free market methods be the guide for such matters? Certainly, the parents or other close relatives of victims of a new drug would find it hard to accept, unless they are libertarian purists.

What bothers me most about libertarian arguments along these lines (including their attitude to tobacco) is not so much their defence of people to self harm, but that they blithely also condone the effective exploitation of such people by manufacturers of dangerous products for profit. This is particularly objectionable when the product carries a high degree of addictivity, such as tobacco, and is one that is known to be particularly attractive to teenagers, who tend not to have the best developed set of skills for anything, let along starting addictions.

I mean, if the argument was only ever about, say, the wisdom of making illegal the consumption of a magic mushroom that everyone could pick out of their garden, then this aspect of the libertarian argument would not be such an issue. You could say the same about the right of people to grown their own marijuana, I suppose. Yet I bet that in those places that do have very relaxed attitudes to small amount of cultivation for personal use, the illegal trade of larger quantities does not magically fall away.

So the argument about relaxing drug laws is never simply about what people want to do for themselves; it's about the broader questions of how it affects society overall, including safety at work, on the roads and economic productivity generally, and how do you treat the manufacturers of dangerous compounds who are happy to take money with no regard for the health consequences of consuming their product.*


* What about alcohol, I hear you say. Well, it certainly has no parallel with Kronic manufacturers: you know exactly what you are getting and at what strength when you buy any legally sold alcohol. Alcohol is tightly regulated, and governments do discourage its overuse. But you always have the argument that is a product capable of safe consumption. Yes, so is cannabis for most people, I know; yet the evidence of the danger it does represent even for moderate use at some strengths, particularly for young users, continues to accumulate.

Clear and convincing

Speaking science to climate policy

There's been a lot of talk around about The Conversation's effort to bring calm science to the climate change debate. The article above is from there, and is very good.

I see the rest of The Conversation website looks very good too.

The never ending crisis

News Ltd papers, and Andrew Bolt in particular, have been in quite a frenzy over bad opinion polls for the Gillard government for some months. It's like it's a veritable crisis every day in terrible mismanagement by this the Federal government.

Except that, well, I haven't noticed many immediate crises to be mismanaged. As I've suggested before, the problem is one of stasis, not crisis. That is, there are various important policy initiatives waiting to be finalised and knocked into final shape with a Parliament that is more like a herd of cats than any other Parliament in living memory. But these are mainly longer term initiatives - climate change and mineral taxes most particularly - and even the social ones of plain packaging for tobacco and poker machine regulation have longer term effects. My point being that it is more than a tad hyperbolic to be talking up a daily sense of immediate crisis due to the slow negotiation and implementation of these policies.

It's no surprise that polling is bad for the government until they actually get something implemented.

I am particularly amused at Janet Albrechtsen's column this morning, also extracted by Andrew Bolt, with this key section:

Her public positions lack private convictions. From opposing a big Australia, gay marriage and a republic to supporting the flag and the importance of religion, Gillard so obviously echoes voters for no other reason than political gain. Her statements on everything from immigration to population are knee-jerk populism, aimed at dominating the media cycle and putting out potential policy bushfires, rather than presenting a genuine narrative about her political beliefs. Gillard darts all over the place depending on what she wants...

Funnily enough, Janet and Bolt don't seem to realise that this description works even better for Tony Abbott. OK, I'll concede, we all knew he would never be for gay marriage. But consistency with his own party's (theoretical) principles and his past views, as opposed to populism:

* "direct action" on climate change as better than a tax or an ETS? He has to pretend this works as a market, but we all know it is simply a case of him needing product differentiation after holding half a dozen or so different positions on an ETS before his rise to leadership. About half of Coalition supporters don't believe he is being honest about believing there is a need to take action on CO2 at all.

* a nasty big tax scare campaign on a carbon tax. No populism in that, no sir-ee.

* a parental leave plan more generous and expensive than the Labor one. Let's unnecessarily out-Labor at their own game, hey Tony?

* a promise of not touching IR laws, even though this used to be an item of clear product differentiation between Coalition and Labor.

* Back to Nauru; the place where you house boat people for 2 - 3 years and let them build a full case of depression before letting them into Australia anyway. No, that doesn't have a touch of populism about it at all!

Let's face it, Janet and Andrew, if you want inconsistency and leaps to populism, there is no better example in the Australian polity at the moment that Mr T Abbott.

Bee on extra dimensions

Backreaction: Extra Dimensions at the LHC: Status Update

It's rather technical in detail, but Bee Hossenfelder has a look at the early results from the LHC and what they mean for black hole production and theories involving large extra dimensions. The conclusion:

While it is in many cases not possible to falsify a model, but just to implausify it, large extra dimensions are becoming less plausible by the day. Nevertheless, one should exert scientific caution and not jump to conclusions. The relevance of CMS constraints on multi-jets depends partly on assumptions about the black holes' final decay that are not theoretically justified.

The last bit seems to be about her earlier comment that any LHC black hole would be "a quantum gravitational object and it is not correctly described by Hawking's semi-classical calculation. How to correctly describe it, nobody really knows."

Good to know they don't know what to look for, then!

This'll really make your cake rise...

Baking powder for environmentally friendly hydrogen storage

Boom tish.

Handy figures to keep in mind

Beyond Condoms: The Long Quest for a Better Male Contraceptive: Scientific American

This article gives a pretty comprehensive coverage of the never ending quest to find a decent male contraceptive. I was most impressed with this line, though:

Compared with the one-egg-per-month output of the female reproductive system, the roughly 1,000-sperm-per-heartbeat output of the male reproductive system is "a quantitatively challenging problem" for contraceptive research, Amory says.

Young single men: feel free to incorporate this factoid during your next venture in a singles bar. Married men: impress your wife by offering this new found knowledge during a dinner party with that nice new couple you recently met.

There's one other quote that I thought interesting from the article:

In animal models the compound bisdichloroacetyldiamine safely and reversibly induces infertility by inhibiting an enzyme, aldehyde dehydrogenase 1a2, required for retinoic acid synthesis in the testes. Unfortunately, bisdichloroacetyldiamine also inhibits a similar enzyme, aldehyde dehydrogenase 2, required for alcohol metabolism in the liver—meaning that animals on bisdichloroacetyldiamine were unable to process alcohol. "And some would say that if it weren't for alcohol no one would need a contraceptive anyway," jokes Amory

What happens if you "can't process alcohol"? Would five drinks keep you drunk for a week? (I guess it takes a while to for it to get out of you via the lungs.) Would 12 drinks in a day pickle your insides?

Things achieved on a long weekend

* Unblocked the Vacumaid via the application of the old (normal) vacuum cleaner to the inlet that was not sucking. My handyman (handyperson?) credentials have soared, but from a very low base.

* Went to Lifeline Bookfest, and about the first thing I spotted, sitting in a face up position, was volume 1 of the famous multi-volume biography of Graham Greene by Norman Sherry. Purchased for $3, I doubt I will venture past this volume, but having read Greene's short autobiography of the first part of his life last year, I'm curious to see what he left out. See, I told you that the Bookfest was great.

* Saw Super 8. I'm surely not the first to say it, but it's "ET with teeth and a bad temper." I thought it was not bad, but not likely to linger long in memory; still, it's probably the best JJ Abrams movie I have seen. You see, long time readers know I have a problem with him, and dammit, he's still doing it.

He's the Director of the Giant Faces, who seems to think you need to be able to see skin pores to understand the emotion of a scene.

I get tired of pointing this out. Someone - Spielberg, his wife, his dog - I don't care who it is - tell him to frame a shot and then pull back half way and re-compose it. It is just the Abrams rule of thumb that will never let you down - "you are too close."

Anyway, as many reviewers noted, the young teenage(?) actors are really good, and the script as a homage to early Spielberg is quite good too. I liked the ideas better than the execution; but that always seems to be my fate with JJ Abrams.

* Taught the children how to play poker, as well as Pig. (I only found Pig as an adult in a Hoyles book, but it is a remarkably good party game for kids and adults.)

By nuclear power to the Pole

Last night, quite by accident, I saw the second half of Charlie Bird Explores the Arctic, in which the Irish journalist joins a Soviet nuclear powered icebreaker that takes passengers to the North Pole every summer.

The fact that this is now a quite routine tourist event that has been running for years had escaped my attention.

It costs about $20,000 per person, and the ship is quite well appointed, as far as nuclear powered icebreakers go. Once at the pole, everyone gets off and stands around a temporary North Pole pole stuck in the ice, a bar-b-q takes place on the ice, and several made people go for a dip in the water that is exposed around the ship.

Unfortunately, I can find no Youtube clip of this, but you can currently watch the show on the SBS TV website. The first half is spent with some Inuit, and there is a fair bit of discussion about how they definitely know the climate is changing.

I see that there is an old Youtube of an English woman making this trip in 2001, which gives you the general idea.

I must try and keep up more with fantasy ways to spend spare money I don't have.

Barr explains

Roseanne Barr: 'Fame's a bitch. It's hard to handle and drives you nuts' | Culture | The Guardian

I really did like Roseanne for the first 3 or 4 seasons. Like most sitcoms, it grew tired and was pretty much unwatchable (and unwatched) in its last season, but the first few years were pretty innovative in the way Barr describes in the article above.

In fact, in the first few paragraphs, Ms Barr sounds quite sensible, but then we get a long recount of how and why she felt abused soon after her famous sitcom started. I have read much of this before; it certainly sounds like it must have been a nightmare on the set for the rest of the cast while Roseanne and the producers/writers fought bitterly and openly. And who really know who's right here? Barr can swing wildly from sounding credible, to sounding half nutty.

But towards the end, she criticises Hollywood for tolerating the likes of Charlie Sheen, and here she is on the money again:

Based on Two And A Half Men's success, it seems viewers now prefer their comedy dumb and sexist. Charlie Sheen was the world's most famous john, and a sitcom was written around him. That just says it all. Doing tons of drugs, smacking prostitutes around, holding a knife up to the head of your wife – sure, that sounds like a dream come true for so many guys out there, but that doesn't make it right. People do what they can get away with (or figure they can), and Sheen is, in fact, a product of what we call politely the "culture".

But when it comes to his abusing his producers, she does relate:

Where I can relate to the Charlie stuff is his undisguised contempt for certain people in his work environment and his unwillingness to play a role that's expected of him on his own time.

Well, it seems to me Sheen has a lot less to complain about, given that (unlike Barr) he didn't get a comedy show by developing a character in years of tough stand up comedy. It seems he only had to lead a dissolute life, and a comedy based on that fell into his lap. (I'm assuming that's how it happened anyway.)

Finally, I note that The Middle - a very solid, enjoyable sitcom that is underappreciated - is a pretty clear successor to Roseanne. Maybe it's my own working class family background that makes me like these comedies.

A free plug

Brisbane Bookfest | Lifeline Community Care Queensland

Any South East Queensland reader is reminded that the Lifeline Bookfest is on at the Southbank Convention Centre this long weekend.

As their January one had to be cancelled because of the floods, I assume they will have a lot of books to sell.

You really should go; it's great.

And turning now to international hamster news...

France caught in a legal trap over rare rodent

The story feature as very good portrait of a hamster too.

Today's bit of curious medical research

Magnetic fields reduce blood viscosity - physicsworld.com

In their experiment, Tao and Huang showed that applying a 1.3 T magnetic pulse to a small sample of blood can significantly reduce it's viscosity. About 8 ml of blood with a viscosity of 7 centipoises (cp) – above healthy limits – was contained at body temperature (37 °C) in a test tube. The tube formed part of a device called a capillary viscometer used to measure viscosities. The sample was then exposed to a magnetic field applied parallel to the direction of flow of blood via a coil around the edge of the test tube. After one minute of exposure to the field, the blood's viscosity had been reduced by 33% to 4.75 cp. With no further exposure to the field, the viscosity had only risen slightly to 5.4 cp after 200 min, which is still within healthy limits.

I guess it would be good to know how long the effect does usefully last for. Still, it's all very interesting.