Another Texan who believes in AGW

How to talk to a climate sceptic | Environment | guardian.co.uk

I found this a few weeks ago but forgot to post it: a good interview with Katharine Hayhoe, another Texan climate scientist who is firmly on the AGW mainstream science camp, and who goes out of her way to convince the notoriously skeptic evangelical Christian demographic that it is a real problem.

Some extracts:

The third thing I like to tell people is that we do have projections about what the average conditions will be in the future, and so what we can say is that this summer is a picture of what it would be like every summer if we made certain choices regarding our energy sources, and if we reach certain levels of climate change. So for example this summer we've already had 43 days over 100 degrees in Lubbock, which is higher than normal. And if you look in the future this summer is what we'd expect the average summer to be like by the end of the century under lower emissions or by the middle of the century under higher emissions. So we're complaining about this summer, but this could be the average summer within our lifetimes if we continue to depend on fossil fuels....

.....in the southern Great Plains, we are a semiarid environment and we are very water-short already. West Texas is a huge agricultural area and it lies over the Ogallala Aquifer. Since irrigation began in the 1960s, the Ogallala Aquifer has shrunk by over 150 feet in many locations.

Estimates of how many years of water we have left in the aquifer, which has been there since the last ice age, say that as much as two-thirds of the aquifer could be unusable within 30 years. So then you overlay climate change on that existing problem, and you find that with higher temperatures you obviously need more water to provide plants with the same amount of irrigation because evaporation is a factor. We also find that precipitation patterns are becoming more unpredictable, we're getting more heavy downpours and more dry periods in between, which reduces aquifer recharge, because when you get heavy downpours it runs off into the surface water and then obviously you're not getting any recharge. So climate change is exacerbating the problem we have, and it's the same across most of the Southwest, which is very water-short.

She says about 65% of the evangelicals she talks to (I think she is of that brand of Christianity herself) do not believe climate change is real. She has her work cut out.

3-D burn out

Four theories on the death of 3-D. - By Daniel Engber - Slate Magazine

So, the return on the 3-D version of movies has really tanked. It seems, even for a good movie, people are just going along to see the 2-D version.

It doesn't surprise me. It needs to be used much more sparingly.

An over-interpreted study

Testosterone and fatherhood: Are men designed to nurture children? - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine

William Saletan does an excellent job at looking at the ways the "fatherhood lowers testosterone" story has been way, way, over-interpreted by just about everyone.

An important argument in Texas

There is an important argument going on between two resident Texans John Nielsen-Gammon and Michael Tobis at the moment over climate change and "weather weirding" and attribution of events to climate change.

In short, John N-G did a long post in which he argued that the remarkably severe Texas drought and hot summer are (if I can risk paraphrase) not primarily due to climate change. He is no disbeliever in AGW by any means, but he is very, very cautious when it comes to attribution of single events to it.

Tobis, on the other hand, has issues with the whole approach to attribution which can be summarised by his last sentence:

You can't apply small-signal arguments to large signals in nonlinear systems. So please stop it.

And someone in comments expands on this in a way which Tobis basically agrees with:

As Jay Forrester and Ed Deming kept reminding us, people are not good at predicting the behavior of non-linear feed back systems. In particular weathermen and climate scientists study the one weather system, rather than the behavior of dynamic systems in general.

In his classes, Dr. Deming made his students look at the behavior of various systems as the systems went “out of control.” It was shocking how a dynamic system could be “in control” and apparently stable, then suffer some small chaotic event, “go out of control”, and exhibit violent behavior as the system moved toward an new equilibrium. We have been adding heat to the weather system, bumped it out-of -ontrol, and we can expect weather that we have never see before as the system seeks a new equilibrium.

John Nielsen-Gammon missed the point that he has a system that is out of control and that his system is violently seeking a new equilibrium. We can expect ongoing violent behavior until the weather system comes back into control. The studies that he cites all assume that the system is "in control" and that the old rules hold. However, those old rules do not apply to the new, “out-of-control” weather system.

This commenter goes on to point that climate models should be expected to not be good at predicting this.

Tobis' point seems to me to make sense, but I guess we may have to wait for another few years of "weather weirding" to see how it pans out.

UPDATE: Nielsen-Gammon makes a further point in clarification in comments:

We're a degree F warmer because of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. The standard deviation around the best-fit curve seems to be about a degree F. So an event which would have been close to the best-fit curve is one standard deviation off it. Given the lack of rainfall, a temperature which would have been expected to be attained about 16% of the time is now expected to be attained about 50% of the time.

So, this event (i.e., this particular combination of drought and heat) has been made three times as likely by anthropogenic greenhouse gases, with lots of assumptions built in. The least of which is what global warming is doing to our local PDF of precipitation in Texas, which could go either way.

Change the narrative

From a short review in New Scientist:

Do you think that airing your feelings right away will help you through trauma? Are you persuaded that bringing kids to prisons will scare them straight? Convinced that costly, intensive long-term interventions are needed to close the achievement gap in education, curb alcohol abuse and reduce teen pregnancies?

Think again, says psychologist Timothy Wilson. At the heart of his book Redirect: The surprising new science of psychological change is the conviction that many favoured approaches to changing behaviour are akin to "bloodletting" and may do more harm than good. Armed with the tools of experimental social psychology, he argues we can move beyond these untested, "common-sense" views and begin to make some real progress.

Central to Wilson's perspective is the idea that our interpretations of the world are rooted in largely unconscious "narratives" - stories we use to frame the world and that shape our sense of identity - and that these too often leave us unhealthy and unhappy. The good news, he says, is that there is a way to redirect these interpretations "that is quick, does not require one-on-one sessions, and can address a wide array of personal and social problems". Wilson calls this new way "story editing", and in his view it carries enormous potential for efficiently producing lasting positive change.

It sounds like an expansion of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, but this guy's idea sounds pretty much like what I have thought about on and off over the last few decades.

The "largely unconscious narrative" that you would have suspect causes problems is scientific materialism and its potential to discount free will as being "real" in any objective sense, as well as painting all emotion and thoughts as essentially mere molecular activity with no inherent meaning or purpose.

Of course, there are different ways of arguing that such ideas are not necessarily a consequence of scientific materialism, and biology is such that there is enough pleasure in life for nearly all people that they don't want to end it all because of an intellectual interpretation of what life is like, at heart. But I have long wondered whether people act unconsciously on a internal narrative that, when they get down to it, they are only diverting themselves from reality, do not even have a fundamental control over their own thought processes, and there is no reason for long term optimism.

This theme was also dealt with at length in Bryan Appleyard's book Understanding the Present, which I liked a lot, except for its proposed solution that we embrace Wittgenstein.

An old story

Surgeons use toe to replace lost thumb - Health News, Health & Families - The Independent

For some reason, I remember the same operation being done decades ago after reading about it in the Courier Mail. I suspect I may been in high school at the time.

As you were.

Melancholic kid's song

Last night I had to put up with another primary school kid's concert. The novelty of these wears off sharply after each kid has done their first two or three, and in all honesty, some teachers really struggle to come up with good ideas.

When I were a lad, it was simply a matter of each class learning off a couple of songs by heart (at least one of them probably of Irish origin,) standing on a couple of precipitously stacked long benches, and belting them out to the piano accompaniment of Sister Lawrence. (Actually, it may have been a different nun, but Sister Lawrence sticks strongly in memory due to her general reign of terror over Grade 1 and 2. Have I mentioned before that it was one of the most depressing days of my educational life to find on the first day of Grade 2 that I had her again for another year?)

But the point is - I am sure this was a relatively painless experience for the parents, and it was probably over with much quicker than what primary schools get away with now. Primary school teachers be aware: 6 year olds do not do choreography well. You don't do choreography well. Give it up - get them to sing some 2 songs while stationary and get off the stage.

And as for other content - look, even a climate change worrier like me gets sick of every year having one or two classes do some sketch or something or other related to recycling, being kind to the planet, etc. Do something cheerful.

Anyway - where was I? Oh yes: one thing one class did last night was to the Unicorn song (Irish Rovers, 1968.) I hadn't heard it for years, but you would have to call it a bit of melancholy Irish folk for kids. And this got me thinking of other melancholic kid's songs from my childhood, and how the genre seems to have gone away.

Surely the biggest of them all in the genre was Puff the Magic Dragon, which I see was by Peter Paul and Mary from 1963. Being Australian, I associate more it with The Seekers, the group for which every song strikes me as melancholic.

There was another sad sounding kids song that I thought about this morning, but it escapes me now.

In any event, how come we have environmental concern now at least as great as that in the 1960's, but we don't have a sad sounding kid's song about it? Maybe it's just that folk doesn't have the airplay that it used to have in that decade? I mean, it may be unfair, but I suppose I do usually associate "folk" with serious or depressing situations. (It's a bit like the image of Country & Western, I suppose, but my impression is that it is more "pop-y" in both sound and topic now.)

So get to it, songwriters. Some good, depressing songs about carbon dioxide, the rising sea levels covering the old holiday home on the beach, grandma being taken to hospital due to heat exhaustion; politicians too stupid to do anything: there's plenty of material. But I still don't want to hear it at a school concert.

A confusing matter, and a Dr Who complaint

When do gay kids start "acting gay"? - By Brian Palmer - Slate Magazine

Prompted by news of a lawsuit in America to do with anti-gay bullying in a school, Brian Palmer looks at the somewhat interesting question of whether a young child acting outside of "traditional gender roles" is an indication of future sexual identity. In brief:

A hefty pile of research shows that boys as young as 3 years old who break from traditional gender roles have a high likelihood of becoming gay adults. Predictive behaviors include playing with Barbie dolls, shying away from roughhousing, and taking an interest in makeup and women's clothing. (Read the Explainer's take on why boys prefer to play with sticks while girls go for dolls here.) The relationship isn't one-to-one, however, and it's certainly not the case that all boys who love Barbie dolls will later identify as gay. The correlation is much weaker in the other direction: A disproportionate number of boys who don't conform to gender stereotypes turn out to be gay men, but lots of gay men played with G.I. Joe as boys and quarterbacked the high-school football team. Neither does the relationship appear to be as strong among girls. Tomboys aren't as likely to become lesbian adults.

Psychiatrist Richard Green conducted the leading study in this field in the 1970s and '80s. He followed 44 boys who defied traditional gender roles from early childhood to adulthood. Thirty of them became gay or bisexual adults while just one child from a 34-member gender-conforming control group turned out to be gay. The subjects who strayed the most from conventionally boyish behavior were the most likely to be gay. Green's study has since been repeated by other researchers with similar outcomes. (Studies on females show that only around one-quarter of gender nonconforming girls grow up to be lesbians.)

The complicated thing about this is that acting outside of normal gender roles is also commonly seen as a sign of future gender identity issues. Why is it that some boys with this apparent inborn inclination to feminine interests will go on to develop a deep unhappiness with their own body to such an extent that they feel they can't be happy unless they hormonally/surgically modify it, and others will go to be "merely" homosexual, with varying degrees of feminine behaviour as part of that?

Of course, lots of people have written extensively about sexual identity and gender issues, but I am not inclined to waste a huge amount of time on reading about it; I just note that it is a matter that I think is obviously complicated, and far from properly understood.

I think I noted recently here that Native Americans (supposedly) saw cross-gender behaviour in kids as a sign they were a special, virtually holy, "two spirits" combining both male and female spirits. According to this article:

Every tribe watched their young carefully to determine if one of their children were two-spirits. If a boy leaned towards female clothes and mannerism, the tribe encouraged his explorations and vice versa for females.

Given the political use to which such anthropology can be put in the gay marriage debate, there is reason to be a bit suspicious about over-statements on this, and indeed, here's a site that claims reverence of "two spirits" was by no means a universal practice:

According to researcher Will Roscoe, former coordinator of the Gay American Indians History Project, there is no single belief about Two-Spirits among the more than 800 tribes in the United States and Alaska, about 200 of which are not federally recognized. Two-spirits may be respected within one tribe and ostracized in another, while the topic of sexuality could be ignored altogether in yet another tribe.

As I said, human behaviour and psychology in this field is very complicated.

It certainly also makes it a bit of a challenge wondering how one should explain "gay" issues to children. I have not yet had to discuss the "gay" question with my own kids, despite the best efforts of Dr Who to continually bring up gay issues again and again. Surely I can't be the only father in the world who finds this annoying. Even after the departure of the gay re-inventor of the show, Russell Davies, who you could clearly see was inserting a subtext of all types of pan sexual behaviour as being cool and normal, the new producer Steven Moffat, who is not gay, is openly going out of his way to keep introducing gay characters. Here's what he said in an interview:

But also someone pointed out to me [that] in the previous Doctor Who, the first one I had run, there were no gay or bisexual characters and I was sort of slightly appalled. I was thinking, I’m not like that at all. I would never have done that. So I was thinking, “Dammit, it’s the one criticism I’ve ever listened to. Good point, Doctor Who should always be…" It’s not because it’s politically and morally correct. It’s right for Doctor Who, isn’t it? It’s cheeky and off-centered. And fun.

Yeah, well, thanks a lot Steve. You've made it into a psyops program aimed at educating kids on sexuality. Yep, that's why we watch Doctor Who, which is, after all, still primarily a kid's science fiction program, just that it is well enough acted with good enough production values that adults watch it too. And, by the way, although I like the cast quite a lot, its stories are not as good as they were a few years ago, before the Davies decline. In fact, it's nearly time to give it a rest again, I think, after this season.

Anyway, back to kids and the "gay" explanation. I spoke to another father who said he simply answered the question "what's a lesbian" by saying it was a woman who loved a woman. Easy peasy. Maybe that is suitable for an 8 year old, but honestly, explaining homosexuality purely in terms of "love" isn't being realistic with a slightly older kid who has something of an understanding about heterosexual sex.

Part of the problem, as I say, is that it's not clear that adults understand it at all properly from a biological, psychological or cultural point of view either. So I don't care what others may say - it's a tricky issue to explain to a child/young teenager.

More calls for realism

Bishop of Derry calls for end to celibacy in Catholic church | UK news | The Guardian

I liked the last paragraph:

The reordination into the Catholic church of married Anglican priests has pointed up the fact that priestly celibacy is not a doctrine, but a discipline. In 1970, the decline in priesthood vocations persuaded nine leading theologians to sign a memorandum declaring that the Catholic leadership "quite simply has a responsibility to take up certain modifications" to the celibacy rule. Extracts from the document were reprinted in January. Not least because one of the signatories was the then Joseph Ratzinger, now pope Benedict.

Debriefing debriefed

Escaping from the past of disaster psychology � Mind Hacks

Here's a fascinating article about how trauma counselling by group debriefing gradually recognized as probably doing more harm than good.

Interestingly, it points out that you couldn't even tell that by asking the victims who had received it:

In one study, 80% of patients said the intervention was “useful” despite having more symptoms of mental illness in the long-term compared to disaster victims who had no treatment. In another, more than half said ‘debriefing’ was “definitely useful” despite having twice the rate of postraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after a year.

Debriefing involves lots of psychological ‘techniques’, so the psychologists felt they were using their best tools, while the lack of outside perspective meant it was easy to mistake instant feedback and regression to the mean for actual benefit.

This sounds a little counter-intuitive, but as the article notes, that the only way to reliably tell its effects is by comparing the future progress of groups who receive it to those who don't.

The Brisbane Space Pants Foundation

Free Shuttle Artifacts! | Space Exploration | Air & Space Magazine

From the article:

Currently up for grabs on a government website: a pair of astronaut pants, a spacewalker’s life-support backpack, a spacesuit glove, and thousands of black insulating tiles from the bellies of the space shuttle orbiters.

Now that the shuttle has retired after 30 years, NASA is having the equivalent of a massive going-out-of-business sale.

While most of the media attention last spring focused on where the vehicles themselves would go on display (Washington, Los Angeles, Florida's Kennedy Space Center and New York) thousands of lesser pieces of shuttle history are still looking for permanent homes. With help from the General Services Administration, NASA is giving away everything from spare main engines to sunglasses worn by the astronauts.

Sounds great. The only catch is in the next sentence:

The artifacts will go to museums, universities, elementary schools, libraries and planetariums all over the country to become part of their permanent collections.

Since there's another Brisbane in California, I think the best I can do is set up the Brisbane Space Pants Foundation, and see if I can score a free set of astronaut pants. Straight to the pool room, they would go. (If I had a pool room.)

I wonder if they have a set of the Japanese space underpants that were worn for 2 months straight? I probably wouldn't even have to pay for postage: give them the address, and they could probably walk their way to Australia.

Hormones are strange

In Study, Fatherhood Leads to Drop in Testosterone - NYTimes.com

The report notes:

Testosterone, that most male of hormones, takes a dive after a man becomes a parent. And the more he gets involved in caring for his children — changing diapers, jiggling the boy or girl on his knee, reading “Goodnight Moon” for the umpteenth time — the lower his testosterone drops.

So says the first large study measuring testosterone in men when they were single and childless and several years after they had children. Experts say the research has implications for understanding the biology of fatherhood, hormone roles in men and even health issues like prostate cancer.

Given that other studies have indicated testosterone can bounce around for all types of reasons, including whether your political party has just lost an election, or if (you are soccer goalkeeper), depending on if you are playing away or at home, I don't know that it is really that surprising.

Testosterone is a bit strange.

Good catches

It was interesting to note from last week's Economist that the TSA, the much maligned security service* in the US that is responsible for airport screening, has a "Good Catch" site up which makes occasional report of all the unusual and potentially dangerous things they have stopped getting on board flights. The TSA blog article about the site contains some of the comments you might expect against the TSA.

This is an entertaining idea for a website. The posts are coming in much too infrequently, though.

* usually by right wing libertarian types with psychological problems about their "junk" being vaguely seen by some bored screen watcher in another room, or brushed against during a pat down

McDonalds in the spotlight

Employment: Defending jobs | The Economist

According to the chart at the link, McDonald's is the world's 4th largest employer (following the US Dept of Defence, China's army, and Walmart. There must be a lot of Walmarts in America.)

On the weekend, I went to McDonalds and had their "birthday special" of the return of the McFeast and Shaker Fries. I actually don't recall shaker fries, but the disappearance of the McFeast two or three years ago has been a matter of deep regret. Its replacement, the "Angus" burgers, often feel a bit too heavy for lunch for me. The McFeast is their "just right" burger.

I seem that someone else in the blogosphere has done a detailed culinary review of the return of the McFeast, and gives it a big "fail". But then, he starts with an admission that he never liked it in the first place, as he doesn't like tomato on a burger (?) The bad review also notes that "the salad was too cold" and with the shaker fries " the shaking was embarrassingly loud." U-huh.

I see from his blog that he is from England (culinary heartland of the universe - ha) and has an entry about a Dr Who birthday cake that starts with what I hope is a joke, but I'm not sure:

I love Doctor Who…my lounge room is full of Doctor Who paraphernalia and my wedding cake had two Daleks on the top.

His taste in anything is, I'm afraid, not to be trusted...

Adventures in dioramas

You wouldn’t believe how long this diorama took to put together.  My son showed great talent in painting the tiny mining figures we found by good luck at a hobby shop, and he’s pretty good at construction with matchsticks and a hot glue gun too.   The trees are made from green scouring pads which are pulled apart and stuck onto a twig with appropriate “branches” (something I learnt from the internet.)

Yes, it took me half a century to learn how to make a diorama to primary school level.   (I don’t recall ever doing one at school.  It was all project posters with lots of words and illustrations in my day:  these seem to not be popular now.)

Great moments in Japanese politics

Radiation gag backfires on trade minister | The Japan Times Online

Trade minister Yoshio Hachiro crossed swords with the media Thursday by attempting to rub his body against a journalist after touring the stricken Fukushima power plant, sources said Friday.

"I'll give you radiation," he reportedly said to the journalist.

Dear Gillian

Change agent | Gillian Anderson

She's not looking bad, the older Agent Scully. (I bet she hates that. Mind you, I always get the impression from interviews that would be a bit intimidating to meet.)

Analysing people analysing Julia

As my regular reader Jason has an intense and somewhat irrational hatred of both Julia Gillard and Richard Glover, I'm sure he's happy to note this morning's column by Glover which starts "Can someone explain to me why people hate Julia Gillard with such intensity?"

I basically agree with all of it.

Elsewhere, I note that reaction to At Home With Julia has varied widely. It is, let's face it, a silly show that does not attempt to paint a realistic picture (someone somewhere said it's a bit like a human version of the old Rubbery Figures puppet show, extended out for 30 minutes, and I think that's about right.) But still, as I wrote before, as I was very pleased to be hearing some really good politician impersonations again, and found it pleasingly not mean spirited, I liked it.

Yet some on the Left thought it was awful: Mike Carlton hated it (and, I see from the same article, he's another Lefty who has joined the "Julia will go, and Rudd replace her" school of unreality. Why Kevin would be forgiven for the carbon tax, but not Julia, is a bit of mystery to me.)

The most over the top condemnation for the show came from Larvatus Prodeo, where it interpreted purely on feminist principles. Apparently, showing a male partner as feeling left out, ignored, or tormented by teenage boys for being a househusband means you are showing him as emasculated, and that just is so offensive. Yeah, whatever. As much as I can't stand where much of the Right is at the moment, I do not find myself being at all attracted to the dour feminism and sociological waffle of the prominent females at LP. (I like it when Anne Winter does a withering takedown of CL or someone else at Catallaxy occasionally, but I'm not unrealistic enough to think she doesn't hold me in low regard too.)

Oddly, on the Right, I heard Andrew Bolt on his radio spot say that he liked the show more than he expected, and in a way it made him more sympathetic to Gillard. Yet it seems as if he might be gearing up to criticise the ABC on his show tomorrow for trying to help Gillard this way. Again, whatever.

Anyway, it certainly is a show that has received a diverse reception.

UPDATE: I see Annabel Crabb confirms what I have said about Kevin Rudd for a long time. (Maybe I got the idea from her in the first place, I can't quite recall now.)

There's a fascinating, almost mathematical equation going on here.

With Julia Gillard, the probability that any given person will support the Prime Minister decreases with distance from the subject; she is supported by a majority of Cabinet and Caucus colleagues and viewed benignly in the public service, but despised by voters who have never met her.

Mr Rudd's equation is precisely the inverse; the warm support he continues to enjoy in the populace at large tails away sharply, the closer you get to the 2600 postcode. Outside Parliament House, voters might wonder why they can't bring that nice Kevin fellow back again. Inside it, people talk vigorously about chewing their own arms off before doing anything to hasten such a return....

I don't think I'll ever forget the conversation I had with one backbencher a few months after Rudd's overthrow. "I agree with Kevin on just about every policy inclination he has," the backbencher said. "In fact, there probably isn't another person in the party with whom I am more in line." There was a pause, and then the backbencher added, calmly and without even the mildest hint of melodrama: "It's just that I hate him so very much."

Warming water problem

Warming seas could smother seafood - New Scientist

All a bit of a worry:

More than half of a group of fish crucial for the marine food web might die if, as predicted, global warming reduces the amount of oxygen dissolved in some critical areas of the ocean – including some of our richest fisheries.

The prediction is based on a unique set of records that goes back to 1951. California has regularly surveyed its marine plankton and baby fish to support the sardine fishery. "There is almost no other dataset going back so far that includes every kind of fish," says Tony Koslow of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, who heads the survey. The survey records also include information on water temperature, salinity and the dissolved oxygen content.

Koslow's team studied records of 86 fish species found consistently in the samples and discovered that the abundance of 27 of them correlated strongly with the amount of oxygen 200 to 400 metres down: a 20 per cent drop in oxygen meant a 63 per cent drop in the fish. There have been several episodes of low oxygen during the period in question, mainly in the 1950s and since 1984.

Global climate models predict that 20 to 40 per cent of the oxygen at these depths will disappear over the next century due to warming, says Koslow – mainly because these waters get oxygen by mixing with surface waters. Warmer, lighter surface waters are less likely to mix with the colder, denser waters beneath.