El Nino predicted

Some news at the end of last year -

A group of researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Beijing Normal University and Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen has found a way to predict El Niño events up to a year before they occur. In their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their complexity-based approach to better predicting the seemingly random weather events. ...

Once they found that pattern, the researchers went analyzed yearly surface temperature data from 1984 to 2018 to make predictions about El Niño events in the past. They report that their method correctly predicted nine out of 10 El Niño events (and had three false positives.) Additionally, they found that the higher the disorder the previous year, the stronger the following El Niño event. The researchers conclude that it is now possible to predict El Niño events up to a year in advance with reasonable accuracy. 

Some of the work has come from an Israeli university, it seems, so the research got a lot of reporting in the Jewish press.  For example:

“This novel climate network approach is very promising for improving El Niño prediction,” said Prof. Shlomo Havlin, an Israel Prize-winning physicist from Bar-Ilan University who was involved in developing the algorithm.

“Conventional methods are unable to make a reliable El Niño forecast more than six months in advance. With our method, we have roughly doubled the previous warning time,” stressed JLU physicist Armin Bunde, who initiated the development of the algorithm together with his former PhD student Josef Ludescher.

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director Emeritus of Climate Impact Research, explained: “This clever combination of measured data and mathematics gives us unique insights – and we make these available to the people affected.”

He pointed out that the prediction method does not offer one hundred percent certainty: “The probability of El Niño in 2020 is around 80%. But that’s pretty significant.”

As El Nino is usually associated with less rainfall and higher temperatures in Australia, the 2020 prediction is really not good news.

Quantum overview

I quite liked this simplified list of quantum interpretations that appeared in a recent book review in TLS.  John Gribbins came up with this:

As it stands today, depending on how you want to interpret the results from a litany of physical and mathematical experiments all validating each other, you are left, basically speaking, with only so many possibilities of how you might understand the world. Gribbin chooses six of the more scientifically realized and commonly endorsed. As he summarizes them:

One. The world does not exist unless you look at it.

Two. Particles are pushed around by an invisible wave. But the particles have no influence on the wave.

Three. Everything that could possibly happen does, in an array of parallel realities.

Four. Everything that could possibly happen has already happened and we only noticed part of it.

Five. Everything influences everything else instantly, as if space does not exist.

Six. The future influences the past.

As explained further down, this list equates with the Copenhagen Interpretation (number one, roughly) and the rest are:

the Pilot Wave, Many Worlds, Decoherence, Ensemble and Transactional interpretations

I like this bit of quirky information, too (in my bold):

Bohr said that the world revealed by measurements is the only reality worthy of the name, that the act of measurement actively constructs the reality that is being measured. Put an electron in a box. According to the Copenhagen interpretation – as Jim Holt describes in When Einstein Walked with Gödel – it “does not have a definitive location until we look inside to see just where it is. Prior to that act of observation, the electron is in a mixture of potential locations spread throughout the box”. This mixture is “mathematically represented by a ‘wave function,’ which expresses the different probabilities of detecting the electron at the various locations inside the box”. In French the wave function is poetically called the densité de présence, which is a helpful way of thinking about it.

Successful solar thermal?

I noticed an article at Bloomberg on a (pretty much) completely failed solar thermal plant in Nevada called Crescent Dunes.   I've reached my limit of free articles for Bloomberg, but if you haven't, here's the link.   Also, it has a wikipedia entry.

This made me think:  is there a company that is a clear leader in solar thermal that is making it work?

This seems a difficult topic on which to find solid information.

This site lists 8 companies, which work in CSP (concentrated solar power), but it doesn't really explain if they are making money. 

The Bloomsberg article said that that big problem with it is how cheap PV solar has become;  solar thermal's advantage is that it is not limited to making electricity during the day. But at what cost, is the issue, I suppose...

Standard Republican gaslighting

Update: and now -

The smoke hazard

One of the most surprising things about the terrible bushfires has been the seriousness of the smoke issue in Canberra (and to a lesser degree, Sydney).

I mean, I think this story was under-reported, if anything:

An elderly woman has died in Canberra tonight after she went into respiratory distress when exiting the plane to the tarmac which was filled with dense smoke from the bushfires.

The New Daily has confirmed the Canberra woman was on a Qantas plane arriving from Brisbane.

She was alive when she left the plane but relatives believe she went into respiratory distress after disembarking. ACT police and ambulance were called to the airport to assist.

Maybe there will be subsequent reports detailing properly the number of hospital admissions and increased mortality (one disturbing thing is that they say poor air quality and SIDS has a clear connection, making parents of newly born babies freak out with worry.)

But apart from that, it's the galleries and public buildings that are staying closed; the flights cancelled; the terrible images of smoke obscuring all views being spread across the globe.   You can imagine it having a terrible effect on summer tourism for some years to come.

It's part of what makes Right wing excuse making about how we've always had bushfires seem especially pathetic.   

Some criminal underworld stuff going on in Brisbane?

This is a surprising story:

Mr Percival's bar on Brisbane River hit by gun shots weeks after being firebombed

Shots have been fired at a bar on the Brisbane River that was firebombed on December 21.

The shots came from a boat on the river and were aimed at Mr Percival's bar at Howard Street Wharves, under the Story Bridge, according to police.

Police confirmed the shots were fired from a boat carrying three to four people.

 We're not used to bars being firebombed in Brisbane.  The most notorious one was in 1973, and the investigations into it just went on forever. 

Movie viewed

I finally got around to watching The Death of Stalin last night (on SBS On Demand).

It was very good.  It was also good to read this article at Slate as to which parts were true, or at least, half true.  

As I didn't go into it expecting great historical accuracy (as I don't expect there was really all that much humour to be found in the inner circle machinations after his death), the blender approach to the history behind it didn't bother me in this case.  (Mind you, I still wonder about the choices made.  Why make out that his daughter was sent immediately to Vienna?)

Jewish success considered

I'm still catching up on posting about things I read while I was away on a short break.   This is one of them.

As a result of Bret Stephen's recent controversial article in the New York Times, Noah Smith reminded us of a blog post he had written in 2013 which looked at explanations other than high IQ, culture (or conspiracy) which may well show that the apparent success of Jewish folk is somewhat illusory, or explained in more mundane ways.

I thought it raised many good points which I had not heard of before.

GRAEME:  DON'T COMMENT IT WILL BE DELETED

Northern sea surface temperatures: is this unusual?

I am doing a bit of "man in his shed" speculating here, but I had noticed somewhere that, even though there is a delayed start to the monsoon season in North Australia this summer, the sea surface temperature anomalies are pretty high up that way (in the Indian Ocean, and the Timor and Arafura Seas, at least):

Which made me wonder - very high sea surface temperatures were a feature of the summer before the 2011 floods.  How does today compare to then?

Unfortunately, this map does not use the same colour scale, so you have to convert it in your brain:

Now, I know one is a year long analysis, and the other is a one day snapshot:  but still, it seems to me that both show a large accumulation of anomalies in the 1.5 to 2 degrees range, with the difference that this year it is bunched up further north.

Still, is the large blob of hot water unusual for this time of year, and does it indicate that when the wet comes, it will be very wet indeed?

I guess we will soon find out...

Global debt considered

I always worry when someone writes something about economics that seems very reasonable to me, but extremely few commentators are discussing the issue at all.   Is it my lack of understanding of economics, or is it a case of the obvious being ignored by most economics commentators for political or other reasons? 

That's the feeling I have with this short piece in The Guardian by Phillip Inman:  Debt will kill the global economy.  But it seems no one cares.

An aviation thing I didn't really understand before

I had always wondered whether unlucky sailors might be covered with an obvious fine spray of aviation fuel if a passenger jet was doing an emergency fuel dump over them.  Apparently not, although they may still smell it:



Read the article that the video is from at Business Insider.

Events that were made for comedy writers

For future reference

A couple of things I noticed via Twitter or the web over the Christmas break:

This tweet and the thread following contains some useful warnings about how not to improperly access academic stuff:

 Good to know how not to do anything wrong!

And this site is one I had never visited before, but yeah, looks really good:

Update:  now there is Anna's Archive.   Extremely useful.

Hazard reduction

This ABC Factcheck article on the matter of hazard reduction burns for bushfires is pretty detailed, and (as I would have expected) strongly indicative that there is not a fundamental problem of Greenies gone berserk and ruining all attempts at hazard reduction under the current system.

Why would I say "as I would have expected"?   Because, in case you hadn't noticed, it is primarily politicians on the Right, and their culture war warrior commentator supporters, who immediately start complaining about it whenever bushfires start.   It's remarkable, in fact, how conservative commentators who rarely get out of the city are suddenly armchair experts on how much fuel has been left in the forests and how bad those damn Greenies have let it get.   (They appear to have found one case of small scale environmental protest that interfered with one hazard control burn in the last couple of years, as far as I can tell.  From that, they just know that it's all about Greenies interference.)

Seems to me, using my common sense, that if it were a serious issue, the experts in the field (metaphorically, not literally) and the people who manage forests and hazard reduction would be the ones complaining about it.   By and large, they aren't.

Update:   a useful Twitter thread to read by someone with clear knowledge of the system.

Also - Jack the Insider also disputes the "Greenies caused all of this" fake excuse.

While there are environmental groups who campaign to restrict hazard reduction burns, in terms of political representation, there are 1273 councillors in New South Wales. Only 58 of them are Greens. There are no Greens on my local council and not one in the state government. In the Shire of Wingecaribbee, it’s a raft of independents, many National Party aligned, pock-marked with the odd property developer. It is hardly Leichhardt at 600 metres above sea level.

While I can’t speak for the rest of the country, I decided to go to the source, the local RFS, who tell me the real difficulty in hazard reduction burns is the country is so dry. Two consecutive winters with rainfall well below average make hazard reductions well, hazardous.

There was a furore in April 2018 when NSW Fire & Rescue performed a controlled burn in Hornsby which threatened homes as far south as Curl Curl and blanketed Sydney in smoke haze. Do people not remember this?

And let's not forget Graham Readfearn's earlier Factcheck article in The Guardian which I had previously linked to, containing quotes such as:

A former NSW fire and rescue commissioner, Greg Mullins, has written this week that the hotter and drier conditions, and the higher fire danger ratings, were preventing agencies from carrying out prescribed burning.

He said: “Blaming ‘greenies’ for stopping these important measures is a familiar, populist, but basically untrue claim.”

The coal issue

I thought a Twitter thread by David Fickling on the issue of Australia, its coal exports, and climate change, was good and nuanced.   

I think John Quiggin will soon be posting an article about the same topic, and that will be worth reading too.

Update:  and if you want complete lack of nuance from someone who used to take climate change seriously, but then decided to culture war instead, have a look at angry man Mark Latham -

Update 2:   Gee, just how much of the new year am I going to have to spend asking "whatever happened to Jason Soon?".    Clearly, it would seem he doesn't think Australia's enthusiasm to sell coal overseas is an issue, because he's stuck on saying "1.5% of global emissions, nothing we do makes any difference".   But take these comments from the Fickling thread about how our involvement in emissions is much bigger than the 1.3% often quoted by Scotty From Marketing:

A lengthy "factcheck"article last November showed that, if you include emissions from our exports, you can get our national contributions to around 4.4 tp 4.8% of global emissions from burning fossils, depending on how you count:

If Australia's fossil fuel imports, containing an estimated 135.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, are netted off, Australia's share of the global emissions from fossil fuel combustion falls from roughly 4.8 per cent to roughly 4.4 per cent, while Australia's share of total emissions falls approximately from 3.6 per cent to 3.3 per cent.
  

Update 3:  Warwick McKibbin tweets today:

Sounds fair, and he is the climate economist the Liberals have leaned on before. His 2018 article about his favoured approach towards pricing carbon is here.

Update 4:  something good to come out of this?  Young Liberals with the "radical" idea of believing scientists unreservedly, and more aggressively tackling emissions?:

In early December, delegates representing Young Liberal branches across the state voted overwhelmingly in approval of a motion recognising the reality of climate change and the need for action.

The NSW Liberal party’s youth wing recognises this a particularly important issue facing our generation, as our generation will have to face the risks brought about by climate change.

They're going to have to wait to outlive some of the fogeys still in Parliament, though.

The "Scotty from Marketing" fail

Look, I know that people can exaggerate on Twitter and social media, and get a false sense of where broader community attitudes lie, and hence I don't take the outpouring of condemnation that I have been reading from those sources as necessarily accurate;  but I nonetheless find it hard to believe that, in their heart of hearts, anyone on the Right of Australian politics could possibly feel that PM Morrison has struck the right tone in speech or action since the present spate of widespread bushfires started before Christmas.

I have a clear feeling of schadenfreude from watching a politician from a public relations background, and given to pro-fossil fuel stunts like bringing coal into parliament, now trying to work out how to express sympathy about a type of disaster that has, scientifically, a clear climate change connection, and not sound like a hypocrite on climate change policy.

And I do think that the sarcastic twitter hashtag "ScottyfromMarketing" is very amusing.

I doubt that Morrison will lose his job over this, but surely there are some on his cabinet who are seriously disappointed in his performance.

Update:  After seeing the video of his visit to the disaster area last night, I am now not at all sure that he will keep the PM job.  In fact, it seemed that he barely had the social skills to be a politician, let alone a PM.   A truly terrible performance.

Images brought to you by climate change

Yeah, well, here's hoping the dire bushfire season is killing any last vestiges of PR credibility of climate change denialism/lukewarmism for the great majority of the Australian public, as images like these are pretty powerful:

To be honest, I know it won't change the mind of those who have spent a decade or two determinedly believing every fake "sceptic" and billionaire funded denialist with crap arguments that were repeatedly debunked by actual scientists.   They are too invested in their view to risk losing face by admitting that they were wrong.

But there must be an element of the public that thought they would start taking it seriously when they could see how it could affect them personally.  Their day has come.

PS:  to Graeme - I'm just going to delete everything you have to say about this.  I have no time for your nonsense on this issue on a day like today.

Oh, and in light of recent anti-Semitic violence in America, all Jew-ish referencing crap from you I'll just be deleting as soon as I see it.

Christmas greetings

This year's Christmas art has a Chinese theme, in a modest attempt to suck up to our coming overlords, of course:

Actually, it's from this:

The Life of Christ by Giulio Aleni (1637) is a picture-narration of the life of Jesus drawn by that early Jesuit missionary for the Church in China. It contains almost 60 engraved images, probably the earliest and definitely the most precious collection of Chinese icons.

I think you could safely describe his style as "busy".  Not always great with faces, though.  Have a look at this detail from next page, on the Presentation at the Temple, which features, if I am not mistaken, the (rarely depicted these days) circumcision of a not very bothered baby Jesus:

   
You can't half tell that the illustrator is Italian, from the way everyone is dressed, especially the kids and Joseph.  And as for the faces of Jesus and the kid in the front...I guess engravings are hard to re-start from scratch.

Anyway, have a good Christmas season, readers.

The range of future warming considered

Zeke Hausfather is a great read on climate change, although as usual I will now gripe about how you have to read Twitter instead of blogs to keep track of his comments.

Anyway, he wrote a piece talking about the recent fierce argument (largely between climate scientist types - I think) about what "business as usual" might mean - a crispy Earth, or something a tad less dire.  Here's his tweet at the start of his Twitter discussion:

The link to the start of his Tweet thread is here;  and the link to the actual article is here.

Now, Noah Smith has a piece in Bloomsberg which summarises it too, and Zeke thinks it's a good article, even though it doesn't discuss uncertainty:

And here is the link to the Noah Smith article itself.

Noah Smith is very much against any suggestion that you have to kill capitalism to meet lower temperature ranges.   After all, it is under capitalism that the changes have been taking place which have made BAU not a complete, planet killing disaster - just an enormously costly dire problem.

And this is the "glass half full/glass half empty" aspect of the matter.  As Andrew Dessler said:

I think it fair to say that all of this suggests as follows:

1.    Extinction Rebellion style complete and utter doom-for-planetary-life forecasts are, how should we put it?, somewhat exaggerated yet not completely able to be ruled out.   (Whether they help in terms of political motivation, or simply encourage depression and defeatism, is a good question the answer to which I am never 100% certain.)


2.    Progress towards limiting future warning to 2 degrees is not so far beyond reach of humanity as to be unachievable, despite the fact that the political (and societal) will across the globe is not unified enough;

3.  Defeatists such as Jason Soon (and, to be fair, some of my other readers) seem to think that everything is stuck politically forever where it is now on this issue, whereas I do not see that as being the case.   Trump and dumbass Republicans and their culture war, and their similar populists in other countries, are not going to rule the roost forever.   And China by the nature of its government has the ability to make great interference in industry such that I suspect that even the reports of their new coal power plants is not the dire problem that it first appears.

There are many ways in which to ensure that climate change  becomes a more severe problem than it potentially can be - be an outright denier; put your libertarian/small government biases above everything else and run a blog that caters to denialism and encourages old fools to keep voting against any effective action;  accept climate science but get  more interested in Lefties and culture war issues and adopt a defectist attitude;  get in thrall to some billionaire's pet ideas that there is only one way forward with energy.

They are all harmful to useful action.   It seems rather obvious to me that anyone who takes the issue seriously should concentrate on the overthrow of Right wing denialism and inaction in the USA, and the dubious takes on science that appear in India too.     The West needs to have a unified front, and I think that China will ultimately too, in the interest of self preservation.

Update:   Tobis and Dessler make another point (one which I have made before, too):

Animal sympathy will save us?

First, a couple of tweets:

To be honest, it's hard to be sure it really is a koala, and not (say) a backpack - but it does look the right shape; and honestly, who ever knew until relatively recently that wild koalas, who normally do not interact with us all, could be so charmingly trusting of humans when fires are around?

Next:  poor cockatoos:

  
Apart from being woken up by them screeching at 4.45 am in a Brisbane summer, how can you possibly dislike these smart, clean looking birds?  That they should fall out of trees due to heat stress is...distressing.

It's obvious from the internet, but also confirmed by my daughter, that the impact of fires and heat on wildfire can cause more sympathy and upset than seeing dozens of burnt out houses, or hearing about someone who died in their car escaping a fire.

You can say that we shouldn't be like that, really.  But it's human nature to perceive animals (or at least, the more charming variety that we can empathise with and like seeing outside our window) as helpless victims, whereas humans take the risk of bush living and know what they might be getting into.     

So I'm not going to get too concerned about any arguments that (I would bet) some Right wing types are probably making somewhere about misplaced sympathy:  anything that leads to more political pressure to take meaningful action to limit emissions and hence limit the worst case scenario in terms of climate change is a good thing.