All about those emails

What do I think about those leaked CRU emails? Take a shower, a very cold one, excitable skeptics.

This summary of the emails (from skeptical site Watts Up With That, so you can trust it) indicates that most of them are about fighting skeptical views in various ways, but very few are even suggestive of doing it by actually manipulating data or how it is presented.

As I am sure everyone reading this knows, the most "famous" email (referencing a "trick" to "hide the decline") is said by Real Climate to not actually hide anything. It would seem that McIntyre disagrees, but honestly, his obsession with hockey stick graphs gets into so much detail I cannot follow most of his arguments. I doubt that 90% of skeptics who follow him understand much of his statistics talk either.

I should add, as that email is about the hockey stick controversy, that I still don't really understand why skeptics seemingly think this is "be all and end all" of AGW science. I have never taken that big an interest in the graph, because I always suspected that the hockey stick shape might be a little too dramatic to be true. But, as we also have actual thermometers to tell the temperature over the last century or so, I assumed the graph was not actually critical to proving AGW anyway.

My hunch appears basically correct. Bob Ward summarises the hockey stick controversy this way:

The attacks on the hockey stick graph led the United States National Academy of Sciences to carry out an investigation, concluding in 2006 that although there had been no improper conduct by the researchers, they may have expressed higher levels of confidence in their main conclusions than was warranted by the evidence.

The 'sceptics' believe they have been vindicated and have presented the hockey stick graph as proof that global warming is not occurring. In doing so, they have ignored the academy's other conclusion that "surface temperature reconstructions for periods prior to the industrial era are only one of multiple lines of evidence supporting the conclusion that climatic warming is occurring in response to human activities, and they are not the primary evidence".

And Skeptical Science writes:

In the skeptic blogosphere, there is a disproportionate preoccupation with one small aspect of climate science - proxy record reconstructions of past climate (or even worse, ad hominem attacks on the scientists who perform these proxy reconstructions). This serves to distract from the physical realities currently being observed...

When you read through the many global warming skeptic arguments, a pattern emerges. Each skeptic argument misleads by focusing on one small piece of the puzzle while ignoring the broader picture. To focus on a few suggestive emails while ignoring the wealth of empirical evidence for manmade global warming is yet another repeat of this tactic.

The emails do suggest that at least one scientist is very concerned about explaining the plateau-ing of global temperatures in the last 10 years, but this tells us nothing as to how many really think like him.

As many have said, the emails show that scientists are human and really resent being accused of dishonesty, fraud and being part of a nefarious global conspiracy. They also think it is important that people (and governments) believe them.

Ideally science should not get so personal. But it does, and skeptics can hardly claim the high moral ground when it comes to accusations, name calling and spiteful comments about the other side.

I would bet money that these emails make next to no difference in the short or long run.

I would also like to point out that they do not comment at all on ocean acidification, the other reason CO2 needs to be curbed quickly.

Cool sub

Britain's got a new type of attack nuclear submarine, and the best video of it is available via The Independent, but I can't see a way to link directly to the video or to embed it. (The link is currently in the "Latest News" column on the front page.)

The BBC video is much shorter, and barely shows the submarine, but it is notable for the odd way the Admiral says at the end that being a submariner "is about having fun"(!). (I also note that, as a continuing sympton of my advancing age, even Admirals and Rear Admirals are starting to look just too young for the job.)

There must be video from somewhere I can embed. Nope, I can't, just yet.

Anyway, The Telegraph explains what this new class of new attack submarine is supposedly capable of doing:

The Astute, the first attack submarine to be built in Britain almost two decades, has a listening system that can detect the QE2 cruise liner leaving New York harbour from the Channel.

(I find that hard to believe, but it is matter just slightly out of my field of knowledge.)

The submarine will be able to sit off coasts undetected listening in to mobile phone conversations and has the ability to insert Special Forces by mini submersibles into enemy territory where they can direct the boat's Tomahawk cruise missiles with a range of 1,400 miles.

Sounds very James Bond. I like this bit:

The Astute is the first submarine not to have a conventional periscope. Instead a fibre optic tube - equipped with infra red and thermal imaging - pops above the surface for three seconds, does one rotation and then feeds an image in colour that can be studied at leisure. The nuclear power plant has is the size of a family car.

Don't let her breed

Meet Hobbie-J, the smartest rat in the world - Science, News - The Independent

I can see a new rat horror film in the making:

A rat is impressing American scientists with her extraordinary intellect.

Hobbie-J has been dubbed the smartest rat in the world after its NR2B gene, which controls memory, was boosted as an embryo. The rodent can remember objects three times as long as its smartest peers and can better solve complicated puzzles like mazes.

Andrew's (and other skeptic's) problem

Poor old Nick Minchin, and any other skeptical mates from South Australia.

It is, shall we say, not a good look to be jumping up and down about the "craziness" of any type of global warming action when your own State is undergoing a record breaking heat wave in a season not previously recognized as usually being exceptionally hot at all. Minchin has shot himself in the foot in the most spectacular way possible. His criticism yesterday seemed to be against any CPRS legislation going through before Copenhagen, which of itself is not an unreasonable point. But he can't expect to be taken seriously on any point about global warming now due to his self-outing as one who believes it's all a socialist conspiracy. (That and the fact his State is melting in spring, let alone summer.)

And poor old Andrew Bolt. He's getting upset that the Liberals like Tony Abbott, who seems to want to be a skeptic but can't quite bring himself up to the level of Minchin paranoia, just aren't studying his column enough to be able to use dubious skeptical arguments against Tony Jones.

I stick to my belief that Bolt has boxed himself in on this issue years ago, finding a contrarian approach successful in terms of drawing ardent followers to his blog, but now to admit he might be wrong would just cause too much loss of face.

It has long been hard to believe that he genuinely thinks that some of the graphs he posts again and again (most notably, the UAH monthly temperature anomaly graph since 1979) convinces your average punter that there isn't a long term trend to be seen. (Even ignoring 1998, run a line across the peaks over that period.)

His favourite skeptic blog - Watts up With That - does (occasionally) run posts which indicate AGW modelling is right, or indicating a skeptical argument might be wrong, but Andrew rarely (never?) mentions those posts. But he will mention posts such as the one about the degree of skepticism amongst TV weather presenters, as if it matters. Or posts claiming to cite hundreds of "skeptical" peer reviewed papers, when many of them are not skeptical at all, and a large chunk are from a publication (Energy and Environment) that no one with science credibility takes seriously.

No, if this summer goes as bad as this spring is indicating, Andrew will just start have to consider admitting that he might just be wrong, loss of face or not.

UPDATE: this appears to confirm my strong suspicion that for the Coalition to follow Bolt's urgings and embrace AGW skepticism would be electoral suicide.

Again, that's not to say that they could not have made out a good case for not passing the CPRS at the moment, but they can't credibly do it when they have a divided house over the grounds upon which they may wish to do it.

Thus, by gee-ing on the AGW skeptics, Andrew Bolt has inadvertently hurt his own cause.

But to be fair - by convincing some that the CPRS will actually work anywhere near fast enough, and by their evident complete lack of interest in taking nuclear power for Australia seriously, there is a strong argument that Kevin Rudd and the Labor Party is the more dangerous enemy of effective CO2 action.

It's a case of virtually everyone being wrong, for a kaleidoscope of reasons.

Don't forget to "celebrate"...

World Toilet Day | November 19, 2009

(Sounds funny, but actually quite a worthy subject. I kind of wish that their big demonstration was something other than "The Big Squat" though.)

Darwinian thoughts

Charles Darwin and the children of the evolution - Times Online

This article is a pretty interesting discussion of the use/abuse of Darwinian ideas by people like teenage psychopaths, eugenics advocates and others. (Did you know know that the Columbine school murderers thought they were engaged in the Darwinian process of natural selection, as did a Finnish teenage killer and some wannabe killers? No, nor did I.)

The writer also notes that Darwin himself wrote in terms that would, today, be seen (at least) as politically incorrect:

Darwin looked forward to a time when Europeans and Americans would exterminate those he termed “savages”. Many of the anthropomorphous apes would also be wiped out, he predicted, and the break between man and beast would then occur “between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon; instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla”. He took a sanguine view of genocide, believing it to be imminent and inevitable. “Looking to the world at no very distant date,” he wrote to a friend in 1881, “what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.”

All very interesting, and (I assume) kind of annoying to Richard Dawkins.

Pebble bed reactors not dead yet

Idaho National Lab Achieves 19% Burn for Nuclear Pebbles

This post talks about the work on nuclear fuel pebbles which would be used in pebble bed reactors. China is ploughing ahead with the development of modular pebble bed reactors, apparently. (I wonder if South Africa will miss out on the market if they can't get their act together.)

Of course, I have been arguing for ages that this is exactly the type of technology that it would seem needs direct, Western government support to develop, and monies raised by a carbon tax would seem an ideal way to do that. Instead, we'll stuff around paying other countries for dubious offsets, establish a new way for suits to make money by trading mere bits of paper, and set targets regardless of lack of plausible ways to reach them without heavy government investment in new technology.

Hmph.

If the New York Times reads it this way

Under Friendly Veneer, China Pushes Back on Obama

then it's probably true.

McKee reviewed

Jason Zinoman on Robert Mckee | vanityfair.com

Jason Zinoman, who has a particular interest in horror films, reports on his attendance at a screenwriters seminar held by the famous screenwriting teacher Robert McKee.

McKee comes across as a bit of a jerk who wings it on browbeating self-confidence. Here's Jason's summary of how to replicate McKee's technique:

Rule One: Drop names shamelessly. McKee tells us that he once received a doctor recommendation from his friend John Cleese, bummed a cigarette from Toni Morrison, and corrected his pal Paul Haggis when he confused two genres over lunch. But my favorite is his anecdote about telling Stephen Hawking (whom he calls “Hawkings”) that he has never read a book by the scientist but is fascinated by the Big Bang. I imagine Hawking rolling quickly away.

Rule Two: Never express a scintilla of doubt. McKee is insightful about some things, especially with regard to structure, but his relative knowledge or ignorance of a subject in no way affects the manner in which he discusses it. He holds forth on politics (“Terrorism is a police problem and that’s all it is”) and the theater (“there is very little crime drama onstage”) as confidently as he does on the Incitement Incident.

Rule Three: Start in a rage and end with poetry. In Adaptation, a wildly imaginative movie that first sends up, then celebrates, and ultimately condescends to McKee, the teacher advises the screenwriter that any flawed movie can be saved with a “big finish.”

I wonder if McKee can explain the relative dearth of good movie ideas coming out of Hollywood for the last 5 to 10 years.

The calming light

More Tokyo train stations start using lights to stem suicides

This sounds very improbable:

Alarmed by a rise in people jumping to their deaths in front of trains, some Japanese railway operators are installing special blue lights above station platforms they hope will have a soothing effect and reduce suicides.

As of November, East Japan Railway Co has put blue light-emitting diode, or LED, lights in all 29 stations on Tokyo’s central train loop, the Yamanote Line, used by 8 million passengers each day.

There’s no scientific proof that the lights actually reduce suicides, and some experts are skeptical it will have any effect. But others say blue does have a calming effect on people.

Sadly, suicide is still a popular response to difficult times in Japan, although I bet everyone wishes people would choose a less public method:

Suicide rates in Japan have risen this year amid economic woes, and could surpass the record 34,427 deaths in 2003.

Last year, nearly 2,000 people committed suicide in Japan by jumping in front of a train, about 6 percent of such deaths nationwide.

Watching the sun

It was the Sun wot done it. Or was it? | Stuart Clark - Times Online

This reads as a reasonable summary on the controversy over the possible role of the sun on earth's temperature (via cosmic rays and the sun's magnetic cycle.)

The last paragraphs are important:

The smart money is on the level of solar contribution being somewhere between the two extremes. In other words, both solar activity and industrial gases play a role. There is credible scientific work that ascribes up to a third of current warming to solar influence. Studies show that the Earth’s temperature mirrored solar activity until the 1980s. Then the number of sunspots stabilised but the temperature continued to rise. In other words, something overtook the Sun as the primary driver of the Earth’s temperature. That is generally thought to be industrial gases.

Now the test can be made. It is time for all sides to put away the rivalry and begin to work together. Observations must be made, experiments performed and all data must be published, not cherry-picked. This golden opportunity to reach consensus must not be squandered.

Above all, we must not let any downturn in temperatures be used as an excuse by reluctant nations to wriggle out of pollution controls. Just as certainly as the solar activity has gone away, so it will return. If we have done nothing in the interim to curb man-made global warming, we will be in worse trouble than ever.

Conan's vampire

Conan O'Brien's emo teenage vampire segments are pretty funny:

Having already read all my usual sources of news and science, I hereby declare myself Officially Uninspired to post today.

Plastics and masculinity

Pilot study relates phthalate exposure to less-masculine play by boys | Eureka! Science News

Junk movie science

Observations: In 2012 , neutrinos melt the earth's core, and other disasters

Scientific American looks at the "science" of 2012.

As I don't like Roland Emmerich movies, I am not inclined to see it. On the upside, now that he has done the "ultimate" in end of the world destruction flicks, maybe he can't think of anything else to film?

Might still be a desert

Lcross Mission Finds Water on Moon, NASA Scientists Say - NYTimes.com

Of course I am pleased that the Lcross mission found some water, but it is still quite uncertain as to what it means in terms of readily use-able quantities:

Even though the signs of water were clear and definitive, the Moon is far from wet. The Cabeus soil could still turn out to be drier than that in deserts on Earth. But Dr. Colaprete also said that he expected that the 26 gallons were a lower limit and that it was too early to estimate the concentration of water in the soil.

Well, they'll just have to send some astronauts there to check it out.

Astro Boy - go see

I dawdled about getting the kids to agree to take me to see Astro Boy, but I shouldn't have. I really enjoyed it, as did they, and it's a pity the movie has been pretty much a box office failure. (Releasing it outside of school holidays might just have something to do with that, though.)

How could I not like a cartoon which makes jokes about Descartes and other philosophers (when did you last see an animated film which shows us a copy of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason"?); features a comedy trio of robot liberationists who have posters featuring Trotsky and Lenin in their hideout; and deals with the deep issue that was really the major theme of 1980's TV Astro boy - whether robots which act, think and feel like humans should actually be deemed to be human.

Some American reviewers thought it too politicised, but I am sensitive to such things and really did not find it objectionable.*

The arc of the story was, I thought, very satisfying, providing even an explanation as to why Astroboy, built as a replacement for a real boy, should have been provided with weaponry. It is a fine screenplay for such an entertainment, I reckon.

There really wasn't anything I disliked about it. Yes, it reminds you of some other animated and science fiction films, but in some cases, I would say that TV Astro boy dealt with those issues before the movies which then are reflected in this one. (Particularly when you think of the fighting robots of Spielberg's AI, and a similar scenario in Astro boy.)

It has nearly finished its cinema run here; and Tim Train, the only reader of this blog who might possibly be persuaded by this post, you should go see it.

* Update: If you thought the evil President wanting re-election by waging war was inspired by Bush, even though he doesn't look or sound like him, you at least have it balanced by the communist inspired robots who are ideologically sound but very inept. In fact, it is slightly curious that the film is doing well in China, which I thought might be a bit sensitive about that subplot.

Pig smarts

In Pig Cognition Studies, Reflections on Parallels With Humans

Pigs can understand mirrors. Pity (for them) they taste so good.

Strange science for the weekend

An experimentally testable proof of the discreteness of time

Doesn't sound completely loopy to me.

The gathering of the anti-Devenys

Yay, what a good way to start a Saturday. There's an anti-Deveny column by Tom Hyland in The Age, taking apart one of her recent columns which I missed. This is followed by a couple of hundred comments, nearly all of which agree with Tom. Some of the comments I like:

About the only thing you forgot to mention about Deveny is how she manages to combine screeching obnoxiousness with hair tossing smugness, to the detriment of all our digestion...

Catherine Deveny is the Pauline Hanson of the intelligent left. A complete embarrassment of flippant stereotypical arrogance based on pseudo analysis...

I have no problem with undergraduate humour, and when I first read her comments I thought she was a junior writer, but at her age it's just embarrassing.

Hmm. I can't find the comment now that said reading her provoked as many laughs as Schindler's List.

That's apt, because it's related to the reason I actually find her disturbing: she doesn't recognise that she's increasingly portraying people who aren't like her as not fully human.

I just tried to post a comment to that effect, but The Age's computer seems to be overloaded at the moment (I trust it's with people venting about Deveny.)