RCimT: Science roundup 10/05/2011

Another bunch of science links from the last two weeks to get your brain meats working. Which is the coolest? Which is the most promising? Which makes you violate Occam’s Razor to explain? Which sets your skeptic-sense tingling? Which should, conceivably, convert me to your specific religion?

There are no right or wrong answers. Well, there are stupid answers, of course. Which I wholeheartedly encourage!
Continue reading “RCimT: Science roundup 10/05/2011”

RCimT: Science roundup 10/05/2011
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The death spiral is steeper than we thought

Nicked from Pharyngula. The IPCC was wrong in being too conservative. I’d take this moment to point out that the denialists are empirically wrong on yet another point, but I’m too busy despairing.

The interconnectedness of all things is amazing, but daunting. We have so much responsibility vested in us by nature, by making it to the top of the food chain, and we’re probably the most irresponsible species on the planet. Either we grow up right now, or we die as a species and take much of the rest of the planet with us.

The death spiral is steeper than we thought

The packaging and selling of doubt about scientific knowledge

DOUBT from The Climate Reality Project on Vimeo.

Once the folks peddling the products we discovered to be dangerous realized they didn’t need to actually DISPROVE the science, but to rather generate UNFOUNDED DOUBT about it, that’s when we started losing ground in defending reality against vested interests.

The packaging and selling of doubt about scientific knowledge

Climate noise amplification

Ever notice that once in a while, when observing scientific matters, you have a signal to noise problem that’s really difficult to overcome?

I’m not talking about the actual problems of signal-to-noise in building studies, especially out of short and uncorrelated pieces of data. I’m talking about the amplification that goes on in the denialist quarters of the blogosphere, picking up on phrasings or terms of trade that happen to be easy to misconstrue into a soundbite “club” to beat layfolk over the head with. This happens in pretty much every field of study, but never to the extent or effectiveness seen in the field of climatology.

Take, for instance, Phil Jones’ interview with the BBC, from which an intentional misunderstanding of the concept of statistical significance by a question sent in by a climate skeptic entrapped Jones into saying something technically correct but easily misconstrued.
Continue reading “Climate noise amplification”

Climate noise amplification

Kirkby on cosmic rays and climate change

I’m posting this specifically for Klem, if he’s still reading. He asked that the cosmic ray forcing hypothesis be convincingly rebutted before he’d start taking the science proving climate change seriously. Well, since the hypothesis is predicated on Jasper Kirkby’s work, perhaps his words will help tip the scales. Kirkby built a damn fine experiment to try to measure how cosmic rays help create ionizing particles. Too bad it’s been misconstrued as feeding the denialists’ anti-reality predilections.

“People are far too polarized”, he says. No kidding. They’re polarized enough to completely get the results wrong. Climate Crock of the Week explains the study and how it pretty much shows that cosmic rays don’t account for the amount of forcing we see.

Kirkby on cosmic rays and climate change

This can only end in cruel and unusual punishment.

Via Mother Jones:

“We are not evacuating Rikers Island,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a news conference Friday. Bloomberg annouced a host of extreme measures being taken by New York City in preparation for the arrival of Hurricane Irene, including a shutdown of the public transit system and the unprecedented mandatory evacuation of some 250,000 people from low-lying areas. But in response to a reporter’s question, the mayor stated in no uncertain terms (and with a hint of annoyance) that one group of New Yorkers on vulnerable ground will be staying put.

New York City is surrounded by small islands and barrier beaches, and a glance at the city’s evacuation map reveals all of them to be in Zone A (already under a mandatory evacuation order) or Zone B–all, that is, save one. Rikers Island, which lies in the waters between Queens and the Bronx, is not highlighted at all, meaning it is not to be evacuated under any circumstances.

According to the New York City Department of Correction’s website, more than three-quarters of Rikers Island’s 400 acres are built on landfill–which is generally thought to be more vulnerable to natural disasters. Its 10 jails have a capacity of close to 17,000 inmates, and normally house at least 12,000, including juveniles and large numbers of prisoners with mental illness—not to mention pretrial detainees who have yet to be convicted of any crime. There are also hundreds of corrections officers at work on the island.

Read more. And remember what happened at Orleans Parish during Katrina.

Update: Compounding this questionable decision is this warning regarding potential electrical shutdowns throughout New York.

This can only end in cruel and unusual punishment.

Fox makes fun of scientists, NASA, and climate realists in one fell swoop

Fox News gets it wrong, on purpose, again. I know, I’m shocked too. They breathlessly title this article Aliens Could Attack Earth to End Global Warming, NASA Scientist Frets — having obviously been edited from “NASA Scientist Claims” (check the URL) because that was insufficient sneering.

First, let’s make this clear — the panel was asked to come up with scenarios why aliens might attack us. They were asked to come up with “neutral”, “unintentional harm” and “intentional harm” scenarios wherein we make first contact with aliens. Among the reasons aliens might decide to attack us are: 1) to enslave us, 2) to eat us, and 3) to strike preemptively before we wreck their shit.

Extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) “could attack and kill us, enslave us, or potentially even eat us. ETI could attack us out of selfishness or out of a more altruistic desire to protect the galaxy from us. We might be a threat to the galaxy just as we are a threat to our home planet,” it warns.

One such scenario is the stuff of many a Hollywood blockbuster, a “standard fight-to-win conflict: a war of the worlds.” But another might resonate more with fans of Al Gore’s documentary film “An Inconvenient truth.”

It speculates that aliens, worried we might inflict the damage done to our own planet on others, might “seek to preemptively destroy our civilization in order to protect other civilizations from us.”

The reason they might clue in to our presence to begin with? Well, we’re kinda in the process of wrecking our own environment, in ways that might be detectable from light years away via the same methods that we’re using right now to figure things out about exoplanets’ atmospheres. The fact that once, we had very little CO2 in the atmosphere, and now we’ve got a lot more (like double!), might be a big old warning flag to these extraterrestrials that something is happening on our planet and it might be worth checking it out. They might realize that we’ve entered the industrial age but haven’t matured past rampant capitalism, and that has arrested our ability to actually do something about having destroyed our only life support system. They might well be concerned that we’re spacefaring, and that we might spread our self-destructive habits to other niches in the cosmic neighborhood, maybe even threatening their own planet with our backward and self-centered ways.

But the scientists were asked to come up with sci-fi scenarios why they might attack us. This ain’t “oh those crazy liberals think we’d better stop that imaginary global warming that Al Gore invented or else some aliens will wipe us out”. This ain’t about the conservative ideals of profit-first, sustainability-never. This is speculation based on a specific request made of these scientists and it’s not all that far-fetched given that our own level of technology allows us to determine things about planets that are hundreds of light years away that might just tip us off that something big was changing on those planets too. This is barely science fiction. And yet Fox News takes the opportunity to craft the perfect headline, the one that’ll make sure us crazy liberals are laughed at for our crazy ideas.

There’s nothing objectionable about the study you’re sneering so hard at, Fox. I’d advise you stop sneering soon or your collective faces might freeze like that.

Fox makes fun of scientists, NASA, and climate realists in one fell swoop

RCimT: Climate round-up

Apropos of the topic of discussion for today’s radio show, here’s a roundup of some links related to climate change, plus some other related sciencey bits that I otherwise just wanted to get out of my tabs. Enjoy!

Here’s how climate change was subsumed into the “culture war”. Good overview of how we got to the point where science and anti-science polarized along political lines, and how it’ll backfire on the pro-money and anti-science crowd.

Knowing that bots and hired trolls have all but filled the discourse on other matters, Googling for related topics and astroturfing dissent as though they were legitimately grass-roots, it’s no surprise that climate denialists are employing these same tactics to muddy the discourse.

Some new study came out claiming some ridiculous things about the science proving anthropogenic global warming, and the media is touting this study as “blowing a hole” in the science, calling those people that understand and accept the evidence “alarmists” in the process. Phil Plait rips ’em a new one over this mendacity, and in the process, Learns to Stop Worrying and Love the Ad Hominem in the process. Though I’d argue that since he’s also showing why they’re wrong, what he’s doing is simply including a personal attack in the conclusion. You’ll want to click pretty much every one of the links in his post, as the actual debunking mostly happens off-blog.

Like at RealClimate, for example. If you don’t want to go through the links above, at least check that one out.

John Abraham, one of the participants in the Atheists Talk radio show today, had another radio spot recently about climate change that you should check out.

The Koch Brothers, apparently movers-and-shakers in the conservative world, are making a concerted effort to stamp out a wind power generation project in New Jersey. And, of course, disguising it as a grassroots movement.

Mike Haubrich, host of the Atheists Talk show, has a good piece on “Hide the Decline”, those unfortunate terms of trade in the “Climategate” emails. Those emails led to a million false allegations against climate scientists and climate science as a whole due to a simple misunderstanding and a willful ignorance of the truth, even after having it explained a million and one (for good measure) times.

And now that the raw data from the “Climategate” study has been released, and STILL they can’t find any actual wrongdoing or manipulation in the scientists’ processes, I’m sure that’ll evaporate finally! Right?

If we could find some way to keep space debris from smashing it to bits, I’m now convinced space solar is the best path out of this era of fossil fuels and into the next, of renewable resources. Building the arrays and keeping them safe from space junk would be expensive, but no more expensive than, say, three ongoing wars, or the Bush-era tax cuts.

Enjoy the radio show! I’ll be listening live myself, if I can get the stupid feed to work properly this time around. Last time the streaming was glitchy as hell. Here’s to hoping it’s sorted now.

RCimT: Climate round-up

Sagan never said this about climate change, which BTW is STILL HAPPENING.

When science says something potentially damaging to your bottom line, and all the evidence points to the inevitable conclusion that yes, that potentially damaging thing is real and really damaging both to your bottom line and to the fate of human civilization, what’s your first reaction? Naturally, lie like crazy for half a century until your lies pick up enough steam to dupe enough people that you can get away with all sorts of lies, big and small, to protect said bottom line. Yes, at the expense of human civilization. I mean, it’s perfectly okay, since climate change won’t kill everyone until long (or possibly shortly) after you’ve enjoyed the lap of luxury through your declining years!

This is exactly what the Big Lie that scientists “predicted an ice age in the 1970s” was. And given the scope of that big lie, it’s honestly no surprise that the good folks at the Washington Examiner borrowed Sagan’s authority to suggest that this big lie was in fact the truth. And by “borrow” I mean “defecate on”.

While I can’t prove a negative, I would be very skeptical of it unless they’ve got some period documentation. Sagan was at any rate one of the first to worry about global warming. He was a principal architect of the current understanding of Venus, showing that the carbon dioxide in its atmosphere caused it to be much hotter than astronomers of the time had imagined. In my Sagan biography I write (p. 45):

“One day in Berkeley, Carl told Ronald Blum (he had moved west, too) that he was worried about the carbon dioxide in the air. The burning of fuel was creating more carbon dioxide. This would increase the earth’s greenhouse effect and warm the globe with disastrous consequences. At the time, that was an incredible if not crazy thing to say. It could not have been later than 1963.”

This was based on an interview with Ronald Blum, a college friend.

Science historian Spencer Weart also said he had never heard the claim that Sagan called for increased CO2 emissions:

No, I never heard that Carl Sagan, or indeed anyone in the 1970s, endorsed the idea of producing CO2 to forestall an ice age. It’s true that the idea of using CO2 in this way was circulated already early in the 20th century, but anything along those lines would have been speculation about a distant future–few expected a real ice age would come except over the course of centuries or, more likely, millennia.

Not only does the Washington Examiner op-ed revise 1970s history, it also takes liberties with more recent news. The op-ed, titled “Ice age threat should freeze EPA global warming regs,” says astrophysicists recently predicted that because of low sunspot activity, “we may be heading into the next ice age.”

But the scientists who conducted that solar research had a different take: “We are NOT predicting a mini-ice age. We are predicting the behavior of the solar cycle. In my opinion, it is a huge leap from that to an abrupt global cooling, since the connections between solar activity and climate are still very poorly understood.”

Media Matters has more.

There was never a prediction of a global ice age. There were a few non-scientific magazines like Time that got science wrong (as though that doesn’t happen to this very day!), but there was most certainly not any consensus amongst any scientists that we were heading into an ice age, nor would Carl Sagan suggest releasing CO2 to combat a problem that the best science of the day said we weren’t experiencing. That anthropogenic global warming is happening has pretty much been shown to be true since 1956. This is a damnable lie, and anyone in the media willing to lie to further their cause should be fired immediately.

I know, awful naive of me. But then, what do I know? I’m just a “Self appointed web based blogger of nonsense, tosser!”. Which I think means I appointed myself to blog, as well as masturbate to nonsensical pictures.

Mike Haubrich and Greg Laden are going to talk to Kevin Zelnio and John Abraham this Sunday on Minneapolis’ Atheists Talk Radio (that’s right, the radio show I was on once! Good memory, faithful reader!) about climate change. If you’d like, ask them some questions ahead of time.

Sagan never said this about climate change, which BTW is STILL HAPPENING.

RCimT: Climate roundup

When it comes to climate science, it’s best to get your information from climate scientists.

On the one-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster famously not-foretold by Jamie Darkstar of Darkstar Astrology, the US House Republicans have decided to mark the occasion with a new drill-baby-drill campaign. Meanwhile, this past year has all but sealed the deal on the verity of anthropogenic global warming. It’s happening, it’s been happening for decades, we’ve been screaming about it for decades, and nobody fucking cares that we’re driving right off this cliff.

Well, there are some minor victories in the fight, such as Obama’s move to refund the weather satellites that the GOP defunded as an “unnecessary expense”. And Senator Brown’s move to end the taxpayer subsidy of oil companies, who even without these subsidies would have made over a trillion dollars in profits in the last decade, mostly owing to the extreme gouging consumers see at the pumps. We already pretty much know they’re setting their prices to exactly what the market will allow, and if they jack the price up because they lose their taxpayer subsidies then you’ll see the same sort of ratcheting-back of gas consumption that started happening a few years ago. They’ll then lower the price again to keep everyone hooked, to keep everyone from weening themselves off their gas guzzlers.

And as usual, the enemies in this fight are easy to spot. Just look for the people who call necessary spending “wasteful”, and unnecessary corporate socialism handouts sacrosanct. While the Republicans rail on and on about the debt, demanding that “everyone feel the pain” of certain cutbacks, they’re simultaneously the ones giving big tax breaks to the robber barons and taking away the social programs that keep the poor from going bankrupt. The rich do not become rich in a vacuum. Economies thrive when the money is continuously cycled. It’s not about welfare or hand-outs, it’s about preventing the pyramid from being so top-heavy that it collapses. But these same folks are the ones who disbelieve all the science that shows we’re heading off that global warming cliff, so it’s no surprise they don’t care for the reality of economy, preferring instead to worship their “invisible hand” deity.

Oh how I wish I ruled this world. Maybe then some common sense would seep into humankind’s governance for once.

RCimT: Climate roundup