Colby says:
…don’t ever ask me whether I’m loyal to Alberta or to Canada if you think you might not like the answer.
I’d vote for you, man, but I’m no citizen of Alberta. Yet.
On the subject of which: is there anyone other than me who thinks Alberta should be spending their petrodollars on defense? Maintenance of economic disparity comes out of the barrel of a gun, or something like that.
The US has released oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That’s a pretty big deal, but it’s things like this which it’s for.
The damage estimates are large, 10B+, despite this not being a worst-case scenario for New Orleans. One interesting question is who will end up paying for them in the end. The US taxpayers in the form of the federal government and the large reinsurers such as Warren Buffett will be first hit. However, I can easily imagine plaintiffs connecting this hurricane to global warming and suing large GHG emitters and carbon extractors. Although the evidence connecting anthopogenic climate change and extreme weather is not 100% certain, it could well be enough to convince the same jury that convicted Merck on Vioxx, or Dow on silicone breast implants. This will be an interesting area of law for the next few decades, and the difficulties of the science and the amount of money on both sides should ensure lucrative careers for all the lawyers.
I remember hearing about a comment from some (generally skeptical) Arkansas physics professor, along the lines of “global warming just means you have 100 years to move to higher ground”. Maybe this is how it begins.
Okay, where were we. MM03, the McIntyre and McKitrick critique of the MBH98 “hockey stick” paleoclimate reconstruction, gets dramatically different results with what I called a “reasonable approach” to what’s supposed to be the same data. That’s not quite accurate: MM03 is not presenting an alternative calculation to MBH98, and arguing that it is more appropriate than MBH98’s, it is instead supposed to be the same calculation, albeit with calculation errors corrected. So it repeats the same calculation, on the same data, fixes some errors in the calculation and data found along the way, and gets a dramatically different result. What do the original authors have to say about that?
It’s clear there are some, ahem, interesting personalities involved in this little spat. I’m going to do my best to avoid paying attention to personalities, he-said-she-said, details of journal interactions, Senate subcommittees, etc. It also seems clear that, whatever particular resolution of the technical matters at hand, it won’t have much of an impact on what scientists believe about climate change. There’s too large a body of knowledge, built up over the last century, along too many different directions, for any one study to dramatically affect the big picture. I’m not going to bother with that, I’ll just focus on the technical aspects of this one little picture.
I mean professionally competent ones, of course. See, I got sucked into this exchange over at Commons Blog, about what seemed like a skeptic being forced off a government climate change panel. As it turns out, the guy who resigned, Roger Pielke Sr. of Colorado State, is not a skeptic, at least not in the “doubts anthropogenic global warming” sense. But surfing around, I did manage to find some skeptics. And one pair of Canadians, McIntyre and McKitrick, have made enough noise to get noticed by the scientists, and even managed to get their work published in peer reviewed journals.
I know that not everyone feels this way, but for me, peer review is important. Getting past an editor and the peer reviewers implies a certain amount of basic persistence and coherence, and separates the iconoclasts who might have a point from the mere cranks. Now I’ll admit, Energy and the Environment, the journal which published two of McIntyre and McKitrick’s three contributions to the literature, seems to be pretty far out there. The same issue that the original MM2003 critique appears also has a contribution titled “Supernovae Have Influenced Earth’s Climate: Study Leads to Reduced Effects from CO2″ from some physics-challenged correspondent. (I’d guess the effect of space aliens and the Flying Spaghetti Monster is left to future work.) Still, they do have a paper accepted in Geophysical Research Letters, which sounds like a reputable journal to me, and what with concerns over a single graph (the so-called “hockey stick”) forming the basis of what little remains of climate change skepticism, I thought it might be interesting to have a look.
The mainstream POV is represented in the blog world by RealClimate.org, a site put together by a number of professional climatologists for the specific purpose of explaining climate research and responding to misstatements and misunderstandings. RealClimate has a number of posts on McIntyre and Mckitrick’s critiques. McIntyre has a number of sites, of which I’ve looked at the blog Climate Audit and Climate2003, which has useful links to lots of the original papers.
My goal is to attempt a sympathetic look at the critique. I know little about climate science (the domain of the original authors), nor about mining and economics (the expertise of the critics), nor am I an expert on statistics (the apparent area of disagreement), but then, as far as I can tell, no professional statisticians have been consulted on either side, so I won’t let that dissuade me. It doesn’t seem to bother anyone else involved in the discussion. We’ll see how it goes.
The NY Times Magazine has an article about the latest pessimist concerned about Saudi’s ability to pump as much oil as the world wants. And some beautiful photographs, too. If the pessimists are right, prices will go even higher; at some point, fossil fuels will look like the expensive choice. While shopping yesterday, I checked out the price of biodiesel, as sold in the supermarket. Pure canola oil, suitable for human consumption, $1.12/liter in a 16 liter box. That’s not that far from gas around here. I know it’s not a fair comparison, because fuel has taxes that food oils don’t, and diesel is a little cheaper than gasoline, and the canola was likely grown with fuels bought last year at cheaper prices, and using straight vegetable oil in a diesel engine requires either some engine modifications or some chemistry and a methanol feedstock, but still — notice I’m making excuses for the fossil fuel! There were also gas lines at the gas station in front, something I haven’t seen since my youth in California. I guess the store’s incentives were good enough that people thought queueing was worth it rather than going to the empty gas station across the street. It wasn’t a long line, and it was gone by the time we went home, but wow, gas lines.
Another Shuttle mission, another NASA comission. Colby seems most impressed with the failure to heed the Columbia Accident Investigation Board’s comments about PowerPoint. Me, I dunno. You can produce poor engineering on a typewriter just as well as a computer screen. The day this latest mission was launched, I read a quote from a NASA flack crowing over the achievement of launching, while following all the recommendations of CAIB, particularly the “reforming our culture” part. This seemed nonsensical to me. How do you reform a culture? And how do you tell if it’s reformed? And indeed, it seems that the culture remains unreformed.
No, the part that struck me was the section (the minority report is Appendix A.2, starting on page 188) labelled “Requirements”. You gotta know why you’re there, everything else — risk acceptance, engineering tradeoffs, etc., flows from that. This section reads like a discussion of organizational processes and documentation systems, but it’s really a discussion of the soul of American space flight. And the fundamental problem is that there is no articulated mission, at least not one that the folks who are supposed to carry it out can understand. It’s as if, on some level, NASA management actually accepts that the whole Shuttle program has been a stupid waste of time, money, and American lives.
The best essay I’ve yet seen on same-sex marriage. (Props Pinole Creek.)
Quiet streets, big houses. Blue sky, crystal sands and azure sea. Safe — people leave their doors unlocked at night, and their children play together. Mostly religious, yes, but accepting of the secular among them. And a very strong sense of community, of building something together, building something larger than yourself, and important.
Yes, the Israeli settlements. Paint it like this, and I too would have to be dragged away, kicking and screaming.
Displayed gas prices broke into four digits here yesterday. The one station that posts the actual price was okay, as were the few stations which had forseen the need to upgrade their signage (was this really a surprise?), but most displayed no price or “02.9″.
Some people say the world will run out of oil and we’ll all have to walk, but it won’t happen that way. It’ll just get more expensive. Gas will no longer be sold at pumps, and will instead come in 50 ml hand-milled crystal bottles, with faux French names painted in gold on the velvet-lined oak gift box. Something like:
L’essence de la terroir, by Yves St. Laurent. Only the finest blend of natural fossil hydrocarbons, extracted from the rich rock beneath the sands of Kirkuk. Energy-rich, with a perfect balance of sweet and sour notes, this 90 octane fuel is suffussed with the beauty of sunshine on ancient seas. Suitable as a premium solvent, a traction motor fuel for your finest vehicles or for tasting on its own. Contains less than 5% ethanol fillers. Return for deposit where required by law. Not tested on animals. Copyright 2012 ExxOOCToTexaconBP