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?

They don't think much of it, not surprisingly. They don't bother to submit the response anywhere, just drop it on their FTP site. Apparently they don't think anyone important reads Energy and Environment. The main observation in the note is that MM03 unwittingly omits most of the early data which allows 16th century and earlier reconstruction, and doesn't catch the error because MM03 doesn't do any cross-validation. Ouch! It is quite embarassing to have the principal feature of your reanalysis be "leaving data out", and worse yet to have this pointed out by the people you were trying to critique in the first place. But embarassment is not determinative, and MBH98 can also be seen as embarassed due to the data not quite matching up with what was reported in the original Supplementary Information. So let's set embarassment aside and continue.

Perhaps McIntyre and McKitrick do not agree that they left data out, and stick by their original claim that the differences are due to corrections of data and calculations? No, peeking ahead at their response to the unpublished note (which they submitted to Nature!), they accept that the difference is in the deleted data, and (armed now with the knowledge, provided by the unpublished note of MBH, of what data they deleted) begin to critique the quality of the deleted data series. So everyone agrees it's the data.

What about the calculations? The story about the calculations is very interesting. MM03 write: "the MBH98 principal components fail to maximize explained variances". Since a principal component maximizes explained variance by definition, it's difficult to understand what could be going on here. Perhaps the authors of MBH98 have no idea what a principal component is? Could be, but unlikely they'd base their paper on it then. Did they roll their own PC calculations, screwed up somewhere, and didn't bother testing? Perhaps, but given the number of PC implementations available, it seems like an odd choice. Did they use a well-tested PC code, which turned out to have a bug? Unlikely, but it's happened before: the singular value decomposition routine (which actually forms the core of a PC calculation) in the generally high quality, heavily used, and even open code package Numerical Recipes had a subtle bug for a number of years. Could a communication failure have occured, such that what MM03 is running principal components on is not the same as what MBH98 is running principal components on? It seems within the realm of possibility. One can have many interpretations of a communication failure ("you didn't adequately disclose", says he; "you didn't bother to read the paper", says she), but the failure to communicate is objective.

Among these many possibilities, how does MM03 determine what happened and resolve the discrepancy? It doesn't: it just "corrects" the problem, moves on, and when the final result differs from the original paper, concludes that the original result is erroneous. An interesting attitude, to be sure. I think I haven't heard the last about the calculations.

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.

The subject is recent paleoclimate, the reconstruction of the Earth's temperature over the past few hundred years. The paper in question is MBH98 (plus a Corrigendum), an article in Nature doing a reconstruction from 1400 through 1995, which concluded that recent years are really quite warm, and pins the cause to CO2 forcing. It's not the first study of paleoclimate, nor the last, and not necessarily even the best (see here for a few others, links to review articles, etc., and the 10 Feb 2005 issue of Nature for yet another reconstruction), but it seems to be the first big study doing a spatially resolved high resolution reconstruction of the recent climate, with an interesting important conclusion, which is how you get into Nature in the first place.

The first response to MBH98 is MM03 (Supplementary Info), published at Energy and Environment, which I found at this interesting overview of various climate contrarians. MBH have an unpublished answer. Climate2003 also makes available a couple of failed attempts at getting a comment into Nature, with one answer from MBH. The latest are MM05a (another E&E article), and MM05b, to appear in GRL, also available from Climate2003.

MM03 spends a great deal of time on data management issues, and receive credit in the MBH98 corrigendum. This stuff matters a lot if you're trying to redo the calculations, or suspect bias (or fraud!). They identify and attempt to correct various problems with the data they are working with, and also redo the calculations in a different manner. After these changes to the data and procedures, they end up with substantially different results from MBH98, particularly earlier than the 16th century. Their result is much warmer, in contradiction to MBH98's conclusion. MM03 ascribes the difference to general data errors (miscopying, truncation, outdated) and incorrect principal component calculations. MM03 does not appear to ever succeed in fully reproducing the MBH98 calculations, does not appear to attempt cross-validation and verification (which takes up a good deal of the space in MBH98), nor do they attempt correlation with climate forcings. Still, it looks quite worrying: a reasonable-sounding approach to what ought to be the same data gives a dramatically different answer.

Enough for the moment, more later.

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

The Commons Blog is a bastion of free market environmentalism: let's protect Mother Earth, by ensuring strict property rights, functioning free markets, etc., complete with links to Cato Institute reports and Michael Crichton novels (which, by being nominally fictional, can tell the real truth while avoiding the incestuous nature of the peer reviewed literature). And you know, I have to admit, I'm all over this, I love markets, and share the basic value of distrust of government. It's very difficult for legislators to make correct evaluations of technologies, trade off costs and benefits and who benefits and suffers. So privatization as a means of environmental protection is very appealing to me.

But not just for the environment. National security is another area ripe for privatization. Sure, the tools used in national defence have been produced by industry for some time (can you say, "military-industrial complex"? I knew you could). And, in the current situation in Iraq, much of the heavy lifting, infantry-wise, has been provided by so-called "contractors". (Salon had a series on these awhile back, or see NYT Magazine.) Still, this is all private industry in service of the government. What true privatization of national defense would mean would be to allow markets to determine, not just how to defend, but what to defend. How much should be spent on military prepardness and action? What countries are worth attacking? Does it depend on the amount of natural resources, weapons of mass destruction, or whether the dictator might go over to the dark side? What are the costs, and what are the benefits? Let the markets decide. Perhaps a system like the privateers of old might work, still regulated by government, but with allocations of resources determined by the Invisible Hand. I think free markets could work just as well for protecting the homeland security-wise as environment-wise.

So I was cruising through EUB Decision 2002-014, the simply fascinating regulatory approval for the Keephills expansion, and I noticed an interesting thing. As a condition of operation, Transalta is required to purchase carbon offsets equivalent to the difference from a combined-cycle natural gas facility of the same capacity, or whatever new standards require, for the life of facility, 30+ years. That's a big effin' deal. First of all, if you believe in the whole offset business (and the EUB won't take either Transalta's or Alberta Environment's word for it, they have to get a third party audit), it cuts about 63% off the GHG emissions. So now the electric bike wins easily, as long as I don't pedal too hard. (I still want a motorcycle. Vroom vroom.) But it's also a big change from the financial side too. Building a fossil plant is a risk. It's a bit cheaper today than a renewable plant, but you have to accept the risks of what the fuel is going to cost in the future. You pay your money, you make your choices, and you try to build a diversified portfolio, but still, prices may go up or down. (If you own the coal mine, the risk is hedged, but it's still there.) What committing to offsets does is add a whole new class of risk: carbon offset price fluctuations. Sure, they are cheap today, but you just promised to buy millions of tons a year, for decades into the future. What's more, at least with coal, there's hundreds of years of experience in how the prices fluctuate. With offsets, the market is totally new, and the scientists haven't even totally decided what offsets count yet, much less figured out how to pass the issue on to the accountants. Can you say price uncertainty? European carbon went from 5 EUR/ton to over 30, in less than six months. What will carbon cost in 2035? I don't know, but Transalta shareholders are going to find out.

Live octopus tentacle. Fabulous. Watch the video. (Props Pharyngula.)

I've been playing with Google Maps recently. Driving not long ago, my wife wanted to check out Lake Wabamun for possible camping/picnic spots, so we took a detour. We didn't find any, but did find something more interesting: a decent roadside tour of where our power comes from. Here's a nice view of Lake Wabamun, and the Highvale mine, the largest coal mine in Canada, which provides coal for the Sundance and Keephills generators. The big blue thing is the cooling pond for the Sundance generator, with the Keephills pond being to the right a bit, kind of jellyfish shaped with the plant itself at the end of the one tentacle.

Keephills is the newest one, 766 MW net capacity, burning 3.2 Mt of coal/yr. That works out to 7.5 MJ/kg coal. Sundance is larger, 2020 MW, 6 units (boiler, turbine, and generator), three stacks, 9Mt/yr of coal (7 MJ/kg coal). A typical heating value for subbituminous coal, the kind mined at Highvale, is 20-21 MJ/kg, and the newest units at Keephills are supposed to be something like 38% efficient, so these numbers make sense. Since a kWh is 3.6 MJ, it takes about 0.5 kg C to make one, releasing 1.8 kg CO2. So that's about how much CO2 my electric power releases.

I can now, at long last, work out the GHG emissions due to my ebike. A full charge contains 24 V * 12 A-h = 0.288 kWh, * 1.8 kg CO2/kWh = 0.52 kg CO2, and using a 20 km range, this works out to 26 g CO2 / km. This may be an optimistic number: I've only tried going a full round trip of 20 km a couple of times, and the second time the bike left me pedalling myself a km or so from home. Also, it doesn't take into account the pedalling work I'm putting in (substantial), charger efficiency (pretty good in general, but my particularly old-fashioned charger could be as bad as 50%), transmission losses from the plant (probably just a few percent), or the fact that the average power I'm consuming may not be as efficiently generated as the newest generator installed at the local plant. Still, it's workable as a rough best case. For comparison, a Smart fortwo emits 90 g CO2/ km (Chrysler spec), and my car emits about 180 g CO2/km (at 8.0 liters gas / 100 km and 2.2 kg CO2/liter gas, computed assuming gas is pure octane). So, best case, we're reducing GHG, definitely by some, likely by a factor of 3 to 7, and certainly less than 10. In my understanding, ten-fold is the important target. Ten-fold reductions would allow India and China to develop to first world lifestyles while moderating anthropogenic climate impact enough to matter. The real story here is how hard 10x is to achieve, even in nearly ideal circumstances (short commute, beautiful weather, committed participant). In other words, get ready for a warmer planet.

The thing is, an ICE scooter would probably do as well, be more fun, and get me to work faster. One number I found on a 50 cc four-stroke says 1.3 l/100 km, which means 29 g CO2/km, in the ball-park of the coal-powered bicycle. Of course, any gasoline consumption still funds global terrorism, and pollution emissions per km from small ICEs like scooters tend to exceed (by a lot!) even large modern cars, so there are some tradeoffs. Not to mention my wife might classify them as a motorcycle.

Nice article from NYT. In a sense, turning wine analysis into LC/MS based optimization is the obvious thing to do, once wine has already been reduced to a single-axis, 100 point score.


The thing is, as a consumer, I do feel a need for this kind of thing. I bought some wine yesterday, and despite having a little interest, and despite the vastly reduced variety available at my local liquor store, I still felt baffled. I read somewhere that there are estimated to be somewhere between 13,000 and 15,000 brands of wine available on the US market. That's too many. Choice is good, but studies of satisfaction show that people like around 3-5 choices, not 15,000. The rest is just noise. Ditto for microbrews, but at least in beer, people know they're primarily purchasing a funky label. Collect the whole set.

1. Intent on disrupting your morning commute
2. Sleeps a lot (could be member of so-called "sleeper" cell)
3. Shows interest in bomb-making supplies such as acetone, sulphuric acid, or Kitty Litter
4. Goes out for hours late at night; on returning is not forthcoming about where he went, who he met, or what they were doing
5. Grows facial hair; foregos alcohol, tobacco, and coffee as prescribed in Koran

I found a wind energy calculator to help you assess whether or not to install a turbine on your property, based on a Canadian wind atlas, plus lots of other stuff. I plugged in my postal code, and found out that my region rates as "Good" (a 3 on a six point scale). Fantastic! I'd love some free power. So, what exactly does "good" mean?

Based on my consumption, in my postal code, the calculator recommended 4 1kW generators, each on a 19m pole. Neighbors are gonna love that. But hey, maybe they like green power too, and won't be concerned by the bird kill.

Installation cost, including hardware and labor, is estimated at $25k. More than I have in my wallet, but that's okay, maybe we can finance it. It takes money to make money, and the power is free, right? So what the ROI, or, in terms the efficiency types like, the payback on that puppy? The calculator knows how much power costs here, so it can work all that out.

The answer is (drumroll please): 91 years. No typo, ninety-one. I'll be dead, and probably my kids too, and no doubt my house will have been gone for decades before it pays off. Oh yeah, not to mention the turbine itself, which has only a 25 year life expectancy.

Unless, of course, you include financing costs. Or required maintainence and overhauls. Maintenence and overhauls, by itself, costs twice as much as the power its generating. Even if the system were entirely free, and sitting in my backyard tomorrow, it couldn't pay for its own maintenance!

So this is what it's like to live in a "good" spot for wind power. I'd hate to see the numbers for "mediocre".

Get a plot for your next novel, or hack it up as a perl script and hope for fame.

The biggest risk to (class of entity) in (location) is due to (peril), and can only be avoided by (remedy).

Here are some lists to get you started on the first three. The remedies, I can't help you with.

{life | life on this planet | human life on this planet | endangered
species | human health and happiness | political stability |
business/economy | my job | my health }

{the Universe at large | this planet | my nation | my town | my
family | my head}

{war (conventional) | war (nuclear) | tribal strife | terrorism |
crime | corruption | resource exhaustion (oil) | resource exhaustion
(fossil fuel) | resource exhaustion (water) | resource exhaustion
(tantalum) | erosion | desertification | soil salinification | ocean
desalinification | climate change (global) | climate change (local) |
nuclear winter | fishery collapse | currency collapse | the
Republicans | the Democrats | the Internet | AI | nanotechnology run
amok | GM crops | BSE | avian flu | pollution (air) | pollution
(water) | religion | atheism | overpopulation | television | meteor
impact | extinctions of large predators | surfeits of large predators}