How To Lie With Statistics – Climate Edition

Willis Eschenbach - Keep doing that and you’ll go blind:

… So it is absolutely unsurprising, and totally lacking in statistical significance, that in a comparison with 28 variables, someone would find that temperature is correlated with one of them at a p-value of 0.05. In fact, it is more likely than not that they would find one with a p-value equal to 0.05.

They thought they found something rare, something to beat skeptics over the head with, but it happens three times out of four. That’s what I found so funny. …

[Update] And of course William M. Briggs has written something on the statistical quality of that paper as well.

How To Lie With Statistics – Climate Edition

Wonderful.

Bad Joke

Steve on the latest about the climate policy of the BBC:

…
Several years ago, the BBC stated in a report:

The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus [on anthropogenic climate change].

Tony Newbery (see Harmless Sky blog) was curious as to the identity of these “scientific experts”, and filed a Freedom of Information Act request. Rather than simply complying with the request, the BBC refused the request. Tony appealed to the ICO and lost. The ICO agreed that the BBC was a “public authority” but held that the information was held “for journalistic purposes” and exempt
[…]

Tony appealed to the Information Tribunal. The BBC appeared with six lawyers. BBC official Helen Boaden argued that the meetings had been held under Chatham House rules and that the identity of the participants was therefore secret. Tony was again given short shrift, with the members of the Tribunal being surprisingly partisan, as reported by Orlowski.

Out of left field, Maurizio located the information on the Wayback machine here. Rather than the participants being the “best scientific experts” as claimed, they were almost entirely NGO activists. …

The best of the best of the best, sir.

Unprecedented

Acutally, no. Really, no.

Bloody Bastards – The Full Story

No way Steve McIntyre would leave that without proper comment:

Karoly and Gergis vs Journal of Climate
– Steve McIntyre, climateaudit.org

On June 10, a few days after the Gergis-Karoly-Neukom error had been identified, I speculated that they would try to re-submit the same results, glossing over the fact that they had changed the methodology from that described in the accepted article. My cynical prediction was that a community unoffended by Gleick or upside-down Mann would not cavil at such conduct.

The emails show that Karoly and Gergis did precisely as predicted, but Journal of Climate editors Chiang and Broccoli didn’t bite. Most surprising perhaps was that Karoly’s initial reaction was agreement with the Climate Audit criticism of ex post correlation screening. However, when Karoly realized that the reconstruction fell apart using the methodology of the accepted article, he was very quick to propose that they abandon the stated methodology and gloss over the changes. In today’s post, I’ll walk through the chronology.
…

Non-Barking Dogs

Lucia's The Blackboard has an guest post by "Paul_K" on "Pinatubo Climate Sensitivity and Two Dogs that didn’t bark in the night":

…
Summary of Conclusions

Allowing for uncertainties in the temperature and flux datasets, the response from Pinatubo is compatible with a 2xCO2 climate sensitivity of between 0.9 and 1.7oC, with a ML value around 1.4 oC. Outside this range from 0.9 to 1.7oC, it is not possible to obtain simultaneous matches to temperature and energy balance data within a temperature excursion range of 0.5 to 0.7oC. (Note that the actual measured temperature excursion was somewhere between 0.4 and 0.5 deg C. My allowed range here already incorporates maximum correction for ENSO. For comparison, Soden’s estimate for ENSO corrected temperature excursion reaches a maximum of 0.65oC. A reduction in the allowed temperature excursion would reduce the upper bound on my estimated range of climate sensitivity.)

The DK2005 estimate is unequivocally too low because of underestimation of ocean heat transfer and a deficient model.

The Wigley2006 central estimate of 3.03oC is impossibly high because of overestimation of ocean heat transfer; it can only match temperature data if the flux information is ignored.

I suspect cynically that these results explain why quantification of the sensitivity is notably absent from the Soden2002 paper, and the flux data are notably absent from Wigley2005.

…

Doomsday Cults

Wikipedia: Psychological impact of failed predictions

Social scientists have found that while some group members will leave after the date for a doomsday prediction by the leader has passed uneventfully, others actually feel their belief and commitment to the group strengthened. Often when a group's doomsday prophesies or predictions fail to come true, the group leader will simply set a new date for impending doom, or predict a different type of catastrophe on a different date. Niederhoffer and Kenner attribute this motivation of the charismatic leader to maintain a consistent belief structure as due to a desire to save sunk cost: "When you have gone far out on a limb and so many people have followed you, and there is much "sunk cost," as economists would say, it is difficult to admit you have been wrong."

And:

Wikipedia on: When Prophecy Fails
…
Premise of study
Festinger and his colleagues saw this as a case that would lead to the arousal of dissonance when the prophecy failed. Altering the belief would be difficult, as Keech and her group were committed at considerable expense to maintain it. Another option would be to enlist social support for their belief. As Festinger wrote, "If more and more people can be persuaded that the system of belief is correct, then clearly it must after all be correct.
…
Conditions
Festinger stated that five conditions must be present if someone is to become a more fervent believer after a failure or disconfirmation:

• A belief must be held with deep conviction and it must have some relevance to action, that is, to what the believer does or how he behaves.
• The person holding the belief must have committed himself to it; that is, for the sake of his belief, he must have taken some important action that is difficult to undo. In general, the more important such actions are, and the more difficult they are to undo, the greater is the individual's commitment to the belief.
• The belief must be sufficiently specific and sufficiently concerned with the real world so that events may unequivocally refute the belief.
• Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognized by the individual holding the belief.
• The individual believer must have social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence that has been specified. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, the belief may be maintained and the believers may attempt to proselytize or persuade nonmembers that the belief is correct.

It seems the man-made apocalypse named "Sandy" has – considering the hype – passed rather uneventful in the US (unless of cause if you live on Cuba or some place else in the Caribbean, in which case the US Media or "Climate Progressives" do not give a fuck about your loss of life).

It'll be interesting to see whether the apocalypse will postponed – as in: "You were lucky this time, BUT THE NEXT MAN-MADE FRANKENSTORM WILL GET YOU FOR SURE!!11!!1!ONE!!ELEVEN!".

Or maybe the results of Sandy will be simply spruced up and fluffed up as much as possible.

[Update] OK, I'll admit it, I was wrong, I underestimated the initial reports from this storm. Yes, it was an unusually large storm, and yes it hit the USA hard. But a single freak storm does not make global warming, as neither does a single snow disaster make global cooling. And it was a single freak storm, because if you look at the past years and storms making land-fall in the US (yes, please look up the past huricane seasons here and here), only Katrina stands out, and only because the levies (protecting low laying lands) built by the US corps of engineers were shite and broke – with properly maintained levies, Katrina would have been forgotten now.

Bloody Bastards

David Karoly, 7th June 2012 to Gergis and Neukom:

“The same argument applies for the Australasian proxy selection. If the selection is done on the proxies without detrending ie the full proxy records over the 20th century, then records with strong trends will be selected and that will effectively force a hockey stick result. Then Stephen McIntyre criticism is valid. I think that it is really important to use detrended proxy data for the selection, and then choose proxies that exceed a threshold for correlations over the calibration period for either interannual variability or decadal variability for detrended data. I would be happy for the proxy selection to be based on decadal correlations, rather than interannual correlations, but it needs to be with detrended data, in my opinion. The criticism that the selection process forces a hockey stick result will be valid if the trend is not excluded in the proxy selection step.”

Raphael Neukom, same day to Karoly:

“I agree, we don’t have enough strong proxy data with significant correlations after detrending to get a reasonable reconstruction.”

-Now, from Part 2a Journal Correspondence file, On June 14, Gergis back to editors:

Over recent days we have been in discussion with colleagues here in Australia and internationally about the use of detrended or non detrended data for proxy selection as both methods are published in the literature.
People have argued that detrending proxy records when reconstructing temperature is in fact undesirable (see two papers attached provided courtesy of Professor Michael Mann) .
While anthropogenic trends may inflate correlation coefficients, this can be dealt with by allowing for autocorrelation when assessing significance. If any linear trends ARE removed when validating individual proxies, then the validation exercise will essentially only confirm the ability of the proxies to reconstruct interannual variations. However, in an exercise of this nature we are also intrinsically interested in reconstructing longer-term trends. It therefore appears to be preferable to retain trends in the data, so that we are also assessing the ability of the proxies to reconstruct this information.

Hockeysticks - How To Create One, Part 765

This is getting ridiculous.

Anarchist Fodder For Thought

Dmitry Orlov's second part of "In Praise of Anarchy":

…
Kropotkin's third, and perhaps most significant observation addresses a common misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution. You see, when most people say “Darwinian” it turns out that they actually mean to say “Hobbesian.” Kropotkin pointed out that the term “survival of the fittest” has been misinterpreted to mean that animals compete against other animals of their own species, whereas that just happens to be the shortest path to extinction. This misinterpretation of facts directly observable from nature has led to the faulty Hobbsian justification of the economic appetite as something natural and evolved, and therefore inevitable, giving rise to the conjectured laws of the marketplace, which in turn favor nonempathic, exclusionary, brutal, possessive individualists. The result has been to enshrine mental illness—primitive, pathological, degenerate narcissism—as the ultimate evolutionary adaptation and the basis of the laws of economics. Thus, an entire edifice of economic theory has been erected atop a foundation of delusion borne of a misunderstanding of the patterns present in nature.
…

Richard Seymour on Chavez:

Richard Seymour on Chavez:

I think we on the international left have struggled to really comprehend what is going on in Venezuela. It's not a question of us being particularly dim, or not me anyway (you can look after yourselves): it just defies all our expectations. Who would have thought that a politician elected on a 'Third Way' ticket with a degree of ruling class support would turn into the mortal enemy of US imperialism and the Venezuelan ruling class? Who could have anticipated that an agenda of constitutional change, none of it terribly radical on the surface, would become a kind of political manifesto, a programme of action in the hands of mobilised masses aiming to make good its promise of equality, participatory democracy and human rights, to realise them in the fullest sense? Who would have expected that the ruling class would be so brittle that they would lash out in an ill-judged coup, thus losing a tremendously important political battle, causing a crisis in the state and proving to the Chavez government that had to be a 'class struggle' government to a degree, mobilising its popular support against the elite? Now, importantly, who would have thought the radical left government would still be in power, still going strong, still not hitting a brick wall in terms of delivering reforms?

Voyager 1 has left the Solar System.

Voyager 1 has (probably) become the first spacecraft in human history to leave the Solar System.

Wow.

News like this is for me truly inspiring on what the human race can accomplish.

Why don't we do more of this?

For The Record – On "Climate (Change) Denial"

• – The climate is (always) changing, and humans had some hand in that
• – The Earth has been warming, and humans had some hand in that as well
• – Human CO2 emission have raised temperatures, but this is neither the only cause of climate change (and global warming), nor will it be an catastrophe ("CAGW")
• – If looking at which human activity has the severest adverse effects for our eco-system, CO2 ranks rather low, IMHO
• – If looking at which human activity has the severest adverse effects for fellow humans, CO2 ranks rather low, IMHO
• – So, in my maybe not so humble opinion, the fight against CO2 is an fight against an phantom, a waste of time (at best) and probably rather stupid and severely counterproductive - YMMV
• – Therefore, IMHO, attacking all people who are critical against this CO2-mania as "deniers" of "climate (change)" or of "global warming" is rather stupid and counterproductive – YMMV

So, if you label me as a "climate (change) denier", or a "global warming denier", or somesuch, then I hereby give you notice that you are an anti-scientific hack and an idiot.

And to summarize as a postscript, I think "CO2 & catastrophic climate change" is a giant distraction from the very real problems we face:

• On the ecologic front, non-CO2 related human activity is destroying eco-systems, species and habitats like nothing before in the history of life
• On the front of our global society, capitalism is adversely and severely impacting the lives of billions of people (including mine, and most likely yours)
• And on a personal front, ME/CFS is destroying my life

So I am terribly sorry that I think your misguided alarmism about CO2 is a waste of resources.

Stop Pagination Now

Stop Pagination Now
Why websites should not make you click and click and click for the full story.

Slate’s editorial guidelines call for articles to be split into multiple pages once they hit the 1,000-word mark, so I have to keep this brief: Splitting articles and photo galleries into multiple pages is evil. It should stop.

Pagination is one of the worst design and usability sins on the Web, the kind of obvious no-no that should have gone out with blinky text, dancing cat animations, and autoplaying music. It shows constant, quiet contempt for people who should be any news site’s highest priority—folks who want to read articles all the way to the end.

…

About 1.1 Degree Celsius Warming per Doubling of Atmospheric CO2

Using annual values, the increase in global temperaute from 1850 to 2011 was 0.783 °C (HadCRU3T) and the increase in CO2equivalent was from 289.0 to 464.1 ppm (GISS).

If all that increase was caused by CO2e this implies a sensitivity of:
Sensitivity = 0.783 * log(2) / log(464.1/289.0)
= 1.145 °C per doubling of CO2e.

This is close [to] the estimates of other climate realists. 

Single Point Cherry Picking (SPCP) – An tutorial on climate alarmism

There is one certain way to create climate skeptics:

Cherry pick one single data point, in the form of a photo – a polar bear swimming, the results of floods or storms in a city (use photoshop if you don't have something like that at hand), or maybe you standing on the sorry looking rest of a glacier, or something like that – and write a emotional article around it, write that world is ending due to human CO2 emissions, and end the article with "now you know".

If you don't have access to such imagery and can't create them yourself, don't fret! Simply wait for a news story about some random weather event (warm, cold, wet or dry weather, snow fall, storms, tornadoes, huricanes, or forrest fires – doesn't matter, just pick a random one) and claim that it is due to "dirty weather" and CO2 – simple as pie!

Don't worry, people on your side (the "climate consensus") will not call you out on your emotional hit-peace, and will ignore your utter disrespect of the scientific method (see the Corollary to Plait's Rules for reference). Play fast and loose! As long as you stay on message – human CO2 emission will cause an catastrophe  – nobody minds what exactly you write (at least nobody from your side!).

And if an skeptic shows up, call him an "idiot" or an "moron" in the comments – case closed. It is especially important to drive away all moderate skeptics, ignore their arguments, hit them over the head with simpleminded explanations, call them names, insult them and their intelligence – the result will be that only complete idiots and the most masochistic skeptics will stay to debate with you, proving your point that any skeptic who ventures onto your comment section is an complete idiot.

And except these few fools, you will make sure to be surrounded only by alarmist zealots who have the same flawed thinking about the climate as you do – isn't that nice?

If you feel a bit whiny, you can lament the misinformation by big oil, or say they are "so called" or "unconfirmed" or "self appointed" skeptics, but that is optional.

Now you can feel good that you did something "about the climate", and can safely ignore that you just firmly alienated one more skeptic with your unscientific fear-mongering.

And next week I will show you how to prove with one single image of the night sky, and the method of SPCP, that we live in a static universe (or you can prove the opposite, if you are so inclined).

Still no Hockey-Sticks in Hurricane data or Tropical Cyclones data

Policlimate (via WUWT):

One interesting comment:

rgbatduke says:
October 1, 2012 at 2:03 pm
…
So, to the unknown, but probably nonzero extent that manmade CO_2 has indeed contributed to the naturally increasing global warmth over the post LIA era, you are more right than you know. One would absolutely expect storm intensity and frequency to decrease or remain about the same, all things being equal. Of course in the Earth’s climate system, all things are never equal, and separating out systematic signal from chaotic noise is very, very difficult. But the result is hardly surprising.

The only thing that is surprising is that Gore and many other numb-nuts are so eager to promote the CAGW hypothesis that they openly mis-state — or if you prefer lie — about this and claim that storm frequency and violence is increasing.
…

davidmhoffer says:
October 1, 2012 at 3:03 pm
rgbatduke THANKYOU!

I think making that point on a warmist blog was the first time I got one of my comments “disappeared”. I raised that point repeatedly for years, but gave up trying to get broad attention to it. …

NowPublic emails leaked/hacked?

Since recently I'm getting spam via an email account only used for NowPublic. Looks to me like they "lost" their user database.

The Allies Second Front in World War II

The Allies Second Front in World War II: Why Were Canadian Troops Sacrificed at Dieppe?

Michael Mann on Paranoid Anti-Scientific Conspiracy Theories

My dear Professor Lewandowsky, have you looked at Michael Mann?

date: Wed, 12 Nov 2003 08:06:54 -0500
from: "Michael E. Mann"
subject: Re: Fwd: Re: clarification re Mann / McKitrick and McIntyre

Dear All,

… It is best to let things play out this way. These folks appear to have some very large industry groups behind them running the show, setting up forums for them on capitol hill (the latest sponsored by the infamous "Marshall Institute") and its best for scientists not to exchange any emails with them--they will only quote you out of context and misrepresent your comments.

Please feel free to contact me to discuss further. So I strongly advise against any scientists communicating with these people. Understand that anything you send to them, you are giving to a highly organized industry PR firm that is behind this effort. An investigative reporter in the media may be revealing the dubious details behind this in an article in the near future.

Please feel free to contact me to discuss further,
mike

F*#$ing a$$holes

I listen to online radio. Through iTunes. I have now a collection of fine online radio stations, which suit my taste. My list in iTunes contains the URL of the station-playlist in the form:
http://pri.kts-af.net/redir/index.pls?esid=…&url_no=1&client_id=7&uid=…&clicksrc=xml

That is the URL iTunes got from Apple

But now, none of these stations work anymore. Because some idiot has removed them from that server.

And the new station-playlist is in the form:
http://www.live365.com/cgi-bin/play.pls?stationid=ynotradio&tag=itunes

pri.kts-af.net now redirects to apple.com.

I now have to go through all stations and manually change the URL.

m(

LFTR in 5 Minutes - THORIUM REMIX 2011

LFTR in 5 Minutes - THORIUM REMIX 2011

You know the promises made about Fusion Energy? Cheap, reliable, safe and endless energy? LFTR does all that – and then some.

Watts on how climate science should be done

Watts on how climate science should be done:

I would argue not for removal of bad stations, but rather for the replacement of bad stations with well-sited stations, with simultaneous overlapping data collection so that biases can be both measured directly and permanently eliminated.

Of course, that's not what's actually being done…

Science in Capitalism

Adequate resources to support the scientific enterprise would not only reduce incentives for misconduct but improve the lives of all scientists and allow them to spend more of their time searching for answers to research questions instead of funds.

How not to do Science – Non-climate Science Edition

I really do not want to know. Part of the point of having two independent experiments is that they cross-check each other - independently. We do that most effectively when we are blind to the other experiment's data, right up to the last minute. In fact we even try to blind ourselves to our own data up to a point. As much as possible of the analysis should be optimised and decided in advance, before even looking at the data. This prevents even the possibility of subconscious bias entering the studies. If you are biased, the truth will probably still out in the end, but in the meantime your statistical estimations of confidence and significance will all be wrong.

Justus, I think you would have liked this

A couple of years ago I became involved in a grand plan to make sounds out of LHC data. We called this project LHCsound. Recently we have revisited the idea with the aim of listening to real data produced in the proton-proton collisions happening right now, and I found myself back in my favourite place - talking to (okay, emailing) musicians with ideas for making this happen.

It's been seven years now.

Richard Seymour on proletarian hegemony

Richard Seymour on proletarian hegemony:

Peter Thomas, in his Marxism talk about Gramsci and the 99%, made a defence of the concept of proletarian hegemony against certain misconceptions that might put people off it. Pointing out that the working class is numerically and proportionately larger than ever, he suggested that the 99% was potentially the name for hegemony as a principle of unity, rather than as simply a form of domination: what we all have in common, despite our immense differences in identity, social category, occupational culture and habitus, etc., is that we are all exploited. This is what working class hegemony means in practice today. Not, generally speaking, the unity of a national popular bloc of classes under working class leadership: this becomes less the case as capitalist mode of production has entrenched itself, and thus simplified the class system in one sense. Rather, it means the dominance of the working class as the axis of our common exploitation and thus as the strategically privileged basis for organisation. The arrival of the Asturian miners in Puerta del Sol, site of the Indignado rebellion, could be the the sign and sanction of this hegemony in motion. The question, then, is whether Spain's heteroclite social and industrial struggles can be stitched together under the banner of the 99%.

Climate Sensitivity

One of the seminal sensitivity estimates is Forest et al 2006. Nic reports that he tried for over a year to get data for this study with Forest finally saying that the raw data was now “lost”.

I have been trying for over a year, without success, to obtain from Dr Forest the data used in Forest 2006…. Unfortunately, Dr Forest reports that the raw model data is now lost.

Nic was able to to get data for two predecessor studies and has concluded that the calculations in Forest et al 2006 were done erroneously:

If I am right, then correct processing of the data used in Forest 2006 would lead to the conclusion that equilibrium climate sensitivity (to a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere) is close to 1°C, not 3°C, implying that likely future warming has been grossly overestimated by the IPCC.

This is important stuff. Nic is very sharp, Forest et al is an important paper and Nic’s conclusions are damning. It’s frustrating that, after all the controversy, climate journals don’t require authors to archive data and that IPCC authors continue to “lose” data.

Why we don't have cheap energy yet

Today's solid fuelled reactor vendors make long term revenues by making profit on the fuel fabrication. Without any fuel to fabricate and sell, a LFTR would have to adopt a different business model.

The Hockey Stick – May Change Your Mind About Climate Science

Far from being an irrelevancy, for me personally, the MBH hockey stick was absolutely vital in first extinguishing my scepticism then fiercely re-igniting it. When I first saw it, I was blown away by the clear evidence of unprecedented climate change, and I immediately told people I was no longer sceptical about climate change, a subject I had not been paying much attention to or writing about at that point, but had expressed some doubts about in print a few years before. That it had been published in Nature was good enough for me at the time. Aha, I thought, a smoking gun.

Then when I came across Steve’s work and realised how full of holes both the method and the data were, and that the IPCC was not interested in listening the criticisms, it made me doubly sceptical about not only paleo-climate data, but climate change theory generally, Nature magazine’s standards and — following the farcical enquiries — the British scientific establishment’s willingness to be bought. The hockey stick was by no means the only thing that caused me to change my mind twice, but it was the most salient.

Matt Ridley Posted May 28, 2012 at 6:38 AM | Permalink (via)

Why is there no secure HTTPS download for Adobe Flash?

I mean, come on! MITM?! You got Flash on the majority of computers today, and no HTTPS for updates? SRSLY?

"Our government rearmed the enemy in order to oppose our old allies"

How did I pick up this dark, ironical, flip view of the war? Why do I enjoy exhibiting it? The answer is that I contracted it in the infantry. Even when I write professionally about Walt Whitman or Samuel Johnson, about the theory of comparative literature or the problems facing the literary biographer, the voice that’s audible is that of the pissed-off infantryman, disguised as a literary and cultural commentator. He is embittered that the Air Corps had beds to sleep in, that Patton’s Third Army got all the credit, that noncombatants of the Medical Administrative and Quartermaster Corps wore the same battle stars as he, that soon after the war the “enemy” he had labored to destroy had been rearmed by his own government and positioned to oppose one of his old allies. “We broke our ass for nothin’,” says Sergeant Croft in The Naked and the Dead. These are this speaker’s residual complaints while he is affecting to be annoyed primarily by someone’s bad writing or slipshod logic or lazy editing or pretentious ideas. As Louis Simpson says, “The war made me a foot-soldier for the rest of my life,” and after any war foot soldiers are touchy.

George Carlin on Divide and Conquer

George Carlin on Divide and Conquer:

Now, to balance the scale, I'd like to talk about some things that bring us together, things that point out our similarities instead of our differences. 'Cause that's all you ever hear about in this country. It's our differences.

That's all the media and the politicians are ever talking about--the things that separate us, things that make us different from one another. That's the way the ruling class operates in any society. They try to divide the rest of the people.

They keep the lower and the middle classes fighting with each other so that they, the rich, can run off with all the fucking money! Fairly simple thing. Happens to work. You know? Anything different--that's what they're gonna talk about--race, religion, ethnic and national background, jobs, income, education, social status, sexuality, anything they can do to keep us fighting with each other, so that they can keep going to the bank!

You know how I define the economic and social classes in this country? The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class. Keep 'em showing up at those jobs.

What is a ‘left’ or ‘workers’ government?

What is a ‘left’ or ‘workers’ government?

A government of the traditional workers’ parties does not gain power, merely because the majority of workers have voted for it. It also depends upon being allowed take office by the bourgeoisie, in other words they feel they are forced to give up their governmental positions to the leaders of the parties with a base in the workers’ movement. They do this either because they feel it would be counter-productive to destroy the myths of parliamentary democracy merely to prevent the temporary loss of power or because they feel compelled to retreat before a mass upsurge of the workers movement (as in Germany in 1918 and the SPD-USPD government, or in Spain with the Caballero government of September 1936).

However, it is only governmental positions that the bourgeoisie give up. They maintain their control over the major sectors of the state machine, over the key areas of the economy and over most of the means of communication. In other words, they retreat from the ‘front-line’ of the state, which in any case have less and less importance as the concentration of capital proceeds, but instead consolidate their power in the hierarchies of the state machine and in the economy.

Thus the ‘left government’ is not a revolutionary government formed by the smashing of the bourgeois state. Rather it exists with capitalism and its state still intact.

At a time of major social crisis the bourgeoisie is prepared to concede even major material reforms on condition that their main agency of control – the state machine – is left intact. Short-term concessions can be made as long as the bourgeoisie retain the means to perpetuate their long-term control. Reforms can always be repealed and fresh attacks launched when the workers movement has declined. …

While it was written 1977, with the impressions of Chile and Italy, is still (and especially) interesting today in the context of Venezuela – were we are seeing the realization – and Greece – were this option is currently not really on the table, but things might have to change.

Death Threat Emails – May contain no Death Threats

After triggering a global news event with reports about death threats against climate scientists, the ABC and Fairfax Media are under investigation by Media Watch after a central plank supporting their reports was found to be non-existent.

Before the flaws in their reports were revealed, their versions of the truth had been picked up by Britain’s The Guardian and the scientific journal Nature.

The critical error in their reports, which has been revealed by The Australian, is that emails held by the Australian National University that were supposed to outline death threats against climate scientists have been independently assessed as containing no death threats.

Plait's Non-Symetric Rules of AGW Science

Plait's First Rule:
It is OK if a person receives millions in funds for research about catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW), if (and only if) he supports the CAGW theory – a person critical about the CAGW theory on the other hand is not allowed to receive money for research about anthropogenic global warming.

Plait's Second Rule:
It is OK if a person writes about CAGW, if (and only if) he supports the CAGW theory – a person critical about the CAGW theory (no matter whether in parts or whole) on the other hand is not allowed to write about CAGW.

Plait's Mother Teresa Rule:
The funds of a person with pro-CAGW views are of no interest – a person critical of the CAGW theory on the other hand must be funded by the devil the oil industry.

Corollary to Plait's Rules:
The proficiency of the person is of no interest: A stupid person can be as loud mouthed about his pro-CAGW views and spread scientific falsehoods as much as he likes, while a CAGW critic is not allowed to state his views even in a civilized manner.

Medieval Warm Period vs. Current Warm Period

Craig Loehle takes Michael Mann smear piece "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars" apart – and does it while remaining very politely and calm at that.

vureel.com pushes etypesetup.exe adware

Just watched a video on Vureel.com and the website tried to push etypesetup.exe "Somoto" Adware onto my computer – Fuckers.

Oh, that's good

Willis Eschenbach on Tricksy Scientists:

Dang, I didn’t expect that rise in CO2 that started about 6,000 BC. I do love climate science, it always surprises me … but the big surprise was not what the ice core records showed. It was what the Shakun2012 authors didn’t show.

I’m sure you can see just what those bad-boy scientists have done. Look how they have cut the modern end of the ice core CO2 record short, right at the time when CO2 started to rise again …

I leave the readers to consider the fact that for most of the Holocene, eight centuries millennia or so, half a dozen different ice core records say that CO2 levels were rising pretty fast by geological standards … and despite that, the temperatures have been dropping over the last eight millennia …

And I leave everyone to ponder how far climate “science” has fallen, that a tricksy study of this nature can be published in Nature, and can get touted around the world as being strong support for the AGW hypothesis. The only thing this study supports is the need for better peer review, and at a more basic level, better science education.

After hide the (treemometer proxy) decline, we now have hide the (CO2 proxy) increase…

Free-market Think Tank asks Nanny State for Help

The Heartland Institute has assembled a top-notch legal team and is asking the government to pursue criminal charges against Peter Gleick and his accomplices, as well as preparing to file civil suits against Gleick and his accomplices on behalf of Heartland and the scientists who have come under attack because of his actions.

I think it is amusing when a free-market think tank runs to the nanny state for help. But well, they are right to sue the hell out of Gleick, but they are wrong in their believe in free-markets…

Data fudging the prime cause of global warming

After "Models the prime cause of global warming" we bring you "Data fudging the prime cause of global warming":

And of course there’s this famous animation where the middle 20th century got cooler as if by magic. Watch how 1934 and 1998 change places as the warmest year of the last century. This is after GISS applied adjustments to a new data set (2004) compared with the one in 1999:

Science at the gates of plagiarism

Steve McIntyre:

There’s another plagiarism incident around the same time that I’d meant to document and more serious. A longstanding Climate Audit technique has been to illustrate proxy weights by plotting circles with area proportional to the weights. I’d observed that proxy weights could be extracted from the linear algebra, even for RegEM. The points had been revived in CA posts at this period concerning Steig and I reported that I’d tweaked the RegEM algorithm to extract the weights. The same technique was applied in Mann et al 2009 (Science); Mann’s language closely tracked the CA language. But more importantly the concept was identical to the concept written up at CA, both in the extraction of weights and the illustration in a graphic.

Michael Mann, Serial Misrepresenter of Reality

On Michael Mann:

…
Mann Contradicts Himself
While so far Mann has simply misrepresented his sources, he also contradicts himself. On page 138, Mann, brings up a paper by Eugene Wahl and Caspar Ammann, saying:

They showed that, had McIntyre and McKitrick subjected their alternative reconstruction...

No paper by McIntyre and McKitrick has ever claimed to make an “alternative reconstruction.” This should seem more like a fabrication than a contradiction until the reader reaches page 191. There, Mann quotes a description of McIntyre:

Paleoclimatologist Tom Crowley perhaps summarized it best: “McIntyre ... never publishes an alternative reconstruction that he thinks is better ... because that involves taking a risk of him being criticized. He just nitpicks others. I don’t know of anyone else in science who ... fails to do something constructive himself.”58

Mann approvingly quotes Crowley criticizing McIntyre for not publishing an “alternative reconstruction” despite the fact 53 pages earlier, he claims McIntyre published an “alternative reconstruction.”

Mann Contradicts His Sources and Himself
Mann contradicts his sources. Mann contradicts himself. It is hardly surprising he would do both at the same time. On page 123, he says:

The central claim of the McIntyre and McKitrick paper, that the hockey stick was an artifact of bad data, was readily refuted.45

To understand Mann's misrepresentation here, there is no need to understand any technical details. All you need to do is compare a few simple sentences. First, compare the above sentence with a quote from the abstract of the paper he discusses (emphasis added):

The particular “hockey stick” shape derived in the MBH98 proxy construction – a temperature index that decreases slightly between the early 15th century and early 20th century and then increases dramatically up to 1980 — is primarily an artefact of poor data handling, obsolete data and incorrect calculation of principal components.

Even though McIntyre and McKitrick's conclusions refer to “poor data handling, obsolete data and incorrect calculation of principal components,” Mann claims their argument dealt solely with “bad data.” On its own, this would be bad, but it becomes silly when the reader looks at Mann's note #45. It says (in part):

To be specific, they claimed that the hockey stick was an artifact of four supposed “categories of errors”: “collation errors,” “unjustified truncation and extrapolation,” “obsolete data,” and “calculation mistakes.”

In the main text of his book, Mann portrays the paper's argument as solely referring to “bad data.” In the note he attaches as a reference, he lists as part of the paper's argument, “calculation mistakes.” …

The Skeptics Case

The main point of the skeptics and all you need to know about the climate debate:
The Skeptics Case

Sun Tzu’s principles for an unfair scientific fight

Judith Curry:

• Outsmart your opponent so that battles aren’t necessary
• Pick your battles carefully.
• In the course of your battle, don’t lose the moral high ground.
• Divide and conquer; don’t give your enemy cause to rally together and combine forces
• Overconfidence can be fatal to your strategy
• If the campaign is prolonged, the resources will not be equal to the strain
• If you know your enemy, you can win battles without a single loss

George Carlin on your rights

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Gleick's Integrity

Judith Curry about Gleick's integrity:

Gleick on integrity:

• A brief lesson in the integrity of science
• Climate Change and the Integrity of Science, Again
• AGU’s new task force on scientific integrity and ethics begins
• Threats to the integrity of science: congressional testimony

I even referenced his testimony in my uncertainty monster paper.

My first interaction with Gleick was he invited me to speak in an AGU session that he was organizing on the integrity of science, my presentation can be found here.

He has made it known to me via email that he has been displeased with my “behavior.” I seem to have gotten his goat to have been mentioned in the fake Heartland strategy doc (hard to believe that he didn’t write this).

The irony of it all, this coming from a scientist that has made a particular point about integrity and written many essays and even testified to congress on the subject.

And Steve Mosher makes an interesting observation:

Oh: at first they said how dare you accuse Gleick.
Now, he is a hero?

Huh. Well, no need to worry about libelling Gleick or any other person.

A tip: Please do not visit Joe Romm’s blog and use the name Peter Gleick to confess to forging a document. because, fooling people by assuming a false identity will get you hero status.

err..

Is Peter Gleick the "Heartland Insider"?

Posted in full, emphasis mine, comments in square brackets mine:

The Origin of the Heartland Documents
by Peter H. Gleick
Posted: 02/20/2012 7:45 pm

Since the release in mid-February of a series of documents related to the internal strategy of the Heartland Institute to cast doubt on climate science, there has been extensive speculation about the origin of the documents and intense discussion about what they reveal. Given the need for reliance on facts in the public climate debate, I am issuing the following statement.

At the beginning of 2012, I received an anonymous document in the mail [I assume that "anonymous document" was the two page forgery] describing what appeared to be details of the Heartland Institute's climate program strategy. It contained information about their funders and the Institute's apparent efforts to muddy public understanding about climate science and policy. I do not know the source of that original document [the two page forgery?] but assumed it was sent to me because of my past exchanges with Heartland and because I was named in it.

Given the potential impact however, I attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information in this document. In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else's name. [So after he got the forgery, he stole swindled the other Heartland document?]  The materials the Heartland Institute sent to me confirmed many of the facts in the original document, including especially their 2012 fundraising strategy and budget. I forwarded, anonymously, the documents I had received to a set of journalists and experts working on climate issues. I can explicitly confirm, as can the Heartland Institute, that the documents they emailed to me are identical to the documents that have been made public. I made no changes or alterations of any kind to any of the Heartland Institute documents or to the original anonymous communication [the forgery?].

I will not comment on the substance or implications of the materials [funny, the opening sentence ("… a series of documents related to the internal strategy of the Heartland Institute to cast doubt on climate science …") seems to be exactly that]; others have and are doing so. I only note that the scientific understanding of the reality and risks of climate change is strong, compelling, and increasingly disturbing, and a rational public debate is desperately needed. My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts -- often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated -- to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved. Nevertheless I deeply regret my own actions in this case. I offer my personal apologies to all those affected.

Peter Gleick

Some of these claims made by Peter Gleick don't seem to be based in reality, to put it mildly.

WattsUpWithThat is obviously having a ball.

The dog that didn't bark?

Being an expert at apologizing, Gleick indeed may have received a phony letter by some paranoid internet fan. Or he concocted it. These are the only two possibilities. Given that he was named parenthetically in the fake document and placed in an exalted status in that letter, I would guess he had a hand in the authoring.

It would have to be a crazy internet fan who had access to Heartland’s private documents, since some content seems copied and pasted.

Phil Plait, unconfirmed skeptic

A wonderful list of all these idiots nice people with their cognitive dissonance, not being able to recognize that they have been duped.

I’ve decided to put in the hard yakka and document how the climate doomsday blogosphere have responded since the Heartland Institute’s statement that at least one of the documents is a forgery.

The following are the various ‘updates’ and ‘disclosures’ that try to put the best spin to the notion that the narrative in the key ‘Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy’ document is correct even though the document itself is fake.

I’ve used the list in Judith Curry’s “Heartland” post which helpfully provides a collection of views on this ‘ShrillGate’ investigation. [The comments within square brackets are (mostly) mine]

I will post only gem from this list (there are more), because it is just so beautiful:

16-Phil Plait, Breaking news: A look behind the curtain of the Heartland Institute’s climate change spin, Bad Astronomy
“[UPDATE: Heartland has confirmed that some of the documents are real, but claims the strategy document, which I quote below about teaching strategy, is faked. This claim has not yet been confirmed or refuted. DeSmogBlog has more info.]”
[Phil Plait denies that he is a member of the crazy climate doomsday cult. As of this moment, his claims that he is a skeptic has not yet been confirmed nor refuted]

There are exceptions in that list (like Christian Hunt), but they are few and far between.

Fakegate: "What would I write IF I WERE AS CRAZY AS AGW SKEPTICS?"

To start with, why does the document feel a need to provide a bio for Wojick--who works closely enough with Heartland to have a bio on their website--but not for all the climate scientists and writers that it cites in this section?

Then there's the tone. I have never heard a warming skeptic refer to themselves as "anti-climate", or to their opponents as "communicators". And believe me, I get chewed out by climate skeptics with great regularity.

And in a way I find it hard to put my finger on, the worldview just feels . . . off. There are a bunch of little things--this is the only document in which the word "warmist" appears, for example. But it's much more than that. It's too nice to opponents ("high profile", "communicator"). And it views climate skeptics as far more powerful than they (in my experience) actually feel, and opponents as combating their messages, rather than the other way around. It seems to fundamentally misunderstand the paranoia of a movement that sees itself as under siege.

The commenters who attack me on my global warming views do not see us as equals doing battle on the plains of Mordor. They think of me as having been captured by a dubious consensus that is manufactured and maintained by social pressure, the general human tendency to alarmism about complex threats, and the self-interest of a few scientists--and in truth, they can point to some instances, like the longstanding belief that humans had 48 chromosomes, which were maintained against all evidence by a very powerful social dynamic. Obviously, I disagree with their analysis, but I do understand their reasoning process--and that they have a reasoning process. I don't feel like the writer of this memo understands either. It's more like they sat down at the computer and said, "What would I write IF I WERE AS CRAZY AS AGW SKEPTICS?"

Funny, "having been captured by a dubious consensus that is manufactured and maintained by social pressure, the general human tendency to alarmism about complex threats, and the self-interest of a few scientists" is exactly what I think about large parts of the sciences, the media and ultimately the public when it comes to climate change – and I am reasonably suspicious of conspiracy bullshit theories and think I am not crazy (alas, I probably could not provide evidence for that).

Need I point out that this seems almost expressly designed as a counterweight to the ClimateGate emails which talked about keeping opposition voices out of journals and the IPCC report? Except ludicrous--even if it were true, can anyone imagine a climate skeptic saying to themselves, "Well, they've got the IPCC and the peer-reviewed jouranls, but thank God, we've got Forbes!"

That is exactly the "social pressure" the ClimateGate emails make clear.

The bottom line is that while the Times thought that "its tone and content closely matched that of other documents that the group did not dispute", to me, they aren't a close match at all. Rather, they read like, well, like someone without the imagination--or motivation--to pass an Ideological Turing Test wrote up a neat little executive summary for their ideological fellows.

Yepp, those who manufactured this "Climate Strategy" document wouldn't pass as climate skeptics. Which shows that the people talking about Heartland "Deniergate" clearly are not able to look into the criticism the "deniers" have (I'm looking at you Phil Plait).

High-Profile Fakegate

For me, this leaves the most fascinating question of all: who wrote it? We have a few clues:

1. They are on the west coast
2. They own or have access to an Epson scanner--though God knows, this could be at a Kinkos.
3. They probably themselves have a somewhat run-on writing style
4. I'm guessing they use the word "high-profile" a fair amount.
5. They are bizarrely obsessed with global warming coverage at Forbes, which suggests to me that there is a good chance that they write or comment on the website, or that they have tangled with writers at Forbes (probably Taylor) either in public or private.
6. The last paragraph is the biggest departure from the source documents, and is therefore likely to be closest to the author's own style.
7. I have a strong suspicion that they refrained from commenting on the document dump. That's what I'd do, anyway. A commenter or email correspondent who suddenly disappeared when they normally would have been reveling in this sort of story is a good candidate.
8. They seem to have it in for Andy Revkin at the New York Times. There's nothing in the other documents to indicate that Heartland thinks Revkin is amenable to being . . . turned? I'm not sure what the right word is, but the implication in the strategy memo that Heartland believes it could somehow develop a relationship with Revkin seems aimed at discrediting Revkin's work.

Unfortunately, I'd imagine that this is still a sizeable set of people, and it will be hard to identify the author. I suspect that it will be easier to do if the climate-bloggers--who may well know this person as a commenter or correspondent--get involved in trying to find out who muddied the story by perpetrating a fraud on their sites.

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Interestingly, Gleick, who would normally be preening and prancing in glee at this sort of attention to the Heartland Institute has so far been utterly silent at his Forbes blog and on his Twitter feed.

Heartland Fakegate

Unless there’s an explanation I’m missing, that seems to clinch it–why would health care donations show up in their climate strategy report? Unless of course, it was written by someone who doesn’t know anything about facts of the donation, but does know that the Kochs make great copy.

Catastrophic Sea-Level Rise?

Actually, still no apocalypse:

Go see ALL charts at the article at WattsUpWithThat.

"Markets are efficient if and only if P = NP"

Markets are efficient if and only if P = NP
Philip Maymin, NYU-Polytechnic Institute

ABSTRACT
I prove that if markets are weak-form efficient, meaning current prices fully reflect all information available in past prices, then P = NP, meaning every computational problem whose solution can be verified in polynomial time can also be solved in polynomial time. I also prove the converse by showing how we can “program” the market to solve NP-complete problems. Since P probably does not equal NP, markets are probably not efficient. Specifically, markets become increasingly inefficient as the time series lengthens or becomes more frequent. An illustration by way of partitioning the excess returns to momentum strategies based on data availability confirms this prediction.

The Aborigines always know which way they face – and they do tell you so

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space. This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."

The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English).2 Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space. So if the Kuuk Thaayorre think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time? This is what my collaborator Alice Gaby and I came to Pormpuraaw to find out.

To test this idea, we gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they'll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role.3 So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don't use words like "left" and "right"? What will they do?

The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.

If you live on a large empty-ish continent, that you need to always know which way you are facing.

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Dear Phil Plait: On libelous smear-campaigns

In July 2010, an anonymous whistleblower(s) began what Nature called a “libelous” “trial-by-internet”.[11] The informer(s) commenced emailing the investigators, other scientists, and politicians, alerting them to instances of fraud in Bulfone-Paus’ laboratory.[12] The anonymous instigator(s) went by several pseudonyms, including Marco Berns, David Hardman, and Fernando Pessoa.[12] Blogs with information regarding the case and the alleged misinformation were posted on a website, hosted in Panama, under the name of Martin Frost.[12] Many expressed their dismay that a colleague would be subjected to such a “smear-campaign”.[11][13] However, in an editorial in the Lab-Times, the writers express, “Ultimately, we have been left to question whether the ‘Bulfone-Paus stone’ would have actually started rolling without the ‘smear campaign’. To be honest, we doubt it."[12]

Just because you (and others) say something is a smear-campaign (or some such) against you (or Michael Mann) doesn't make it so. And not every critique of you is a "case study of the tactics of climate change denial" and certainly it is not you (or your ego) who is "the target", but your limited understanding of climate science – if you don't want to take a skeptical look at the state of affairs in climate science, then stick to astronomy.

And Phil, stop GoogleAlerting yourself, it isn't good for your inflated ego – you start thinking everything that isn't praise of you must therefore be a campaign at which you are the center of.

Due diligence needed for scientific reports for policy purposes

Email 1653

Again, thanks for your continuing courtesy in this. Replication and checking are fact of life in business (where most of my experience lies), especially when you are communicating with the public. There are very formal processes for this; auditors and securities lawyers, who are among the most highly paid professionals in our society, do little more than replicate and check. If you wish to offer securities to the public, you get used to dealing with questions from them. The corresponding processes in paleoclimate studies (and probably most academic pursuits) seem very casual to me. When studies get used for policy purposes, it seems to me that there is a material change in the level of due diligence is required. This leads to a conundrum: many scholars seem quite happy to have their studies quoted in big reports (like IPCC), but then fail to make arrangements for public archiving of their results and methods and become defensive if they are asked for their data. In the offering of securities, there is an interesting stage that deals with this - if a report by an indepenedent professional (e.g. a geologist) is used in a prospectus, the independent professional has to provide a consent letter authorizing the promoters of the prospectus to refer to his report and to supply the consent letter to the securities commission. The terms of the consent letter impose disclosure requriements on him. This would deal with the situation of someone like Crowley, whose study is quoted by IPCC, but who repeatedly and persistently refuses to disclose his proxy data versions. In a prospectus situation, if the IPCC wished to use Crowley's report, Crowley would have to agree to make his data pulic if asked (which he should probably do on alternative grounds).

Rosanne D'Arrigo killed the hockey stick

Email 2013

Know anything about the "divergence problem" in tree rings? R D'arrigo talked to the NRC yesterday. I didn't get to talk to her afterward, but it looked to me that they have redrilled a bunch of the high-latitude tree rings that underlie almost all of the high-res reconstructions, and the tree rings are simply missing the post-1970s warming, with reasonably high confidence. She didn't seem too worried, but she apparently has a paper just out in JGR. It looked to me like she had pretty well killed the hockey stick in public forum--they go out and look for the most-sensitive trees at the edge of the treeline, flying over lots and lots of trees that are lesss sensitive but quite nearby, and when things get a little warmer, the most-sensitive trees aren't anymore, and so the trees miss the extreme warming of the recent times, and can't reliably be counted as catching the extreme warmth of the MWP if there was extreme warmth then. Because as far as I can tell the hockey stick really was a tree-ring record, regardless of how it was labelled as multiproxy, this looks to me to be a really big deal. And, a big deal that may bite your chapter... --Richard

"More Evidence that Universal Health Care Would be Less Expensive"

We've written quite a bit about single payer health care systems as well as other models that are a mixture of public and private spending.

We've also analyzed some of the sources of excess cost of US healthcare to other countries. What is uniformly true about universal health care systems is that they all spend less on medical care per capita than the US. …

More Evidence that Universal Health Care Would be Less Expensive – denialism blog

Phil Plait, this is for you.

Phil Plait, enjoy this short piece on YouTube.

Models the prime cause of global warming – Sun may or may not be involved in climate change

from: Phil Jones
subject: FW: Your graph regarding global temperature anomaly
to: heino.schmid

The warming from 1915 to about 1940 is generally believed to be due to a slight increase in solar output and a reduction in volcanism. The recent warming from 1975 is due to the build-up of greenhouse gases, as they begin to dominate over sulphate aerosol releases. The slight cooling from 1940 to 1975 is thought to be due to industrial development (using lots of dirty coal) increasing aerosol emissions.

From: Phil Jones
To: Ian Strangeways
Sent: 01 December 2008 13:01
…

1. Were the changes of temperature before about 1940 due mostly to natural causes? You say in one of your notes on my chapter 9 that they might in part be anthropogenic, and that I should not be categorical. I assume that the answer is 'we don't know for sure'

Yes, if anthropogenic explains much of the trend since the 1970s, then it should also explain a small part of the changes before 1940.

2. Were these natural causes mostly or entirely changes in the SOI, the PDO and the other oscillations?

No the natural factors are the Sun and volcanoes. How these factors influence the SOI, PDO and other oscillations is a factor also. The SOI, PDO and others are natural modes of variability - that the atmosphere likes. Solar changes and volcanoes may push the atmosphere towards one of these modes. Anthropogenic forcing is likely to manifest itself as changes in atmospheric modes.

3 I assume that volcanoes affect just individual years (e.g. 1991).

Volcanoes probably affect the year after and the year after that. So for Pinatubo, you'd expect to see the effects in 1992 and 1993 (for a 1991 eruption).

4. I assume that post 1975 some of the changes are still due to the SOI and PDO (especially in view of the big jumps in their indexes at that time).

Possibly, but blaming the changes on an Oscillation doesn't help that much as we've no idea why the oscillation change. See the earlier argument in Q2.

4. [sic] Is proof of CO2 involvement post 1975 derived entirely from models or is there evidence in the actual instrumental data?

Mostly from models - a la Ch 9 of the IPCC Report.

Say what? The models are mostly the evidence?

At 14:43 01/12/2008, you wrote:
Phil

Thanks, that all looks fine.

But just one surprising thing:-

You say the sun (and volcanoes) cause the changes (of the temperature anomalies), possibly by affecting the oscillations. But I was under the impression that the sun was supposed to have no influence whatsoever (in the short term anyway). Now you are saying it is a major factor. In what way does the sun act to cause the changes. It's not through its variations in the solar constant because that is very stable. So how?

Hopefully this really is the last question

Ian

And here comes the answer:

date: Mon Dec 1 15:13:50 2008
from: Phil Jones

subject: RE: Fall of temperatures around 1945
to: "Ian Strangeways"

Ian,

The Earth's atmosphere system is chaotic. Volcanoes alter circulation oscillations by cooling the surface and warming the stratosphere. The Sun does similar things through variations in cloud around the world.

The Sun's output needn't change hardly at all.

The various oscillations are know to change and have done since they were discovered. This could be internal dynamics of the climate system, but it is also likely that the major forcing factors are involved as well.

If the Sun suddenly increased its output - say by 5%, we all wouldn't get warmer. The atmospheric circulation patterns would change to attempt to still move the heat from the equator to the poles. Most regions would get warmer but some cooler.

Cheers

Phil

Does Phil Jones postulate a strong negative climate feedback through clouds? Apart from the hole "the sun influences the climate, but then again it doesn't do much change" logical inconsistency?

Contrast with:

From: Caspar Ammann
To: Michael E. Mann

The more we are able to explain why the first half of the 20th century warmed up naturally,the more confidence we get on the detection of the anthropogenic signal afterwards.

And:

The industrial revolution (at the turn of the century - 1890-1910) is often taken to be the beginning of humans influencing global warming.

CR2032

If your friends and family ask you from time to time for service for their computers (or you have older PCs running yourself), then you should stock up on some CR2032 batteries. Next time you see a "BIOS checksum error" or some such, chances are the battery on the MF motherboard is dead you just need to replace it to get the computer running again. And you may need to reset the BIOS settings though and see if the default values are OK. And set date and time.

What Illegal Abortion Looks Like

Many are linking to this story around the blogosphere and I encourage everyone to read it. In it, a Ob/Gyn describes her emergency care of a woman who arrived in her ED in hemorrhagic shock from a botched illegal abortion. Though clearly it was touch and go and there was some panicky action, our heroine thought fast and saved a life. My mother once worked in a labor and delivery ward to put herself through medschool in the days before Roe v Wade and this type of situation was common.

This is a great story because it illustrates two points. One, the war on abortion by the right wing is futile. We know abortion is more common where it is illegal and cases like these are more common. Banning abortion does not save lives. It results in more abortions, and more lives lost. Worse, in countries with strict bans even treatment of ectopic pregnancy is forbidden where there is still a beating heart detected by ultrasound. Doctors in these countries can literally go to jail for saving a woman's life, all for the sake of a non-viable embryo that will kill the mother. The hypocrisy of calling this position pro-life is demonstrated by cold hard data. More women die. More fetuses are aborted.
…

What Illegal Abortion Looks Like

Whitney Houston is dead

I never was a fan of Whitney Houston, but this song somehow got close to me:

Whitney Houston - My Love Is Your Love

She truly had a beautiful voice. 48 years is way too early to go for anybody. She will be missed.

Whitney Houston - I Wanna Dance With Somebody

Who are the "good" guys in Syria exactly?

Robert Fisk: Could there be some bad guys among the rebels too?

John McCain backed the good guys in Libya, who are now keenly torturing their opponents to death.

The same John McCain now backs the good guys in Syria – no "boots on the ground", mind you, for this is war without death for America – and it all seems OK, until I sit opposite a guy over coffee in Beirut who kind of makes the whole story a bit more complicated. We back surrounded minorities, fighting bravely for their rights against overwhelming odds – Homs, for example. We did the same when the Kosovo Liberation Army – not exactly the squeaky-clean outfit that Nato would have us believe until Slobodan Milosevic surrendered – fought against overwhelming Serbian odds in 1998.

… Stories of the brutality and cruelty of Syrian officials are true. Let's repeat that: stories, reports, images, YouTube, real recordings of these cruelties, are all true. But then there's the shocked face of my friend, neither Syrian nor a journalist, drinking coffee with me, who agrees with much of the story. Snipers, yes. "Most of the shooting victims are hit in the head or chest. If you are hit by a sniper, you are in a serious way." There has been shelling – of homes and of at least one clinic – and there are graves in gardens. But then there are the other little comments, almost forgettable but still disturbing. The habit of "Free Syrian Army" soldiers of playing Islamic music before crossing roads under sniper fire and of praying before pressing their foot on the gas. Well, nothing wrong in that, for heaven's sake.

Then the large number of FSA men who appear to be Islamist rather than Islamic – this subtle difference is initially hard to spot, says my friend. And then the boasts of "armed activists" in Homs – there now seems to be a gentle difference between activists (armed) and protesters (unarmed) – who are executing their Alawite and Christian neighbours. …

Ronin and "Maximum Risk"

I have never seen "Maximum Risk" (and I probably never will), but seen a trailer I noticed some locations that Maximum Risk and Ronin share:

• Nice, Alpes-Maritimes, France
• Paris, France
• Villefranche-sur-Mer, Alpes-Maritimes, France

The spot used in Villefranche-sur-Mer is identical, albeit at total different scene – but Villefranche-sur-Mer is a small village. I wonder if the scenes in Nice or Paris did use the same spots.

The Girl With The Black Dress And Turquoise Bike

The girl with the black dress and turquoise bike:

If you go to Governors Island with Google Street View, you'll see a girl with a black dress and turquoise bike driving in front of the Street View camera.

Huh.

I tried to google some more information, but could not find anything more: So this is all I could figure out so far ....

If you want to check it out yourself:

View Larger Map

If you know anything, leave a comment!

[Update] Thanks to a comment, I found this with many more images – but no explanation though.

Franco is still dead…

Franco is still dead…
By Scott Horton

… but his spirit seems to have inspired a courtroom drama in Madrid the past few weeks. Baltasar Garzón—the crusading investigative judge who once sought the arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, probed crimes against humanity in Central America, exposed massive corruption in public-works projects in Spain, and tried to open the lid on the mass killings of the Franco era—was himself placed in the dock, accused of misuse of his judicial powers. In the end little was left to chance in the rush to destroy him, an effort that brought into alignment the many powerful figures he had offended: the now-governing conservative Partido Popular, which was richly embarrassed by the corruption disclosures of the Garzón-led Gürtel investigation; the United States government, which was angered by his pursuit of a torture investigation focusing on Guantánamo and was openly working for his removal; the heirs of the Franco era, who were whipped into a state of hysteria about the prospect of an investigation into the mass murders of that era.

Even Spain’s leftists and liberals seemed uneasy with the quixotic and sometimes politically tin-eared jurist. Only a ragtag group of human-rights advocates and bar associations from around the Hispanic world stood with Garzón, remembering how he had stood with them against the atrocity crimes of dictatorships, which the polite and the powerful preferred simply to ignore. Now Garzón stands convicted of abuse of power, in comically politicized proceedings that he is not permitted to appeal.
…

The late John Daly on Treemometers

… The tree ring is a composite of all these variables, not merely of temperature. Therefore on the 15% of the planet covered by trees, their rings do not and cannot accurately record temperature in isolation from the other environmental variables. In my article on Greening Earth Society on the Hockey Stick, I point to other evidence which contradicts Mann's theory. The Idso's have produced more of that evidence, and a new article on Greening Earth has `unearthed' even more. Mann's theory simply does not stack up. But that was not the key issue. Anyone can put up a dud theory from time to time. What is at issue is the uncritical zeal with which the industry siezed on the theory before its scientific value had been properly tested. In one go, they tossed aside dozens of studies which confirmed the existence of the MWE and LIA as global events, and all on the basis of tree rings - a proxy which has all the deficiencies I have stated above. The worst thing I can say about any paper such as his is that it is `bad science'. Legal restraint prevents me going further. But in his case, only those restraints prevent me going *much* further.
(via)

"Jones et al. have been cleared of all wrongdoing"

Cleared my arse.

Q85 Graham Stringer: I suppose we are haggling about the word “attempt”, aren’t we?
Sir Muir Russell: Yes.

Graham Stringer: That’s the real issue.

Sir Muir Russell: I don’t want to play with semantics because the real challenge that is in behind here is that the Russell Review—we will call it that—didn’t come to a conclusion on deliberate deletion of e-mails that had been requested. The reason we didn’t do that was something that I think I made clear to Mr Boswell when this came up in question 171 in March. I said I wasn’t going to put the review into the position of making the sort of quasi-judicial prosecutorial, investigative judgments that Mr Thomas—you will remember he spoke at the beginning of that session— had spoken about. That was an ICO’s job. That was the position that we took. So, had we been going to get into this, we would have had to start asking questions under caution. We would have been doing the sort of investigative stuff, because you’re getting to the point where you’re alleging that there might have been an offence, and that really wasn’t the thing that my inquiry was set up to do, especially when there is a parallel entity called ICO that has the investigative skills, the training and the background with its personnel.

So that, in short order, was why we didn’t go down the road of saying, “And did you delete things that had been requested?”, because we felt that that would take us into an area where we would have had to operate under caution, and it wasn’t actually relevant to where we had got to on the issue that all this is about, which is what was the end product of the influence that this process had on what was said in the IPCC report. We can talk about that at some length But what I said to Mr Williams about going after the big issues is really referable to the fact that we moved in that direction rather than chasing the words in the individual e-mails.

They didn't investigate because they were afraid of the possible answer, the most likely answer IMHO.

The ICO, by the way, wasn't interested in using their "investigative skills" as well.

Q86 Graham Stringer: I find it a bit surprising, that you didn’t ask directly when a lot of the controversy had been about the request to delete e-mails. You didn’t personally ask Professor Jones—it was the 29th, not the 27th; I apologise for that—directly whether he had deleted those emails?

Sir Muir Russell: That would have been saying, “Did you commit a crime?”, and we would have had to go into a completely different area of the relationship and formal role for the inquiry. Remember, what this chain of logic is all about is a process that is leading up to what did or didn’t get admitted as evidence in an IPCC chapter. That’s the issue that matters.

Q87 Graham Stringer: Well, I think it does matter.

Sir Muir Russell: It is not that it is immaterial. We had lots to say about FOI and Professor Acton can say quite a bit about what the university has done about that.

Yes, that is the question: Did they commit a crime? And being afraid of the answer, Muir didn't ask.