The UK Met Office, a climate agency, released some information about the immediate future, based on modeling. Briefly, it notes that natural cooling effect may temporarily ameliorate the increase in temperatures caused by global warming in some locals; it does not say that global warming is attenuated in any way whatsoever. It is more of a long term weather forecast than a climate change prediction.
The climate science denialist community, a community run by willfully wrong miscreants and with a following of mostly ignorant sycophants, and which only likes modeling when it seems to show what the denialists want it to show, made much inappropriate hay of thisleading to BBC Today to produce this headline:
“Met Office Does Not Believe that Global Warming Will Be As Severe As Previously Predicted”
When asked, the Met Office says they’d prefer the following headline to reflect what they were saying:
“Latest forecast for the next five years show that the earth will continue to be at record high levels, and there is a fair chance that new records will be made during that period.”
Here is the BBC fixing their mess-up:
Sad to see Today digging in rather than getting on board with a vigorous effort at making it right.
Fifty five of us jammed in a bus designed to hold fourty people plus a driver, rolling down Highway 90 from Upstate New York to Chicago. As a teenager (just turned 15), I was thrilled to be going to Chicago to attend the Fight Back Conference, a thinly disguised Communist Party meeting. I was going, in part for Keith, the young African American kid (about 12 years old) who was shot in the back by a state trooper just under a year earlier. Keith was driving a mo-ped down the toll road, on the shoulder, where he shouldn’t have been. It appears that he did not notice the trooper pull over behind him, so he just kept driving off. Or maybe he was trying to escape. If memory serves, he was the first human to be shot and killed with one of the brand new Magnum sidearms that the troopers fought so hard to arm themselves with, to replace the old .38’s typical in those days for police officers. He was shot square in the back.
The Best Argument to Eliminate the Tenure System comes from Atlantic University, Florida, where Professor James Tracy has asserted that the Sandy Hook shootings in Connecticut either did not happen or were staged. Asking if the deaths, if they happened, were part of a training session, he further asks “Was this to a certain degree constructed? … Was this a drill?” Read the story of the crackpot professor here.
The StopRush Project has announced that over 2,200 sponsors have pulled ads from Limbaugh’s show, via documented messages/statements. Many other sponsors have left his show quietly, bringing the actual amount of sponsors who have left, to a higher, unknown total.
The Governor of Massachusetts will have to appoint someone to replace John Kerry as Senator from the Bay State if he is in fact appointed to the position of Secretary of State. Did you know that Barney Frank is interested in that job? That would be so cool.
I write a monthly post on birds, usually about some scientific thing like evolution, at the blog site 10,000 Birds. A while back, that site was attacked by internet attackers and they had to remove a lot of functionality for a while, then rebuild the site to new specs. That herculean task is now over, and the site is redesigned and downright crispy. Go visit 10,000 Birds!
Today’s quiz: Which key on your keyboard is the “house” key?
The Hobbit is a book by JRR Tolkien, a just released blockbuster movie, and a hominid from Indonesia. Here, we are speaking about the hominid from Indonesia.
A while back I wrote a review of a book by Dean Falk, for American Scientist. You can find that review here, and you can find a different review of the same book here on my blog.
Falk’s book is about endocasts and brains her area of specialty and she goes into the study of two specific hominids in particular, Taung, and LB1. Taung (pronunced “Tah oong,” roughly) is the type specimen of Australopithecus africanus, the first described Australopith and probably the first early hominid recovered in Africa, which by the way was in 1924. LB1 is one of the diminutive Homo found on the island of Flores, Indonesia, sometimes called “Hobbit” that shook things up a bit a few years back. Assuming this is what most experts say it is, this is a new species in the human family, Homo floresiensis. Go and read the reviews cites above to find more, or better yet, read the book. A cool feature of Dean’s book is that she is a scientist writing about the research she knows about, but it is NOT a general “here’s what happened in human evolution” book, but rather, focuses much more on a smaller subset of issues.
My old friend Maciej Henneberg and Robert Eckhardt have a very different opinion of this fossil than Dean Falk does, and as far as I know, different from the broader consensus. Henneberg and Eckhardt (and some others) view Homo floresiensis as a previously existing species (ie., Homo sapiens) but pathological. They may be right, but they probably aren’t. And, the whole story of who has done what with these fossils, and to each other, is one of the more rollicking adventures in paleoanthropology. If this drama was playing out in the 18th century, there would have been a few duals by now.
Anyway, I just found out that Maciej and Robert wrote an extensive comment on my book review, and sent it to American Scientist who did not want to publish it because it was too long. Subsequently, the’ve published their original review on a blog and sent American Scientist a shorter version, which has been placed on the American Scientist web site. The blog post is: Response to American Scientist Review – Longer Version and the American Scientist version is A letter regarding Greg Laden’s review of The Fossil Chronicles. I invite you to read them both, but I’d start with the American Scientist version because the longer one is very long.
Looking just at the contiguous 48 states of the US, NOAA has determined that 2012 was the warmest year on record. It was also ranked second in “extreme” weather events including fires, major storms, and drought. Tornado activity was less than average.
The report came out yesterday and states:
In 2012, the contiguous United States (CONUS) average annual temperature of 55.3°F was 3.3°F above the 20th century average, and was the warmest year in the 1895-2012 period of record for the nation. The 2012 annual temperature was 1.0°F warmer than the previous record warm year of 1998. Since 1895, the CONUS has observed a long-term temperature increase of about 0.13°F per decade. Precipitation averaged across the CONUS in 2012 was 26.57 inches, which is 2.57 inches below the 20th century average. Precipitation totals in 2012 ranked as the 15th driest year on record. Over the 118-year period of record, precipitation across the CONUS has increased at a rate of about 0.16 inch per decade.
On a statewide and seasonal level, 2012 was a year of both temperature and precipitation extremes for the United States. Each state in the CONUS had annual temperatures which were above average. Nineteen states, stretching from Utah to Massachusetts, had annual temperatures which were record warm. An additional 26 states had one of their 10 warmest years. Only Georgia (11th warmest year), Oregon (12th warmest), and Washington (30th warmest) had annual temperatures that were not among the ten warmest in their respective period of records. A list of the annual temperatures for each of the lower-48 states is available here. Numerous cities and towns were also record warm during 2012 and a select list of those locations is available here. Each state in the CONUS, except Washington, had at least one location experience its warmest year on record. One notable warmest year record occurred in Central Park, in New York City, which has a period of record dating back 136 years.
Here’s a scary graphic:
Figure 2. Temperatures for the contiguous U.S. in 2012, compared to the previous record warmest and coldest years in U.S. history. The annual U.S. average temperature was 3.3°F above the 20th century average, and was an astonishing 1.0°F above the previous record, set in 1998. It is extremely rare for an area the size of the U.S. to break an annual average temperature record by such a large margin. Image credit: NOAA/NCDC, caption from Jeff Masters.
You can see the entire report here, and a summary here. A report on Fox News coverage of the report is here. Jeff Masters as Wunderblog discusses it here.
Climate change science denialism has pretty much run its course. We’ve been experiencing a large number of climate change related events (see this list for a brief summary) lately. It may well be that the number per year of such alarming events will go down and up over time. It may be that we will forget that some of them are happening because we grow used to them. But they are happening at a larger rate than just a few years ago, the years are getting warmer and warmer, and the effects predicted by the science have been manifest as predicted, but for on thing: They are happening sooner, faster, and worse than predicted in many cases.
But even tough climate change science denialism is now being moved aside (rightfully so) it is still out there an you may encounter it. Many of the active denialists can’t really back down because they are so invested in the denialism that doing so would require that they admit that the effects of denialism on policy have been deadly. Science denialists do, in fact, kill people indirectly whether it be in the form of anti-vax denialism, climate change science denialism or some other form.
There is a web site that specializes in addressing the various questions denialists raise in order to cast doubt on the real science. We are no longer at the point where pro science people need to have the answers ready when the denialsts show up, because that just gives them more credit than they deserve. Rather, the appropriate response is to point them to this site: Skeptical Science
Oh, and guess what. There’s an app for that! Here: Skeptical Science on the iPhone or iPad . If you want the app for Android or some other platform, click through to the site and look in the sidebar.
More information on global warming and climate change HERE.
Alfred Russel Wallace was born on this day in 1823 (he died in 1913). You know of him as the other guy who invented a theory of Natural Selection which was very like Darwin’s; they published the theory together. He also spent considerable time traveling around on boats in the tropics, like Darwin did, and collected one or two items that made it back to to various museums.
One of the most awful tragedies of 19th century science happened to Wallace, when on July 12th, 1852, the ship he and his very important and interesting insect specimens, and notes, that he was taking back to the UK from the Rio Negro area caught fire and sank. He and others survived in a life boat and were eventually picked up.
First, a word about the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s position on climate change, heat, and fires. It has been suggested (by a commenter here) that the BoM is claiming that the current heat wave is not related to climate change, but rather, a matter of natural variability and a late arriving monsoon. But that is not true. The BoM has a different take on the current situation. From Ben Cubby, an Australian journalist:
The heatwave that has scorched the nation since Christmas is a taste of things to come, with this week’s records set to tumble again and again in the coming years, climate scientists said.
The hottest average maximum temperature ever recorded across Australia – 40.33 degrees, set on Monday – may only stand for 24 hours and be eclipsed when all of Tuesday’s readings come in. Previously, that record had stood since December 21, 1972.
‘‘The current heatwave – in terms of its duration, its intensity and its extent – is now unprecedented in our records,’’ the Bureau of Meteorology’s manager of climate monitoring and prediction, David Jones, said.
‘‘Clearly, the climate system is responding to the background warming trend. Everything that happens in the climate system now is taking place on a planet which is a degree hotter than it used to be.’’
Jones goes on to say that record-breaking temperatures will become more common in years to come, owing to global warming, though of course there will still be ups and downs because natural variation will be riding on top of a warming temperature baseline. He also notes that the changes in weather and effects on agriculture, water availability and general human health are playing out pretty much as predicted by scientists in numerous studies over the last several years. The article by Cubby also goes on to say that 2013 may end up being the hottest year on record.
It is interesting to note that Australian meteorologists have been forced to add a new color to their weather maps in order to depict the extremely warm temperatures. (The image at the top of this post uses the new color, or as they say in Australia, “colour.”
The high temperature averaged over Australia was 105°F (40.3°C), eclipsing the previous record of 104°F (40.2°C) set on 21 December 1972. Never before in 103 years of record keeping has a heat wave this intense, wide-spread, and long-lasting affected Australia. The nation’s average high temperature exceeded 102°F (39°C) for five consecutive days January 2 – 6, 2013–the first time that has happened since record keeping began in 1910.
Naturally, as with anything that happens in Australia or America, the heat wave is causing an international incident. Get Energy Smart Now notes:
Some might say that those ‘Down Under’ have a competitive streak with Americans — great allies but truly ecstatic when an Aussie beats an American at the Olympics. At times, however, competition can go too far. And, such is the case with the #BigAussieHeat. After the United States set massive numbers of high temperature records in 2012 … it seems that Australia is on the path to top America’s nightmarish heat wave conditions with environmental conditions.
Next thing you know the’ll be trying for the America’s Cup again!
And now, from this report, a video on Bush Fires in Tasmania:
And, rescuing a Koala:
Anthropogenic global warming: It’s real, and it is impacting us now.
Thanks to Stephan Lewandowsky, who has been providing me with very useful information about the situation down under, where he and his family are sweltering.
Australia is experiencing a heat spell. The Climate Information Services of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has issued a special statement (I’ll provide some details below). This is not unexpected, since over the last few years global warming due to the human release of large amounts of fossil Carbon into the atmosphere has been heating everything up. In fact, a paper that came out mid (southern) winter 2008 predicted that by the end of the century, extreme high temperatures in Australia would reach 50 degrees or more. I’ll provide some data for that too. But first, since most of the readers of this blog live in the US I’ll provide a table showing the relationship between degrees F an degrees C.
C
F
20
68
30
86
40
104
50
122
So, when you reach 50C … well, there are recipes that are called “cooking” that use temperatures in that range.
The 2008 paper found the that we can expect extreme high temperature “values in excess of 50°C in Australia, India, the Middle East, North Africa, the Sahel and equatorial and subtropical South America at the end of the century.” The paper simulates future climate by looking at past and present conditions and factoring in the expected temperature changes from the ECHAM5/MPI-OM climate model which is a combination of the IPCC atmospheric general circulation model (ECHAM5) and MPI-OM ocean-sea ice component developed at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. You can read the gory details here (PDF).
That work was done a few years ago, and one of the things I’ve noticed about predictions of future climate change done over the last five or six years is that they are under-estiamtes. If a 2008 paper says Australia will be hitting highs of 50 degrees C by 2095, then based on this heuristic (and it is merely a heuristic but so far one that is working pretty well) you might expect regular extremes higher than 50 degrees C in Oz by 2030 or so. (That uses the Thumsuck Climate Model technique in which we divide all the conservative estimates by three.)
We’ll see. I’m sure that work will be revised and updated soon enough and we’ll have a better model to work with. Meanwhile, climate science denialists are already cooking up a conspiracy theory in which evidence of an extremely warm period in the 19th century was erased by the Australian Scientists and NASA so we would think things are warmer now than today when in fact the warmest period was prior to WW I. Look for that, and laugh, because it is funny. (Not “funny ha ha,” so much. More like “funny, why are they still doing this?”)
So, what has been going on in Australia over the last few months and what is going to happen over the next several days? It’s been hot and it is going to be hot. From the BoM:
Large parts of central and southern Australia are currently under the influence of a persistent and widespread heatwave event. This event is ongoing with further significant records likely to be set. …
The last four months of 2012 were abnormally hot across Australia, and particularly so for maximum (day-time) temperatures. For September to December … the average Australian maximum temperature was the highest on record with a national anomaly of +1.61 °C, slightly ahead of the previous record of 1.60 °C set in 2002 (national records go back to 1910). In this context the current heatwave event extends a four month spell of record hot conditions affecting Australia. These hot conditions have been exacerbated by very dry conditions affecting much of Australia since mid 2012 and a delayed start to a weak Australian monsoon. … The current heatwave event commenced with a build up of extreme heat in the southwest of Western Australia from 25-30 December 2012 … Particularly hot conditions were observed on the 30th, with Cape Naturaliste observing 37.7 °C, its hottest December day in 56 years of record. From 31 December the high pressure system began to shift eastward … Temperatures reached 47.7 °C at Eyre on the 2nd its hottest day in 24 years of record, while Eucla recorded 48.2 °C on the 3rd, its hottest day since records began in 1957. … Hobart experienced a minimum temperature of 23.4 °C on the 4th (its hottest January night on record), followed by a maximum of 41.8 °C (its hottest maximum temperature on record for any month in 130 years of records) and the highest temperature observed anywhere in southern Tasmania.
The report includes the following two figures:
The maximum temperature anomaly from the 1961-1990 average for the last week of December (the start of the heatwave event in Western Australia). Units are °C.The maximum temperature anomaly from the1961-1990 average for January 1 to 6. Units are °C.
According to the most recent news reports, things are pretty hard for people in Australia but there have been few deaths, possibly only one so far, due to heat as yet recorded. This is probably because Australia is in fact a fairly hot and dry country. This is not the same as a heatwave in the Upper Midwest in the US where conditions are different, the population may be more vulnerable, and there are a lot more people per unit area and heat waves often result in dozens, sometimes hundreds, of deaths.
As mentioned in an earlier post, fires have also been an issue in Australia. For example:
Fires are already burning in five states as a search continued for people missing after devastating wildfires in the island state of Tasmania.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard toured Tasmanian townships and promised emergency aid for survivors.
Residents told of a “fireball” that engulfed communities across the thinly-populated state at the weekend.
“The trees just exploded,” local man Ashley Zanol told Australian radio, recounting a wall of flames that surrounded his truck as he carted water to assist fire crews in Murdunna.
SPECIAL CLIMATE STATEMENT 43: Extreme January heat. Last update 7 January, 2013. Climate Information Services. Bureau of Meteorology
Sterl, A., Severijns, C., Dijkstra, H., Hazeleger, W., Jan van Oldenborgh, G., van den Broeke, M., Burgers, G., van den Hurk, B., Jan van Leeuwen, P., & van Velthoven, P. (2008). When can we expect extremely high surface temperatures? Geophysical Research Letters, 35 (14) DOI: 10.1029/2008GL034071
Until a few minutes ago, I didn’t even know what the heck Vocal Fry is. Apparently some people have gotten really annoyed about it, as it is a speech mannerism that has emerged among young folks, who are always annoying, and especially females, who are always annoying. Apparently. (I also did not know that until a few minutes ago! I’m learning a lot of new stuff today!)
It’s been written up in a scientific journal (see below), in popular media, and it was brought to my attention by a facebook post of Debby Goddard’s. But of all the sources I’ve seen, the following video best describes the phenomenon for those who don’t already know what it is:
Speech mannerisms come and go, and they seem to be part of the cultural process of ever-shifting styles. Some have suggested (Trigger warning: Possible Pop Psychology!) that this is an ingroup-outgroup mechanism. If you don’t know the current mannerisms, you can’t sit at the Middle School lunch table with the other cool kids.
Here’s an interesting thing about speech mannerisms: When we Westerners see them in other cultures, we (well, not you and me, but those other Westerners) often glom onto them as markers for primitivism or as indicators of less than fully developed culture or even language. A great example for those who know it is the banter of the men in the film The Feast, a Chagnon film depicting a Yanomamo Feast (more about the feast here). The men are bartering, arguing, making alliances, and showing off, and it is done with a cadence almost as though they were rapping. This is on top of the already highly nasalized language, and with face and hand gestures that vaguely resemble Western children complaining about things. This makes them look like children. Of course, they are talking about important matters of local economy, about death and warfare, about relationships, marriage, and so on. They are not acting like children in their own culture but they are heavily invested in a highly stylized set of vocal mannerisms that are not easy for a Westerner (well, those other Westerners) to interpret.
It has been said that Vocal Fry is the new Valley Speech, and if so we can see the lilting rise at the end of every single sentence replaced with a dropping of tone and glottalization at the end of every sentence, on certain TV ads and in certain sitcoms.
The Journal of Voice reports a study, Habitual Use of Vocal Fry in Young Adult Female Speakers.
The purpose of this study was to examine the use of vocal fry in young adult Standard American-English (SAE) speakers. This was a preliminary attempt to determine the prevalence of the use of this register in young adult college-aged American speakers and to describe the acoustic characteristics of vocal fry in these speakers. Subjects were 34 female college students. They were native SAE speakers aged 18–25 years. Data collection procedures included high quality recordings of two speaking conditions, (1) sustained isolated vowel /a/ and (2) sentence reading task. Data analyses included both perceptual and acoustic evaluations. Results showed that approximately two-thirds of this population used vocal fry and that it was most likely to occur at the end of sentences. In addition, statistically significant differences between vocal fry and normal register were found for mean F0 minimum, F0 maximum, F0 range, and jitter local. Preliminary findings were taken to suggest that use of the vocal fry register may be common in some adult SAE speakers.
I think the most interesting finding may be one they are not too sure of based on the available data. Fry has been around a while, and has in the past been reported as a marker for larger scale chunks of speech, like paragraph-size utterances, but the new use is simply to fry-out the ends of sentences. If this turns out to be the case it constitutes an arbitrary re-use of an extant vocalization tool as a purely stylistic form rather than as a marker of meaning, since we probably already could tell where sentences ended. Also, it needs to be noted (as they do in the study) that this particular research does not identify focal fry as a thing done by females of a certain age. This study simply looked at females of a certain age, and did not attempt to identify the demographic parameters of the mannerism’s use.
Wolk, L., Abdelli-Beruh, N., & Slavin, D. (2012). Habitual Use of Vocal Fry in Young Adult Female Speakers Journal of Voice, 26 (3) DOI: 10.1016/j.jvoice.2011.04.007
Summer is coming on strong south of the Equator, and in Australia this has meant unprecedented record high temperatures, and in the state of Tasmania, severe brush fires that have destroyed numerous homes, adding to the bad news from fires in the southeastern mainland. Prime Minister Julia Gillard said “And while you would not put any one event down to climate change … we do know that over time as a result of climate change we are going to see more extreme weather events.” That is not exactly true, of course. There are no climate related events that lack the fingerprint of global climate change. Certain events would have occurred in some for or another in the absence of climate change but the chance of any given event is increased, and the potential severity of every single event is increased because of the Earth’s increased temperature from the human release of fossil Carbon into the atmosphere and other related causes.
My colleague Stephan Lewandowsky, of the University of Western Australia just sent me these observations, which have not yet been made public but will be verified shortly: “Never before in recorded history has Australia experienced 5 consecutive days of national-average maximum temperatures above 39C. Until today. And this heat is expected to continue for another 24-48 hours, extending the new record run to 6 or even 7 days. For context, the previous record of 4 days occurred once only (1973) and 3 days has occurred only twice (1972,2002).”
Here’s a map of the temperatures country wide yesterday:
People who do a lot of field work end up with interesting stories to tell, especially if the fieldwork is diverse and the conditions are adverse. Often, the sort of thing people want to know about is very different from the repertoire of available stories, but as long as the expectations of the audience is not too rigid, experienced fieldworkers in the various sciences that do field work make the best cocktail party extras.
I never met Jon Kalb, but we have a lot of colleagues in common. I first heard of him as one of the scientists on the same expedition that found the famous fossil “Lucy” (and her various friends and families). The whole Ethiopian foray was interesting as stories go. Research in the Afar region as well as down in the Omo basis was linked to numerous interesting stories worthy of a great deal of lecture time in any reasonable course on human evolution, or several pages of descriptive prose in any book on human evolution. And this is entirely aside from the actual discovery of any actual fossils.
I recalled that Kalb was the guy who was accused of being a CIA agent and thus tossed out of the country (Ethiopia) after doing quite a bit of work there. The person who told me that also assured me that it was not true; he was not a CIA agent. But that particular story goes with a lesson: don’t ever let anyone think you are a CIA agent because they’ll toss you out of the damn country.
The reason I’m telling you all this is because Joh Kalb has written a book, perhaps I can fairly call it a memoir if that term has not been broken into a million little pieces by some other author, of his time in the field. The Ethiopian bit is part of the story, but only a small part, as Jon had done quite a bit of work both before and after. Much of the attraction of books on human evolution and other field sciences is the fieldwork stories, and that’s what Jon’s book is all about. There are stories from North America, South America, Africa, from the driest regions of the world to under the sea. The research is all over the map as Jon was himself, with human origins work being only part of it. (Jon is a geologist so he is not bounded by taxon!)
You know about Albedo. No not Libido, Albedo. Sunlight is to varying degrees reflected off the surface of the earth more or less back into space. That is Albedo. The vast regions of snow and ice covered glacial surfaces in the northern and southern Polar regions contributes to a good amount of the Earth’s Albedo. In the north, the biggest chunk of that is the ice-covered subcontinent of Greenland.
Over the last several years, Greenland’s Albedo has diminished. This was in part predicted by scientists who expected that warmer conditions would change the nature of ice and snow crystals on the glacier’s surface, thus darkening it and causing less reflection. But the rate of Albedo reduction in Greenland has been much more rapid than expected.
Click the scary graph to see more posts on climate change.
This could be because of increased deposition of soot from wildfires and possibly increased dust from aridification, both caused in large part by global warming. This means that global warming could be causing more global warming, and more importantly, that it could be causing it at a higher rate than previously expected.
There is a research project afoot that will look into this, but that is having a hard time getting funded, probably for bad reasons. The project is now asking for crowdsourcing funds. Please have a look at the following video, learn some interesting stuff, get scared, then click the link below the video to donate money to the project, then feel better. But not too much better.
, for American Scientist. You can find that review 
, 
, and numerous academic papers, and much has been written about him, including 
, and 
. The Alfred Wallace Russel Page is 
is a rollicking adventure very much worth the read.
.