THIS IS BRILLIANT! BRILLIANT, I SAY!
Andy Revkin, time to sell your guitar!
Oh, and this one too:
(Hat tip Get Energy Smart)
Monthly Archives: June 2014
Last May Was The Hottest May On Record WAIT WAIT HOLD ON A SEC
There has been a glitch in the data processing process at NASA and the word was sent out that they may be revising the May data. Stay tuned.
Please note May 2014 GISTEMP LOTI numbers preliminary due to a glitch with Chinese CLIMAT data. Update to follow pic.twitter.com/1hRF4iJA55
— NASA GISS (@NASAGISS) June 17, 2014
Thanks Chris Mooney for pointing this out.
For the period of the instrumental record, going back to 1881, May 2014 was the hottest May on record. See this post for more details.
My Review of Nicholas Wade's Book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History.
I first heard about Wade’s book when a colleague started talking about bits and pieces of it. He was reading it pursuant to a writing a review. I asked the publisher for a review copy, which they kindly supplied, and started tracking the pre-publication reactions. After reading the first couple of chapters, I realized that I needed to write a review of this book, but I wanted to do something a bit more than a blog post. So, I contacted American Scientist. I had reviewed two books for them earlier. American Scientist is actually my very favorite science magazine (among magazines that are not peer reviewed research outlets). It is a bit higher level than Scientific American (which is also a good mag) in its treatment of subjects.
The book review editor told me that American Scientist had shifted its book review approach to be more of a notice section, mainly talking about books that they recommended to their readers without intensive critical reviews. But they felt that my review of this particular book would be important so they agreed to try out a more extensive review to feature in the next issue.
For this reason I’ve been mainly quiet about Wade’s book. I did attend an online seminar with him and Agustín Fuentes, during which I asked a few questions, but for the most part I decided to focus only on this printed review which would come out after the dust had settled around Wade’s publication date. Keeping my mouth shut has been painful (as some of you know from our private conversations).
And now that review is done, in print, and thankfully, available on line.
My original plan was to point to the American Scientists review and at the same time provide a longer blog post with all the stuff that would not fit in the printed review. But as I wrote the review and interacted with the editors at American Scientist, the phrase “Normally our reviews are under 800 words” evolved into something more like “This is important, don’t worry about length. We’ll figure it out.” This is not something you hear from editors very often, especially in print media! In the end, the review that got published is the review I’d write on my blog, significantly improved with editorial input form Scientists’ Nightstand editor Dianne Timblin and the American Scientist’s Editor in Chief.
Note: The online review is one of those muti-page web pages, so don’t forget to read all of it!!!
Does keeping a cell phone in your pocket reduce male fertility?
The tl;dr: maybe a little but for benign reasons. If fertility is important to you and you are a man, don’t put hot things in your pockets. This may fall into the category of switching from tidy whities to boxer briefs.
A study came out in September suggesting that it does. It is a meta-analysis by Jessica Adams et all, published in Environmental International, called “Effect of mobile telephones on sperm quality: A systematic review and meta-analysis.”
The study considered the effects of radio-frequency electromagnetic radiation (RF-EMR) on sperm motility (movement), viability, and concentration. As a meta-analysis, the study looked at several in vitro and in vivo analyses, combining the results, and using a statistical analysis to test the idea that RF-EMR has an effect on any one of these three variables. In total, ten studies were selected from a wider range of studies (the others were eliminated for various reasons) across which a total of 1492 sperm specimens were analyzed. The results, from the abstract:
Exposure to mobile phones was associated with reduced sperm motility (mean difference ? 8.1% (95% CI ? 13.1, ? 3.2)) and viability (mean difference ? 9.1% (95% CI ? 18.4, 0.2)), but the effects on concentration were more equivocal. The results were consistent across experimental in vitro and observational in vivo studies. We conclude that pooled results from in vitro and in vivo studies suggest that mobile phone exposure negatively affects sperm quality. Further study is required to determine the full clinical implications for both sub-fertile men and the general population.
Not all studies looked at all effects and there were other differences between them. See the original study (link above) to find all the details.
Of the nine studies that looked at motility, six indicated a reduction due to mobile phones. Five of the studies looked at viability, with four of the five indicating a negative effect. Six studies addressed concentration but with very inconsistent results.
An effect means little unless there is an explanation that makes sense. Several different ways in which RF-EMR could affect sperm are considered in this meta-analysis.
One possible cause is production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) which could lead to DNA damage. ROS are molecules including Oxygen that happen in the normal day to day course of biological activity in cells but that can increase in frequency for a number of reasons, including, and most famously, ionizing radiation. Oxygen is a highly reactive element. When life first arose on earth, Oxygen was not commonly available and was generally destructive to the finely tuned molecular processes associated with living form (probably, and I oversimplify). But life processes tended to release oxygen from molecules in which it was more or less safely sequestered. By and by life processes evolved that handled oxygen by re-sequestering it, life processes evolved that made use of the highly reactive nature of oxygen.
An analogy for this is Xander Cage (Vin Diesel) in the movie xXx. Cage is a dangerous out of control tough guy who has capabilities that the government (represented by Agent Augustus Eugene Gibbons, played by Samuel Jackson) requires for an important task. Cage is tamed, in a sense, so he can carry out the government’s bidding, but at the same time he remains dangerous. There are many movies with this theme. Imprisoned highly capable and dangerous bad guys are given a chance to play a useful role; they are needed because of there capabilities, but their capabilities are dangerous ones, so their exploitation comes with a risk. The exploitation of one of nature’s most dangerous elements, oxygen, provides life with some incredible capabilities, but as a risk.
Oxygen is usefully employed by nature. Oxygen damages biological processes. Nature employs counter measures to minimize that danger (i.e., “anti-oxidants”). But sometimes those counter measures are not enough, either because a very rare form of ROS comes along, one that is not accounted for by life’s counter-measures, or because a counter-measure is simply overwhelmed (or otherwise interfered with).
So in this scenario, RF-EMF cause the generation of a greater quantity of ROS, or especially damaging ROS. My understanding is that this is generally considered unlikely because the range of RF-EMF produced by cell phones is thought to not be physically capable of influencing ROS quality or quantity. However, the authors of this study argue that it is possible:
A small amount of ROS has an important functional role in sperm capacitation, the acrosome reaction, and binding to the oocyte (Garrido et al., 2004). Experimental disruption of the flow of electrons through the mitochondrial electron transport chain has been shown to increase ROS production significantly, with negative consequences for sperm motility (Koppers et al., 2008). In vitro evidence found EMR emitted at the same frequency as mobile phones increased mitochondrial ROS production and DNA fragmentation in sperm, and decreased motility and viability ( De Iuliis et al., 2009). The trends seen in this meta-analysis are consistent with these effects.
A second kind of effect is thermal. Sperm normally develop, in humans (and perhaps mammals in general) in a narrow range of temperatures. Increasing temperatures could interfere with this. There are two ways in which temperature increases could occur. One is that the RF-EMF excites molecules at the site of spermatogenesis, increasing temperatures. RF-EMF in the range emitted by cell phones can certainly do this if there is enough energy. This is what a micro-wave oven is. This particular thermal effect is minimal with cell phones. Were it not minimal we would be slowly cooking our hands and faces while we talked on the phone. Still, at least one study cited by Adams et all shows an increase in heat of people’s faces while they are taking on a cell phone. It is possible that a very small effect that normally has no biological significance would affect sperm production because it is sensitive to heat changes. This effect is considered to be very unlikely as it is simply too small.
However, cell phones also become warm, and this heat could be transmitted to the site of spermatogenesis. I learned about hot cell phones shortly after getting my first smart phone. I had left some apps running (I think the camera app was the culprit) and blanked the screen. The phone sat in my pocket for a while and I noticed a very uncomfortable sensation of increased heat. When I took the phone out of my pocket it was quite hot. It is possible that this made my sperm unhappy.
This study has some severe limitations, some of which are discussed by the authros.
Heterogeneity, that is variation between studies that is greater than expected due to sampling error … is an issue in most meta-analyses. Heterogeneity was high in all our meta-analyses (I2 > 88%) … However, our meta-analysis did include nearly 1500 samples, which increases confidence in the results. The heterogeneity in the motility meta-analysis was partially due to the differences in mobile phone exposure times, as the subgroup analyses demonstrated. The high heterogeneity and relatively low number of studies also precluded meaningful assessment of publication bias… However, sensitivity analyses demonstrated minimal differences when individual studies were excluded, with a tendency for our results to be conservative.
The possibility of confounding variables influencing the results of the observational studies cannot be ruled out. For example, participant age and smoking status were not consistently reported, so it is possible that these affected the observational studies since they are known to affect some semen quality parameters … [S]tudy populations taken from fertility clinics, as used in many studies on male fertility, may not be representative of the general population, as they are likely to contain a higher proportion of men with sperm parameters outside the WHO reference range.
Again, see the original study for more detailed discussion of these limitations.
It is possible that studies that fail to show an effect are simply unpublished and if available would balance out the meta-analysis. The degree of effect is small, so if there was random variation in outcome and several studies on one side of the mean outcome are removed, a small effect would be expected. There may be something about men who keep their cell phones in their pockets that relates to infertility. That seems like a strange idea, but if, for example, thermal effects are important, simply keeping numerous objects in one’s pockets could affect air flow and heat distribution in and near the nether regions. There is no control here; there is not a study of men who keep objects that are identical to cell phones but electronically inert (placebo-phones, if you will) in their pockets. Perhaps men who keep their cell phones on belt clips represent the higher-sperm production men while those who keep their cell phones hidden away have lower sperm production. A control study that looks at external cell phone attachment devices, and probably pocket protectors and other paraphernalia, in relation to fertility and overall manliness would be … well, probably not fundable so forget it.
The important outcome of this study, I think, is that a careful look via many studies of the effects of cell phones on a biological process known to be rather delicate (the making of sperm) shows only a minor effect at best, with much equivocation on whether there is an effect at all. Furthermore, the most likely effect is simply heat, having an object in your pocket that generates extra heat in a region where evolution had previously designed a cooling mechanism, a dangling scrotum that normally keeps the external testes away from the body.
There is the possibility that if anything is happening here at all, it would effect sperm quality in other ways, including DNA or chromosomal damage. That would be important to know. Female egg production is very different from male sperm production, so the two cases are not very analogous, but if there is an effect on sperm it might be worth asking if there is an effect on age. If the effect is anything other than heat, i.e., if it has to do with RF-EMR affecting molecules in cells, then something very important may be going on other than a small effect on fertility. Affecting molecular activity with radio waves might be a thing, and an area of future research and the possible development of medical diagnosis or even treatment. Most of the claims of radio waves for therapy or treatment, however, are wooish bunk. It seems that more study is merited, but for interesting academic reasons and not because this is a clear and present danger.
How to watch #WorldCup #Soccer in the US for Free
Around the world, productivity of businesses, service, all things related to the progress of civilization, and pretty much everything else will be delayed and repeatedly interrupted from today on through some time in July as the quadrennial event known as World Cup Soccer is played out. This is just like the Olympics but much much longer and there is only one sport. Plus, there are only a few countries involved. And, of those, most are sacrificial lambs — only a few of the countries that play ever win.
Every one in the world can watch World Cup Soccer for free by just turning on the TV or hooking up on the Internet. Everyone.
In the United States, however, Disney bought the game out and if you want to watch the game and hear commentary in English and such you have to Pay the Walt. This is done in various ways that I don’t fully understand, so I can’t give you any advice as to how to spend your money that way.
But, Univision, an international network that happens to be Spanish Language, has an on line live stream of the games.
To watch World Cup Soccer for Free, CLICK HERE and check out the site. If there is a game on you’ll be able to click through. No hay problema. Poco los comentaristas dicen que los asuntos de todos modos. Es en su mayoría sólo los nombres de los jugadores están citados el balón rebota sin sentido de un pie al otro y la cabeza a cabeza y los pies a la cabeza y la cabeza a los pies. ¿Sí?
I watched the game for a few minutes today, just long enough to see Brazil score it’s second point. Unfortunately, el punto fue para el equipo contrario! Hahaha!
Can we please get rid of the R******s name?
From WaPo:
When sports fans tuned into the NBA finals Tuesday night to see the San Antonio Spurs take on the Miami Heat, they got a look into another fierce standoff.
A California tribe paid for the anti-Redskins advertisement “Proud to Be” to run in seven major cities during halftime. The airing marked the first time the ad, which initially appeared online in time for the Super Bowl, had run before such a wide television audience.
Are we warm yet? (UPDATED)
According to the NOAA GISS global instrumental record for temperatures (1880 to the present), since 2000 (inclusively) we have had
- 2002 and 2003 ties for first and second warmest January. Januray 2014 was the fourth warmest, 2005 the fifth warmest.
- February 2010 was the third warmest Feburary, and 2002 had the fourth warmest February.
- March 2002 was the warmest, 2012 was the second warmest. March 2014 was the fourth warmest.
- April 2010 was the warmest on record, April 2014 the second warmest.
- We are still waiting for the data on May 2014, but during this time the warmest May on record occurred in 2010, and the second warmest in 2012.
- The warmest and second warmest months during this period were recorded for June, July, August, September, October, November, and December.
- With an impending El Niño, of as yet undetermined strength (and, actually, not 100% certain to occur) we might expect some of the remaining months for 2014 to be in the top two or three rankings for warmest over the entire instrumental record.
- ADDED: May 2014 was the hottest May on record.
May temperatures should be available over the next week or so.
So far, for this period, 2010 has been the warmest year on record. 2005 has been the second warmest year on record. 2007 has been the third warmest year on record. 2002 has been the fourt warmest year on record. Last year, 2013, was the sixth warmest and 2003 the seventh. Of the 14 most recent full years, nine have been in the top ten.
Best applications to install on your new Mac
What are the best applications, free or cheap, to install on your iMac for basic tasks and productivity?
This post is to guide you in the careful and considered upgrade to your newly acquired iMac or other Mac OSX machine, especially for non-Mac experts. For each of the categories of work you may want to do with your computer, I suggest a number of applications beginning, where possible, with the applications already on your computer, then moving on to free alternatives, then inexpensive paid alternatives. In many cases there is a high end expensive alternative that is probably very wonderful but with one exception I wont be talking about those.
I’m writing this in part from the point of view of a Linux user, who has not been involved with Microsoft Windows except when threatened with waterboarding (and I took the waterboarding), and who mainly uses my computer for writing, because I’m mostly a writer. (See this post if you are considering installing Ubuntu Linux.) I do, however, mess around a bit with images; I do not claim to be a photographer but my work involves manipulating photographs and images. Also, I’m a cross platform kind of guy, so that factors into some (but not all) of my suggestions. I like Open Source Software but frankly, if there is a much better option that is non free for a certain use, I’m willing to pay a reasonable (meaning low) price for it. So some of my suggestions will cost.
Browsing
Browsing is of course the most important thing you do with your computer, because this is how you get your news, check your Facebook feed, tweet, and all that. Mac comes with one of the best browser out there, Safari, so just use that. This is an especially good choice if you have multiple iOS/OSX machines and use the same Apple ID on all of them. Your stuff will be integrated.
This does not work well for me because I switch back and forth across platforms, so instead I use …
Chrome/chromium/whatever you want to call it.
Install the Google Browser made of Chrome. If you are at all cross platform, you’ll want this because it is very good at sharing bookmarks and such and it runs on all the platforms you’ll ever likely use. Each instance of Chrome on different machines, including your iPad, can be signed into with the same account and there will be a certain amount of syncing, mostly bookmarks and such.
Writing and Words
Text Editor
I do most of my writing with a text editor (emacs in Linux) and most of what I write ends up in blogs. Using a word processor messes up the text. Text is best. (We’ll look at word processors below.) I generally prefer to write outside of the WordPress platform (all my blogs are WordPress these days) using Markdown. I’ve written about Markdown here. It is a simple writing “language” where you insert symbols to cause headings, italics, links, etc to be created later by a magical process.
You have two built in text editors on your Mac. One is called “TextEdit.” There is nothing fancy about it, which is appropriate for a text editor. One key feature of TexEdit is that is uses the cloud, so you can share text files across your OSX devices. However, the files you put on this part of the cloud are not available to you using iOS, because for some reason Apple has not implemented TexEdit on iOS. This is probably one of the best example of why the Apple Cloud as currently implemented is a toy, at best. (The next iteration of the operating system promises to fix this, coming out in the Fall 2014.)
Other than that, TextEdit, for most purposes, this is fine. There are many other free or inexpensive text editing solutions some of which give you that cloud overlap. I’ve tried them all. I am not especially impressed.
A second text editor that comes with the system is called “Notes.” This is mainly for writing simple notes that are very quickly upgraded, using a cloud-like thingie but it is not “the cloud” … just a hidden in the background cloud … across your devices. I put my grocery lists on this, and I use it to jot down notes for stuff I’m writing, etc. But really, you can use it as a regular text editor as well up to a point.
Since I use emacs on my Linux machine, you may wonder why I don’t use emacs on the Mac, because it is available. Well, I’ve done that but I don’t like the implementation of emacs on mac. It is a bit kludgy and ugly. Somehow it feels wrong. But you could do that if you are an emacs maven, which you probably are not.
A very good free text editor that has excellent features is Bare Bones Software’s TextWrangler. It is like TextEdit with more features. It is nice. Free. But I’m not going to recommend it because I personally think that if you are going beyond TextEditor to the next level of functionality, you will benefit by shelling out money and buying Bare Bones Softwares’ super duper editor, BBEdit. The motto Bare Bones uses for this application is “It doesn’t suck” … and it is true.
You can download a trial version of BBEdit, which I recommend, to see if its features are good for you. I like the layout, and I use text searching, grep-style (regular expression) manipulation, sorting, etc. frequently enough to make it worth while. If you like it, then buy it. It is a bit expensive for a text editor but for me it is worth it because I virtually live inside the text editor. It’s about 50 bucks.
Marked for Markdown
This is the magical processs I mention above. I recommend using “Marked” as your markdown processer. You write something in a text editor. Then you save the file and grab the little icon on the Mac title bar for the text editor, and move it to the Marked icon on your Dock. Magically, Marked opens up with the text all converted and formated and stuff. The most likely thing you’ll do then is to copy and paste the HTML code into your browser but maybe you’ll make a PDF or RTF file. It is the best thing since sliced bread.
WordProcessor
You can get Pages as your Mac word processor if you want. Let me know how it goes. I found it hard to use because I’m too accustomed to other word processors. Frankly I think it is an immature program that I’ll probably try five years from now if it still exist.
For a long time the only word processor I used on a Mac was Apache OpenOffice or LibraOffice. People fight over which one is better. They are identical except that the most recent version of one might be a little newer than the most recent version of the others. LibraOffice emerged as an alternative to OpenOffice when a big giant company nobody trusted bought out OpenOffice. So the Libra in LibraOffice is meant to be revolutionary, freedom fighting, all that. I use LibraOffice on my Linux machine because that is what is installed automatically with the version of Linux I use, and I use OpenOffice on my Mac for no particular reason.
These two Office programs come with a Word Processor, a Spreadsheet program that is quite nice, and a Presenter (like “PowerPoint”) program that is also very good.
That is the free alternative, and it is a good alternative, and you should just do it.
However, you can also install Microsoft Office for Mac, which includes Microsoft Word on your computer. It will cost you. How much? Nobody can say, because Microsoft has a pricing scheme that is not understandable by humans. In my case, since my wife and I share our desktop computer at home, it was free because she was eligible for a free copy of it. If it is free for you, you might want to try it.
I like Word’s handling of Tracking Changes. That is really the only thing I need to do because the publishing industry is totally locked into Word. So, when I’m working with an editor on a project, we have to go back and forth with Track Changes and Comments. OpenOffice’s Writer does not handle those things as nicely as MS Word does, so I’m glad to have MS Word on my computer, though it does make me throw up a little in my mouth when I say that. But yes, Microsoft makes a good word processor.
I’ve almost never had OpenOffice or LibraOffice crash on my Linux machine or the Mac. Since installing Microsoft Office a few weeks ago, Excel, the spreadsheet, has crashed, would not recover my document, and I lost data, once. Just sayin.
Graphics
Built In Preview
The first thing you need to know about graphics is that the “preview” application that comes with the Mac does more than you think it does. Open a graphic in preview (quite likely, by just clicking on it) and poke around. Especially, pick “Tools.”
You can annotate the image. You can adjust color. You can crop. You can scale it, flip it, and rotate it.
Frankly, the vast majority of time you need to manipulate an image, this is the stuff you need to do. Preview is lighting fast, reliable, built in, default, and you should just learn to use it automatically as the first thing you do when you need to mess with an image. You’ll find yourself hardly ever using other software.
iPHoto and Aperture
I hate these programs, though I do use Aperture on a limited basis. I don’t get the way they work. They take forever to load. They are slow and clunky. I believe iPhoto is free on the Mac (and available for the iPad), and Aperture costs money. Between the two, Aperture is so much better than iPhoto that if you have to use one or the other a lot, spring for Aperture. But really, they are a pain.
One of the best things you get with either of these is access to your cloud-based photos. This means your iPad and iPhone photos can be synced to your desktop and accessed. Again, the fact that it has to be done this way is a function of Apple’s Cloud being a toy, and not really that useful. Again, this may all get fixed this Fall when the new system comes out. If you don’t need these things, wait.
Gimp
The Gimp, free, is an image manipulation program originally built for Linux. I use it on the Mac. It is very good for me because I’ve been using it so long I know how it works. But, the Mac version is a bit clunky and buggy, so I don’t recommend it, but I just wanted to tell you that it exists.
Pixelmator is the closest thing I’ve use on a Mac to Adobe Photoshop or The Gimp that is also cheap (but not free) and works very well, once you learn to use it. It also uses the cloud, but again, you can only get to images it had created. This is where the cloud really breaks down because one might want to do multiple things using multiple different software applications, to one image, which means you simply can’t use the cloud because the cloud stores files on a program by program basis. Anyway, Pixelmator requires a bit of a learning curve but once you’ve got it it’s good.
iDraw
I use iDraw for anything that needs vector manipulation, but it also does some pixel manipulation. Increasingly, I find myself using iDraw and Preview together. iDraw is also available on the iPad, so if you have it installed on both you can manipulate images from more than one location. I don’t ever do that so I can’t vouch for it.
Presentation
PowerPoint Like Applications
If you installed MS Office you’ve got PowerPoint. Good luck with that. I don’t like it, don’t use it. If you installed LibraOffice or OpenOffice, you’ve got Presenter. I like it better than power point, and until recently I used it often.
Keynote
Save your presentations in the cloud. Make sure your iPad or iPhone has downloaded the presentation before you take off to give your talk, because you might be heading for no-internet land. Plug the device into the projector and most likely it will just work. As opposed to Powerpoint or Presenter on your laptop which may require you to reboot and restart everything a few times.
Regarding inter-changeability between Presenter, PowerPoint, and Keynote: Forgetaboutit. Sure, you can do it, but whether or not that works changes with each release of each of these programs. This just isn’t something you can rely on.
Annoyingly, some of the features you use on desktop Keynote will not work on iPad Keynote, including some fonts. This is very bad because most likely you’ll design your presentation on the desktop and show it with the iPad. But the degree to which this is the case is reducing with every version, and it hasn’t actually caused me trouble yet. But check your prsentation on the iPad before you leave your desk, just to be sure.
Spreadsheets
I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here. I have typically used OpenOffice Calc and, on my Linux machines, Gnumeric. I recently installed Excel (see above) on the Mac, and I use that now all the time. MS Excel on the Mac is strange, with some functionality removed or hard to get to and it can be a bit frustrating, but if you are a spreadsheet guru you will get past all of that. OpenOffice or LibraOffice Calc is great, works fine, and interacts with Excel fairly well. But frankly, if you are in a business environment where every one sues Excel, you’ll need to get Excel and there is nothing I can help you with here, dear power user.
Apple’s Numbers spreadsheet…
… is a toy. Don’t bother.
Other Things
I’m not going to talk about video because I’m not advanced in that area. I use iMovie, it seems fine. I use the note archiving software Evernote and the iMac version of Evernote is great. I don’t use a Twitter client because they all suck or go out of date as Twitter changes its API. I just use Twitter on the web.
Some other time we can talk about utilities and such, but for now I’ll mention only one program that you may find useful when your hard disk starts getting full: Duplicate Detective. If you have duplicate files filling your hard drive, this application, which takes forever to run because it simply takes time to be sure two files are exact duplicates, may save the day.
I would also like to talk about email software but I can’t because it all sucks. Apple Mail does not work well with Google, and all the alternatives I’ve tried have problems. If you have any suggestions, let me know. If you are a developer, I hope you see this as an open niche and fill it!
XNconvert
Scrivener
Lin
Finder replacement
iDraw
Gimp
Climate-Contrarian Research: Rebutted by Peer Review, Soaked Up by MSM
Given recent attention to the issue of consensus in climate change research, this is a good time to mention a paper that came out recently by John Abraham, John Cook, John Fasullo, Peter Jacobs, Scott Mandia and Dana Nuccitelli called “Review of the consensus and asymmetric quality of research on human-induced climate change.”
I’ll paste the abstract below but first I’ll summarize it in a sentence. The few papers that explicitly deny the basic science of climate change are rightfully rejected by the peer review process because they are crap. Bit they do find more attention by main stream media, presumably because main stream media is inadequate to the task of addressing actual important issues.
Here’s the abstract for the paper published in Cosmopolis.
Climate science is a massively interdisciplinary field with different areas understood to varying degrees. One area that has been well understood for decades is the fundamental fact that humans are causing global warming. The greenhouse effect has been understood since the 1800s, and subsequent research has refined our understanding of the impact of increased concentrations of greenhouse gases on the planet. Also increasing has been the consensus among the world’s climate scientists that the basic principles of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) are correct. This has been demonstrated by multiple reinforcing studies that the consensus of scientists on the basic tenets of AGW is nearly unanimous. Nevertheless, the general public in many countries remains unconvinced not only of the existence of AGW, but also of the degree of scientific consensus. Additionally, there remain a few high-profile scientists who have continued to put forth alternative explanations for observed climatic changes across the globe. Here, we summarize research on the degree of agreement amongst scientists and we assess the quality of scholarship from the contrarian scientists. Many major contrarian arguments against mainstream thinking have been strongly challenged and criticized in the scientific literature; significant flaws have often been found. The same fate has not befallen the prominent consensus studies.
Dana Nuccitelli, one of the authors, wrote a summary of the paper here, in which he notes:
Despite the 97% expert consensus on human-caused global warming supported by peer-reviewed research, expert opinion, the IPCC reports, and National Academies of Science and other scientific organizations from around the world, a large segment of the population remains unconvinced on the issue. A new commentary by Edward Maibach, Teresa Myers and Anthony Leiserowitz in Earth’s Future notes that most people don’t know there is a scientific consensus about human-caused climate change, which undermines public engagement on the subject.
This ‘consensus gap’ is in large part due the media giving disproportionate coverage to climate contrarians. In our paper, we sought to evaluate whether that disproportionate media coverage was justified by examining how well contrarian hypotheses have withstood scientific scrutiny and the test of time. The short answer is, not well.
The consensus gap in public opinion is mirrored by, and relates to, an expertise gap among the researchers. Abraham et al note in their paper:
Insofar as these contrarian themes are representative of other contrarian viewpoints, our findings reinforce those of Anderegg et al., (2010) who found lower expertise and prominence among the contrarian scientists and those of Doran and Zimmermann (2009) who found that as scientific expertise increased, so did certainty in the main premises of AGW. Here we find case study evidence that the science representing major contrarian views is less robust than the counterparts that reflect the AGW consensus.
I remember Jerry Rubin once saying “The masses are asses.” Wikipedia does not, and claims it was Karl Rove. Other sources cite Alexander Hamilton, but apparently it is an old Yiddish proverb. In any event, it is true, of course, but it is not really their fault. The fact that the vast majority of the public arrive at scientific conclusions as a matter of enculturation and not actually replicating the science is exactly what we expect; people are busy and simply want to be informed from reliable sources. The problem is, the sources … are not so reliable. But within climate science it is interesting to see that the non-consensus positions are expressed in the form of low quality research which tends to not pass mustard in the peer review process because it just isn’t good enough. In other words, globally, the more you actually know the more likely you are to accept the realities of climate science; within the sciences, the smarter you are the more likely you are to understand the realities of global warming.
This explains a lot of what we see in Twitter and other social media. Just sayin.
I refer you again to Dana’s post for a more detailed discussion of the paper.
US CO2 Output Up, and how to lie with graphs
Above is a graphic someone tossed at me on twitter the other day. It makes it look like CO2 emissions went way up then went way down so everything is fine. It is, of course, a lie, of sorts.
IT is actually kind of hard to find a graph just for US CO2 that goes back in historic time, but this graphic for the global energy industry clearly shows that the big picture is an upward trend:
The dip we see in recent years is simply an effect of the economy going bad, and things people do that emit CO2 being done somewhat less. Kevin Schultz wrote this up on his blog:
After a five-year decrease in the amount of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are on the rise again. The culprit: a rebounding economy.
CO2 emissions from fossil fuels rose 2.39 percent in 2013 compared with 2012 and grew 7.45 percent for the first two months of 2014 compared with the same period in 2013, according to new data released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). The jump puts an end to the annual decrease that had occurred from 2008 through 2012.
So be careful of that misleading graph, and keep working on reducing emission. This problem will not solve itself.
Global Warming Hiatus?
Just a quick item on the pause in global warming that is said to have happened over the last X number of years. I took NOAA’s instrumental record since the late 19th century and calculated the average deviation for “surface” temperatures from a baseline for the entire period. Surface temperatures refer to the lower part of the atmosphere and sea surfaces. When you look at a graph of “global warming” expressed in temperatures, this is almost always what is meant (this leaves out a lot of things, including the poles, much of Africa, and deeper ocean waters). But it is a standard and a fairly useful one.
If there was a significant pause in the overall upswing of temperatures for any period of time, I reasoned, it would show up as a cluster of negative years … years where the temperature for that year is lower than the previous years. More to the point, “hiatuses” (and I actually don’t like that word because it is being used correctly …. “pause” is a better word) if they happen on a regular basis should show up as a cluster, not necessarily continuous, of negative years.
Look at the graph above. This is simply a graph that shows a point for each year that is cooler than the previous year. There are tests that one could do on this data. For example, a sign test or a run test would tell if there was any clustering of negatives. But I’m not going to bother with this at this point.
It seems to me that negative years are fairly uniformly distributed at the large scale and seem random. There may in fact be some real clusters in here, but if they are, they are not recent.
So there you go.
Climate Change Books (Updated)
This post has gone out of date. Go HERE to see a current list of excellent books on climate change.
US Drought Over Time
I made a movie you might enjoy. There may be something else out there like this, probably better than this one, but it is still cool. I downloaded all the PDF files from the US Drought Monitor archives, using the version of the connected US that has only the year, month, and day on the graphic. Then I slapped them in iMovie and sped the animation up by 800% over the default 1 sec. per pic. I do not have today’s rather horrifying image on it, which I’ve placed above.
Here’s the movie:
How fast can sea level go up with Polar Ice Cap melt?
Independent videographer Peter Sinclair’s ‘This is Not Cool’ video explores recent headline-grabbing research on Antarctic glacial melting, the first video produced under the name Yale Climate Connections, formerly The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media.
Free Climate Change Cartoon Book Chapter!
The NCSE wants to give you a free chapter from the above depicted book. Click here.