Monthly Archives: October 2014

What is the role of the deep ocean in global warming? Climate science deniers get this wrong.

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What is the role of the ocean’s abyss in global warming?1

I’ve already posted on a study published in Nature Climate change that shows that the amount of extra global warming related heat in the Southern Oceans is greater than previously thought. There is another paper in the same journal by Llovel et al, “Deep-ocean contribution to sea level and energy budget not detectable over the past decade.” This paper verifies previous research that the oceans absorb a lot of the excess heat, but looks specifically at the ocean below 2,000 meters, which the paper referrs to in places as “deep” but that we should probably call “abyssal.”1 The paper concludes that the abyss is not warming. This is bad news, because if it was warming the total effects of global warming on the surface would be potentially less, or at least, stretched out over a longer period of time. But, it is not unexpected news. We already suspected that the abyssal ocean does not absorb much of the surface heat, while the shallower ocean absorbs quite a bit.

Research done prior to 2012 (e.g. Hansen et al 2011) parceled out the energy imbalance the Earth experiences from anthropogenic global warming. The extra heat caused by AGW from 2004 to 2010 was divided among the upper ocean (71%), the deeep ocean (5%), with the rest going various other places (only 4% over land). The new paper suggests that the abyssal ocean takes up closer to zero heat.

There are three complexities you need to be aware of to interpret this finding. First is the complexity in the climate system, second is the complexity of the research itself, and third is the relatively straight forward statistical problem of assigning meaning to specific numbers. That third one is important for journalists and regular people to pay attention to, because the climate science denial community is already exploiting it to misrepresent this study.

This is a complex and difficult problem

We know that the vast majority of the extra heat resulting from global warming ends up in the ocean, and also, we know there is a lot of interaction between the ocean and the atmosphere, with heat that might otherwise add to the atmosphere seemingly entering the ocean on a regular basis, with some of it occasionally coming out in large quantitates during El Nino events. This relationship is expected to change over time as the ocean warms, as the transfer of heat between ocean and atmosphere depends in part on the relative difference between them. At some point it is likely that the degree to which the ocean takes up net heat will decrease if the ocean warms up beyond a certain point.

Over the medium and long term this matters a lot. Because of the ocean (and polar ice and a few other things) the effect of increasing greenhouse gasses is not instantaneous. If the Earth was a simple rock with no water, but a Nitrogen atmosphere with, say, 250ppm of CO2, the greenhouse effects of the CO2 would ensure that the atmosphere was at least a little warm. If we doubled the CO2 the atmosphere would warm further, and it would do so very quickly. A new equilibrium would be reached in a geological instant (a few years?). But with the ocean, that change is much slower slower (decades, perhaps many decades), because the ocean buffers the atmospheric change.

When heat goes into the ocean, it then moves around in the ocean because it disperses across the aqueous medium, and because water is always moving in currents or mixing. An El Nino is a change in the movement of water that has been warmed with contact with the surface, so that warm water that has been building up at depth over time changes its movement pattern and moves closer to the surface (and to a different horizontal location) where heat is released. That is one (especially large and important) example of the complex dynamic of atmosphere, ocean, and heat. Currents that move through the upper ocean then dive down to depth may move some of the surface heat to the deeper waters, especially where the currents have dived not just from cooling water (hot water would tend to go up, cold water would tend to go down) but because it is driven in “conveyor” systems which may run counter to expectations of where water should go when considering only local conditions, and especially, if the water is dropping because of an increase in salinity. Again, this is an example of the complexity of the system.

If we add a lot of CO2 to the atmosphere, the atmosphere will warm up, but because of the complexities cited above, it is hard to say how much or how long it will take. The ocean serves to slow the process down. In fact, it is quite possible that if the ocean would be so kind as to absorb a certain amount of this heat permanently, maybe global warming would be somewhat reduced. The ocean is potentially a way of stretching out the effects of global warming. But this effect is likely reduced if the abyssal ocean is not in the game.

Complexities in the research

Meanwhile the measurement of heat in the ocean has been very sparse. Over the last decade more measurements have been taken using new technology, but even that is not as good as we would like to understand what is going on at depth. So, when it comes to understanding heat in the ocean, we may sometimes feel like we are at sea. The two papers in this week’s Nature Climate Change are much more important as studies that calibrate or refine the process of measuring ocean heat dynamics under global warming than they are studies that change our view of global warming. Neither paper concludes anything unexpected, both provide important refinements to key numbers, exploiting the last decade of improved data collection.

One of the complexities is in the details of the Llovel et. al study as compared to the handful of previous related studies. One of the key numbers is the energy imbalance where the ocean absorbs extra AGW produced heat. Energy imbalance is measured in terms of Watts per m–2. The present study yields a value of 0.72. A previous study reported 0.54. Other estimates have varied in this range. Llovel et al point out, however, that these differences may be due to differences in the ocean depth considered in each study and the time periods covered. At least one earlier study measured energy imbalance for the top 1,800 meters, while Llovel et al look at the top 2,000 meters, and all the studies cover somewhat different time periods.

So, we have changing quality of data, a data set that is growing incrementally over time, studies that look at slightly different time and space parameters. And, on top of this, we have the increasingly advanced methods of figuring this all out. Both of the Nature Climate Change studies used a combination of direct measurements of temperature at various depths, a measurement of the altitude of the top of the ocean (sea level) from highly accurate satellite instruments, and measures of the mass of the water in the ocean, from the GRAIL gravity research project. If the mass of the ocean stays the same (same number of water molecules) but the surface rises, that is from heat, and that allows an estimate of energy imbalance. If the ocean goes up more than it should from heat expansion, the extra may be from glacial melting. And that is the simple version.

Statistical reasoning

The statistical part of this is not really so complex. Well, it is, but the part I want to point out is not. Llovel et al concluded “Accounting for additional possible systematic uncertainties, the ocean below 2,000 m contributes ?0.13 ± 0.72 mm yr?1 to global sea-level rise and ?0.08 ± 0.43 W m?2 to Earth’s energy balance.” Sea level rise is close to 3 mm a year, so the abyss is decreasing sea level rise by close to 4%. And, the abyss is in negative energy balance, while the upper ocean is in positive energy balance.

But look at the numbers. –0.13 plus or minus 0.72. There is actually no way to say that the abyssal ocean is contributing negatively to sea level rise. Zero (or small positive numbers) are well within the range of statistical probability. For energy imbalance, –0.08 plus or minus 0.43. Again, zero and small positive numbers are well within the statistical range for this value.

But for some reason we see various individuals, including sadly at least one climate scientist (Judith Curry: “Evidence of deep ocean cooling?“), but mostly anti-science climate trolls, crowing that the “deep ocean” is cooling therefore we are not experiencing global warming. However, the truth is that the total amount of heat that is going into the ocean, instead of the atmosphere or other places, was thought to be large, is still known to be large, and in fact is larger than we were originally thinking (from these papers and several others that have come out recently). And, the contribution of the abyss ocean to both sea level rise and energy imbalance is statistically nil. It might be negative, it might be positive, but it is tiny either way. The deep ocean, on the other hand, is in strong positive energy balance.

1The terminology used in this discussion and some of the research papers (or reporting thereof) is a bit confused. Climate scientists have repeatedly said that heat is going into the “deep ocean” and this paper seems to say it is not. But it is. It is a matter of terminology. This is a source of confusion sometimes exploited by climate science denialists. A good way to define these terms is as follows:

Shallow ocean = 0-700 meters
Deep ocean = 700-2,000 meters
Abyss = > 2,000 meters

Hansen, J., Mki. Sato, P. Kharecha, and K. von Schuckmann, 2011: Earth’s energy imbalance and implications. Atmos. Chem. Phys., 11, 13421–13449, doi:10.5194/acp–11–13421–2011.

Llovel, W. J. K. Willis, F. W. Landerer, I. Fukumori. 2014. Deep-ocean contribution to sea level and energy budget not detectable over the past decade. Nature Climate Change, 5 October.

Interview with Michael Mann

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Last Sunday, I interviewed climate scientist Michael Mann on Atheist Talk Radio. I do occasional interviews there on science related topics (see this list of previous shows).

You can listen to the interview here:

Play Now

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Minnesota Atheists for giving me the opportunity to do these science interviews, which are admittedly different from the usual topics covered by the show.

Prior to the show, I wrote a post indicating that we would be doing this interview, noting that people were welcome to past questions I might ask Mann during the interview. I tweeted that blog post, and Dr. Mann retweeted it, a couple of times. I promoted the show in a number of other places as well. There was a call in number and an email address to send in questions.

The show runs early in the morning on Sunday and the listening area of 950AM radio is fairly small (though it is possible to listen live on line using the Internet or other means). So, frankly, we don’t get a lot of live listeners. The usual number of call in or emailed questions we have (for my interviews, anyway) is usually about two. But, the podcast is much more widely listened to.

There have been some rather intense and lengthy discussions related to Michael Mann’s work on my blog here and here over the last few weeks (see: Steve McIntyre Misrepresents Climate Research History and I hope Judith Curry apologizes for this).

Putting all of this together, the several dozen people who have been tweeting at or about Mann or me over the last month about the Hockey Stick research, and those heavily and actively engaged in the conversations on my blog, must have known about the opportunity to ask specific questions about that work. What actually happened, though, was this:

Why? How is it that there can be so much yammering about Michael Mann’s research and the Hockey Stick graph, but when the opportunity arises to actually ask a direct question about it, the dozens of people making all that noise end up sounding like this:

Crickets. Crickets is all they’ve got, apparently.

Meanwhile, here is a talk Michael Mann recently gave at The Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas:

Improved Understanding of the Role of the Oceans in Global Warming

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The sun warms the Earth’s surface. Additional greenhouse gases and associated positive feedbacks (like, additional additional greenhouse gasses) increase that effect. So, it gets warmer, and by “it” we mean the “surface” of the Earth. This is usually measured as the temperature near the surface across the land and the surface of the sea (Sea Surface Temperature or SST). But over 90% of the heat added by global warming goes into the ocean.

We know how much heat goes into the ocean (other than SST) two ways. One is direct measurements using equipment that samples water at depth, and the other is by super amazing precise measurements of how big the ocean is (reflected in the altitude of the surface), which increases as it heats up. Direct measurements are sparse and do not go back a long ways, and are very rare in the southern hemisphere compared to the northern hemisphere.

A paper just out in Nature Climate Change looks more closely at the Southern Hemisphere by combining direct measurements, estimates from ocean expansion, and some fancy modeling. The study suggests that the estimate of heat held in the upper 700 meters of the ocean in the Southern Hemisphere since 1970 was several percent too low owing to the lack of good data.

The study looks at the period from 1970 to 2004, prior to the deployment of some (but not yet sufficient) improved measurement technology. Study author Paul Durack notes, “Prior to 2004, research has been very limited by the poor measurement coverage. By using satellite data, along with a large suite of climate model simulations, our results suggest that global upper-ocean warming has been underestimated by 24 to 58 percent. The conclusion that warming has been underestimated agrees with previous studies, however, it’s the first … estimate [of] how much heat we’ve missed.”

This is a lot of heat. From the paper, “For perspective, these adjustments represent more than double the 1970?2004 heat storage change for all non?ocean (terrestrial, cryospheric and atmospheric) heat reservoirs combined…”

What does this mean?

It may mean that there is more heat added to the Earth’s surface than we thought there was, which means that any empirical estimates of the effects of global warming would need to be increased. But the real meaning may only be understood when we have a better handle on what happens to heat within the ocean, as shallow waters interact with deeper waters, and how the ocean as a system interacts with the atmosphere. And this heat, at this depth, does interact with the atmosphere. Despite the rather spectacular nature of this finding, its greatest significance is probably that it is a major step towards quantifying what may be the biggest single unknown related to climate change: what is happening in the ocean. It may, though this is subject to revision, increase the higher end of the estimate of “climate sensitivity” which is a measure of how much the surface of the earth will warm given a doubling of pre-industrial levels of atmospheric CO2. In that sense, this is potentially unpleasant news.

I have an FAQ on this research that I’m not sure I can provide a link for, but I’ll past the part that addresses the importance of the research, in the view of the authors:

What are the implications of long-term underestimates to ocean warming?
Quantifying how much heat is accumulating in the Earth system is critical to improving our understanding of climate change already underway and to better assess how much more we can expect in decades and centuries to come. Our key result is that the warming of the global ocean in recent decades has been substantially underestimated. These findings will likely lead to a revisit of previous sea-level and climate sensitivity estimates, and to a re-examination of how scientists deal with poorly sampled aspects of the climate system. A key lesson to be learned from our work is that observing the global ocean is critical, and that prior to the recent improvement in global coverage of ocean observations, a substantial and very important part of the global climate system was under-observed. In order to better understand past and future climate changes it is imperative that the global ocean is adequately observed, as it plays a critically important role in the Earth’s climate and its change.

I have a feeling there will be a lot of discussion of this over the next few days.

The Ebola Test: Civilization Fails

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We really only know things work when we test them to the limit and see what it takes to make them fail, or nearly fail. All those air planes and space ships and regular shops and nice cars that usually don’t fail have a pedigree of prototypes or prototypes of parts that were pushed until they broke. Chickens fired into running Boeing 757 engines with a special Chicken Cannon. Crash dummies driving vehicles into specially built walls. Rocket engines exploding on test ranges. But many systems are never tested that way, and really can’t be. We build the systems and convince those who need convincing that they are stable, adaptable, appropriately designed, and ready. Then, real life comes along and pulls the fire alarm. It is not a drill. The system is stressed, and if it fails, that may be the first time we learn it wasn’t good enough.

Obamacare’s computer nightmare is a good example. It actually worked, ultimately, but at first it was one of the largest interactive computer services ever built and brought to so many users in such a short amount of time. There is general agreement that the system was built improperly and that is why it failed, but I don’t think that is necessarily the case. It may simply be that we can’t know that such a large and complex system is going to work when it is deployed, we should probably expect failure, and we should probably be ready to jump in and patch and repair and redo as needed. And, as a society, be a bit more grown up about the failure.

Three systems have been tested by the current Ebola outbreak and found wanting. One is the system of rational thinking among people. That is just not working very well. We have people in villages in West Africa thinking that health care workers who have come to help them are the cause of the scourge. We have tin-hat wearing Internet denizens insisting that that Ebola has already gone airborne, and that the US Government has a patent on the virus, and somehow it all makes sense, thanks Obama Bengazi! The failure of rational thought, which is a system supported by home grown culture and formal education, has been stressed and found wanting. We are not surprised, of course. I bring it up mainly because I want to point out that this is a general human failure, not just a failure among the victims in Africa who are so easily overtly blamed.

The global public health system has been tested and proved to be an utter failure. WHO and the CDC and all that have done a pretty good job with earlier, smaller, outbreaks of Ebola and other diseases, when they can fly in more people than even live in some remote African village, and most likely the hardest part of those missions is the logistics of getting to the field. That has been facilitated in the past by on the ground aid workers, missionaries, and in some cases, public health researchers who already knew the terrain. But they had a plan, they had gear, and it all mostly worked very well. We assumed the plan and gear and expertise and personnel was in place for a major outbreak. It wasn’t. That system has been tested and failed.

And now we are seeing a third system showing itself to be a failure, and it is actually kind of surprising. In speaking of the problem of screening for possible Ebola carriers coming in to the US on planes we learn that there isn’t a way to keep track of people flying to the US from other countries. From CNN:

“All options are on the table for further strengthening the screening process here in the U.S., and that includes trying to screen people coming in from Ebola-affected countries with temperature checks,” a federal official said… “It’s not as easy as it sounds. There aren’t that many direct flights from Ebola-affected countries to the U.S. anymore. Many passengers are arriving on connecting flights from other parts of the world, and then they come here, so that makes it more of a challenge.”

So, a couple of dozen well funded and well trained terrorists get on airplanes and destroy the World Trade Center and mess up the Pentagon, etc. This makes us consider more carefully the threat of terrorists attacking the US. We set up draconian laws and expensive systems that have the net effect of measurably removing freedoms for Americans, annoying people in other countries, and nudging us closer to a police state than ever before. We’ve even closed the border with Canada to anyone without passports, and even there, US and Canadian citizens can no longer assume they can freely travel back and forth. We fly drones over villages in other countries and blow people up (It’s OK, they were all bad) and we keep closer track of everything all the time everywhere than ever before.

But we can’t tell where a person getting off an international flight originated? Wut? I would have thought that would be the number one thing that would be implemented as part of the Homeland Security Upgrade. First thing.

Homeland Security in the US, the biggest shiniest newest system on Earth, fails the Ebola test.

In some ways, that is actually a bit comforting. But it is also terribly annoying.

Two Odd Examples of Pre Ebola "Ebola"

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I used Google N-gram Viewer to inspect the occurrence of the word “Ebola” in the Google-indexed literature. A few instances of Ebola came up earlier than the disease being known, so I figured they were references to the place name in Zaire/Congo, after which the disease is named. And that was in fact the case. But, of handful of early instances I checked out, two were interesting.

The Ngram is above. Note that I have smoothing set to zero, which I recommend, and I’ve got the date set for early on in the use of the term so pre-disease uses are more visible.

The two interesting instances I wanted to show you are ..

1) An Okapi at the Paris Zoo named Ebola, allegedly the first captive born Okapi to survive in a zoo.

Screen Shot 2014-09-11 at 10.41.19 PM

The other is a bit stranger. Have a look:

Screen Shot 2014-09-11 at 10.44.16 PM

See the yellow highlight? This (and the Okapi picture) are screen grabs of what Google Books give you when you search for a word or term. Here, “China” in funny Gothic looking script was recognized by the scanner as “Ebola.” You can kind of see how that would happen. Not really. But it happened.

The Ubuntu 14.10 Upgrade: What to do

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The Ubuntu 14.10 Release October 23, 2014

Ubuntu 14.10 will be released shortly and I know you are chomping at the bit and want to know all about it.

There is some important news, for some, and there is some exciting news for others, and there is some boring news, and frankly, some bad news.

Before diving into the shallow pool of Ubuntu 14.10 (shallow in a good way) I want to go over some other ground first. I want to address this question:

“I have installed Linux and I don’t like the default desktop. How do I change that without ruining stuff?”

If you are a long time Linux user you know the answer has two parts. First, “Oh, hey, don’t worry, this is why Linux is so great!” and second, something like “sudo apt-get install yadayada, then log out and then log back in again with your new desktop” where “yadayada” is the new desktop. Easy peasy.”

Now, let is rephrase the question, and in so doing reveal the bad news.

“I have installed Ubuntu 14.04 and I don’t like the default desktop. How do I change that to gnome?”

The answer to the question is actually pretty simple, but has a very different form that I find deeply disturbing. Again, there are two parts. First, “Well, Ubuntu comes default with Unity, and Ubuntu with Unity and some other stuff under the hood does not actually allow you to just swap around desktops like you could in the old days without messing around a lot and depending on exactly how good the information you get on this is, and which desktop you replace Unity and all that with, you will probably break something.” Putting this another way, Ubuntu has broken one of the most important features of Linux, one of the features that makes Linux cool, and in so doing, Ubuntu has made Linux more like Windows. Ubuntu/Unity/Etc as a “distribution” is now vertically integrated across the usual layers to the extent that it is either take it or leave it (I oversimplify but not by much).

And of course, you can leave it. That is the second part of the answer. “You will need to essentially replace your current distro with another distro.”

How to replace Unity with Gnome on Ubuntu

There is a tool to do this, available from Ubuntu. This is actually a pretty amazing tool. It allows you to take a current distribution of Ubuntu and convert it to a different flavor. Ubuntu comes in many flavors. The default is with Unity and it is a desktop environment designed for the average user. Then there are alternatives that have either different desktops or that serve very different purposes, and mixing and matching is allowed to some extent. For example, Ubuntu can be a basic server, or a web server (called a LAMP server), or a mail server (or all three) perhaps without any desktop at all. Or, you can pick any of several distinct desktops like Kubuntu (uses KDE, which a lot of people like) or XFCE, which is what Linus Torvalds and I use, or Gnome 3, and so on.

The tool is called tasksel

You install and run tasksel (sudo apt update; sudo apt upgrade; sudo apt install tasksel; sudo tasksel) and you get a thingie that lets you pick a “Package Configuration,” which looks like this:

Screen Shot 2014-10-04 at 11.46.51 AM

You then very carefully follow the instructions or you will ruin everything! But if you do it right, it should very cleanly remove Ubuntu’s default desktop and install Gnome 3 or whatever. HERE are the instructions and HERE is an excellent episode of the Linux Action Show that goes into detail.

Important additional information: First, this information is current in early October 2014. If you are reading this much later than that, re-research because things may change. Second, it is not perfectly true that Ubuntu does not let you install new desktops and use them. It is true, however, that this is not seamless, harmless, or even recommended. A clue to the seriousness of this is that if you use tasksel to remove Unity and install Gnome 3, you can’t then install Unity because Unity will not cohabit with the version of Gnome you’ve installed. There is too much stuff in the middle that does not work right.

I have installed multiple desktops on top of Ubuntu 14.04, including Mate, Gnome 3 and Gnome Panel. It was the first time for me that playing with desktops broke my system and I’ve been using Linux (and Ubuntu) for a long time, and I mess around with desktop a lot. This is the new normal (for Ubuntu). You will see instructions on what you need to do to switch around desktops on Ubuntu, but frankly, that boat may have sailed other than the use of extreme measures such as tasksel.

I will give you a recommendation below if you are confused or uncertain about what form of Linux you might want to install, based on my own experiences.

Now, back to what you need to know about Ubuntu 14.10.

The first thing you need to know is that Ubuntu 14.10 is almost exactly like 14.04. There are virtually no visible meaningful differences as far as I can tell. So if you are using Ubuntu and are sticking with Ubuntu, don’t expect pretty fireworks. This will not be an exciting upgrade.

Second, 14.10 has an updated version of the kernel, the deep guts of the operating system, and this is important. It is good to have a current kernel. Also, this kernel has some important new hardware support. Some Dell laptops have the ability to turn off your hard drive if it feels itself falling, so the drive is not running when your laptop hits the ground. The new kernel actually supports this feature so if you have a newer Dell laptop, you might want that. There is some improvement in the handling of Dell touchpads as well. The point is, you should absolutely upgrade to 14.10 for a number of unexciting but still potentially important reasons.

Want a better desktop, mate?

No, we are not in Australia. The third item is the big exciting news. If you think Unity sucks, and you liked the old fashioned Gnome desktop (back in the days of Gnome 2.0) you will find this cool. Gnome 2.0 was the best Linux desktop for most purposes, in my opinion. With the new approaches taken by both Unity and Gnome 3, and since forever with KDE, I get the sense that the purpose of the computer is to have a cool desktop. For me, the purpose of my computer is to run certain software and manage files. The purpose of the desktop is to facilitate that, ideally in a way that allows me some customization, but that stays consistent over time so an upgrade does not break my workflow or force me to relearn how to use the hardware, and often, that means just staying out of the way. For me, Gnome 2.0 was the sweet spot in meeting those requirements.

But Gnome has moved on. The current thing that looks and acts like Gnome 2 is called Gnome Panel. It kinda works but it has problems, especially (in my experience) on a laptop. It is not being kept up like it should be to be a current usable desktop. So, sadly, Gnome is no longer recommended for those who liked traditional Gnome. This not to say that Gnome 3 (or for that matter Unity) aren’t great. But they aren’t. Just sayin’

But then there is mate.

Mate is a fork of Gnome that intends to maintain Gnome 2 coolness. It has been around for a while now. It has been updated regularly, and the tradition seems to be to come up with the newest version of the mate desktop in sync with Ubuntu’s release schedule. I’ve tried mate a few times, and I’ve had mixed experiences with it, but in the end it is probably the desktop you want to install if you want Gnome 2-osity on any form of Linux.

This is a bit confusing unless you are already used to concepts like the difference between the terms “desktop,” “desktop,” “desktop,” and “desktop.” Mate is a desktop. Most desktops come along with software that is not strictly desktop but works with the desktop. There are two ways to get many (but not all) desktops. One is to install a “distribution” that uses that desktop, like installing Kubnutu to get the KDE desktop. The other way is to have some normal form of Linux on your computer, then you install the desktop onto that and later, you can chose to log into the newly installed desktop, or some other desktop that happens to be on your system.

Mate was available as an Unofficial Ubuntu Desktop. This means that the mate people would take the guts of a current Ubuntu distribution, and replace various parts with other parts so when you download and install the unofficial Ubuntu mate desktop you get Ubuntu with mate as your desktop.

Now, after a period of regular development, mate is an official flavor of Ubuntu. This means that you can do exactly what you could do before, install Ubuntu with mate instead of Unity or KDE or whatever. But it probably has other implications. I assume that being an official desktop enhances the degree to with an Ubuntu Mate distribution will install cleanly and function well.

It does not exist yet. I understand Ubuntu Mate as such will be released on October 23rd, the same day as Ubuntu. And it comes at a time when Ubuntu continues in the process of seriously downplaying the non-Unity desktops. If you go to the Ubuntu site and see what is there and download and install it, you can be forgiven for not ever knowing that you could have installed Edubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Mythbuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, UbuntyKylin, Ubuntu Studio or Xubuntu. You have to dig through a couple of layers of the site and then you get to a scary page that most people will think is just for techies. In the old days, Ubuntu highlighted the diverse alternatives. Now, the bury them. That concerns me.

What you should do instead of automatically installing Ubuntu

There are a lot of Linux distributions out there, and you are of course free to mess around with them. But I’m happy to give you my current advice (subject to change frequently!) about what you might consider doing.

A given Linux distribution, which includes its own distribution materials, may or may not work fully and easily on a given piece of hardware. Considering that when you are looking at or working in a browser or your favorite text editor, the system you are using isn’t that important most of the time, the ease and seamlessness of the installation is really one of the most important features of a distribution. It is my belief based on recent experience messing around with installing several different distributions on five different computers (four laptops, one desktop) that Ubuntu, in one form or another, will generally install the easiest. This includes getting the install medium, doing the installation, and getting help when something goes wrong.

Having said that, installing debian, a traditional well developed form of Linux, on which Ubuntu is based (as are many other distros and most installations worldwide, I think) is pretty easy. Having said that, I quickly add that you probably really want to install one of the “extras” versions of debian, which includes “non free” material and is stored in a scary place and not so well documented.

So, my first piece of advice is this. Get two sets of installation media (this is not hard). One for Ubuntu, the other for debian. Try to install debian. If you run into trouble, switch to Ubuntu. You’ll get the job done. The installation process is not too time consuming or difficult, so this is not a big deal.

My second piece of advice is to figure out what desktop you like. If you actually like Unity, then by all means go over to the dark side and install default Ubuntu. Have a nice time communing with the devil. See you on Halloween!

But if you prefer a different desktop, like Gnome 3 or whatever, then follow my first piece of advice, trying debian than Ubuntu. If debian installs well, then go to town installing your preferred desktop if it wasn’t the default during your install. If debian does not work, then pick the flavor of Ubuntu that has your preferred desktop.

My third piece of advice I’m giving with an important caveat. The caveat is that I’ve not tried this yet so I have no business telling you to do it. But I am going to try this and I think it might be cool. If a Gnome 2 style desktop is your preference, then either install debian and then install mate on top of that, or install Ubuntu Mate 14.10 when it comes out. Just for fun. It might work great.

My fourth piece of advice is this. If you like the Gnome 2.0 desktop and you want to use a well tested and tried interface, consider using XFCE instead. XFCE is quite like Gnome 2 in many ways, but even less in your face. You could install Xubuntu, the Ubuntu flavor with XFCE as the default (or if you have Ubuntu Unity maybe you can use tasksel to switch, depending on things I don’t want to advice you on). Or, and this is probably the ultimate solution, you can instal debian with XFCE. Which, tellingly, is the default desktop for the canonical Linux distribution that is not Canonical. (See what I did there?@?)

And remember, there are only two things you need to keep your eye on. First, you need a computer that will run your software, and pretty much all of these solutions should do that equally well; the only difficulty here is the match between the distro and the hardware, and for a desktop computer, any Linux flavor with any desktop will probably work so you won’t be pounding your desktop in frustration. For laptops you may want to be more conservative and go with the herd (Ubuntu). Second, whatever you do, have fun. And there is nothing in the world more fun than repeatedly reinstalling your operating system, right????

Explaining Extreme Events of 2013: Limitations of the BAMS Report

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The American Meteorological Society, in it’s Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS), has released a report called “Explaining Extreme Events of 2013 from a Climate Perspective.” Three studies looked at excessive heat in Australia, three at drought or dry conditions in California, and 14 looked at various other extreme events (though some of those events may overlap or be related) for a total of about 15 different phenomena.

There was a pattern in the results. The studies looking at heat all suggested a link to anthropogenic global warming (AGW). This is not surprising because AGW has involved a global increase in average temperature which is manifest across a variable climate, so even a modest increase in global temperature, bunched up in to places that are a bit cooler or warmer than average (at a given moment in time) is going to be blatantly obvious when picking out heat events. Some of the studies that looked at the California drought and drought in New Zealand attributed these conditions to climate change, others were more ambiguous or suggested that there was no link. All of the studies that looked at extreme precipitation events concluded that there was no way to make a connection, except one (in Northern India) which as ambiguous.

Michael Mann has pointed out that there is a basic problem with the BAMS study. Many of the extreme climate events of recent years have been linked by various researchers to climate change, but a) none of these researchers seem to have been invited to contribute to this collection of papers, and b) some of those specific events have been linked to climate change by some of those researchers.

It might be tempting to view this volume as an authoritative statement by the scientific community on the role climate change may or may not have had in some high profile, devastating recent extreme weather events. But that would be misguided. The BAMS special issue is not a representative, community-wide scientific assessment like those published by the National Academy of Sciences or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The editors, instead, have solicited contributions from a relatively small number of groups, so the findings do not necessarily reflect the range of views of the broader scientific community. Some leading climate scientists who were not included in the effort have presented evidence of a greater role for climate change in several of the events dismissed or downplayed by the BAMS articles (see e.g. Kevin Trenberth of NCAR on the September 2013 Colorado floods, Stefan Rahmstorf of the University of Potsdam on the June 2013 Central European floods and Jennifer Francis of Rutgers on the 2013/2014 California Drought).

I’ve provided references and links to the studies mentioned by Mann, as well as other studies, below.

Mann points out, and I had noticed this when I first read the BAMS volume, that the studies that looked at extreme precipitation pretty much leave out the mechanism implicated by the above mentioned researchers. In fact, I would say that the basic methodology used to examine these events is flawed in two ways. Before describing that, here is summary information about the studies.

The spatial and temporal context of the studies, and attribution

In order to evaluate the studies in the BAM report, I ranked attribution from 1 to 5. 1 means no effect of climate change at all, 5 means climate change is a major contributor or THE explanation. 3 is the nickpoint; a 3 means maybe maybe not, or serious ambiguity. So 4 and 5 are yes, climate change mattered, 1 and 2 are no, climate change did not matter (but 1 is more strongly stated) and 3 means you can’t say but maybe.

The four studies that look at dryness and drought (including more than one for California so these are not all independent data in that respect) had attribution vales of 2, 3, 4, and 4. The minimum surface area of the climatic events evaluated was about 268,021 km2, and the maximum about 423,970 km2. These events are generally long term. Drought or dry periods are large and slow moving things, and the period of time over which they happen ranges from several months to years. Notably, some meteorologists such as Paul Douglas have noticed a shorter term event, which Douglas calls a “Flash Drought,” a period of little or no rain where there usually is some rain lasting for several weeks, sufficient to disrupt crop growing but not sufficient to lead to long term effects such as depletion of ground water supplies.

The 10 studies that looked at heat (all but one excessive heat, one cold) had attribution values of 1 (the cold in UK), 4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5 and 5, with a surface area ranging from about 220,000 km2
to 133,453,480 km2. Heat waves usually cover large areas, but can be very short term, lasting several days to several weeks.

The 8 studies that looked at extreme precip (most rain, one snow) had attribution values of 1,1,1,1,1,2,3, and 3 … no case was attributed unambiguously to climate change, most not at all. These areas covered a region of between 27,980 km2 and 8,080,464 km2, but most clustered near the lower end of that range. Most extreme precipitation events cover small areas (though the extreme rain experienced during the summer of 2014 in North America may have been a physically very large event running form the Upper Plains to the Ohio Vally, and beyond). Extreme rain and snow storms normally occur over a matter of several days.

Spacial-temporal bias in the BAMS study

The size and lifespan of the events under consideration is the best single predictor of level of attribution given by the individuals studies. For the most part, relatively small short term events were not attributed to climate change, while large slow moving events were more often attributed to climate change. Exactly parallel to this is, of course, the nature of the event. It isn’t just the size and lifespan of the event, but the kind of event that matters, which in turn relates to the size and time frame. But, the size and lifespan of the precipitation events may be part of the explanation for why attribution is low.

This is why. The studies that looked at precipitation used a number of different approaches but for the most part they had the same characteristics. Underlying the application of the various analytical techniques is the question of probability. If a certain kind of event (a large amount of rainfall in one place over a contiguous number of days) is rare, and climate change makes is somewhat less rare, it may be impossible to detect this probabilistically unless the sampling is done right. It is difficult to measure, with statistical confidence, the difference between something that is very very rare vs. merely very rare. Since the studies essentially tried to do this (for the most part), it is not surprising the study results did not attribute those events to change over time.

It may the case that a year by year study of changes in probability of rare events will not detect a change until the change is huge.

And now for a brief thought experiment.

Imagine for a moment that all climate events are the result of the distribution and behavior of small imaginary objects that float around in the air. We’ll call them climaticulus. Climaticules have two attributes: temperature and moisture. Unspecified processes alter these attributes. If enough climaticules in a region are dry for long enough, you might get a drought. If enough are wet, you might get lots of rain or snow. If a lot are warm, you might get a heat wave.

With the climaticule thought-model, variation in two attributes can generate a spatially large long term event (like a drought) or a spatially concentrated short term event (like flooding rains). At the surface, these events look like qualitatively distinct events, but underlying them is a simple system. In this system, the smaller and shorter term events are going to present statistical distributions that are different than the statistical distributions of the larger scale events. Even if they are the same kind of distribution, they will be scaled very differently. It is quite possible that a numerical change in one category of event will remain invisible while others are latent, given similar basic approaches such as “what happened over a year’s time” or “what happened in a particular space.”

That thought experiment may or may not have been helpful, but I can put it another way: Under climate change, the climaticules are sending out a signal that results from changes in average temperature and moisture. When the signal comes as a large slow moving event, it is hard to miss. When it comes as a small ephemeral event, it is easy to miss.

Mechanistic bias in the BAMS study.

As pointed out by Mann (see above), the BAMs study fails to consider an already proposed and reasonably well supported mechanism for increased occurrence of extreme precipitation events. This is the change in the patterns of trade winds and jet streams that seems to result from regionally increased sea surface temperatures and/or relatively more warming in the Arctic.

Under normal conditions, in the northern Temperate zone, air masses move from west to east, between two jet streams. The jet streams guide the air masses and the air masses push around the jet stream … they can be thought of as two aspects of the same system that arises from a a combination of the Earth’s rotation and the movement of heat from equatorial regions north towards the pole.

Under these conditions, the air masses vary in barometric pressure and moisture, and this variation causes rainy atmosphere to move at the large scale from west to east at a fairly rapid clip. So if you are sitting there in Iowa, it might be sunny mid day, than a front comes through bringing some storms, then the sky clear again, over several hours. Or, you might get a larger, wetter, air mass coming along that brings a day of variable amounts of rain.

It is thought that recently it is more common for the jet stream to for giant curves, which relates to the temperate air masses bulging northwards or being pushed southwards. The jet stream slows down. So, air masses that might bring precipitation are either blocked from their west to east movement or move very slowly (and in a somewhat different direction) than they normally would. So, a stormy, wet, rainy air mass may take two or three times longer to move across a given region, causing much more rain to fall there. At the same time, other regions may experience long term lack of precipitation. This is all further complicated by the changes in where the air mostly comes from and goes to, allowing some air to be dryer than usual and other air to be wetter than usual. And, because of AGW, the air is on average warmer so it can hold more moisture.

So, you get a bunch of extra moist air arriving in a place where contact with colder air masses and changes in pressure cause it to be rain-producing, and it sticks around for several days in one spot, or moves very slowly, and you end up with flooding like we saw in Calgary, or Boulder, or long periods of continuous storm formation and rainfall over a large area like we had in the upper Midwest in June of 2014.

What was the jet stream doing for each of the studied extreme events?

Focusing only on temperate regions in the US and Europe, I assembled a set of wind stream maps (from here) that more or less show the behavior of the jet stream at the time of each event. These are a little hard to read but you will notice that the location of the event is in every case up against a wavy part of the jet stream at the time. For reference, I took one of the events, September 13th, and picked out several earlier wind stream maps (every five years for several decades in the past). This is not a systematic sample, but it shows that typically the jet stream, not so long ago, was flatter (probably) than it was during these extreme events. These graphics are all pasted below, and I’m sorry if it takes a while for them to load.

The examination of the relationship between climate change and extreme weather events is tricky, in in its infancy, but we are beyond the point where we should be ignoring emerging research pertaning to the link. The BAMS report ignores that research. Also, the examination of extreme precipitation events should be done in larger blocks of time than one year. Looking year by year, and event by event, almost guarantees not making the link because of the bias in spatial and temporal features of these events.

Colorado storm, September:

Screen Shot 2014-10-03 at 11.28.48 AM

South Dakota Blizzard, October 4-5:

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Wet southern European winter, 2013:

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Heavy precipitation, May-June, Upper Danube and Elbe Basins:

141003163536

Extreme snow, Western Spanish Pyrenees:

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Violent Storm in Northern Germany and Denmark, 28 October:

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For comparison, September 13th from several prior years:

1970:

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1975:

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1980:
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1985:
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Prior work related to climate change and extreme weather events:

Linking Weather Extremes to Global Warming
More Research Linking Global Warming To Bad Weather Events
Is Global Warming Behind the Polar Vortex?
Extreme Jet Stream Pattern Triggers Historic European Floods
Are you ready for more floods and wildfires?
Drunken Arctic Goes Head Over Heels

Two Ways Hollywood and Literature Have Confused The Ebola Problem

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According to popular literature (some fiction, some not) and movies, Ebola can cause havoc, infecting thousands of people, killing over half of them, and threatening an entire nation if it were to become airborne. Turns out that’s not true. Ebola can do all those things without becoming airborne. In several nations.

The confusion caused by this misconception is further enhanced in a more subtle way. Since the Hollywood version of Ebola (or some other similar disease) indicates that it is dangerous because it becomes airborne, we see constant claims today on the Internet that Ebola must be airborne because it is out of control in West Africa. And, of course, we see claims that it is only a matter of time before it becomes airborne. But an examination of the disease from an evolutionary perspective suggests that this is extremely unlikely. It is almost as though people have to believe that Ebola will eventually become airborne (or already is) to take it seriously. It wont’ become airborne. You must still take it seriously.

So that is the first area of confusion, about what Ebola is and what it does and does not do.

To this confusion, by the way, we may add the already mentioned hyperbolic reaction to Ebola, often of a rather tin-hat variety and the equally incorrect hyperskepticism that has made claims like Ebola is not that big of a deal because it is not malaria. That is also demonstrably false.

The second area of confusion is what is normally done when something like Ebola shows up in the US, as it has in Dallas, Texas. The Hollywood and Literature version is that a big silver truck shows up at the site, people with protective gear jump out of the back, individuals are taken away to Level 4 containment facilities that are handily available nearby, the site is sterilized using high tech devices (or imploded or burned down with flame throwers?), and if there are a lot of possibly infected people, everybody is quickly rounded up and moved in large green trucks to a containment camp run by the Army, with Morgan Freeman in charge whom you think at first is a nice guy but turns out to be evil.

Well, some of that is sort of happening, but slowly and clumsily and with no has-mat suits and no containment camp. As I write this I’m watching the live briefing on Ebola in Dallas. We have just learned that pretty soon some guys are going to go over to the apartment where the family of the patient lives. They will do the laundry when they get there because there might be Ebola kooties on the sheets and pillows. The CDC went grocery shopping for them, and they are being told they can’t leave. So in a way this is a little like what Hollywood says would happen, but with much, much lower production value and pretty much as a post-hoc set of reactions rather than a clear plan always in place just in case.

We are also learning at the news conference that there is not a current plan for where to take a second or third Ebola case. No playbook in place. Having said that, the authorities are confident that they can handle the problem.

None of this is surprising. After all, fiction is fiction. That’s why they call it fiction. What is also not surprising, but disappointing, is the low level of thought behind the questions the press are asking, and the highly unprofessional approach taken by some reporters. Pro tip: Don’t ask only dumb questions, or questions that have already been answered, then be all mad and stuff when the press conference ends sooner than you thought it should.

More on Ebola:

Ebola in Dallas Texas: Is our response adequate?

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First, let’s look at the situation in West Africa, because that is way more important than anything going on in the US right now. The WHO has said two things about this. First, if there is not a full intervention, there may be hundreds of thousands or even millions of cases of Ebola several months from now (cumulatively). Second, with full intervention they can stop this epidemic.

What is full intervention? They say that full intervention is the development and manufacture of an effective vaccine, and the deployment of that vaccine to a very large percentage of the affected population.

Putting this another way, the current response has been inadequate, and while it can be improved, it can’t be made adequate. Things are pretty bad, are going to get enormously worse, and there is little hope for any other outcome, unless full deployment of a vaccine that does not exist over the next six months is realistic.

Now let’s look at the US. Public health officials and public health experts have been saying the same thing for months. Don’t worry about an Ebola outbreak in the US. We can handle it. We know what we are doing, and we have the systems in place to take care of this. So just don’t worry.

I’m going to tell you now why this is probably both true and untrue.

It is probably true at the large scale. We are not going to have an outbreak of Ebola in the US that involves hundreds of people getting the disease. Probably not even dozens. But, it is not true that we have the capacity to fully handle Ebola coming to the US in the way most people assume this is meant. It is very possible for Ebola to some to the US and make a bunch of people sick with about half of them dying. How many is a bunch? Five, maybe eight, something along those lines, but possibly a few times, in a few places, adding to a couple of dozen. (Totally guessing here, feel free to make your own guess.) That may not happen at all, but given the current situation it is absolutely possible. However, it is not necessary. If our public health system was truly able to handle an Ebola intrusion, the only people who would have Ebola in the US would be those who arrive with it, and possibly a very small number of additional people, not a bunch. In other words, unless changes are made, the inadequacy of our system, said to be fully adequate, will allow several people in the US to become ill, some will die, over the next year.

Here is why.

First, consider the travel problem, which is probably the smallest part of this. When Patient X came to Dallas with no Ebola symptoms, he was almost certainly not a risk. But he did get on an aircraft with the disease, and took a long trip the US. If this event happens 100 times over the next several months, how many times will the patient become symptomatic on the plane, possibly exposing others? 10% of the time? 5%? 20%? Hard to say, but often enough that over the next several months hundreds of travelers and airline workers will be exposed, but, the chance of them contracting the disease is low. So, with the current expanding outbreak and current policies, a very small number of people may get Ebola in a system that claims to be totally able to handle it. That’s small change compared to what is going on in West Africa, and it is probably the least of our worries here in First World Land.

Second, we have the problem of reporting and identification. Patient X became symptomatic and then for something like a day did not seek medical help, during which time various individuals were potentially exposed. Again, since Ebola is not airborne, the chances of them getting the disease is low, but it is real. The problem is that when people get sick, there is almost always going to be a window of time from a few hours to a couple of days during which the most prepared health care system in the world has no control over what happens because the person does not show up at a hospital or clinic. There may be no way to avoid this, but the risks can be reduced. If the West African epidemic continues members of the communities that overlap between the US and West Africa will be at risk, albeit low risk, of exposure to those who travel back and forth on a regular basis. What needs to happen is that those communities take special care to address this issue internally. All it is going to take is one or two Americans catching the disease from a person living part time in West Africa to shut down air connections between the two regions. If we want to avoid this, there needs to be self-monitoring in the communities.

Third, we have the unconscionable thing that happened in Dallas. A patient who had been in Liberia showed up with Ebola like symptoms in a hospital and was sent home. Holy moly. Why did that happen? Well if you’ve been recently in the hospital for anything that required testing and such, you may already know. Hospitals and clinics, but especially emergency rooms, are run like those steak houses that became popular back in the 1980s. You arrive at the steak house, and a nice person with a big smile seats your group. Then a server comes over and takes drink orders. A second server brings the drinks. A third server comes by for your meal order. A fourth server brings the appetizers, and a fifth server brings your meal. Eventually somebody comes by with the check. (Remember those?)

In an emergency room, there will probably be a physician taking care of you but all the tests that are run are done by different individuals, if there is some kind of treatment you need, the person who cues you in on that (tells you how to take the pill or use the device they are going to give you) is different still. The person who checks you out is different still. What is the possibility that a concern you address to the physical will be responded to by that physician later during your visit? It depends on how fast the person who check you out and sends you home arrives on the scene. Maybe 50–50.

That is probably how Patient X was let go with Ebola. The system has too many places to break. How likely is that to happen again in other emergency rooms or clinics in the US? Not zero.

So, the bad news is that our system does not really put the lid on Patient Zeros that may show up in clinics or hospital, reliably. The system we have been assured would not allow an outbreak probably won’t allow an outbreak, but it may well allow dozens of people to be needlessly exposed, among whom some may contract the disease.

Now here’s the good news. It is said (though the information is spotty) that between 80–100 people who may have had even minimal contact with Patient X are being checked twice a day for fever, and a smaller number are being looked at more closely, even quarantined. The several schools attended by some kids Patient X had contact with are being sterilized. And so on. Frankly, this is more than necessary, but that’s irrelevant. If you only have a few tiny “hot zones” (in this case, one, and not that hot) an abundance of caution is not overkill. If over-cautious reactions eventually emerge whenever an Ebola patient shows up in the US, the larger scale outbreak will be avoided. But the handful of people initially at risk will not be safe by virtue of our system.

Perhaps that is unavoidable, but I think most people will look at the Dallas event and say that sending the patient home clearly should not have happened, and now every hospital and clinic in the country will be extra cautious. Like, remember that one time a surgeon accidentally amputated the wrong leg, and after that one time, it never happened ever again anywhere?

What, you don’t remember that? Hmm… me neither.

(Also, consider this: Imagine implementing the level of caution now being implemented in Dallas in the affected areas of West Africa? Can you imagine implementing this only half way, or a quarter of the effort? That would a) stop Ebola and b) be impossible. That is why the outbreak continues there. We have a lot to be thankful here in the US.)

Conclusion: The communities that have regular interaction with the affected countries are already in many cases somewhat organized as communities. These communities need to develop humane and thoughtful ways of making sure travelers are properly watched after. Everyone who works in any clinic or hospital has to double check what they are doing and not mess up again. The initial conditions that led to the current situation in Dallas are going to become more common over time.

And, remember, so far everything in Dallas is under control, but it will take 27 days to be sure (the incubation period is about 27 days, despite the “21 day” number you keep hearing). Also, while Ebola can manifest in an infected patient as quickly as two days after exposure, it is more typical to show up 8-10 days later. So the first week to 10 days of October is a fairly likely time, perhaps, to see a second case in Dallas, if there is in fact, further infection.

More on Ebola: