Yearly Archives: 2014

Is the age of oil, gas, and coal over? Almost?

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Well, not yet, but one can hope for a rapid transition .

Check out this piece at Motherboard:

?In just 15 years, the world as we know it will have transformed forever. The ?age of oil, gas, coal and nuclear will be over. A new age of clean power and smarter cars will fundamentally, totally, and permanently disrupt the existing fossil fuel-dependent industrial infrastructure in a way that even the most starry-eyed proponents of ‘green energy’ could never have imagined.

These are not the airy-fairy hopes of a tree-hugging hippy living off the land in an eco-commune. It’s the startling verdict of ?Tony Seba, a lecturer in business entrepreneurship, disruption and clean energy at Stanford University and a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur….

Read it here.

Matt Ridley, Anti-Science Writer, Climate Science Denialist

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Matt Ridley is a British journalist whom some in the science community are now quietly referring to as an “anti-science writer.” He has taken up the cause of denying the widely held and deep scientific consensus on climate change. He has a recent blog post he seems to have been compelled to write in response to a new study on the use of tree rings as a proxyindicator for past temperatures. I’ll be writing about that research in a day or two. Ridley’s post is embarrassing, and especially annoying to me because for several years I used his book on evolutionary biology as a recommended (or sometimes required) reading in my courses on human evolution. Here, I’d like to present a simple Fisking of his post. He begins,

As somebody who has championed science all his career, carrying a lot of water for the profession against its critics on many issues, I am losing faith.

Any time I hear someone identify themselves as a champion of science, I check my wallet. Self proclaiming one’s position on an imagined high ground is often the prelude to anti science yammering. Let’s see if that is the case here. He goes on,

Recent examples of bias and corruption in science are bad enough. What’s worse is the reluctance of scientific leaders to criticise the bad apples. Science as a philosophy is in good health; science as an institution increasingly stinks.

This assumes facts not in evidence. Ridley’s assertion looking at science from the outside is that there are bad apples. But his examples of bad apples are bad examples.

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics published a report last week that found evidence of scientists increasingly “employing less rigorous research methods” in response to funding pressures. A 2009 survey found that almost 2 per cent of scientists admitting that they have fabricated results; 14 per cent say that their colleagues have done so.

Remember, Ridley is ultimately speaking here of climate science. But over 83% of the respondents in that survey done by an institution that looks at biomedical ethics were in biomedical or health related areas. A mere 2% were in geosciences. This study has little do do with climate science research or how it is conducted. A champion of science should really be more careful with the data.

Also, that report notes that

Fifty-eight per cent of survey respondents are aware of scientists feeling tempted or under
pressure to compromise on research integrity and standards, although evidence was not collected on any outcomes associated with this. “

We all would like to see the way research dollars are distributed be evaluated, critiqued, and where possible, improved, but there is a large difference between recognizing pressure and showing it has an effect. But, again, any effects shown in that report are utterly irrelevant to any consideration of climate science. Ridley continues,

This month has seen three egregious examples of poor scientific practice. The most recent was the revelation in The Times last week that scientists appeared to scheme to get neonicotinoid pesticides banned, rather than open-mindedly assessing all the evidence. These were supposedly “independent” scientists, yet they were hand in glove with environmental activists who were receiving huge grants from the European Union to lobby it via supposedly independent reports, and they apparently had their conclusions in mind before they gathered the evidence. Documents that have recently come to light show them blatantly setting out to make policy-based evidence, rather than evidence-based policy.

This is a manufactured controversy, and is not related to climate science. The problem with nicotinoid issue is a case of an industry opposing some researchers findings, and there is a good chance that the sources Ridley relies on did not get the story right. (See this for example.) Ridley’s comments are really just another example of him taking sides in a debate that pits industry interests against researchers.

Second example: last week, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a supposedly scientific body, issued a press release stating that this is likely to be the warmest year in a century or more, based on surface temperatures. Yet this predicted record would be only one hundredth of a degree above 2010 and two hundredths of a degree above 2005 — with an error range of one tenth of a degree. True scientists would have said: this year is unlikely to be significantly warmer than 2010 or 2005 and left it at that.

No one has suggested that if we have the warmest year it will be by much. The increase in global warming is steady and medium to long term. Also, it is a complicated issue, as pointed out by Ridley. I discuss this in detail here: 2014 will not be the warmest year on record, but global warming is still real.

In any case, the year is not over, so why the announcement now? Oh yes, there’s a political climate summit in Lima this week. The scientists of WMO allowed themselves to be used politically. Not that they were reluctant. To squeeze and cajole the data until they just crossed the line, the WMO “reanalysed” a merger of five data sets. Maybe that was legitimate but, given how the institutions that gather temperature data have twice this year been caught red-handed making poorly justified adjustments to “homogenise” and “in-fill” thermometer records in such a way as to cool down old records and warm up new ones, I have my doubts.

I tend to agree that one should not characterize the global average surface temperature of a year before the year is over, and then some, to allow for proper updates and adjustments to the data. The fact that there has been so much reporting and blogging on this was likely forced by MSM starting to report on “the warmest year”, because MSM tends to finish all their “year events” reporting before the holidays. (Though WMO has regularly come out with commentary this time of year on the meteorological year, which is not the same as the calendar year.) In any event, this is not a problem in science, it is a problem in MSM and other agents. All the climate science based reporting or blogging on the global average surface temp that I have seen post dates CNN and other media breaking the news, which forced everyone’s hand. (Again, see this.)

In one case, in Rutherglen, a town in Victoria, a recorded cooling trend of minus 0.35C became a reported warming trend of plus 1.73C after “homogenisation” by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. It claimed the adjustment was necessary because the thermometer had moved between two fields, but could provide no evidence for this, or for why it necessitated such a drastic adjustment.
Most of the people in charge of collating temperature data are vocal in their views on climate policy, which hardly reassures the rest of us that they leave those prejudices at the laboratory door. Imagine if bankers were in charge of measuring inflation.

Climate science denialists such as Ridley tend to howl about imperfections in data and methodology. They then howl some more when honest attempts are made at making sure the data are good, or efforts are made to improve methodology. This is a pretty run of the mill denialist tactic.

Ridley’s criticism of the ABM vis-a-vis the Rutherglen data has been addressed in Remember the weather at Rutherglen? BoM was right all along, of course!. See also this.

Third example: the Royal Society used to be the gold standard of scientific objectivity. Yet this month it issued a report on resilience to extreme weather that, in its 100-plus pages, could find room for not a single graph to show recent trends in extreme weather. That is because no such graph shows an upward trend in global frequency of droughts, storms or floods. The report did find room for a graph showing the rising cost of damage by extreme weather, which is a function of the increased value of insured property, not a measure of weather.

There have been numerous studies showing trends in extreme weather. Having said that, the nature of the link between climate change and extreme weather is both complex and the subject of mostly very recent research. It will take a while for the dust to settle on this. If anything, the larger scientific societies involved in this work are behind in addressing and incorporating new research. See for example, NOAA Report Misses Link Between California Drought and Human-Caused Climate Change and Explaining Extreme Events of 2013: Limitations of the BAMS Report.

The Royal Society report also carefully omitted what is perhaps the most telling of all statistics about extreme weather: the plummeting death toll. The global probability of being killed by a drought, flood or storm is down by 98 per cent since the 1920s and has never been lower — not because weather is less dangerous but because of improvements in transport, trade, infrastructure, aid and communication.

Asked and answered in the same statement. First, comparing a time before radar, satellites, advanced communication technology, warning systems, and computers to predict weather with recent times is bogus. Second, both property damage and mortality/morbidity resulting from extreme weather events is very likely to drop as pre-event upgrades, which may sometimes be very costly but that are not counted in the cost of a particular storm, are implemented. This of course applies more to industrialized nations than to other areas. This is expected. But, there is probably a limit to what can be done even in industrialize areas. Not much infrastructure improvement has helped with the California Drought, and all the work done since Katrina or currently planned is likely to provide additional mitigation of the effects of the next Katrina in the gulf.

The Royal Society’s decision to cherry-pick its way past such data would be less worrying if its president, Sir Paul Nurse, had not gone on the record as highly partisan on the subject of climate science. He called for those who disagree with him to be “crushed and buried”, hardly the language of Galileo.

I suppose Ridley could not resist a Galileo reference. Also, when one wants to disagree with scientific consensus, in the absence of a scientific argument, it is convenient to declare the issue partisan.

In any event, Nurse was talking about the very problems Ridley, as a Champion of Science, should be concerned with. I asked Dana Nuccitelli, who follows these things, what he thought about Ridley’s comments on Nurse. He pointed out this post, and noted that “Nurse was actually saying that about influential figures who distort scientific evidence to support their own political, religious, or ideological agendas. Nurse did cite those who distort climate science as one example, but he was speaking in general terms about ideologically-based science distortions (he cited GM crops as another example). Ironically, Ridley distorts Nurse’s comments about distorting evidence in order to attack him.”

Three months ago Sir Paul said: “We need to be aware of those who mix up science, based on evidence and rationality, with politics and ideology, where opinion, rhetoric and tradition hold more sway. We need to be aware of political or ideological lobbyists who do not respect science, cherry-picking data or argument, to support their predetermined positions.”

If he wishes to be consistent, he will therefore condemn the behaviour of the scientists over neonicotinoids and the WMO over temperature records, and chastise his colleagues’ report, for these are prime examples of his point.

That assumes he agrees with Ridley, which he probably doesn’t.

Ridley uses his expertise and experience from the banking industry to criticize climate science and scientist. Is this expertise and experience valuable? Andy Skuce wrote about Ridley’s involvement in the collapse of the British bank, Northern Rock in The Ridley Riddle Part Three: Like a Northern Rock, in 2011:

Matt Ridley was the non-executive Chairman of Northern Rock, a British bank that, in 2007, was the first in over a century and a half to experience a run on its deposits. British banks had all survived two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the end of the British Empire, until Northern Rock failed. Ridley had served on the Northern Rock board of directors since 1994 and was appointed Chairman in 2004. …

Northern Rock’s business model was a very aggressive one, centered on rapid growth of its mortgage business. Before 1997, Northern Rock was a building society, a co-operative savings and mortgage institution. Like many other British building societies, it transformed itself into a bank and was listed on the stock exchange. This led to rapid growth for Northern Rock, which grew its assets at an annual rate of more than 23% from 1998 to 2007. Before its crisis, Northern Rock had assets of about $200 billion and was the fifth-largest bank in Britain. The bank’s retail deposits did not grow at the same rate as its mortgage assets; the difference was made up with funding from capital markets. When the credit crisis hit in 2007, Northern Rock saw its funding vanish. Northern Rock’s debts were more than fifty times its shareholder common equity, making the bank an outlier even among the many other highly-levered financial institutions at that time…. The bank was unable to pay its creditors and had to turn to the Bank of England for help in September 2007. These events led to panic among its depositors, who formed huge queues outside its branches to withdraw their savings.

According to Skuce, financial experts and institutions saw the problems that took Norther Rock down, but apparently Ridley did not.

…the events leading to the credit crunch, the bursting of the housing bubble and the collapse of financial markets, were not entirely unforeseen, especially by commentators outside the banking sector. … In 2006, Robert Shiller of Yale University wrote: “there is significant risk of a very bad period, with slow sales, slim commissions, falling prices, rising default and foreclosures, serious trouble in financial markets, and a possible recession sooner than most of us expected.”…

Matt Ridley has been highly critical of the IPCC reports and of the Chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, mainly for the overblown stories about the Himalayan glaciertypo and the poorly-referenced but correct accounts of the Amazon Basin’s vulnerability to drought. Yet for all the accusations that the IPCC has exaggerated impacts of climate change and “sexed-up” summaries for policy makers, its track record is solid compared to the rosy business outlook that Ridley portrayed in the Northern Rock Annual Report 2006, and published in early 2007, just a few months before the company failed.

Two senior officers of Northern Rock—the Deputy Chief Executive and the Managing Credit Director—were heavily fined in April 2010 by the UK Financial Services Authority for hiding the decline in the performance of the company’s mortgage assets in early 2007. There’s no suggestion that Ridley played any role, or, at the time, was even aware of this misrepresentation of important financial data. All the same, the transgressions happened under his watch as Chairman and, as far as I know, he has not since expressed any regret for the incident. Nevertheless, a few months after his former colleagues had been sanctioned, Ridley had the audacity to write an article for the Times in which he referred to the “discredited Dr Pachauri” in “shut-eyed denial”. Yet none of the contributors to Chairman Pachauri’s reports has ever been shown to have deliberately misrepresented any data.

For Ridley, in business as in climate, prudent precautionary measures are rejected as ruinous, whereas warnings that real disasters may be lurking are dismissed. As the Northern Rock experience showed, being dazzled by the power of virtuous circles can blind you to the fact that, if spun too hard, they can quickly turn vicious.

Now, back to Ridley:

I am not hopeful. When a similar scandal blew up in 2009 over the hiding of inconvenient data that appeared to discredit the validity of proxies for past global temperatures based on tree rings (part of “Climategate”), the scientific establishment closed ranks and tried to pretend it did not matter.

This is a key statement by Ridley. After multiple investigations and a thorough raking over of the evidence, it has been clearly established that “climategate” was unfounded. Ridley believing that climategate refers to real nefarious events is all you need to know to pretty much ignore everything else he says. He might as well be talking about chemtrails.

Last week a further instalment of that story came to light, showing that yet more inconvenient data (which discredit bristlecone pine tree rings as temperature proxies) had emerged.

This is an abysmal misreading of the peer reviewed research and an uncritical acceptance of criticism of that research that was very badly done. I’ll be posting something about the tree ring research soon, but for the time being read this post and the comments. I’ll be done with my new post in a day or so, which is probably about the same time you’ll be done reviewing all ~500 comments!

The overwhelming majority of scientists do excellent, objective work, following the evidence wherever it leads.

Yes. Yes, they do.

… It’s hard for champions of science like me to make our case against creationists, homeopaths and other merchants of mysticism if some of those within science also practise pseudo-science.

Ridley declares himself a champion of science (check your wallet!) and in the same breath attempts to link the scientific consensus on climate change with creationism. I’m shocked to see no reference here to Hitler.

In all the millions of scientific careers in Britain over the past few decades, outside medical science there has never been a case of a scientist convicted of malpractice. Not one. Maybe that is because — unlike the police, the church and politics — scientists are all pure as the driven snow. Or maybe it is because science as an institution, like so many other institutions, does not police itself properly.

Or, there could be another reason.

That Orion Thing Is Great!

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Watch the Orion test flight:

Splashdown:

Why is it great? Well, speaking as a Gemini (not my horoscope sign, but the space program going when I first gained sentience) …

<li>First, it is big, fast, cool looking.  It actually looks like a rocket that might have been designed a decade before they ever actually made any rockets.  It is almost Deco.</li>


<li>Second, they got a guy from the 1960s -- with that slightly, nasal, black and white voice people spoke in back then -- to call the <del datetime="2014-12-06T02:10:27+00:00">race</del> <em>launch</em>. </li>


<li>Third, Orion is really good at taking selfies. </li>


<li>Fourth, it didn't take long. The whole thing was like literally tl;dr.</li>

Oh, and fifth: It worked! Didn’t blow up or anything!

Apparently, the rocket that shot this unit into space is small compared to the one they’ll be using in the future. (More info on the project here.)

Onward to Mars! Finally!

Typhoon Hagupit (Ruby): Update and what you can do to help

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The outer reaches of Typhoon Hagupit are already affecting the target region in the Philippines. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled the areas most under the gun, but the potential for serious problems covers a very large area. The storm has gone through quite a few changes over the last couple of days, but is probably strengthening somewhat right now. No matter what happens, it is going to hit the Philippines as a very serious storm.

Jeff Masters has an update here.

This is the same area that was hit with Typhoon Haiyan last year. Haiyan was a bigger storm. But, Haiyan was also one of the biggest typhoons ever observed (I think people are still arguing over whether it was the biggest, second biggest, etc.). There is potential for very high storm surges, serious winds, very heavy rains (over two feet in some places) which could cause devastating mudslides and flooding.

When this sort of storm hits people often want to know what they can do to help. I’ve learned about a recent project that you may be interested in. This is by Direct Relief. As background, let’s look at a relatively objective source of information about Direct Relief, Wikipedia:

Direct Relief (formerly known as Direct Relief International) is a private humanitarian nonprofit organization based in Santa Barbara, California, with a mission to “improve the health and lives of people affected by poverty or emergency situations by mobilizing and providing essential medical resources needed for their care.”[1] Founded in 1948 by Estonian immigrant William D. Zimdin, the organization is headed by President and CEO Thomas Tighe and a 31-member Board of Directors.[5] Direct Relief has received a 100% fundraising efficiency rating by Forbes,[6] been ranked by the Chronicle of Philanthropy as California’s largest international relief organization,[7] and topped Charity Navigator’s 2014 list of “10 of the Best Charities Everyone’s Heard Of.[8]” Direct Relief is the first nonprofit organization in the United States to be designated by The National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) as a Verified-Accredited Wholesale Distributor licensed to distribute pharmaceutical medicines to all 50 U.S. States and Washington, D.C.[9]

So it is an experienced organization, gets the money you give it out into the field efficiently, and is secular. All things I’m sure you want to see in an organization you make a donation to.

But the Hagupit situation offers an additional opportunity because Direct Relief has a new project in the field there, which looks promising. I was planning on talking to someone at Direct Relief about it, to find out more, but I think he got stuck in a meeting at the UN or something, so we’ll probably talk later (and I’ll report on that to you). Meanwhile, check this out:

Direct Relief’s Emergency Response Team is monitoring Typhoon Hagupit (locally known as Ruby), as it approaches the Philippines. On its current trajectory, the typhoon is expected to make landfall in the Eastern Visayas in the next 72 hours and could affect 4.5 million people.

Direct Relief already has staff on the ground ready to respond in the event of a disaster and has reached out to local partners and health officials located in high-risk regions 5, 6, 7 and 8.

There are also three strategically pre-positioned typhoon modules ready to be rapidly utilized in the event of an emergency. These modules contain enough medicines and supplies supplies to treat 5,000 people for a month following a disaster.

Philippine authorities are currently in the process of evacuating vulnerable communities. Vice Mayor of Tacloban city, Jerry Yaokasin, stated that “we will now strictly enforce forced evacuation.” Yaokasin said that “we have no more excuses, we have gone through Yolanda, and to lose that many lives, it’s beyond our conscience already.”

Direct Relief’s staff on the ground will be maintaining contact with partners and monitoring the situation as it develops in the next 72 hours.

There are three things you will find at Direct Relief’s web site.

<li>First, there is <a href="http://www.directrelief.org/hpp/?extent=99.1924,-1.6963,144.8076,27.1137">a monitor of the storm's path</a>, an interactive googly mappy think which is very cool.</li>


<li>Second, there is more information about <a href="http://www.directrelief.org/2014/12/monitoring-typhoon-hagupit-approaches-philippines/">Direct Relief and the situation in the Philippines</a>; they have one of the better organized web sites for disaster relief non profits. </li>


<li>Third, and most importantly, <a href="https://secure2.convio.net/dri/site/Donation2?df_id=2105&2105.donation=form1&_ga=1.168290657.1168894472.1417733221">there is a way to donate money</a>. </li>

When donating, frankly, I’d suggest the “wherever it is needed most” or “disaster relief” options. They are already there, on the ground; they will be relieving people as it happens. I have a feeling they know best where to spend the money.

How Addressing Climate Change Can Fit In A Positive Economic Agenda

Climate Change, Uncategorized

From Bernie Sanders’ “An Economic Agenda for America: 12 Steps Forward”

The United States must lead the world in reversing climate change and make certain that this planet is habitable for our children and grandchildren. We must transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and into energy efficiency and sustainable energies. Millions of homes and buildings need to be weatherized, our transportation system needs to be energy efficient and we need to greatly accelerate the progress we are already seeing in wind, solar, geothermal, biomass and other forms of sustainable energy. Transforming our energy system will not only protect the environment, it will create good paying jobs.

Minnesota High school league votes to let transgender athletes pick their teams

Gender, Reproductive Biology, Sex

From MPR News:

After months of review, the Minnesota State High School League voted Thursday to let transgender athletes play on the sports teams that best align with their gender identity.

The vote was 18-1. One board member abstained.

…

Three Republican state lawmakers told the board that the Legislature, not the high school league, should handle policy on transgender student athletes. State Rep. Barb Yarusso, DFL- Shoreview, countered that the transgender policy would only apply to a handful of students and urged the board to act.

Supporters of the policy say it will make transgender students feel more welcome in sports. Critics say it’s risky to let transgender girls, who were born as boys, play on girls’ teams.

…

Melanie Outcalt, a 10th grader, said she was worried transgender girls who were born as boys would have an advantage in her favorite sport, volleyball.

“I think it’s unfair that you’re giving boys the opportunity to proclaim themselves as girls just so they can play on a girls team and potentially take away our scholarships,” Outcalt said.

That’s the same argument made in a full-page ad placed by the Child Protection League last Sunday in the Star Tribune.

…

Advocates for transgender athletes say those fears are baseless, and have never been a problem in the two dozen states with similar policies already in place. Minnesota will become the 33rd state to implement a policy for transgender high school athletes, according to high school league media specialist John Millea.

Elliott Kunerth, [noted] “Transphobia and a simple lack of education regarding the transgender community are not an excuse to discriminate against transgender players … Nor will they be valid excuses to treat someone differently. Whether or not a player happens to be transgender is no one else’s concern.”

…

Critics of the policy aren’t sure what their next step will be.

…

“There’s going to be some very unhappy people,” [one opponent of the policy said] “This was obviously a very controversial issue and some folks are going to be very, very upset about this.”

The policy will go into effect next school year, but religious schools will be exempt.

Super Typhoon Hagupit

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Super Typhoon Hagupit is on its way to the Philippines. The image above shows the storm track for Typhoon Haiyan, which was a very damaging super Typhoon that came through the same area last year, and served as an example of climate change making things worse. The smaller map is the Japan Meteorological Agency’s prediction of Hagupit’s path. They are very very similar.

Hagupit will not likely be as strong as Haiyan (see details here) because the region does not have the extra warm deep water that supercharged Haiyan. But Hagupit is still going to be a bad storm.

How scientists unraveled the El Niño mystery

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The Road to Paris is a web site created by the ICSU, “…a non-governmental organization representing a global membership that includes both national scientific bodies (121 National Members representing 141 countries) and International Scientific Unions (30 Members),” founded in 1931. If the ICSU had not existed when the UN was formed, the UN would have formed it. Think of the ICSU as the UN of Science. More or less.

(Follow Road to Paris on Twitter.)

Anyway, Road to Paris refers to the 2015 international meetings on climate change, and the purpose of the web site is to provide excellent information about climate change, up to date, so those engaged in that process, either as direct participants or as onlookers, will be well informed.

“Fishing in pink waters: How scientists unraveled the El Niño mystery” is an amazing piece of work written by Daniel Gross (I made minuscule contributions), looking at the history of the science of the El Nino Southern Oscillation, which is one of the most important climate or weather related things on this planet. This is timely, because we are expecting an El Niño to form over the winter. Maybe. Well, eventually we will have an El Niño. (It has been an unusually long time since the last strong one.)

Please visit this web page, read it, enjoy it (it is highly interactive), and spread it around.

2014 will not be the warmest year on record, but global warming is still real.

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I’m going out on a limb here. 2014 has been a very warm year. We’ve had a number of record setting months. But, a couple of months were also coolish, and November was one of them. December started out cool (like November ended) globally, but actually over the last few days the global average temperature has been going up. But, unless December gets really warm really fast, is is probably true that we will break some records but not all. This entire discussion, however, is problematic for a number of reasons.

How much does one year matter?

How warm or cold a given year is does not matter much for the overall trend. The upward march of global surface temperature is squiggly, but on average upward. Expect variation. Decadal trends are more important and more relevant. Global warming is continuing at the surface (sea surface and land based thermometers).

The graph above is a quick and dirty depiction of warming, using NASA’s GISS temperature record. The Y axis scale is anomaly in hundreds of degrees C, the X axis is months since the beginning of a 12 month moving average from January 1980. The point is just to show a) the increase in temperature just over the last few decades and b) how it squiggles up and down. We appear to be in an upward squiggle at the moment.

There are multiple temperature records

There are multiple “records” and they are assembled in slightly different ways and thus have slightly different data. They all show the same long term warming, and they all tend to correlate with each other. But they are slightly different. Some databases probably under-sample certain regions, for example. If we have a year that is very warm in relation to the most recent “hottest” year, it is unlikely to be so much warmer that it blows the previous record away by a huge number. Actually, that could happen, but it is more likely that some of the data sets are going to break the record while others do not.

Warmest year since when?

Not so much related to this specific year but important to keep in mind: This is the instrumental record. When we speak of record breaking years, we are usually comparing a particular year (like 2014) to each and every other year in a database that has been assembled from instrumental measurements. These databases variously go back in time to some point in the 19th century. They all start after CO2 was being release into the atmosphere at levels that probably matter, but way before the huge increase that has caused our present climate crisis. So, the instrumental records do measure, and as it turns out, demonstrate global warming. When we try to extend this record back in time, we lose track of variation in two ways. First, the proxyindicators (indirect measurements) used to estimate what the instruments would say were there instruments (and a time machine, presumably) have their own variation, so a number from ancient times is not perfectly comparable to a measurement from, say, 2013. Second, there is variation and conflation across time. We generally can’t point to a particular datum on a long term squiggle of global temperature from ancient times and say it represents a particular year.

What we can say is that for a particular period of time in the past the likely range of annual temperatures then was such that a given number (like, for example, this year’s annual global average) would likely be outside that range. When we do this, all of the recent years of global surface temperature are very very unlikely to have been exceeded by any actual annual temperature since the last interglacial (over 100,000 years ago). Most of the last one to two million years have seen mostly glacial and occasional interglacial conditions, but with the difference between those to climate settings increasing more recently and being less in the more distant past. It is possible that some years during interglacials over the last one or two million years exceeded our current warm temperatures (of the last couple of decades) but not many. As you go back in time, the chances of that increase because it was a bit warmer. For various reasons we are more confident about the last 800,000 years or so (as having few if any warmer years). When you get back to two to three million years there were time periods that may well have had lots of years warmer than the 21st century to date average. To get to consistent temperatures, for most years, warmer than present, you probably have to go back father.

So, we have this sentence: “2014 is the first or second warmest year since _______ .” That will likely be what we can say in a few weeks, after the data are measured, collected, processed, and made available. Or, we may be able to change that sentence to “2014 is the warmest since _____ in all of our instrumental records” or perhaps “2014 is the warmest since _____ in X out of Y of our instrumental records.”

Filling in the blank involves inserting the first year of the relevant instrumental records (such as “1880”) but it can also be filled in with older dated depending on how we feel about variation in the older, proxyindicator records. But it should also be rewritten a bit to include the probabilistic component.

This is just the surface temperature and does not reflect the totality of planetary warming

Personally, I think we should try to refer to these numbers as “surface warming” or the “surface temperature” and continuously remind people that this is only part of the story. How do you measure your body temperature? A thermometer stuck in an orifice will do. Or one of those magical strips on the forehead. Or an ear thermometer. But these are all surface measurements of your body and are subject to error or variation. The better measurement is the one the medical examiner uses in estimating time of death; stick the thermometer into the liver (they have special pointy thermometers for this purpose, and only do it on dead people.)

The Earth’s liver is the ocean. Well, not exactly, but the majority of extra heat that happens because of the increased greenhouse effect caused mainly by human added CO2 ends up in the top 2,000 meters of the ocean (see this for a recent paper on the topic). At medium scales of time, the surface temperature does a good job of tracking the Earth’s temperature, but heat moves, to different degrees at different times, between the air and the sea, so on a year to year basis it is a rougher approximation. But it is the best approximation we’ve got, so we use it.

El Niño

Some of my colleagues have been snarking about changing the name “El Niño” to “El Annoyingo” or something like that. We are expecting an El Niño. We’ve been expecting it off and on for months. It has been a long time since a major El Niño, perhaps longer than we’ve ever had since good records have been kept. The Pacific Ocean looks very El Niño like in some ways but it is not an official El Niño. Whether or not you have an El Niño is something of a continuum.

It is generally felt that the effects of a coming El Niño are not particularly influencing the 2014 average global temperature, but if a real live El Niño emerges over the next few months, next year will be the record breaking year, as opposed to this year. Or both, one right after the other.

Other commentary

Most of the climate bloggers and publicly conversing scientists I know were probably planning to not talk about 2014 as a “warmest” or “second warmest” or “record breaking” year until after the data are in. But a couple of major news outlets have started talking about it, so now we are seeing some conversation on the topic and I’ve posted links below to some of that. I probably wouldn’t have written this post (until January) had major media not started to chime in a bit prematurely. I think it was a mistake for major media to start talking about 2014 as a warmest year when close to 10% of the data were not in, the journos were looking only at one or two data sets, and to a large extent we are talking about weather not climate. Mark my words: If 2014 turns out to be second warmest in the majority of data sets, climate science deniers will make the claim that “they claimed it would be the warmest year, but it wasn’t. Checkmate, climate change!”

CNN’s premature claim: NOAA: 2014 is shaping up as hottest year on record
BBC’s premature claim: UN climate talks begin as global temperatures break records
Reuter’s premature claim: U.S., British data show 2014 could be hottest year on record
Sensible blogging on the topic:

  • 2014 Headed Toward Hottest Year On Record — Here’s Why That’s Remarkable
    • <li><a href="http://climatecrocks.com/2014/12/03/tallying-2014-closing-in-on-a-record/">Tallying 2014: Closing in on a Record?</a></li>

<li><a href="https://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/press_releases/pr_1009_en.html">2014 on course to be one of hottest, possibly hottest, on record Exceptional heat and flooding in many parts of the world</a></li>

<li><a href="http://tamino.wordpress.com/2014/12/04/a-pause-or-not-a-pause-that-is-the-question/">A pause or not a pause, that is the question.</a></li>

    The archaeology of some Polish vampires

    Archaeology, , , , , ,

    Apotropaic magic is designed to ward off or control evil. In vampire fiction, as well as in real life in cultures that include a belief in vampires, apotropaic objects might be crucifixes, cloves of garlic, etc. Apotropaic methods are known to have been used in burials. In the photograph above, a sickle blade has been placed across a person’s neck at burial time, probably to keep them from reanimating and becoming all vampiry (Individual 49/2012 (30–39 year old female) with a sickle placed across the neck, from the paper cited below.) Some people have believed that a regularly occurring disease can be transmitted from those who died of that disease, after death, even after burial. In these cases, apotrapaic methods would be used to ensure that the corpse remains inactive. One might speculate that the idea of a corpse reanimating comes from the infrequent occurrence of a person not really being dead when everyone is sure they are. Such events are like huge snow storms. That happens once, nobody can stop talking about it.

    How the dead are treated is the bread and butter for a lot of archaeology. Death is important, and (usually) it is an unambiguous event. Explaining death is often found to be an important, often formalized or ritualized feature of a culture. For example, among the Efe Pygmies and Lese Villagers I worked with for many years, it was generally thought that a death caused by anything other than an obvious act of violence or accident (and thus, the vast majority of deaths) was caused by some sort of intentional bad magic. In other words, all “natural” deaths are homicides. The response to a death in that culture is typically to determine guilt. Ideally, the perpetrator is identified as a hypothetical individual who carried out magic from a very far away and uncertain location, or at least, that is what I observed and that is how people seemed to regard the process. That way everyone can walk away from the death without having to start a feud with a known neighbor.

    Abigail Tucker, writing in the Smithsonian, talks about “The Great New England Vampire Panic” in Connecticut, a mainly 19th century phenomenon which involved special treatment of individuals we think may have died of tuberculosis. Tucker talks about the Brown Family, which had suffered a number of deaths.

    As Lena was on her deathbed, her brother was, after a brief remission, taking a turn for the worse. Edwin had returned to Exeter from the Colorado resorts “in a dying condition,” according to one account. “If the good wishes and prayers of his many friends could be realized, friend Eddie would speedily be restored to perfect health,” another newspaper wrote.

    But some neighbors, likely fearful for their own health, weren’t content with prayers. Several approached George Brown, the children’s father, and offered an alternative take on the recent tragedies: Perhaps an unseen diabolical force was preying on his family. It could be that one of the three Brown women wasn’t dead after all, instead secretly feasting “on the living tissue and blood of Edwin,” as the Providence Journal later summarized. If the offending corpse—the Journal uses the term “vampire” in some stories but the locals seemed not to—was discovered and destroyed, then Edwin would recover. The neighbors asked to exhume the bodies, in order to check for fresh blood in their hearts.

    …On the morning of March 17, 1892, a party of men dug up the bodies, as the family doctor and a Journal correspondent looked on. …

    After nearly a decade, Lena’s sister and mother were barely more than bones. Lena, though, had been dead only a few months, and it was wintertime. “The body was in a fairly well-preserved state,” the correspondent later wrote. “The heart and liver were removed, and in cutting open the heart, clotted and decomposed blood was found.” During this impromptu autopsy, the doctor again emphasized that Lena’s lungs “showed diffuse tuberculous germs.”

    Undeterred, the villagers burned her heart and liver on a nearby rock, feeding Edwin the ashes. He died less than two months later.

    That was in 1892.

    As a general rule, a rule that is broken enough to make it interesting, a given people at a given time have a way they normally treat their dead. The ingredients of the typical mortuary practice for a culture might include whether or not the corpse is buried, burned, left out to become a skeleton, “entombed” above ground or in a crypt, put in a coffin or not, buried with a shroud or not, if buried, buried in a particular position, buried in a particular orientation, buried with specific objects, etc. When you see a pattern of mortuary practice in a graveyard, and one or a few of the burials are different, there may be something interesting going on. I had the pleasure of supervising a PhD thesis by my friend and colleague Emily Weglian looking at burial traditions in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Supervising a thesis is a great way to learn numerous esoteric details. One of the issues that came up for Emily was how to interpret burials that were backwards in an oriented cemetery. In parts of Europe it was the practice to bury the dead with the head facing west so when the individual later reanimated and stood, they would be facing Jerusalem, or in the direction one might walk if one was going to walk to Jerusalem (there are a lot of versions of this, I oversimplify here). Individuals who had a life (or a death) that marked them as different, which might mean unholy, criminal, etc., might be posthumously dissed by burring them in the opposite direction, which would not necessarily stop their zombified form from walking (or tunneling underground) to Jerusalem, but it would certainly annoy them when they found out they were going in the wrong direction. But, another possibility was raised for certain corpses buried at 180 degrees; they may have been the pastor of the flock, who would obviously face his own people and presumably know enough to turn around before heading to the Holy Land when the time came for everyone to do that.

    VampiresDontExistButSo, what about Polish Vampires? I’m going to keep this simple because a) the research is available in an open access journal so you can read it yourself and b) there is an excellent blog post on the research by Katy Meyers (see links below). From the Abstract of the paper:

    Apotropaic observances-traditional practices intended to prevent evil-were not uncommon in post-medieval Poland, and included specific treatment of the dead for those considered at risk for becoming vampires. Excavations at the Drawsko 1 cemetery (17th–18th c. AD) have revealed multiple examples (n = 6) of such deviant burials amidst hundreds of normative interments. While historic records describe the many potential reasons why some were more susceptible to vampirism than others, no study has attempted to discern differences in social identity between individuals within standard and deviant burials using biogeochemical analyses of human skeletal remains. The hypothesis that the individuals selected for apotropaic burial rites were non-local immigrants whose geographic origins differed from the local community was tested using radiogenic strontium isotope ratios from archaeological dental enamel. 87Sr/86Sr ratios ( = 0.7112±0.0006, 1?) from the permanent molars of 60 individuals reflect a predominantly local population, with all individuals interred as potential vampires exhibiting local strontium isotope ratios. These data indicate that those targeted for apotropaic practices were not migrants to the region, but instead, represented local individuals whose social identity or manner of death marked them with suspicion in some other way. Cholera epidemics that swept across much of Eastern Europe during the 17th century may provide one alternate explanation as to the reason behind these apotropaic mortuary customs, as the first person to die from an infectious disease outbreak was presumed more likely to return from the dead as a vampire.

    Katy’s post summarizes the results, but also critiques the media attention to this project, which as usual includes some abysmal reporting. She summarizes:

    1. Death by cholera is just an alternative hypothesis, not necessarily the truth. The authors mention that it is an alternative many times, they never say (unlike popular news) that cholera is definitely the cause.
    2. If cholera was the reason, you would be performing the apotropaic rites on the first couple individuals who died from the disease, so this doesn’t mean ALL died from cholera, but perhaps some did.
    3. They were not real life vampires, they were only vulnerable to being turned into vampires by evil spirits. REAL VAMPIRES DON’T EXIST. These were people who died under unfortunate conditions and were thought to be vulnerable to evil spirits in the afterlife.

    Just so you know, non-normative treatment of the dead is pretty common. If a body is buried at a funny angle or has some other minor variation, it may not mean much. But if a body is nailed to the ground with several spikes like a burial known in Celakovice, you’ve got to figure something is going on. Unusual treatments like this are not found in the thousands or (probably) even the hundreds, but they are found widely. Also, it isn’t all about vampires. Vampire concern is only one problem. It seems that some individuals are being punished after death by receiving a non-normative mortuary treatment (perhaps they committed suicide or carried out some other act viewed as worthy of eternal damnation). That’s a very different situation than treatment arising from fear of reanimation or posthumous shenanigans.

    And, as subtly indicated above, these beliefs are not confined to far away ancient cultures. There are people alive today that are the first generation offspring of those who lived in Griswold, Connecticut, the town with the TB vampirism. Griswald itself is and always has been very small, but the surrounding area is the birthplace of John McCain,Eugen O’Neil, Nathan Hale, Watergate Lawyer L. Patrick Gray, and as far as I know most of these individuals and other notables from the region are not vampires.

    Here is your followup reading:

    Gregoricka LA, Betsinger TK, Scott AB, Polcyn M (2014) Apotropaic Practices and the Undead: A Biogeochemical Assessment of Deviant Burials in Post-Medieval Poland. PLoS ONE 9(11): e113564. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0113564

    Where do vampires come from? by Katy Meyers.

    Temperature and sex determination

    Uncategorized, , , , ,

    Some interesting new research. The paper is, unfortunately, behind a paywall but they made a video, so it is worth posting.

    Here’s the press release for the paper:

    Scientists know that temperature determines sex in certain reptiles—alligators, lizards, turtles, and possibly dinosaurs. In many turtles, warm temperatures during incubation create females. Cold temperatures, males. But no one understands why.

    A recent study sheds further light on this question. The findings of researchers Kayla Bieser, assistant professor at Northland College, and Thane Wibbels, professor of reproductive biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, will be published this month in the primary research journal “Sexual Development,” and is now available online.

    This study represents the most comprehensive, simultaneous evaluation of the chronology of how sex-determining genes express themselves during embryonic development and and looks at the impacts of estrogen.

    Bieser and Wibbels followed five different genes and what was going on in the exact same turtle. To date, scientists have looked at a number of turtles and pooled the data but Bieser is the first to follow individual turtles. She wanted to know when and how they “express” themselves. For an example, Bieser describes expression as the physical manifestation of those genes such as blue or brown eye color.

    She looked at turtle eggs incubated at male and female temperatures and documented what the genes were doing while sex is being determined. “Which genes ‘turn on’ and when, could be an indication of what is triggering sex,” Bieser said.

    According to Bieser, temperature-dependent sex determination species may be unable to evolve rapidly enough to offset the increases in temperature, which may ultimately result in their extinction.

    “It’s critical that we understand the genetic mechanisms for which temperature acts and incorporate this knowledge into management plans for the conservation of these vulnerable species.”

    Secondly, Bieser applied estrogen to eggs at a male-producing temperature. The purpose she said is to help determine the triggers for sex determination and how hormones, such as estrogen, can override the temperature signal.

    In other words, would temperature or estrogen win out in deciding sex? The answer: in short, neither. What she found — and this is new information — is when estrogen is applied to eggs incubating at a male temperature, gonads—or sexual parts—do not develop. Or, if they do, they barely develop.

    Why? “We don’t know yet,” Bieser said.

    Scientists have been doing this experiment for some time but never reported these results. She suspects the reason is because scientists did not dissect the gonadal area specifically and that they took the general area but may have not analyzed the gonads to the same detailed level. In fact, this was a sticking point for one of the reviewers of this study—so Bieser provided photos of her findings.

    “This research provides a critical understanding of how temperature acts on and above the genes in species where temperature determines sex—this is particularly critical in light of global climate change,” Bieser said.

    Here’s the video:

    The original paper:
    Bieser K.L. · Wibbels T. 2014. Chronology, Magnitude and Duration of Expression of Putative Sex-Determining/Differentiation Genes in a Turtle with Temperature-Dependent Sex Determination. Sexual Development 8(6).

    A partial history of the turkey (Podcast)

    Uncategorized, , ,

    “As Thanksgiving ebbs into memory and Christmas looms on the horizon, Eat This Podcast concerns itself with the turkey. For a nomenclature nerd, the turkey is a wonderful bird. Why would a bird from America be named after a country on the edge of Asia? The Latin name offers a clue; the American turkey is Meleagris gallopavo, while the African guineafowl is Numida meleagris. But why did the first settlers adopt a name they were already familiar with, rather than adopt a local indigenous name such as nalaaohki pileewa for the native fowl. Simple answer: nobody knows…”

    Listen to the podcast (with extensive notes) here…

    A partial history of the turkey

    Uncategorized, , ,

    cover-320x320“As Thanksgiving ebbs into memory and Christmas looms on the horizon, Eat This Podcast concerns itself with the turkey. For a nomenclature nerd, the turkey is a wonderful bird. Why would a bird from America be named after a country on the edge of Asia? The Latin name offers a clue; the American turkey is Meleagris gallopavo, while the African guineafowl is Numida meleagris. But why did the first settlers adopt a name they were already familiar with, rather than adopt a local indigenous name such as nalaaohki pileewa for the native fowl. Simple answer: nobody knows…”

    Listen to the podcast (with extensive notes) here…