We know know what the famous announcement by the European Southern Observatory is. They found an asteroid with ring! Two of them!
…the remote asteroid Chariklo is surrounded by two dense and narrow rings.
Telescopes at seven locations in South America, including the 1.54-metre Danish and TRAPPIST telescopes at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile were used to make this surprise discovery in the outer Solar System.
This unique finding has sparked much interest and debate since it is the smallest object by far to have rings and only the fifth body in the Solar System — after the much larger planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — to have this feature.
Astronomers think that this sort of ring is likely to be formed from debris left over after a collision.
Above is the nifty interactive graphic from the National Snow and Ice Data Center showing sea ice extent in the Arctic for the current year (the lower squiggle). This year’s squiggle looks like a peak, and it is possible that Arctic Sea ice extent is now on the decline. Minimum extent is typically reached in September.
The other squiggles are all the years since 1979 that seem to have had peaks later in the year than this year’s apparent peak of a couple of days ago. Those years are 1992, 1997, 1999, and 2010. In other words, for the available data set, four out of 34 years, or just over 10% of the years, had sea ice extent peaks that post date March 21st, which appears to be this year’s peak. There is still a chance that more ice will be added and this year’s squiggle will see an uptick. Well, I guess it is fair to say that there’s about a one in ten chance of that happening. But, I hear the Arctic is a bit warm and that the ice is getting all breaky-uppy so that seems like it might be a high estimate.
This is probably not too important because the relationship between what the ice does during its maximum extent and what the ice does during its minimum extent is seemingly random, and it is the minimum extent that counts.
You will recall that I’ve predicted the minimum extent of sea ice this year, here.
The degree to which sea ice extent is reduced is important. It normally melts to some degree every year, but when it melts a lot the open sea can absorb more heat from the sun, and there is less shiny ice to reflect sunlight away. This causes extra warming in the Arctic, a phenomenon known as Arctic Amplification, which may be implicated in changing large scale weather systems, resulting in the phenomenon known as Weather Whiplash.
Professor Torcello’s point was made in part by reference to the tragic events at L’Aquila, Italy, where a screw up mainly by non-scientist government official seems to have resulted in unnecessary deaths due to an earthquake. Torcello notes:
If those with a financial or political interest in inaction had funded an organised campaign to discredit the consensus findings of seismology, and for that reason no preparations were made, then many of us would agree that the financiers of the denialist campaign were criminally responsible for the consequences of that campaign. I submit that this is just what is happening with the current, well documented funding of global warming denialism.
That’s a powerful analogy from real life. If we are allowed the luxury of thought experiment, we can probably put an even finer point on it. Let me give that a try. Remember, this is a thought experiment. These things did not happen.
Bridges across the region are starting to deteriorate and some say they should be replaced. But there is an industry that makes a lot of money repairing bridges, as distinct from replacing them. That organization is represented by a number of public relations and lobbying organizations funded by the industry. The ruling legislative body has hearings to help decide if bridges should be replaced over the next few years at great cost, or if the annual budget for repair should be maintained.
There may be legitimate arguments on both sides of the issue, but the vast majority of engineers with relevant expertise feel that repair can not keep up with deterioration and bridges may start falling down despite best efforts to keep them up. A consensus has emerged that the bridges should be replaced. But the hearings happen anyway.
At the hearings there are a number of witnesses making various points, but among these witnesses are several representatives of the above mentioned industry and their lobbyists and public relations organizations. These witnesses are asked a number of questions and they provide a lot of information. But, they intentionally leave out important data, emphasize less important data that happens to support their cause (cherry picking) and they even go so far as to falsify studies. Overall, their argument is convincing, even if it is based on willfully misrepresented information and lies.
The legislative body, looking to save money in their budget decides to kick the can down the road, based on the testimony of representatives of the repair, not rebuild, interests. No bridges are replaced.
A few years later a string of busses carrying toddlers to a toddler convention is driving across one of the bridges. Below the bridge happens to be a tour boat that was leased by the Dalai Lama. He’s on the boat. Also on the bridge is a medical transport vehicle carrying a half dozen hearts to a nearby transplant hospital where very ill children will be given a new lease on life.
The bridge collapses, everyone on the bridge, and under it on the boat, are killed but many of them die slow and miserable deaths because the busses and other vehicles are pinned below water line under the debris, and they drown over the next half hour as the vehicles slowly fill with muddy, cold, river water.
OK, now, what do you think of the witnesses who knowingly and maliciously provided false testimony to the legislature, which ultimately was used to decide to not replace the bridge? Oh, by the way, the bridge that collapsed in this thought experiment would have been the first bridge to be replaced.
There are several things that Lawrence Torcello did not say. He did not say that “scientists who don’t believe in catastrophic man-made global warming should be put in prison.” But James Dellingpole claims that Torcello said that. James Dellingpole needs to apologize to Professor Torcello for that.
Eric Owens of the Daily Caller said that Torcello “wants to send people who disagree with him about global warming to jail.” Professor Torcello did not say that. Eric Owens owes the professor an apology.
Infowars.com and The Drudge repeated that Professor Torcello “called for the incarceration of any American who actively disagrees that climate change is solely caused by human activity.” He didn’t. More apologies owed.
These quotes (and their documentation) come from a piece by Graham Readfearn, which you can read HERE. Readfearn’s post also describes the kind and amount of harassment Professor Torcello has received since he revealed his idea that people who intentionally cause harm should be held responsible. (See also A corollary to Godwin’s law: the “law of genocidal intentions” by Ugo Bardi.)
The bridge analogy is very straight forward and if that really happened it would be hard to argue against very seriously looking into the industry representatives’ actions. The L’Aquila earthquake is a much less clear situation used by Torcello to make the point. Had there been bought and paid for expert testimony assuring everyone that filling cracks in buildings with some sort of cement like filler would suffice to keep everyone safe from earthquakes, from representatives of the crack-filling-compound industry, that case would be more like the bridge-thought-experiment. How does climate change fit into this?
Significantly changing the chemistry and physics of the atmosphere through burning fossil fuels makes a lot of people a lot of money. But it is also similar to lighting a fire under a pot of tap water on your stove. Once the CO2 is in the atmosphere it starts the multi-decade (and longer) process of changing the climate in ways that will undoubtedly have important negative effects, including sea level rise, changes in atmospheric circulation, and so on. People are going to die, economies are likely to collapse. It is a very bad situation.
Willfully misrepresenting the realities of climate change for personal gain (financial or not) is a nefarious act. I’m not sure if it is technically a criminal act, but maybe it should be. This is overall very tricky stuff. Lawrence Torcello has raised the question, as a philosopher interested in this problem. The result of his raising the question has lead to severe harassment and a spate of public misrepresentation of what he has said. In other words, a scholar has pointed out that there may be serious issues of legal responsibility related to attempts to do something about the fire we’ve lit under the pot, and the response to that has been to try very hard to make him shut up.
Climate change science denialists are not honest brokers. And that’s the nicest thing that comes to mind that I can say about them at this moment.
Trigger warning: Explicit video of a homeless man being executed by the cops.
I strongly recommend that you don’t call the police. If you do, because for some reason you have to, get the hell out of there before they arrive. Why? Because our Post-9/11 first responder philosophy is not the first responder philosophy you grew up with. First responders have one primary directive: Protect themselves, at all costs. Your safety is the cost. For firefighters and the like this means running the other way when there is danger, because of 9/11. Recently, a New York City fire chief was quoted as saying “Good thing we didn’t get here sooner” (or words to that effect) in relation to a gas explosion. In recent weeks somebody who did not get the memo called the cops for a “domestic disturbance” happening in a public park. When the cops arrive they killed a man that was trying to help. It goes on and on. The police, generally, will protect themselves before they protect you, even if it means gunning down people who are not really a threat to them.
Here is the video. Yes, the guy had knives. He was probably either a bit disturbed when the cops got there or became disoriented when they started shooting flash bangs at him. But they had him surrounded, run to ground, and it was only after he turned away from them that they gunned him down. After he was gunned down the police acted like he was a live cobra, but really, he was just some guy bleeding out on the ground where they dropped him.
I predict that this will be determined a justifiable shooting.
I’m quoting here from Daily Kos who quotes AP (the AP site is borked):
The illegal camper shot by Albuquerque police this week was turning away from officers when they fired at him, according to video released by Chief Gorden Eden on Friday.
The shots come after a confrontation in which the man, identified as 38-year-old James Boyd, tells police he’s going to walk down the mountain with them.
“Don’t change up the agreement,” Boyd says. “I’m going to try to walk with you.”
He tells officers he’s not a murderer.
Boyd picks up his belongings and appears ready to walk down toward officers. An officer fires a flash-bang device, which disorients Boyd.
Boyd appears to pull out knives in both hands as an officer with a dog approaches him. He makes a threatening motion toward the officer, then starts to turn around away from police.
That’s when shots ring out, and Boyd hits the ground. Blood can be seen on the rocks behind him.
Published on Mar 14, 2014
Weather seems to be staling. Look into how the speed of the jet stream causes this “stuck in a rut” weather pattern. Meteorologist Paul Douglas also takes a look back as to how this winter compares to years past. Checking out extreme drought conditions, snow cover and cooler temperatures overall. This did not only impact the U.S. but other areas of the world. England experienced their wettest winter yet!
Today, Wednesday, an immense storm will move into the Canadian Maritimes after grazing the US East Coast. In the US the storm may severely affect Cape Cod with many inches of snow and hurricane force winds. At sea, in the northern Gulf of Maine and points north, there is a severe risk to boats with very high waves and very severe winds. Halifax could get a foot or two of snow and there will be high coastal waves and strong winds.
This is a rare storm, but of the class of storms that seems to have become more common as the global system of air currents shifts under conditions of global warming. Repeated snow in the normally low-snow mid-Atlantic, severe flooding in the UK, cold in the US central and southern regions, and arid conditions in California (as well as some other bad weather) are a continuation of so-called “Weather Whiplash” that seems to be caused by changes in the pattern of trade winds and the jet streams stemming from a reduced gradient of warm to cool conditions from the Equator to the North Pole. The Jet stream has been bent low over North America for weeks, maybe months (hard to keep track it’s been so long).
There is some discussion of the storm here, where there are additional links, but it seems to not be the focus of much attention in the media, probably because it will mainly affect the Canadian Maritimes, because apparently we don’t care about the Canadian Maritimes.
Weather Nation has this video which covers “Bombogenesis” which is the process involved in the formation of this super duper megastorm.
I imagine we’ll be hearing more about this storm after it sinks a few ships and strands a bunch of people in deep snow.
The European Southern Observatory will make an announcement tomorrow (or later today depending on where you read this, but Wednesday) about an amazing new discovery they made in outer space.
I’m not going to tell you what they found because it is top top secret. But it is very interesting and cool. What I can show you is part of the hilarious twitter feed called #ESOrumors that sprung up today in the Astronomy community.
Dean Snow was one of my two advisors in undergraduate school. I have fond memories of all six months of college. But that’s another story. Anyway, several years ago, Dean got wind of the research showing that humans exhibit sexual dimorphism in the ratios of the middle digits of the hand. It is believed that this is accounted for by differential rates of bone growth during early development that happen to be different, on average, between males and females. There is probably not an adaptive explanation for this. Rather, at some important developmental stage there is an endocrine effect on bone growth that happens to leave a signal we can use to tell males from females, to a certain degree.
Some of this research has gone so far as to suggest that the degree of differentiation relates to other behavioral traits. My favorite is the idea that among men, high level athletes have a higher ratio of finger length difference for the middle fingers than average men. Gay men, on the other hand, have even higher ratios. Therefore all athletes are gay. I won’t bother giving you references for that work because I’m not interested in defending it or even suggesting it is true. I simply choose to believe it, for fun. Let the Evolutionary Psychologists work out the details.
Regardless of any behavioral links, this sexually dimorphic trait could be used to sex individuals. (That term “sex individuals” is a quaint way archaeologists say “determine the chromosomal sex of individuals using proxy methods such as brow ridges and stuff, like they do on the TV show Bones.”) Dean’s idea is this: If finger length ratio is sexually dimorphic, then we could potentially sex the wall hand stencils found in prehistoric contexts as part of the panoply of paleolithic cave art.
It has generally been assumed that males made the wall art. Why? Because we generally assume that males did anything cool in the Palaeolithic. Why? Because Palaeolithic Archaeology, and many other forms of archaeology, has traditionally involved men communing with each other across the ages using things like phallus symbols and hands. Like this:
A phallus in the hand is worth … oh, never mind.
The thing is, there are good reasons to believe that it is not true that females never did anything, ever. Females don’t do nothing ever these days, why would that have been the case in the Palaeolithic? Also, think about the origin and evolution of technology. Chimps use a lot of technology. Virtually all chimp technology is used by females, invented by females, passed from female to female, and so on. Males don’t seem to do any of that. Well, now and then a male is seen to wave a stick around, and one male chimp once picked up an empty gasoline can and waved it around. Publications ensued. But really, the chimp-human ancestor, almost certainly more chimp-like than human-like, probably used some technologies. If I had to guess, I’d say that the earliest chipped stone tools, the Oldowan and related industries, were made by females. These early tools were likely used to access embedded resources, and it is embedded resources we see chimp females (not males) access with technology.
Later, when our ancestors invented phallus shaped tools like spear points, perhaps males took over those technologies. Indeed, I would not be too uncomfortable with the hypothesis that the seminal spear points were a guy thing.
It is also true that men don’t have a monopoly on art. Across the world we see art as an embedded part of cultures, and whether females or males engage in that activity varies a great deal. It might even be the case that among traditional substance or foraging groups females do more art than males. It is probably worth pointing out that one of the best places for art to show up is on cloth, or as part of the manufacture of cloth from fibers, bark, etc. We know from ethnography that this is more a female thing than a male thing. We also know that much of that material is not preserved, and it takes a great deal of effort to access that very important area of culture in prehistoric contexts. Anyway, if art is related to textile and related technology, than we can be pretty sure that early modern human females were doing art. If technology was invented by female chimp-like ancestors of humans than we can be pretty sure that females were involved in that too. In fact, the question we should be asking is this: When in prehistory did males start to do something interesting?
So, back to the wall stencils, like these:
If we can sex hands by measuring digit length ratio, maybe we can tell if these hands are those of women or men. Here’s Dean Snow talking about that prospect:
The people who I know that study the behavioral implications of digit ratios tend to use x-rays of the hand in order to get near perfect measurements of the bones. This cuts out some of the variation that make the process difficult. The actual distribution of ratios between males and females overlap a great deal. Here’s a typical graph showing the distribution of measurements modeled as normal distributions:
Quite a bit of overlap
The problem in archaeology is that we are often stuck with data or methods that provide the opposite from the above mentioned x-ray machines. Archaeological data is usually messier than other forms of data. That certainly applies to hand prints on cave walls, which not only show the flesh and not the bones, but they are stencils, which have even less fidelity as indicators of fetal hormonal effects. But, it is certainly worth a look. Also, maybe, just maybe, there is more sexual dimorphism in certain Paleolithic populations which might make the signal more clear. It turns out, that may be the case.
Preliminary research on hand stencils found in the Upper Paleolithic cave sites of France and Spain showed that sexual dimorphism in human hands is expressed strongly enough to allow empirical determination of the sexes of the individuals who made some of them. Further research increased the sample of measurable cases from 6 to 32, a large enough sample to show that persons who made hand stencils in the caves were predominantly females. This finding rebuts the traditional assumption that human hand stencils in European parietal art were made by male artists, either adults or subadults. Findings further suggest that the sexual dimorphism of hands was more pronounced during the Upper Paleolithic than it is in modern Europeans. Attempts to apply the same algorithms to a sample of North American Indian handprints confirms the view that different populations require separate analyses.
Other work done by Snow and others suggests that this pattern does not hold across all populations of hands. One would not necessarily expect it to. As usual, further research is needed. In any event, for research on Palaeolithic images on cave walls, this is hands down one of the more interesting results.
After 16 minutes, Michael Mann on climate change, climate sensitivity, etc.
Why does Joan of Arc Being look so worried? The fire hasn’t even touched her!Mann uses the analogy of a person jumping (or being thrown?) off a tall building, and as he passes the third floor notes that everything is fine. Another analogy that might be helpful is being burned at the stake. After they tie you to the stake and pile up the wood, you’re fine. Then they light the wood on fire and you’re still fine. For a while.
It is very hard for me to view the world without my Anthropological glasses, since I’ve been one kind of Anthropologist or another since I was 13 years old. Thinking about climate science deniers, I realized what makes them annoying to me. Let me tell you what I mean.
The ongoing conversation at an archaeological site.When Archaeologists (a kind of Anthropologist, in the tradition I was trained in) dig a site, they are constantly learning about what is under ground at that location, and throughout the process develop a model of what it all means. As an aside I should mention that increasing understanding is not the inevitable outcome. Sometimes more questions are raised than answered. Point is, as more and more earth is moved and more of the structure of the site and its artifactual contents are revealed, the conception among the diggers of what they are working on grows more detailed and often more complex. The archaeologists talk while they work. There will be experts and learners, novices and those with great experience, and as they dig the site speaks to them (a common metaphor in archaeology) and the diggers listen, knowing that what the famous Dr. House always says must not be forgotten: Everybody, including archaeological sites, lies. So at no point do good archaeologists come to a comfortable understanding of what they are uncovering. It is always uncomfortable, shifting, nagging, bothersome, challenging. And most importantly, this process is what archaeology is. The late James Deetz once told me that fieldwork was the most important thing to him and I asked him why. He said, “That’s where I think. I think standing in a hole.” And that is generally true of Archaeology. Archaeologists think standing in a hole, usually in groups, and they talk and between the ongoing results of the digging, the thinking, and the talking, stuff happens in their minds that advances our overall understanding (or complexity of questions about) something in the past. It also feels good. If you are doing that – digging holes in all sorts of weather, spending more time on your knees than a Catholic choir boy, always being dirty but not in a good way, sun burned, tick bitten, knuckle scraped, being mocked by the patch of earth you are busy destroying – and it does not feel good than you should do something else.
So that is what it is like to engage in the process of doing archaeology. Then a car pulls up.
The guy gets out of his car and comes over and asks, “Whatcha doing?” and somebody tells him.
“We’re digging an archaeological site, we’re archaeologists!” an enthusiastic less experienced member of the crew pipes up, walking over to the fence to engage with this member of the public, as we are supposed to do. “It’s an historic site from the early 19th century. There used to be a farm here. We’re tracing out the foundation of the house, and over there, we think we’ve uncovered the place where the farmers butchered their …”
One of the larger round rocks.“I found an artifact,” the interrupting visitor says, interrupting.
“What?”
“It’s in my trunk, let me get it.”
The archaeologist is left standing at the fence. Sniggers can be heard by some of the more experienced crew members, and glances are passed around like some neat, newly uncovered object might be. There is a reason the least experienced person on the crew was the only one to jaunt over to the fence when the guy showed up.
Returning from his car, holding a huge very smooth ovate river cobble, nearly perfect in symmetry, probably quartzite, “This thing,” hefting it over the fence into the waiting arms of the young archaeologist. “I brought it to the museum but they told me it was just a rock. Obviously they don’t know their rocks! I’ve been running back hoe on construction for years. I know this is not just a rock.”
For some reason, smooth rocks and people who know things have an affinity.
The conversation goes on for a half hour. We learn this guy has been carrying around his rock for over two years, showing it to people now and then. He has a number of theories about what it is, but his preference is to link the rock to Celtic mariners who crossed the Atlantic in olden times and wandered across the continent teaching the hapless Indians how to build stone chambers in which to conduct ceremonies. Despite the fact that this rock is clearly very important, representing a trans-Atlantic connection that only enlightened people accept as true reality, he leaves the rock with the young field worker who promises to bring it to the museum and put in a proper storage drawer where it can be studied by future Archaeologists.
So that was one hour the entire crew can never get back, one hour of failed and eventually forsaken attempts to dissuade the guy of his silly misconceptions, one hour of not thinking about the archaeological site, and also, for reasons of security, one hour during which one or two of the diggers found something interesting but kept quiet about it lest the discovery be drawn into the useless and distracting conversation, or worse, prompt Mr. Backhoe to return over the weekend with his big yellow machine to see what he might find.
That’s what climate science denialists do.
At the moment, and this is probably almost always true, there are some very interesting things going on in climate science. Some of the current issues have to do with the effects of anthropogenic global warming on severe weather. Here’s a brief overview of what is going on.
We know warming increases evaporation and thus potentially causes drought.
We know warming increases water vapor in the air, which further increases warming (but how much is a matter of debate) and increases the potential for severe rainfall.
We know sea surface temperatures are elevated, so when major tropical storms form, they have the potential to be bigger.
We know sea levels have gone up and continue to do so, which means that storm surges from various kinds of storms are greater than they otherwise might be.
These effects have something to do with the Drought in California, some major flooding and rainfall events of recent years, and the severity of a handful of major tropical storms including Katrina, Haiyan/Yolanda, and Sandy.
For some time science has predicted changes in atmospheric circulation caused by warming that would likely alter major weather patterns. In recent years, this seems to have been observed. So-called “Weather Whiplash” is a phenomenon where the weather in a region goes extreme for a bit longer than it should, then shifts to a different extreme. Drought and flood, heat and cold, that sort of thing. We don’t know but strongly suspect “Weather Whiplash” is caused by global warming’s effects on major air circulation patterns. This is a hot area of research right now, and it is fascinating.
We argue about the likely effects of global warming on specific kinds of storms, from temperate tornadoes to tropical hurricanes. Numerous analyses of data and models of climate change have suggested that there may be more of these storms in the future, other studies ‘conclude’ that we can’t be sure, and very few studies show that storms will decrease. The most methodologically questionable studies are the ones that predict decreases in storm overall, though there are a few good studies that suggest that certain tropical regions will experience fewer major cyclones.
That is a rough outline running from greater to lesser certainty. Down there in the lower certainty range there is some interesting science going on. One thing that makes the science especially interesting is the unhappy tension between what climate scientists ideally would like to do and the urgency of understanding what will happen with severe weather in the future. On one hand, climate scientists would like to get a couple of decades of excellent data to supplement older, not as excellent data, to see how climate systems responding to warming reshape our weather patterns. On the other hand, we would ideally like to know now not only if we have to worry about increasingly severe weather, but we’d like to know what kinds of severe weather will occur, when, and where.
That’s interesting. Going back to the analogy of digging an archaeological site, this is like digging a site that is of a familiar type, finding mostly what you expect, but knowing you are adding important data to the overall growing body of information about Early Bronze Age Peloponnesian urban settlement, or New England 19th century farmsteads. But while you are excavating the site you find a stain deep in one corner of a test pit you thought you were about to be done with, and there’s an unexpected artifact in the stain. So you open up a larger area and find a homestead that is not on the map and is not supposed to be there, and as you excavate more and more of it you discover it is loaded with exotic unexpected artifacts and represents human activity that was not known to have occurred at this place and at this time. This would be the most fun you can have with your pants on, kneeling, in the field of archaeology.
And then some guy comes along with his stupid rock and takes you away from it all for an inordinate amount of time. But in climate studies, it is not some guy. It is dozens of denialists, who do appear to be at lest somewhat organized, showing up and doing everything they can think of to interfere with your work. When the scientists get together to discuss the very interesting and important uncertainties, to evaluate very recent work, to share thoughts about the interpretation of newly run models or newly analyzed data sets or newly observed phenomena, they have to spend a certain amount of that time dealing with the denialists. They may even have to spend a certain amount of time talking with lawyers. When they talk to the public or to policy makers they have to spend a certain amount of time, sometimes quite a bit of time, debunking denialist myths and explaining the basic science that should have been accepted as premise a long time ago.
Now imagine once again that you are an archeologist and you and your team have finished work on a major project. You’ve put together a symposium to be part of a major international meeting, at which 9 different papers will be read and discussed addressing various aspects of your findings. You go to the conference. But 2 out of 10 of the people in the room are this guy’s friends. They will insist on asking questions about the Celts and the Giants that once roamed the Earth, and Aliens that mated with earthlings in antiquity to form a race of Lizard People. And they are not polite. Only 2 of 10 in the room come to the conference with these ideas, but they are highly disruptive and control much of the conversation at the symposium, at the bar afterwards, at the airport waiting lounges where people going to and from the conference accidentally run into each other, on the twitter stream spewing from the conference venue.
This is why climate science denialists are so annoying. They are sucking a measurable amount of energy and resources from the process of doing the science and understanding the climate system. Another analogy would be this: Every department of natural resources spending 10% of its budget mitigating against negative effects on Bigfoot, and every news report of anything having to do with parks, hunting, bird conservation, etc. having a Bigfoot spokesperson to address bigfoot issues. When you take climate denialist fueled false balance and re-describe it in any other area of public policy or scientific endeavor, that’s what you get. Bigfoot or something like Bigfoot. Cold Fusion experts always included in any discussion of the Large Hadron Collider, Alien Hunters having equal time after every episode of Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos 2014, and so on.
There is plenty of uncertainty at the cutting edge of climate science. There is very little uncertainty at the core. This is because it is centuries old science and the scientists pretty much know what they are doing. Engaging in the false debate is a waste of time and effort, and that, I personally suspect, is the main objective of the denialists. They want to slow down progress, though they may have various different reasons to do so. None of those reasons are valid. They are not Galileo, though they want everyone to think they are. One wonders if they believe that of themselves.
That would be extra annoying.
Photograph of Eliot Park Neighborhood Archaeology Project by Jen Barnett.
If we, Western Civilization, had started out with electric cars, and a century later someone came along with the idea of exploding little dollops of gasoline mixed with air to propel them, that person would be thought insane.
Depending on price, the cost of energy to propel an electric car a given distance can be about 5% of the cost to propel a gas-explosion style car. The electricity to power the electric car can be produced in any number of ways, some icky some cleaner, but much more efficiently. Some of that energy can be generated where the car is parked, at home or work, under a Photoage, a structure with photo cells that serves as a garage. Since most cars just sit there for much of the day, this can be a significant amount. Meanwhile, the car’s batteries can be part of the smart grid, the top 15% or so being used by the grid to store/use electricity keeping supply and demand closer.
I used to think the inefficiency of making all the volts in big giant plants and sending it out over wires obviated all of this but experts tell me this is not true. Also, as the grid becomes more and more localized, and it becomes more and more normal to fit homes or other buildings with solar and use batteries, etc., the source becomes closer to supply. But really, it may be the difference between generating a magnetic field from available electric potential vs. causing a series of explosions inside a big heavy metal thing that matters most.
(This brief comment was prompted by Don Prothero‘s post of the image at the top of the post on Facebook.)
WTF Frontiers in Psychology Journal? Scientists publish a peer reviewed paper in your journal, a bunch of cranks complain about it, and successfully bully you into taking the paper off your web site? Do you seriously want the rest of the scientific world to take you seriously, ever, from now on? I’m thinking that’s not going to happen. We await a full and unmitigated apology to Stephan Lewandowsky, JohnCook, Klaus Oberauer and Michael Marriott, the authors of Recursive fury: conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation
In the mean time, since you felt the need to dispose of any semblance of ethical and professional behavior and remove the paper from your web site, here is a copy of it for anyone who wants it. That should be available until further action is taken to silence these scientists.
Also, I won’t be writing about any papers published in this journal in the future until the above described apology is produced.
[Recursive Fury] reported a narrative analysis of the blogosphere’s response to publication of [an earlier paper,] LOG12. The blogosphere’s response bore a striking resemblance to the very topic of LOG12: our finding that rejection of climate science is associated with conspiratorial thinking triggered elements of conspiratorial discourse among those who sought to deny that denial of climate science involves a measure of conspiratorial thinking…
Recursive Fury attracted some media attention…as well as critique. It should come as little surprise that this critique did not involve a scholarly response, such as submission of a rejoinder for peer review, but that it entailed a barrage of complaints to the University of Western Australia (UWA), where I was based at the time, and the journal Frontiers.
While not retracting the paper, Frontiers removed the article from its website in March 2013. The journal then commenced an arduous process of investigation which has now come to a conclusion.
Frontiers will post (or has posted) the following statement on its website today:
“In the light of a small number of complaints received following publication of the original research article cited above, Frontiers carried out a detailed investigation of the academic, ethical and legal aspects of the work. This investigation did not identify any issues with the academic and ethical aspects of the study. It did, however, determine that the legal context is insufficiently clear and therefore Frontiers wishes to retract the published article. The authors understand this decision, while they stand by their article and regret the limitations on academic freedom which can be caused by legal factors.”
In other words, the article is fine but Frontiers does not want to take the legal risk that its restoration on the website might entail.
Go to Stephan’s post for additional links and a much richer context and history of this bone-headed move by Frontiers and the climate science denialists.
Aside from its tragic nature and its apparent media value as a mystery greater than who will be the Next American Idol, the apparent disappearance of flight 370 has another meaning, I think, that has been entirely missed as far as I can tell.
The other day I was having a conversation with some colleagues, which led to someone quoting Stallman, which in turn led to noting that Stallman refuses to use a smart phone (or any cell phone, perhaps, can’t remember) because of the danger of being constantly tracked by the authorities. I note that my “smart phone” is dumb as a brick. Whenever I need it to know where the heck I am so it can tell me which way to go, it seems to say “Huh? What? WTF am I?” more often than not. If the authorities are tracking me based on my smart phone, the authorities are badly misinformed. Nonetheless, Stallman is right, this sort of technology is potentially privacy-threatening. But it may be that his thoughts are ahead of his time. Based on my own experience, I’m not sure that anyone is figuring out where I am because I have a smart phone.
(I have noticed the occasional ad show up on Facebook related to something I had recently walked by, but I’m sure I’m being paranoid. Right?)
Several years ago the Soviet Union stood as the world’s largest empire ever, more or less. It included in it’s grasp the majority of of Europe and about half of the rest of the world, plus or minus ambiguous associations with China by various states. Then one day, in a blinding moment of history, the Soviet Union collapsed, the Berlin Wall fell, and Eastern Europe was freed from its grey oppression. Remember that?
Of course, it was not all at once, but nearly so in historical terms. Archaeologically it would look like a discontinuous horizon of concrete rubble containing the occasional Lenin fragment separating material cultures that look similar but that have some important differences. You would not see the individual events at all.
But somewhere in there with all that wall knocking over and statue pulling down and Rose Revolutions and stuff there occurred a single event, before the rest of the events happened, that on one hand was singularly insignificant and on the other hand the most important thing that ever happened in history, and that event was much like the unexplained disappearance of Flight 370.
Surely you have guessed by now the event to which I refer. Mathias Rust’s epic journey.
On May 28, 1987, Rust flew his small single engine plane from Germany to a point next to Red Square, a bit down the street from The Kremlin, via Iceland and Finland. Nobody stopped him. He was noticed here and there but never challenged. Basically, Mathais Rust revealed an amazing truth: You can fly a small air craft from The West to The Kremlin, no problem! The emperor has no clothes, the empire has no air defense. It wasn’t long after Mathias Rust landed in Moscow that all the things we think of as the end of the Cold War happened. They happened for a lot of reasons, but Mathias Rust was far more than a straw placed at just the right moment on the camels’ back. More like a Cessna 172 landing on a bear’s back.
A Boeing 777 is big. One went missing in a heavily populated part of the world with a history of tension and warfare. I don’t expect Southeast Asia to have the same exact level of radar coverage as other parts of the world, but I do expect it to be difficult to have a Boeing 777 go totally missing there. I mean, after all, this is not Subsaharan Africa. Years ago, when I was actively working in Subsaharan Africa, I was contacted by an intelligence agency. They had the zany idea that I might know where a Boeing 737 they had lost track of might be. They were watching it, it was privately owned and being used for … various things, apparently … and one day the guy who checks on these sorts of things at a particular airport went to look, just routine, to make sure the Boeing 737 was in the same place it had been put after landing the night before and the damn thing was gone. It was so missing that they had stooped to asking anthropologists if they had seen the plane around anywhere. But that was then, and there, and this is now, and elsewhere.
Personally, I’m not too surprised this could happen, but the average person on the internet should be, as far as I can tell. Why, for example, does Edward Snowden have nothing to say about this? If the NSA and all those other agencies are able to track our every move, how can a Jumbo Jet vanish without a trace? (I quickly note: They’ll probably find it, but it is too late for maintaining any faith in The Watchers. If it is located now it will be bumbled upon, not found because someone, somewhere, knows where everything and everyone is.)
Flight 370 tells us that they don’t know everything, they being, well, you know. They can’t do everything. Not only are you and I not being tracked, but clumps of hundreds of people all together including engineers traveling abroad, people without passports and, for chrissakes, Chinese People, are able to vanish from the face of the Earth without any agency or government being able to simply point and say “Oh, they’re right there, plus or minus a few hundred meters. We know where everyone is.” Because they can’t do that. They don’t have the technology, the resources, the time, or the inclination. And, most important of all: It turns out that Tom Clancey’s novels are fiction!
So, how do you hide a Boeing 777 from the US’s NSA, Chinese Military and Intelligence, and the intelligence and military communities of all the other countries? You don’t. They don’t know where it is already. Whatever you were thinking the Man was capable of, think again. Flight 370 shows us that the capabilities of Big Brother are highly exaggerated.
