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Interview with Michael Mann

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

You can listen to the interview here:

Play Now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ebola Test: Civilization Fails

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ubuntu 14.10 Upgrade: What to do

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The Ubuntu 14.10 Release October 23, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to replace Unity with Gnome on Ubuntu

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

The tool is called tasksel

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

Screen Shot 2014-10-04 at 11.46.51 AM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Want a better desktop, mate?

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

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

But then there is mate.

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

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

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

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

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

What you should do instead of automatically installing Ubuntu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Ways Hollywood and Literature Have Confused The Ebola Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Ebola:

Ebola in Dallas Texas: Is our response adequate?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is why.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Ebola:

I hope Judith Curry apologizes for this.

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I’m not going to talk about Mark Steyn, other than to say that if you know who Rush Limbaugh is, Mark Steyn is a bit to the right and a tad more obnoxious, but not as smart.

You can find out more by clicking here, using the Climate Change Science Search Engine.

I’m also not going to say much about Judith Curry except that, unlike Steyn, she was a regular scientist who did climate science. Over time the material she has written, both in peer reviewed journals and on her blog, has become increasingly aligned with those who are highly skeptical that global warming is real. She has a theory that global warming is an artifact of models (even though we can see it without the use of models), and I’m pretty sure she’s been wrong about almost everything she’s done recently. But, that’s how science works. Sometimes a scientist is wrong. Some are not wrong very often. Some are wrong almost all the time. It’s a thankless job, but somebody’s got to do it. Maybe someday she’ll start getting more useful results with her work.

Anyway, Mark Steyn has recently aligned himself with the Mens Rights Movements, and Slyme Pit (you know who they are), in other words, antifeminist, pro harassment, not-too-concerned-about-rape crowd, in their cottage industry of giving me a hard time on the Internet. That fits since he is, after all, to the right of, and not quite as smart as, Rush Limbaugh.

And now, Judith Curry, has aligned herself with Mark Steyn and his systematic harassment of climate scientist Michael Mann, and to a lesser extent, me.

Screen Shot 2014-09-30 at 10.09.27 PM

This is a tweet favoriting a tweet by Mark Steyn pointing to his own blog post in which he carries out obnoxious attacks on Mann and me. For my part, he points to this post on my blog, which he takes to be an indication that I stalked a particular woman. Go read the post. Tell me if shutting down a crazed graduate student who was harassing other grad students, an undergrad, and a few others, using standard procedures (telling mom and dad, in this case) is stalking. It isn’t. Also, tell me if Judith Curry’s favoriting of this tweet indicates her approval of Steyn’s methods. Does it?

This “favoriting” of Steyn’s tweet of his post by Curry seems to align Curry with the worst of the worst. Did she also “like” Rush Limbaugh’s assertion that Sandra Fluke needs to keep an aspirin between her knees, and that the tax payers should not be paying her to have sex? Or Rush Limbaugh’s comments making fun of kids who need help getting a simple lunch at school? I’m hoping, though, that Judith Curry simply was unaware of how much of a misanthrope Steyn is, maybe she’s never heard of him before and doesn’t know that he is this incredibly offensive person, and just saw someone taking a jab at Mike and clicked on the little “favorite” button.

It was after all, just a “favoriting” of a tweet by Steyn. Which means Curry can step back from this with a simple apology to Michael Mann and me. Then, no big deal, I’d move on. Up to her.

Or, she could not do that. But I really didn’t think she was that kind of person. But maybe she is.

(See also this response to Steyn’s tweet.)

Climate Science Ice Bucket Challenge The Complete Collection

Climate Change, Uncategorized, , , , , ,

I am going to try to keep all the climate science ice bucket challenges here as they occur. At present there are quite a few individuals who have not yet answered the challenge. I’m sure they will. Some of them, in the Northern Hemisphere, may be waiting for it to get colder so the act becomes more meaningful.

Anyway, here’s what we’ve got now. If I’m missing someone, please add a link in the comments!

It all started with Andy Lee Robinson “Arctic Sea Ice Death Spiral” challenge…

Andy donates to the Dark Snow Project and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, challenges David Rose, Paul Beckwith, and Jason Box.

Jason Box “Arctic Sea Ice Bucket Challenge” Dark Snow Project

donates to ALS, challenges Peter Sinclair, Dane Nuccitelli, John Cook

Peter Sinclair, sternly, of “This is not Cool”, for the Yale Forum on Climate Change…

donates to ALS, the Dark Snow Project and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. Challenges: Everyone! Plus, Jeff Masters, Rob Honeycutt and Mauri Pelto

Dana Nuccitelli of the Guardian

… donates to ALS, the Dark Snow Project and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. Challenges Michael Mann, Katharine Hayhoe, and Kevin Cowtan.

Mauri Pelto, doing a stylish striptease…

…donates to Challenges Tom Hammond, Olier Grah, Megan Pelto.

Kevin Cowtan, imported Ice to carry out the challenge…

… and donates to ALS, the Dark Snow Project and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. Challenges Mark Richardson, Robert Way, and Catie Murphy.

John Cook of Skeptical Science …

… donates to ALS, the Dark Snow Project and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. He challenges Stephan Lewandowsky, John Bruno and Gavin Cawley.

Stephan Lewandowsky appears to get away…

… with meeting the challenge and not getting wet. Or does he?

There may be over 10 billion of us by 2100

Uncategorized, ,

Climate change may be the existential threat, but underlying this is, of course, population size. And this is a problem that never seems to go away. There are of course two ways, broadly speaking, to limit population growth aside from draconian policies governing reproduction (such as China’s One Child policy). One is sometimes called the demographic transition. This is when a combination of factors including so-called modernization which may involve increase quality of health care in combination with increased social equality lead to lower birth rates. The other is when things go badly wrong and interruptions in the food supply, warfare genocide, and epidemic disease simply cull out large parts of the population.

The following chart shows the effect of two major famines on the overall population increase in Ethiopia since 1950. If you squint and look at it kinda sideways you can see the slowing of population increase during this period. But really, it made little difference.

Screen Shot 2014-09-20 at 8.44.05 AM

And here is the population of Rwanda since 1950, with the 1994 Genocide marked in. Here the event is much more clearly indicated but again, over the long term, there is not that much of an effect, just a delay in reaching some high future number.

Screen Shot 2014-09-20 at 8.49.48 AM

Until recently, experts on population had estimated that world population would reach about 9 billion by around 2050, and then level off. But a new study by the UN indicates that population is likely to increase to more than 10 billion or so by the end of the century. The study came out in this week’s issue of Science (Gerland, P., Raftery, A. E., Šev, H., Li, N., Gu, D., Spoorenberg, T., … Heilig, G. K. (2014). Reports World population stabilization unlikely this century, (September), 1–5. doi:10.1038/42935, with additional information here). Here is what the projection looks like for the world, but you can go to the link and see the projections for each country, various regions, and projections for other demographic values.

Screen Shot 2014-09-20 at 8.56.57 AM

From the Abstract:

The United Nations recently released population projections based on data until 2012 and a Bayesian probabilistic methodology. Analysis of these data reveals that, contrary to previous literature, world population is unlikely to stop growing this century. There is an 80% probability that world population, now 7.2 billion, will increase to between 9.6 and 12.3 billion in 2100. This uncertainty is much smaller than the range from the traditional UN high and low variants. Much of the increase is expected to happen in Africa, in part due to higher fertility and a recent slowdown in the pace of fertility decline. Also, the ratio of working age people to older people is likely to decline substantially in all countries, even those that currently have young populations.

The new study is done differently than most earlier studies. According to Patrick Gerland, a UN demographer, “Earlier projections were strictly based on scenarios, so there was no uncertainty. This work provides a more statistically driven assessment that allows us to quantify the predictions, and offer a confidence interval that could be useful in planning.” Also earlier studies made unrealistic assumptions about fertility, allowing the entire world to have a higher or lower fertility to develop a range of outcomes. Author Adrian Raftery notes, ““In a given year and country the fertility rate might be half a child higher, but the probability that it would be half a child higher in all countries in all years in the future is very low.”

We need to be working towards a more rapid demographic transition, which in large part involved education of girls and access to good health care so babies survive better, and good reproductive services so women can no be so easily coerced into being baby factories.

What will this winter be like in North America?

Uncategorized, , , , , ,

The Polar Vortex hurt. We who lived in it, through it, with it, are like farm animals that got zapped by the electric fence a couple of times … notice all that long grass growing by the fence. Stay away. It hurt! So we are worried that this will happen again.

It is a reasonable worry, from a scientific point of view. The Polar Vortex visitation last winter was the result of changes to trade winds and jet streams that has characterized our weather for the last few years. One of the big questions on my mind is this: Are wavy jet streams and corresponding changes in the distribution of excessive rainfall and drought likely to become spatially patterned? In other words, is it likely that when the Polar Vortex wanders that it will tend to wander to the same small set of locations, like Siberia or North America? So far this seems to be at least partly true. The drought in California has not been maintained because of a lack of rainfall at that latitude, but rather, a lack of certain seasonal precipitation (winter snows) at that longitude, because of the oft-cited “ridiculously resilient ridge” which is actually one of several standing waves in the polar jet stream that shunts wet air around California, to places the Midwest. It is conceivable that the Polar Vortex, as part of the climate change induced “new normal,” will wanter off-pole and onto a landmass (either Eurasia or North America) often-ish, from now on, or until continued global warming results in some other pattern which we’ll probably call “New Normal 2.0”.

This is a question I’ve asked various scientists who are working on this problem. The answer I’ve gotten so far has been, paraphrased, “Yeah, I don’t know, maybe, we’re thinking about that. Get back to you later.”

But there is hope. I’ve put links to three places you can go for more discussion and information below. Here’s the tl;dr. The National Weather Service does a very good job of predicting what winter will be like in North America, but the accuracy of that prediction, unsurprisingly, drops off month by month. So the current prediction is probably pretty good for November/December, but as January and February come along, what is predicted now may be off. With that caveat, these are the salient predictions:

1) There will not be a Polar Vortex excursion into North America. Probably. The thing is, if this is a recent phenomenon and increasing in likelihood, the predictions may be off, but there are good reasons to believe they are not. Don’t assume the Polar Vortex will visit us, but don’t sell your wool pants at that last garage sale of the year.

2) California may actually get some rasonable precipitation this winter. It is hard to say if it will be drought-breaking rain, but it may help.

3) Although winter seems to be starting early this year (with many inches of snow having fallen or about to fall on the Front Range, the Dakotas, etc.) the overall prediction is a somewhat warmer than average winter for most of North America.

4) The Southwest, California, Texas, North-Central Mexico will have a bit more moisture than average, but other than Pacific coastal Mexico, not a lot more. That won’t translate into huge snowfalls except at high elevations. The middle of the country, from Montana to western Ohio and Michigan, south to a line running from southern Idaho across to Florida, including the Southeast, will have average precip. So, Minnesotans may see early snow if it remains cool, but this will not be an exceptionally snowy winter. Less than usual moisture is predicted for Kentucky, Ohio, western Pensylvaina, parts of New York and most of New England. But, this is only a small amount, so don’t sell your snow blower at that garage sale.

Parts of the Pacific Northwest and inland across to western Montana may be a bit dryer than usual.

Overall, temperature wise, no region is expected to be especially cold, mostly somewhat warm. The regions of Canada and Alaska along the Arctic Circle will be very warm (relatively … so many degrees below zero instead of many more degrees below zero) as we would expect with “Arctic Amplification.” Moisture levels, overall, are not going to be extreme in either direction anywhere, though the dry in the Northwest may be noticeable.

In other words, the average person’s perception of weather, which varies from reality a great deal, will include the actual realized variation, if the predictions hold up.

The NWS predictions can be found via this page.

Eric Holthaus has a discussion of the coming winter here.

Paul Douglas of Weather Nation has more here, with a lot of other info relevant to Minnesota.

That Facebook Book Meme Thing

Uncategorized, ,

My friend Iain Davidson tagged me with the facebook novel meme. Here are the rules: Oh, hell, never mind the rules. I wanted to provide links to the books so I decided to do this as a blog post which I’ll paste on my facebook page (and of course tag some unlucky facebook friend).

Here it is. I broke some rules. So what?

Moment in the Sun: Report on the Deteriorating Quality of the American Environment by Dr. Robert Reinow was my Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. As a child I watched Reinow’s Sunrise Semester course on TV a couple of times. He would give a lecture on some manner or other by which humans were ruining the environment. Then he and his wife would put on a skit demonstrating it satirically. I especially remember the Reinow family sitting around to eat a nice dinner, and Mrs. Reinow sneaking over to the stove, opening the top of the pot in which the stew cooked, and dumping in copious quantities of DDT. “This is what we are doing to ourselves!” One day I started a project. I had just started driving and I wanted to visit every public road between Rout 9W and the Hudson River from Albany south at least a couple of counties distance. Early on during that project I came across Holly Hock Hollow Road. It sounded familiar. I drove up the road, and along it were various signs made to look like they were written by elves or gnomes, about this and that aspect of nature or the environment. Finally I came to an unoccupied (at the moment, but lived in) cottage and small complex of outbuildings. I had come to the Reinow estate. I went back a couple of times later but never managed to run into them. The book, which is the point of this paragraph, was prescient. It predicted pretty much everything that happened over the 20 years or so after it was written, from acid rain to DDT. The book made me an angry supporter of the environment, like Reinow was.

I had messed around with the Sherlock Holmes Canon here and there for a long time then one day decided to read them all cover to cover. Then I did it again. Twice. I don’t know why, I just like it.

Karl Hiassen wrote Tourist Season and then he wrote a bunch of other books, fiction, not children’s fiction, with a guy named Skink in them. I use those attributes to define the “Skink Canon” though in truth Skink himself is a relatively minor character in some of the books, and is never the main character. But he is in all of the books. The protagonist and antagonist in his novels shift though they are often similar to each other while Skink stays in place. In the swamps. Where he lives. I guess I like the Skink canon because if I lived in Florida I’d probably be Skink by now.

Everybody seems to either love or hate Anne Rice, and when they do, it is all about the vampires. The vampires are nice, and I would certainly included those stories on a longer list of books, but less appreciated but in my view better is the series related to the Mayfare Witches: The Witching Hour, Lasher, and Taltos. Creepy weird good stories. Take notes, you’ll need them. Maybe a nice genealogy program will help.

Rita Mae Brown wrote a number of novels exploring both related and unrelated themes in the same setting (though sometimes varying the century). This includes a long series co-authored with her cat. Rubyfruit Jungle is her famous, break-through, prize winning work. Amid this larger set of works is a trilogy, if memory serves correctly but I may be missing a piece (and they were written out of order but I’m giving you the historical order of the story here) that I take to represent her larger work. They are: Six of One, Loose Lips, and Bingo.

Marge Piercy’s Gone to Soldiers is an historical novel set during World War II following several different individuals of varying degrees (including zero) of connection to each other.

I read Lord of the Rings when I was too young to totally get it but I enjoyed it. (It was about the second or third “adult” thing I read). Then I read it again when I was older and then one more time. Then, when I as in the Congo with a really bad case of Malaria I read a good part of it again and the story entered my delusional state, which was … interesting. I survived both. I’ll include Hobbit in with the trilogy because it fits.

About the same time I was reading Lord of the Rings, I read The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science (in my case, two paper back volumes, one on physical science, the other biology). It is how I got introduced to science, sort of (I was actually introduced earlier but this was my first systematic learning of science, insofar as reading a book serves in this way). The science I was reading was a bit out of date but to a kid one digit in age that hardly mattered. Black holes were a conjecture, the big bang as I recall somewhat more accepted. Many particles had not been “found” but that search was very much underway. The biology section sticks with me less probably because I’ve gone ahead and unlearned all of the 1960s biology, since I’m kind of a biologist.

When people ask me what novel to read, I often say “Hey, did you read The Egyptian by Mika Waltari yet? No? Read it!

If you haven’t gotten around to Mastering Regular Expressions yet than you are missing out.

I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in the seventh grade, and it was quite life changing.

I read Deschooling Society (70 Edition) in the ninth grade. It was quite revealing.

I dropped out of school in the 10th grade. But that’s another story and there is no book.

One day my sister said, “You’re kind of a freak, here, read this,” and handed me Welcome to the Monkey House. It was my first adult fiction. I didn’t find it freaky. That must prove I was a freak. Soon after I read Fahrenheit 451, then everything by Bradbury and Vonnegut (available at the time) along with, as mentioned Lord of the Rings. So that is how I got my start on literature.

A Naturalist’s Voyage Round the World: The Voyage of the Beagle is the most revealing of Darwin, within a reasonable volume of words. I don’t know if it changed me but it has stuck with me and I refer to it often.

Although A Perfect Spy might be a perfect Le Carré book, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone who hadn’t already read the Smiley canon. And, really George Smiley is where it is at: Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality,The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Looking Glass War, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Honorable Schoolboy, Smiley’s People, and so on (there are about three others).

Sungudogo, the story of a pair of adventurers traveling across the Congo in search of an elusive primate that may or may not exist, reminds me of a lot of things I’ve done myself. Brilliant novel.

Ten Thousand Birds

Birds, Books, , , , , ,

There are over 10,000 species of bird on the Earth today. There is one blog called “10,000 Birds” for which I write a monthly article, in case you did not know. But this post is about Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology Since Darwin, a book by Tim Birkhead, Jo Wimpenny and Bob Monegomerie.

Birds and various studies of birds are central to evolutionary theory and the development of all of the surrounding biology and science. Here’s a short list of key roles birds have played in evolutionary biology:

<li>Darwin's study of pigeon breeding was central to <a href='http://www.powells.com/partner/41349/biblio/9780674637528?p_ti' title='More info about this book at powells.com' rel='powells-9780674637528'>On the Origin of Species</a> and later works. </li>

<li>The Galapagos <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2008/02/14/charles-darwin-finches/">finches</a> and other birds, observed by Darwin during <a href='http://www.powells.com/partner/41349/biblio/9781626365605?p_ti' title='More info about this book at powells.com' rel='powells-9781626365605'>The Voyage of the Beagle</a> were also key in the development of his work.</li>

<li>Darwin's work involved a great deal of other birds, such as <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/02/13/darwin-and-the-voyage-10-rheas-1/">the Rhea</a> and helped shape his thinking about species.</li>

<li>Skipping past many examples, and far ahead in time, The Sibley–Ahlquist taxonomy was the first major application of DNA to develop phylogeny. </li>

<li>As described in <a href='http://www.powells.com/partner/41349/biblio/9780679733379?p_ti' title='More info about this book at powells.com' rel='powells-9780679733379'>The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time</a>, the Grants' study of finches in the Galapagos advanced evolutionary theory with detailed tests of Darwin's models, and influenced <a href="http://gregladen.com/wordpress/wp-content/pdf/Laden_Wrangham_Roots.pdf">one of the most important works on the origin of humans</a>. </li>

<li>Birds have often been used as examples in teaching evolution.  Have a look at this example: <a href="http://10000birds.com/a_new_case_study_of_natural_selection_in_birds.htm">It May Be Hard To Swallow, But Bumpus Could Get Bumped To The Back Burner</a> </li>

Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology Since Darwin is an absolutely spectacular book. It is big and heavy and over 500 pages long. It is dark green like all great scholarly books. Despite it’s great lenght it has only 11 chapters, so you know the material is treated in depth. It has dozens and dozens of pages of notes and references. It has an appendix with a list of 500 ornithologists. It has a separate appendix with a list of ornithologies.

That’s all nice but the meat of the book is in those long intense chapters. These chapters provide a very thorough, detailed, and fascinating history of ornithology, often focusing on the ornithologists, their quirks, their visions, the contexts in which they worked, and their findings. So, yes, this is a history of the science. The story starts when birds first flew into the field of evolutionary biology, or perhaps, were captured by it, and traces the history of biology from a birds eye’s point of view, including the development of the modern synthesis, and on to the behavioral revolution of Lack, the conceptual revolution of Tinbergen, and the ecological reframing of MacArthur.

This could serve as a very readable core of a college elective in the history of science, though it is certainly not a textbook. Richly illustrated, well written, engaging.

Tim Birkhead is a professor of zoology at Sheffield, and has done major bird research. He wrote The Wisdom of Birds: An Illustrated History of Ornithology and Bird Sense: What It’s Like to Be a Bird. Jo Wimpenny is a bird researcher at Sheffield. Bob Montgomerie is professor of biology at Queen’s University in Ontario, and studies the evolution of plumage and bird sex.

Judith Curry Scores Own Goal in Climate Hockey

Climate Change, War on Science, , , , , ,

Did you ever read a textbook on economic history, or an in-depth article on the relative value of goods over the centuries expressed in current US dollars? Have you ever encountered a graphic that shows long term trends in rainfall patterns or other climate variables, using a couple of simple lines, designed to give a general idea of relative conditions during different eras? Here are a few examples of what I’m talking about.

This is a graphic made by a major investment firm culling information from dozens or perhaps hundreds of sources into a single graphic. This is the graphic as it was initially provided by the researchers

The value of gold in US dollars since the 14th century, from the Bank of England, Goldman Sachs Global ECS Research. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/charting-price-gold-all-way-back-1265
The value of gold in US dollars since the 14th century, from the Bank of England, Goldman Sachs Global ECS Research. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/charting-price-gold-all-way-back-1265

This is a graph of oxygen concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere. It is culled from a large number of different sources. This is the graphic, based on numerous proxyindicattors, as published in a peer reviewed paper:

From: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/361/1470/903.full.pdf
From: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/361/1470/903.full.pdf

This is a compilation from many different sources of stock market values assembled to show waves in stock market behavior over the last few centuries:

Long term look at stock market waves. From: http://www.elliottwave.com/affiliates/featured-commentary/bear-market-formation.aspx?code=91715
Long term look at stock market waves. From: http://www.elliottwave.com/affiliates/featured-commentary/bear-market-formation.aspx?code=91715

This is a set of climate related variables show in relation to human “civilization” over 18,000 years (n.b.: the term “civilization” is reserved in archaeology and prehistory for specific phenomena which did not occur before about 10,000 years ago).

Various climate variables in relation to human civilization (sic) over the last 18,000 years, from: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/17/climate-and-human-civilization-over-the-last-18000-years/
Various climate variables in relation to human civilization (sic) over the last 18,000 years, from: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/17/climate-and-human-civilization-over-the-last-18000-years/

In all these cases complex sources were culled in the peer reviewed literature 0r professional research literature, and turned into summary views of something happening over time. The graph itself is meant to show a derived variable, not the underlying complexity of the data. The graph is the sausage. The making of the sausage is laid out in the original documents, in some case in the peer reviewed paper the graphic appears in.

Here, Judith Curry makes the argument, in an excessively tl;dr blog post, that climate scientist Michael Mann acted inappropriately, perhaps fraudulently, or perhaps as a matter of scientific misconduct, when the IPCC published a version of his famous Hockey Stick Graph that instead of looking like this:

The famous Hockey Stick Graph with pretty colors and labels indicating which part of the data come from instrumental records and which parts come from proxies.
The famous Hockey Stick Graph with pretty colors and labels indicating which part of the data come from instrumental records and which parts come from proxies.

Looked like this:

Dumb old black and white version of the Hockey Stick Graph that shows the key point of the graph but does not indicate the different origins of the numeric values being plotted. Like the graphs above.
Dumb old black and white version of the Hockey Stick Graph that shows the key point of the graph but does not indicate the different origins of the numeric values being plotted. Like the graphs above.

For the record, here is the original version of that graphic from the peer reviewed paper. Note that it indicates where the data come from but that was back in the late 20th century when in order to have color graphics in your paper you had to hire monks to draw them and there weren’t any monks available.

Screen Shot 2014-09-12 at 7.09.15 PM

And here is the same graph in a similar updated paper a year later, looking much better:

From Mann, M., Bradley, R and Hughes, M. Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations. GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 26, NO.6, PAGES 759-762, MARCH 15, 1999.
From Mann, M., Bradley, R and Hughes, M. Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations. GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 26, NO.6, PAGES 759-762, MARCH 15, 1999.

And, at the time of the publication, owing to the costs of monks and such, color versions of the graphics were made available. This is what anyone who wanted to could look at at the time:

Screen Shot 2014-09-12 at 9.19.50 PM

Mann’s graphic representation of climate change, the Hockey Stick, is not fraudulent. But it is verified, real, and important. There are people in the climate discussion who make up graphs, of course (see this) but Mann is not one of them.

So Judith Curry and the flock of winged monkeys and child molesters that comment on her blog are arguing that Mann carried out scientific misconduct when he did something that is normal to do, and in fact, that he didn’t actually do. This is an “own goal” for Curry because it is a clear cut case of making up a version of reality in order to denigrate a fellow scientist and discredit his research on the basis of color coding rather than the science. Curry has credentialed herself a denialist.

(Related: Curry’s Credibility Crumbles by Climate Hawks.)

That. Is. Science. Denialism. Welcome to the list, Judith.

By the way have a look at this image:

wp32765e9f_0f

If you ever see an image like this used by a climate science denialist, ACCUSE THEM OF FRAUD AND MISCONDUCT because this graph shows NOTHING about the multiple sources used to create the single black line squiggle therefore it is ILLEGAL.

Sorry… I get carried away sometimes. Anyway, I have a pro tip for those who are following along with the climate change discussion: Individuals who study climate change from any perspective (as a climate change scientist, some other kind of scientist, policy maker, communicator, interested citizen) should realize that some depictions or summaries are underlain by extensive and complex literature. A proper scholarly approach, even by an avocational scholar or journalist, requires keeping that in mind and digging beneath the surface where needed. So if you see a monochromatic hockey stick like curve, or any climate squiggle, hopefully there is a reference to where it comes from and then you can dig around and reconstruct the scholarship, if you are reasonably smart, reasonably diligent, not lazy, and well intentioned.

Or you can be one of Judith Curry’s followers and just whine about it.

Finally, here’s a recent version of the Hockey Stick Graph showing the many ways it has been verified. Checkmate, denialists.

HockeyStickOverview_html_6623cbd61

Added: Judith Curry Picks A Cheery…

Giant Semiaquatic Predatory Dinosaur

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It is called Spinosaurus aegyptiacus but it sounds a bit more like Godzilla. Spinosaurus is a theropod dinosaur (that’s the groups birds evolved within) found in what is now NOrth Africa, between about 112 and 97 million years ago. It was first discovered about one century ago, though those bones were destroyed during WW II. Spinosaurus aegyptiacus might be the only species of this genus, or there may be two. It is probably the largest carnivours dinosaur, up to 18 meters in length. Up top of the post is the picture from Wikipedia. Although the head looks a lot like a crock, you can see the overall Godzilla-esque body.

A paper out today in science presents a detailed analysis of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus‘s aquatic adaptations. Writing for Science, Michael Balter notes:

Researchers have long debated whether dinosaurs could swim, but there has been little direct evidence for aquadinos. Some tantalizing hints have appeared, however, in claimed “swim tracks” made by the bellies of dinos in Utah and oxygen isotopes indicating possible aquatic habitats in a group of dinosaurs called spinosaurs. Now, a research team working in Morocco has found the most complete skeleton yet of a giant carnivore called Spinosaurus [which] confirm that Spinosaurus was bigger than Tyrannosaurus rex, but also show that it had evolutionary adaptations—ranging from pedal-like feet to a nostril far back on the head to high bone density like that of hippos—clearly suited for swimming in lakes and rivers.

The scientists describe Spinosaurus aegyptiacus as “semiaquatic.” It’s pelvis is small, hind limbs short, and as mentioned, its limb bones are solid to act as balast. It’s hind limbs may have acted as quasi-flippers while in water. The dorsal sail “may have been enveloped in skin that functioned primarily for display on land and in water.” They say nothing about its ability to exhale nuclear fire-breath. Perhaps that will be ascertained with further study.

Here are some of the bones and a semi-reconstructed skeleton:

F2.large

Of related interest:

<li><a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2014/09/05/titanic-fearless-dinosaur-unearthed/">Titanic Fearless Dinosaur Unearthed</a></li>

<li><a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2014/09/03/flying-dinosaurs-a-new-book-on-the-dinosaur-bird-link/">Flying Dinosaurs: A New Book on the Dinosaur Bird Link</a></li>

Has #Ebola Death Toll Surpassed Malaria in West Africa?

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In the earlier days of the West African Ebola outbreak, it was not uncommon to hear people note that we should not panic about Ebola because, after all, far more people are killed from Malaria than Ebola. This is of course an irrelevant argument. That is like telling a person who has lost their family in a tragic airplane accident that it isn’t so bad because, after all, far more people die in car crashes than aircraft crashes. For example, on August 5th, James Bell write in the Guardian, in a piece called Concerned about Ebola? You’re worrying about the wrong disease:

Since the Ebola outbreak began in February, around 300,000 people have died from malaria, while tuberculosis has likely claimed over 600,000 lives. Ebola might have our attention, but it’s not even close to being the biggest problem in Africa right now. Even Lassa fever, which shares many of the terrifying symptoms of Ebola (including bleeding from the eyelids), kills many more than Ebola – and frequently finds its way to the US.

I’m not picking on James Bell here. A lot of people said things like this, and the facts are true, though as I said, there is almost always (actually, in exactly N-1 scenarios within a given domain of scenarios) an argument that goes like this, and it really isn’t particularly relevant unless one is tasked with dividing up a fixed set of resources that will be used for a fixed set of problems. Resources rarely come that way and problems are rarely solved that way. As I pointed out earlier, consider the thought experiment where you have $10,000,000 that you want to give to either developing an Ebola vaccine, or a Malaria vaccine. Since billions have been spent on developing a Malaria vaccine and there still isn’t one, your donation would be a drop in the bucket. Retrospectively, it would be equivalent to something like the combined costs of couriers and mail by researchers working on a Malaria vaccine over the last few decades. Or the cost of coffee and donuts in the break room. Or conference travel fees. Or something like that. The point is, a bunch of millions of dollars might actually produce an Ebola vaccine given the starting point we have now, or at least, move us a good deal in that direction.

But now, we can ask if Ebola in the countries that are heavily affected right now is still “minor” compared to Malaria.

This is a matter of numbers and the numbers are hard to come by. James Bell notes that between February and July, inclusively, there had been over 300,000 malaria deaths, I assume world wide. So the comparison is not really relevant; we should be looking at what is happening specifically in, for instance, Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone (or the three combined perhaps). Comparing world wide figures to a regional outbreak is a bit like reducing the Malaria death rate by shifting from numbers from countries that have endemic Malaria to include the global population.

It is hard to know how many people die of malaria every year, and the quality of the data varies considerably from country to country. A fairly recent study (here’s a discussion of it) suggests that an older estimate of 600,000 deaths per year should be doubles to 1,200,000 deaths per years. Having worked and lived in a region with some of the worst malaria (measured numerous ways) for several years, I can easily accept a doubling of numbers. If we assume that 1.2 million is right, by the way, Bell’s number of 300,000 is actually conservative.

Using data from that malaria study and WHO’s Ebola data, we can make some comparisons. I’m including all the information so you can check my work.

Here we have data from Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. The population number and malaria deaths per year are both from the aforementioned study and pertain to 2012. Then I divided malaria deaths per year by 12 to get a monthly value. I’m more comfortable working in months than years because an Ebola outbreak is normally short lived, and the number of deaths changes dramatically from month to month.

Following this we have the total number of Ebola deaths per country (summed in the right hand column as are the above mentioned data) and the approximate number of months of the outbreak. Then, the total deaths divided by the number of months. This constitutes a low-ball estimate of deaths per month from Ebola for the given expanding outbreak. Here we can see that in the comparison between Malaria and Ebola, it is not clear that one is a greater threat than the other (142:92, 49:67, 145:144).

Then we have the August-only monthly number of deaths. Here we dee that Ebola is huge compared to Malaria. So, back when people were saying “Malaria is worse,” in late July and early August, Ebola was starting to prove them wrong.

The last two numbers are calculated for all three countries combined. Here we are going out on a limb, and it is better statistically to crawl out on a thicker limb than a thinner limb. I made some estimates here, and those numbers conform to what is being talked about by WHO and others. If Ebola continues to spread at its current rate the daily number of new cases could be between 150 and 300 by the beginning of January. I state these as low vs high estimates, but actually, they are both conservative. Multiplying this by 30 days in a month, and dividing by 2 to approximate the ca 50% mortality rate, we have conservative numbers for Ebola that leave Malaria in the dust. Even if the doubling of estimated Malaria death rates should be doubled again, Ebola will be a bigger factor than Malaria.

Liberia Guinea Sierra Leone Total
Population 3,954,977 10,068,721 5,696,471 19,720,169
Malaria Deaths Per Year 1706 586 1734 4,026
Malaria Deaths Per Month 142 49 145 336
Ebola Deaths Total 508 400 461 1,369
Months of outbreak 6 6 3 –
Monthly average Ebola deaths 92 67 144 303
August Ebola Deaths 644 148 224 1,016
Estimated Janurary Ebola Deaths (low) – – – 4,500
Estimated Janurary Ebola Deaths (high) – – – 9,000

So that is why we should stop saying that Ebola is not Malaria, so relax about Ebola.

More on Ebola: