Math is hard, Barbie!

The Trophy Wife asked me a question, which turned out to have a slightly different answer than she thought. Her question was "When was the last hurricane to hit New York?"

Because Irene got more media attention than normal, she figured it had been a while.

As it turns out, there have been 84 "tropical or subtropical cyclones that have affected the state of New York since the 17th century." About one a year, recently.

However, looking over the list, I noticed something. The groups seemed roughly the same size, but the last one, up to modern day, was a decade. The groups preceding it were quarter centuries. Then a half century. Then a century.

So I charted it (thank you, Excel). Filtering out Irene (to keep it in even decades), the X Axis (that's the horizontal line, for those of you with a standard American education) is decades. The Y Axis (that's the other one) is the number of storms. (Feel free to do the math yourself.)



I'm not saying it means anything. Because we all know that climate change (a.k.a. "global warming") is a myth, right? Just because there have been increasing numbers of storms hitting New York since the Industrial Era? Coincidence, right?

"Climategate" - Is the Sky Really Falling?

So, several thousand emails were hacked from the University of East Anglia, dumped on some other server elsewhere in the world, and are now being trumpeted as "proof" that climate change is a hoax. And thousands of global warming conspiracy theorists are now pouring over all these illegally-obtained emails trying to find anything they can spin into evidence of a global conspiracy.

Does that summarize the situation pretty well?

Personally, I think that the best take on the situation comes from Aaron Wiener on the Washington Independent:

Is 'Climategate' Really the Game-Changer Skeptics Say It Is?

On Friday, the news broke that hackers had obtained and released thousands of email exchanges between climate scientists at England’s University of East Anglia. Climate change skeptics pounced on the leak, dubbing it "Climategate" and proclaiming that the questionable communications between the scientists proved that global warming was based on cooked data.

"Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?" asked one headline. Another piece called the scandal "one of the greatest in modern science." Today, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) called for an investigation.

So what exactly in these emails is causing such celebration among the deniers? The Daily Telegraph compiled "the most contentious quotes," and while they’re certainly embarrassing for their authors, they don’t come close to undermining the very basis of climate science. Here are three of the six they list:

From: Michael Mann. To: Phil Jones and Gabi Hegerl (University of Edinburgh). Date: Aug 10, 2004
“Phil and I are likely to have to respond to more crap criticisms from the [global warming-denying] idiots in the near future.”

From: Phil Jones. To: Many. March 11, 2003
“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome [global warming-denying] editor.”

From Phil Jones To: Michael Mann (Pennsylvania State University). July 8, 2004
“I can’t see either of these [global warming-denying] papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

These emails demonstrate a deep disdain for global warming skepticism that does not befit scientists in objective pursuit of the truth. But disdain is a far cry from intentional falsification, which is what they’re being accused of. These scientists could — and maybe should — suffer consequences for presenting their findings, and those of their colleagues, in a way that jibes with their broader agenda. But to say that this leak threatens to undermine next month’s climate negotiations in Copenhagen strikes me as more than a bit excessive.

As Gavin A. Schmidt, a climatologist at NASA put it, "Science doesn’t work because we’re all nice. Newton may have been an ass, but the theory of gravity still works."

Or, from Nate Silver on FiveThirtyEight:

Still: I don't know how you get from some scientist having sexed up a graph in East Anglia ten years ago to The Final Nail In The Coffin of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Anyone who comes to that connection has more screws loose than the Space Shuttle Challenger. And yet that's literally what some of these bloggers are saying!

Incidentally, 2009 is shaping up to be the 5th warmist year on record, according to the conspiracists at NASA.

More to the point, from Brad Johnson on Think Progress:

Evidently due to this e-mail conspiracy, Arctic sea ice is at historically low levels, Australia is on fire, the northern United Kingdom is underwater, and the world's glaciers are disappearing. Oh yeah, and it’s the hottest decade in history.

Oh, and Inhofe's calling for an investigation. Into a UN committee. Because he thinks we have jurisdiction there? And, just so I'm clear, this is the same James Inhofe whose biggest campaign contributor is the oil and gas lobby?

Yeah, I thought so.

Global Warming 101

I've been asked to provide a simple, easy-to-follow look at global warming. There's a lot of misunderstanding of the subject out there, so let's take a basic look at the Big Picture.

The concept of climate change was first developed in the early 1800s. The idea of greenhouse gases was developed in the 1800s, and the term was coined by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, who figured out in the 1890's that the increasing amount of CO2 in the air would warm the environment (in fact, he thought it would prevent the next ice age).

The greenhouse effect, in nature, is actually a good thing: it's the main reason that the Earth is significantly warmer than the Moon's surface (which doesn't have an atmosphere). The way it works is simple: sunlight is absorbed by the Earth, and instead of simply reflecting back into space, it's trapped by gases in the atmosphere that act as insulation. These gases, both natural and manmade, absorb and reflect parts of the infrared radiation: water vapor, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane and ozone are the primary greenhouse gases, along with entirely man-made gases such as hydrofluorocarbons and perfluorocarbons.

Left to itself, Nature is a careful balancing act. Whether you feel that it was made that way by God, or whether you want to take a more scientific approach, that is an indisputable fact. The earth could not have lasted either the billions of years that the scientists tell us, or the 6,000 years that the creationists want to promote, if this engine was out of balance. Let's use the metaphor of two machines and carbon dioxide (and we'll call it CO2, if only because it saves me typing ten letters every time - yes, I'm that lazy).

One machine puts out CO2, the other (which we'll call the "scrubber") absorbs it and cleans it up. The CO2 scrubber can absorb gases at only a certain speed, and can be overwhelmed by the amount produced by the other machine (that's because, to drop the metaphor for a second, plants can absorb CO2, but only at a fairly specific rate).

The system is set up for the CO2 machine to produce its gasses at a certain rate, which the scrubber can handle. This leaves a "safe," trace amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and everybody's happy. But if the machine starts producing too much, you get a larger amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and the insulating quality I described above starts to happen faster.

Now, the first machine is made up of people and animals breathing, fires, all the natural processes that go into the production of CO2. Now, suddenly, we introduce a second CO2 machine into the equation, pumping out even more CO2 (we even have a make and model for this second machine - the Industrial Corporation's "Revolution"). The scrubber can't keep up, and you have more and more CO2 in the air.
On top of this, remember that the scrubber is made up of the combined actions of all the plants in the world. And then consider this thing we call "deforestation," where more and more of the world's trees are being destroyed without anything new being planted. That's like somebody walking into the room every so often and dialing the scrubber to a lower setting, without turning down either of our machines.

This is obviously a very simplistic metaphor, but it gives a very basic overview of why the natural system isn't working the way it should, and why the gradual increase in CO2 that's been noted should be a cause for alarm.

Unfortunately, while the industries who've tied themselves to fossil fuels have waged a campaign to spread lies about climate change and global warming, these same industries openly ignored their own scientists. Back in the early 90's, the Global Climate Coalition represented these industries.

“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

The coalition was financed by fees from large corporations and trade groups representing the oil, coal and auto industries, among others. In 1997, the year an international climate agreement that came to be known as the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated, its budget totaled $1.68 million, according to tax records obtained by environmental groups.

So we can ignore most of what the industries are telling us, since they're only worried about how much money they can make. (This is yet another reason why allowing the "Free Market" to operate unchecked may not be the best way to run a country, incidentally.) Meanwhile, in the real world, the news is only getting worse.

Arctic sea ice thinned dramatically between the winters of 2004 and 2008, with thick older ice shrinking by the equivalent of Alaska's land area, a study using data from a NASA satellite showed.

Using information from NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Satellite (ICESat), scientists from the US space agency and the University of Washington in Seattle estimated both the thickness and volume of the Arctic Ocean's ice cover.

ICESat allows scientists to measure changes in the thickness and volume of Arctic ice, whereas previously scientists relied only on measurements of area to determine how much of the Arctic Ocean is covered in ice.

Scientists found that Arctic sea ice thinned some seven inches (17.8 centimeters) a year, or 2.2 feet (67 centimeters) over four winters, according to the study by NASA and the University of Washington, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans.

The big picture, by the way, is called "climate change" - the term "global warming" only refers to one specific aspect of climate change. An important, and even potentially disastrous aspect, but one that can still be corrected.

I don't care what you think about ice and snow on the roads, global warming is a bad thing

Today, let's talk about global warming. Also known as "global climate change."

See, on another blog out there, I said some mean things about Michele Bachmann, and somehow ended up in a debate about global warming. That's how things work on these here Intarnets - it's a series of tubes, and they don't always go where you expect.

(Now, part of the message of the post involved the Left Coast Rebel saying that liberals were close-minded and not willing to listen to other people's viewpoints. And ten minutes after I posted my viewpoint, that same rebel asked his readers if he should delete it. Ultimately, it stayed, but I like the inherent irony in him even asking the question.)

Now, much of that debate was reprinted here in three parts. And, since Andy has already posted replies to last week's rant, let's see if we can lure him here, since he seems to be particularly interested in climate change. (To level the playing field a little, I'll start here primarily with arguments he's already seen.)

Now, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a group put together back in 1988 by the UN to monitor studies about climate change and determine the facts of the matter. Despite White House opposition, the IPCC noted an increase of about a degree and a half in average surface temperature in the latter part of the 20th century. They determined that greenhouse gases and deforestation were the primary causes, and nature (solar variation and volcanoes) had produced most of the warming up through about 1950, but had actually cooled things somewhat since then.

The summary of that study is here, if you're curious. Most of the major scientific organizations internationally have endorsed that study, by the way, and the IPCC shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore on the subject.

You're heading out into Conspiracy Theory territory if you believe that a giant international cabal of scientists is counterfeiting their evidence for some nefarious purpose. Nor do I think that it's likely that all the governments in the world worked together to alter the findings of those same scientists, without any of those scientists saying anything. (On top of which, wouldn't the Bush White House have had some input in suppressing the results, if that was the case?)

(And, admittedly, there was one scientist who left the group, back in 2005, named Christopher Landsea. However, he was specifically miffed about another scientist saying that strong hurricane activity was due to global warming, when he had performed no studies in that area.)

There are several climate model projections in the IPCC report, which suggest that global surface temperatures will rise another 2 to 12 degrees F. up through 2100, depending on who you believe (and it will probably continue to rise beyond that, since the 75% of the earth covered in water is a great heatsink).

But even that 2 degrees will cause significant melting in the polar regions, and even a few inches of increase in the world's oceans will be a bad thing.

Now, I understand that there are arguments against this concept. A number of scientists (mostly funded by Exxon-Mobil, oddly enough) have come out saying that this theory is implausible. Sadly, the logic holds up, and the facts remain facts.

(On the subject of Exxon-Mobil, they did manage to get one leading scientist ousted as chairman. Not that they were trying to alter the results of the report or anything...)

Over the last 150 years, carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations have risen from 280 to nearly 380 parts per million (ppm). You know, since the start of the industrial revolution. Why would that be?

And looking at that CO2, let's consider the nature of the chemical.

There are 3 major carbon isotopes, numbered 12 to 14. Carbon-12 is the most common, and carbon-14, the radioactive one, is the least common. They're usually spread pretty evenly, but, being radioactive, carbon-14 has a relatively short half-life, so that you can measure how old something is by how much of the trapped carbon in a specimen is carbon-14 - the less -14 there is, the older it is.

Here's the thing: since the various carbon isotopes are spread evenly through nature, you'd expect that they'd be spread evenly in the atmosphere. Now, since the carbon in the air shows a lot less carbon-14, doesn't that mean that most of it came from older sources? Like, for example, fossil fuels?

Incidentally, before anybody brings up "well, there are questions about the accuracy of carbon-14 dating! -- you know, I've tried to look into that, and the only place I've found those questions are in Christian (primarily creationist) websites. If you want to make that argument, you'll have to include a link to something from the scientific community, because it looks to me like they're pretty clear on the subject.

Our government seems to be concentrating on CO2 in their current legislation, as if that was the only culprit in air pollution. I mean, there are others: for example, ozone (O3), which is an unstable form of oxygen (O2) which happens to be poisonous (we need it in the upper atmosphere, but not where we're breathing, right?). Then there's the various sulphur compounds, many of which will kill you, and a bunch of various other compounds (mercury, weirdly enough, was taken off the charts by the Bush administration, despite the fact that it's been noted for the number of birth defects and other horrific problems it can cause).

You know, there's a term in the air pollution field: "particulate matter." It's that crap in the air that floats around for a while and then drops and clings to things. "Soot" is one type. (You know those Sherlock Holmes movies with the fog and stuff? I understand that the fog in those was actually smog from the factories, back in the 1800s/Industrial Revolution era, and it used to stain men's clothes to the point that paper collars and cuffs, that you could remove and throw away, were common.)

You know, when you think about it, soot should be heavier than air, right? I wonder how it gets up into the atmosphere? I mean, if your experiment with carbon dioxide proved that heavier gases will always drop, wouldn't a particulate drop even faster?

And where does acid rain come from, anyway? I mean, moisture in the air mixes with nitrogren oxide, sulphur dioxide or the like, and forms an acid that might travel for thousands of miles before it lands and screws stuff up around it.

Do you not believe that dumping millions of tons of pollutants into the atmosphere might have an effect on things like the absorbtion of sunlight by plants? (And remember, it isn't just CO2 being put out by those smokestacks.)

And one of the favorite arguments of the anti-global-warming crowd lately has been this 2008 petition, where 32,000 scientists said that you can't prove global warming.

I've been wondering about those 32,000 scientists. I mean, when you look into it, you start to notice some discrepencies. Let's start with "scientist" as a definition. It means somebody with a degree and some science background, right? Are you required to be working in a scientific field? You've got 31,478 college graduates who signed this thing. But only 3,803 (by Ron Paul's count, at least) have "specific training in atmospheric, earth, and environmental sciences."

So, if we take their word for it about their training (and if they were going to fake this, they'd have a larger number, right?), that's about 12% who know enough about earth sciences to not be pulling information out of their posteriors. Did I do that math right?

You know, you've got to wonder about that other 88% of them. What did they study? There's got to be some math, some physics - that's a given, right? Of course, pretty much any degree has a certain number of prerequisites, including science, math and the like. But, really, a Doctor of Theology - well, by that definition, he's a scientist, right? I haven't seen a good accounting of what fields of study these degrees were in, so I can't talk with any certainty, but since they specified the numbers I used, I have to assume that there was a reason for it.

According to most studies, when you include the PhD's, there are 30,000 doctorates awarded each year. So based on that, they were only able to find 32,000 willing to sign on here? (OK, not even that many: only 31,478 - that doesn't seem like a lot.)

It's hard to believe

John McCain has separated himself from the Republican pack in one key issue: Climate change. He opposes it, he'll work to fix it, he'll take substansive action on it. He's even willing to say that it's a national security issue.

But he doesn't seem willing to do anything other than talk in order to combat it. Although he claims that climate change is a central point of his campaign of late, he has no plans to even be in the neighborhood when the Senate votes on a landmark bill to impose mandatory limits on greenhouse gases.

In a press conference late Wednesday afternoon, McCain said he did not support the bill sponsored by two of his closest allies, Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Warner (R-Va.) because it doesn’t offer enough aid to the nuclear industry, and he would not come to the floor to vote on it.

"I have not been there for a number of votes. The same thing happened in the campaign of 2000," he said. "The people of Arizona understand I’m running for president."

Keep that statement in mind for a moment. "I have not been there for a number of votes." That seems to be his strategy when it comes time to do anything other than simply talk about the environment. He uses the tactic of avoidance whenever he could actually take action to back up his words on hte environment.

"I'm proud of my record on the environment," he said at a news conference Friday at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City. "As president, I will dedicate myself to addressing the issue of climate change globally."

But an examination of McCain's voting record shows an inconsistent approach to the environment: He champions some "green" causes while casting sometimes contradictory votes on others.

The senator from Arizona has been resolute in his quest to impose a federal limit on greenhouse gas emissions, even when it means challenging his own party. But he has also cast votes against tightening fuel-efficiency standards and resisted requiring public utilities to offer a specific amount of electricity from renewable sources. He has worked to protect public lands in his home state, winning a 2001 award from the National Parks Conservation Association for helping give the National Park Service some say over air tours around the Grand Canyon, work that prompts former interior secretary and Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt to call him "a great friend of the canyon." But he has also pushed to set aside Endangered Species Act protections when they conflict with other priorities, such as the construction of a University of Arizona observatory on Mount Graham.

McCain's lifetime score with the League of Conservation Voters is 26% (compared with 96% for Obama and 90% for Clinton); Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund's conservation report card gave him 38 percent in the 108th Congress and 40 in the 109th, with a 39% lifetime score. But for this session of Congress, McCain managed to miss every single vote in regards to environmental issues, so both groups give him a zero rating - technically, "N/A" for the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund). (By comparison, Obama and Clinton each missed 4 out of 15 key environmental votes.) Overall, McCain's attitude toward the environment is merely a part of his strategy to lure independent voters away from Obama; the difference is, Obama is willing to work toward improving the environment. McCain is only willing to talk about it. That doesn't make him an environment maverick - it makes him a hypocrite.

Given McCain's contradictory attitude on any number of subjects, how many people actually believe that the new green John McCain is something that they can believe in? John McCain seems unable to stop lying. At times, it's passive, like when he urges divestment and sanctions against Iran, despite the fact that his campaign manager, Rick Davis, was lobbying for clients who did extensive business with Iran.

But too often, he's actively lying, like when he states that he supports our veterans, despite rarely voting to help them (to include voting against the Webb/Hagel veteran's benefits bill, because giving veterans too many benefits might make them want to leave the military). Or when he tries to claim, in New Orleans, that he's consistently supported the people of New Orleans - at which point the DNC issues a press release citing specific examples which show how McCain has consistently voted against helping the people of New Orleans.

I cannot think of a single issue that McCain hasn't done a complete turn-around on, in an effort to improve his chances of getting elected. And there are people out there who still think he's honest.

It's hard to believe.

Update (6/6/08): But I suppose there is another viewpoint after all. C & L (one of the all-time great sites) pointed me to a short article+video posted on the Atlantic.com website by Matthew Yglesias, where he points out:

In some ways, I think McCain himself doesn't quite realize how Bush-esque he is. He clearly doesn't like Bush, and has been disliking him for a long time. But that kind of personalized, overblown disdain for Bush-the-man can wind up leading you to overestimate Bush-the-grand-strategist. To McCain, Bush's policies have failed because of Bush. Replace Bush with McCain and shift tactics around the margins, and the same basic ideas should work out fine. It's a nice theory, but I don't think it's a true theory.

So there you go. It's always possible that John McCain isn't a complete liar: perhaps he's just deluded. And his attempts to change his past opinions may not be lying, either: it may just be evidence that he's trying to bring the public record in line with what he wants to remember about himself. Again, deluded. And still not somebody you'd want in the White House.

Well, I guess it's a good sign...

You know, it's odd. When you're clicking around randomly on YouTube, you might come across Al Gore's Penguin Army, which includes the tagline "What is Al Gore's new movie, An Inconvenient Truth, all about? Global Warming? The Environment? Or something much more BORING? See Al Gore's Penguin Army learn how crazy this flick really is..." It even has a link to a MySpace page (which, as it turns out, is pretty much just a placeholder for the movie).

And if you're really bored, you might make the mistake of watching the thing. And that's when you realize that this video is evidence of why some people are neither professional comedy writers or animators. It's boring. The animation is crap.
It has one joke (which isn't even funny - the penguins fall asleep because Al Gore is boring), and it goes on for WAY too long. (OK, it's only two minutes and change. But it seems like a lot longer, somehow...)

But, hey, somebody went to the trouble of making it and posting it, which is more than you've done, right? Well, that's where it gets a little tricky. Because, as it turns out, this little piece was produced by a company called DCI, a public relations firm working for Exxon-Mobil.

And strangely enough, would you like to guess which left-wing rag uncovered this? Mother Jones magazine? Nature? Again, that's where it get's tricky. Because the member of the Giant Liberal Conspiracy who found this out turns out to be the Wall Street Journal, which has long been an arm of the Democratic party, right?

So that leaves us with only two questions. First, isn't Big Oil supposed to be some kind of supervillian bent on world domination? Then why are they acting like high school kids?

And second, with trillions of dollars at their disposal, this is the best they can come up with? Something that even Conan O'Brien wouldn't think was funny? Yes, bad animation can be forgiven in an amateur video. But for maximum effect, there should be some humor involved. After all, the purpose of the video is that people should want to see it. And should want to show it to their friends. And maybe, should absorb, at least subconsciously, part of the message.

But if the video is stupid, it's got limited replay value, which destroys the entire purpose.

Suddenly, I'm feeling a lot better about the future of the environment, if these guys are the ones trying to destroy it.

I'm also wondering if Linux is going to sue, since the PR firm stole their penguins.