View 699 Monday, October 31, 2011
The high tech lynchings begin, as we all expected. See below.
News Flash: the planet is warming. The Earth (or at least the land) is 1.6 degrees F warmer today than it was in 1950. It really truly is getting warmer. Now 1.6 F is 0.88 C. Subtract 1950 from 2010 and I believe that is 60, which is .6 of a century. The general observation has been since Arrhenius that the Earth is warming at about 1 degree C per century, or about 0.6 C per sixty years.
You might keep that in mind when you read today’s Climate Change Headlines from the morning papers. Typical is the Washington Post:
WASHINGTON — A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures really are rising rapidly.
The study of the world’s surface temperatures by Richard Muller was partially bankrolled by a foundation connected to global warming deniers. He pursued long-held skeptic theories in analyzing the data. He was spurred to action because of “Climategate,” a British scandal involving hacked emails of scientists.
Further down in the article we find
Muller’s research team carefully examined two chief criticisms by skeptics. One is that weather stations are unreliable; the other is that cities, which create heat islands, were skewing the temperature analysis.
“The skeptics raised valid points and everybody should have been a skeptic two years ago,” Muller said in a telephone interview. “And now we have confidence that the temperature rise that had previously been reported had been done without bias.”
Which is heartening. It is always good to find that the data are not biased. I have not found that Muller has proved the accuracy of these great averages to a tenth of a degree (either Fahrenheit or Centigrade), but that wasn’t what he set out to do. I note that all the charts I can find show that the Earth has warmed from about -0.4 to about +1.4 degrees C from around 1860 to 2005, with various measures of possible error, and this general approximation seems agreed to by nearly everyone who studies the trends over that long a time. I note that during the 1940 to 1980 period there was a very general consensus that the Earth was cooling and that Schneider, Margaret Mead, and others were very concerned about the return of the Ice Age – See Schneider’s book The Genesis Strategy. I know that it is now explained as a general exhortation against pollution and in favor of prudence, but I also know that I interviewed Schneider when the book came out in 1976, and everyone including Schneider was concerned about a return of the ice ages. This was the consensus position of the period, and one I shared.
The concern was over an apparent 0.2 C cooling of the Earth from the 1940’s to the 1970’s.
At the time I questioned the accuracy of the measurements. That wasn’t from any theoretical objection to the notion of a return of the Ice; it reflected my experience in trying to get accurate temperature measurements during my aerospace career. It’s a lot harder to get accuracies to 0.1 degree (C or F) than you might think even when what you are measuring is human skin temperature, or the ‘average’ temperature of a chamber in which both air and radiant temperatures are changing. It’s hard to get a good agreed definition and measurement of the average temperature in an aircraft assembly factory, where there are hot spots (welder torches, as an example) and bright spotlights (radiant heat sources, some drastic), uncontrolled air currents (some foremen provide fans they bought in the drug store), both confined and open spaces, brightly lit high bay areas and deeply shadowed areas with no radiant temperature, and many other such factors.
My point is that it was then, and is now, difficult to get good definitions and measurements of temperature to anything like a tenth of a degree; but to the extent that we have measurements we can agree on, they all point to a consistent rise in Earth temperature of about 1 degree C per century, and that this trend has been going on since 1800. Prior to 1300 the temperature was cooling at some fraction of a degree per century. Of course it’s pretty hard to get a good estimate of the temperature of the Earth in Viking times. We do have gross reports, such as settlements in Greenland, vineyards in Scotland, longer growing seasons around monasteries in France and Germany, crop bonuses in China, and whatever we can infer from tree rings and such things; but I don’t think I could infer the Earth temperature in the year 2000 to anything like a tenth of a degree from such records.
So the planet is warming. We knew that.
What surprises me is the lack of concern about CO2 and ocean acidity. That, it seems to me, is potentially a greater danger than any warming trend, and I don’t see a lot of studies of that. I am sure I need to look harder. But that has enough potential damage that it might well be worth finding ways to take CO2 out of the ocean, such as by encouraging plankton blooms; I’d sure like to see more of those studies.
But the headlines are that the Earth is warming and even a “skeptic” agrees!
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This is supposedly discussed here http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/29/uh-oh-it-was-the-best-of-times-it-was-the-worst-of-times/#more-50286 but I haven’t had a chance to dig through it; it seems more complicated than I’d think it needs to be. Perhaps I am having a fit of absence of mind.
The High Tech Lynching of Cain will continue, now that the establishment has discovered that he is a serious candidate.
He has both the virtues and defects of a political amateur. He also has a record of taking good advice. So the latest charge is that he made non-sexual inappropriate gestures to some women some years ago. We should ask Clinton if that disqualifies him from being President.
Can someone tell me what is a “Simple Western”? Clearly I am isolated from some important news. Today’s SCIENCE magazine was sent to me with a stick-on page cover containing my address – no question that the American Association for the Advancement of Science has given this outfit my address – telling me to rejoice, the gel-free, blot-free, hands free Simple Western is here. There is some reference to proteinsimple and a young man is ecstatic because he can simply push a button and walk away. There is also a web site, www.simplewestern.com. And nothing else. And a web search took me to a pernicious web site that – well, you’d have to look at it, but I warn you there may be some who enjoy such antics by supposedly intelligent people but I find it annoying — and baffling because they still don’t tell me what this procedure is supposed to accomplish. Does it diagnose? Make me high? Make me smarter? Give me a secret path to John Wayne movies? I suppose I could cruise the web long enough to find out, but I don’t intend to bother. I am astonished that the AAAS has been a party to this.
Advice: if you want to sell a service to intelligent people – and I would presume that subscribers to SCIENCE are – then you might want to tell them what your product does. Don’t assume that just because they are intelligent they will automatically be familiar with whatever the heck you do.
Another web site tells me
ProteinSimple has developed Simple Western assays as an alternative to traditional Western blot analysis for protein sizing and quantitative immunodetection. Assays are performed on Simon, an instrument that integrates and automates all manual operations associated with Western blotting without the use of gels, transfer tanks, blots or film. Researchers just load their samples, press start, walk away and return to fully analyzed experimental results.
which tells me that those who are likely to want to buy a machine for doing this are very likely to know what it is. And the elaborate ads convince me that doing a Simple Western required expensive equipment so there’s a lot of profit in selling this stuff. So perhaps paying for a cover sticker on SCIENCE makes sense. But I still have no idea of what a Simple Western is. Am I that far behind in the – I would guess biological – sciences?
But I am really concerned that scientists might be influenced to buy a particular brand of expensive machine by THIS ad.
AND MY THANKS to all who sent me explanations. It will be in MAIL later. I know now, and thanks again.
Department of disturbing new items:
The radio is announcing on the regular news – I have heard this twice – that in one restaurant in China you can visit a cage full of Koala bears, choose one, pay Twenty-two ($22.00), and have the animal served either broiled or braised. I know no more about it than that, but I would have thought that live Koala Bears cost more than that? More if I learn more.
