| Tuesday, December
1, 2009
Summarizing ClimateGate
There is a good summary of what is known and what is not known about
Climate Change models by MIT Meteorology professor Robert Lindzen in today's
Wall Street Journal.
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB10001424052748703939404
574567423917025400.html
It's a good introduction to what's serious about ClimateGate.
The notion that complex climate "catastrophes"
are simply a matter of the response of a single number, GATA, to a single
forcing, CO2 (or solar forcing for that matter), represents a gigantic step
backward in the science of climate.
GATA is
the globally averaged temperature anomaly. It is the single figure of merit
that governs the concern about climate change and global warming, and the
real truth is that it can't be measured to the kind of accuracy demanded by
the climate change/global warming hypothesis. Debates about the wisdom of
governing multi-billion dollar economic decisions on the basis of a single
figure of merit are certainly not inappropriate at the policy level; and
debates about the reliability of that figure of merit are certainly
appropriate in scientific journals. Note that those who advocate those
debates are generally denounced as "deniers", and the Climategate Papers
suggest strongly that political tactics, not scientific concern, have been
the moving issue in much of the UN IPCC reports. Lindzen clarifies this. If
you haven't read his paper, it's worth your time to go read it now.
Lindzen summarizes the science, and in an aside says that perhaps the worst
crime of the IPCC conspirators as revealed by the Climategate Papers is
"their destruction of raw data". We can all agree to that. Do note that the
raw data cannot possibly generate a consensus GATA accurate to fractions of
a degree. The data aren't that good. Much of the raw data
have been deleted, but some general observations remain. I've mentioned this
before, but it's worth reminding ourselves of some things we all know.
The Earth has been much warmer in historical times. We have some general
ideas about climate in ancient and classical times, but we needn't go back
that far: we all know about the Medieval Warm period. We all know that the
Vikings established dairy farms in Greenland. Some of those farms are
emerging from glacial ice, but some remain covered. We all know from
Doomsday Book that there were vineyards in northern England in the time of
William the Conqueror. It's less well known that there were vineyards in
Scandinavia and Scotland, but that's easy to establish. We have records of
growing seasons from those times from both Europe and China. Protests that
the Greenland Viking farms were due to some strange wandering of the Gulf
Stream are merely assertions: neither evidence for those wanderings nor
mechanisms for accomplishing them are backed with serous evidence. It was
just plain warmer from about 800 AD, and that continued until about 1325
when climate changed rather dramatically with a year of dark and cold rain,
and it began to get colder. The exact GATA of the Medieval Warm period isn't
agreed -- how could it be? -- but that the Earth was warmer then is simply
not in doubt, nor is there anything like a consensus on just why we had that
warming. It was a significant fact in both Western and Chinese history --
food was more abundant, populations grew, travel was easier -- and the
effects seem to have been positive. We know that the Earth
has been much colder in historical times. My favorite example is that the
cannon of Ticonderoga, captured by Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys
("by the authority of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!") and
dragged across New England by Henry Knox. Rivers froze solid enough to drag
cannon across them. We have other indications of temperatures from 1700 to
1800. It was cold. Rivers froze. Growing seasons were shorter than now. We
have similar data for Europe and China. Recall Hans Brinker and the Silver
Skates and skating contests on the frozen brackish canals of Holland. Again
we have no reliable (to a degree, much less to fractions of a degree)
estimations of GATA, but we can all agree that it was considerably colder.
We know that temperatures began slowly to rise sometime
after 1800 (there was so far as I know no dramatic event) and the trend was
obvious after about 1825. Growing seasons grew longer. Rivers that formerly
froze solid became unreliable. Spring icebreaks came earlier, and streams
froze later. Cuckoos nested earlier. Those trends continued into the
Twentieth Century, and may be continuing now.
We know that the major climate alarm in the 1970's and early
1980's was the fear of a coming Ice Age. Gus Spaeth, Carter's environmental
quality advisor, was concerned that nuclear waste depositories be able to
withstand glaciation. Margaret Meade as President of AAAS had much to say
about the coming bad times as the world began cooling. During the 1980's the
speculations of Arrhenius made about 1895 about possible "greenhouse"
effects of CO2 began pushing forward, and with increasingly powerful (and
cheap) computers climate models became affordable to many academic and
scientific institutions. The models began predicting warming, although the
data collectors weren't really finding it. The rest is history. There
emerged a "consensus" about an "inconvenient truth". Whether that consensus
was forced by scientific data or by social engineering is open to question.
Finally we know that one phenomenon of the coldest part of the Little Ice
Age was the "Maunder Minimum": a long period of minimal solar activities,
characterized by long periods of few to zero sunspots. You can monitor rcent
solar activity at
http://www.solarcycle24.com/ . Given that the science is
not settled, and that the economic effect of national policy to counter
"climate change" are enormous, simple Bayesian analysis would indicate that
we ought to be spending a lot of money to determine just what the climate
trend is: and that means funding contrarian studies, studies designed to
refute the "consensus" theory, as well as funding the collection of accurate
data. This seems an obvious conclusion. It is of course inconvenient to
those whose careers have been financed by grants peer reviewed by peers who
don't include "deniers." =====================
We hear a lot about Tora Bora and the attempt to kill Bin Laden. Those who
want to know what happened are advised to read the story as told by the
commander of the Delta Force troopers ("The Unit") sent to do that job. He
wrote under the pseudonym of Dalton Fury but most of us know who "Dalton
Fury" is. The book is called Kill Bin Laden and
there is a Kindle version as well as
a regular paper version. It's readable, it's detailed, and it makes it
pretty clear what happened in those days. Learn the facts on the ground
before drawing political conclusions. ==============
You can see the videos of the TWiT I was one at
http://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp4/
twit.mediafly.com/video/twit/twit0223/
twit0223_h264b_640x368_500.mp4
=========================
I got this email this afternoon. WARNING. I would
NOT, repeat NOT, do this procedure. See message from security expert
Rick Hellewell below.
Thought I'd copy and send this to you FYI.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34223754/ns/technology_and_science-security/
By Suzanne Choney msnbc.com updated 9:31 a.m.
PT, Tues., Dec . 1, 2009
A Microsoft security update for its new
computer operating system, Windows 7 as well as older versions of Windows,
is resulting in some users getting a "black screen of death" on their
machines, according to reports. The problem may be tied to security
updates recently released by the software maker.
"Microsoft is investigating reports that its
latest release of security updates is resulting in system issues for some
customers," the company said in a statement. "Once we complete our
investigation, we will provide detailed guidance on how to prevent or
address these issues." (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC
Universal.)
Windows users are familiar with the "blue
screen of death," when their computers essentially shutdown because of an
operating system problem. The new "black screen of death" appears to occur
when the computer is first turned on, then shuts down.
British security firm Prevx writes about the
problem on its blog <http://www.prevx.com/blog/140/Black-Screen-woes-could-affect-millions-on-Windows--Vista-and-XP.html>
, and suggests following this procedure:
1) Restart your PC 2) Log on and wait for the
black screen to appear 3) Make sure your PC should be able to connect to
the Internet (black screen does not appear to affect this) 4) Press the
CTRL, ALT and DEL keys simultaneously 5) When prompted, Click Start Task
Manager 6) In Task Manager Click on the Application Tab 7) Next Click New
Task 8) Now enter the command: "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe"
"http://info.prevx.com/download.asp?GRAB=BLACKSCREENFIX" 9) Click OK and
your (Web) browser should start up and begin the download process 10) When
prompted for the download Click run, the black screen fix program will
download and run to automatically fix the issue. 11) Now restart your PC
and the black screen problem will hopefully be gone.
"There appears to be many causes of the black
screen issue," wrote Dave Kennerley of Prevx Support on the company's
blog. "The symptoms are very distinctive and troublesome. After starting
your Windows 7, Vista, XP, NT, W2K, W2K3 or W2K8 PC or server the system
appears normal.
"However, after logging on there is no
desktop, task bar, system tray or side bar. Instead you are left with a
totally black screen and a single My Computer Explorer window. Even this
window might be minimized making it hard to see."
<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3303539/>
Mike
From Peter Glaskowsky: Man, I totally
would never go download an OS patch from some site I've never heard of.
Prevx may be totally honorable, and its patch may be completely perfect, but
there's really no way to tell from this side of the Internet.
Readers should wait for Microsoft to release its own
official fix, especially if their machines aren't exhibiting the problem.
. png
Security expert Rick Hellewell adds:
I'd agree with Peter. If your computer is not broke, wait for Microsoft to
issue the patch. If it is broke, you could attempt their (Prevx) fix at your
own risk. I'm not sure how widepread this is.
Microsoft said (in PC World article) "Microsoft has
investigated reports that its November security updates made changes to
permissions in the registry that that are resulting in system issues for
some customers," says Christopher Budd, Microsoft's security response
communications lead. "The company has found those reports to be inaccurate."
In fact, the problem may be caused by malware.
According to PC World, Previx "did not contact Microsoft about the problem
directly.". Previx wants you to use their security tool to 'fix' the
problem.
This could be just marketing crud. In any event, don't
panic -- or add to the hype.
...Rick...
Wait
for official word from Microsoft. At least that's what I'd do. In fact what
I am doing. If any reader has the Black Screen of Death I
would like to hear from him. This is the first I have heard of it.
[See followup below]
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