Haven’t had one in awhile. Too tired and cold (4C and raining in Ballarat) to do much else.
Keep it clean. Play nice.
Bonus picture regarding events of this week:
Image from the Oregonian, h/t to “Gore Lied“
Haven’t had one in awhile. Too tired and cold (4C and raining in Ballarat) to do much else.
Keep it clean. Play nice.
Bonus picture regarding events of this week:
Image from the Oregonian, h/t to “Gore Lied“
And, As long as I am picking nits… I have about 100 semester hours in college credit in science courses, from Astronomy to Zoology. and there is a fair portion of what you guys (the generic “you”)write that looses something in translation. (I frequently think of my friend who finished high school just in time to be an anti-aircraft gunner in WW II)
How about this rule: “If it has more than 16 letters it needs simplification”
It probably wouldn’t kill you to use fewer acronyms. Real words are easier to understand.
hello Anthony – am enjoying my visits as always, but would love to see the solar data come back as a daily feature – other than the widget – like you had before. And to have UAH and other monitoring with clear unadorned graphs that I can lift easily for use! Stephan’s link above to the hockeystickblogspot reminded me of what I was missing.
Ballarat is always cold, and in an Australian winter, its colder than cold.
Of course, we are a bunch of pussies. In the USA you get snow. We just think anything below about 12 degrees C is cold 🙂
After thinking about the McCartney thread, I think there’s an opportunity here.
Celebrity lifestyles often generate large carbon footprints. Because celebrities are often busy, they don’t have the time to offset that carbon themselves. So they buy their offsets from banks and financial institutions. But this may cause ethical conflicts for some celebrities who are anti-capitalism or anti-globalisation.
The rationale for offsetting seems to be the precautionary principle. So paying large amounts of money to prevent something that may never happen. Doctors could perhaps learn from this, so if a patient presents with an ingrowing toenail, amputate their leg. It resolves the toe problem and prevents the problem re-occuring.
So I think we should offer PPO’s, that is Precautionary Principle Offsets. Many existing offset schemes are flawed by uncertainty that the offsetting mechanism actually offsets any CO2. Examples may be investing in ‘renewables’ like wind generation, where there is already a large carbon footprint in creating the offset mechanism and additional carbon emitted when they work in a sub-optimal fashion.
PPO’s however can provide stronger guarantees. So for example Sir Paul chartering a 747 to fly London to NY may generate a carbon debt of 650 tons. Typical retail price for offsetting that is £14/ton, so £9100 per 747 return flight. We could offer PPO’s for £10 and guarantee not to emit an equivalent amount of Co2 via mechanisms such as not chartering private jets to go watch him play.
Money paid for PPO’s would be reinvested in green, renewable, low carbon schemes that would demonstrably provide more reductions than competing schemes, such as described here-
http://www.airmiles.co.uk/content/generatePage.do?destination=the+world+in+mind+travel+xiaohe
“Xiaohe aims to create 30 permanent jobs and 360 temporary jobs, bringing in $48.20 million via salaries and employee welfare per year. This increase in funding will give people in the region the opportunity to break away from poverty.”
That scheme suggests a cost per employee of $125k per head. That money may unfortunately be invested in luxuries which increase carbon footprints and creates additional resource demands.
By contrast, PPO’s would enable our heroic volunteers to work full-time, dedicated to the pursuit of a low carbon, sustainable and environmentally friendly lifestyle, all at a lower cost to high carbon emitters like Sir Paul.
PPO’s would create low carbon, green jobs. Carbon would be sequestered and recycled in the following ways, as examples-
C6H10O5. This would be a fundamental building block to enable low carbon transportation for our dedicated offsetters. Our organic, biodegradeable and recyclable sailing ships would sail between PPO bases, creating permanent green jobs for the crew, as well as temporary workspace for dedicated PPO offset team members.
C2H5OH. This is another essential part of the PPO carbon conversion and sequestration process, providing a vital fuel source for PPO employees to work hard, and help reduce your carbon footprint.
C400H620N100O120P1S1. Just look at the amount of carbon that can be reprocessed, recycled, and sequestered here, not to mention Nitrogen and Sulphur, which can also be damaging to the environment. This compound will be used in a variety of ways, including as solid fuel and will be provided in a form suitable for vegetarians.
Our dedicated PPO workers can also provide other valuable benefits to the environment. We all know about the albedo effects. Our workers can sail to locations where solar effects are high, and (particularly N.Europeans) boost the local albedo, reflecting dangerous energy back into space by risking their own bodies.
But buy PPO’s. We will adopt a low carbon lifestyle, so you don’t have to!
(Investors can buy in early via the tip jar)
pesadilla,
Sorry, but an article based on the premise of the ‘corruption of the Bush years’ is a non-starter.
And when it is implying that Obama is the clean-up guy to take care of that corruption, I recheck the article to see what edition of the The Daily Onion it is from.
Now an article pointing out that the biggest difference between Nero and Obama is that Nero did not play golf would be good reading.
What will be interesting is to see how much hype and fear mongering Tropical Storm Alex will generate. Its preceding wave and depression are possibly the most heavily reported tropical weather events of all time.
DocWat says: (June 26, 2010 at 2:15 am) I do not understand the obsession with arctic sea ice. Every week there are two or more posts here discussing arctic sea ice.
Agreed, DocWat; it encapsulates my call made in the second post on this Open Thread: “Because of that I believe an editorial board is necessary to sift the stories which bear the imprint of WUWT.”
Not an easy call, but I believe a necessary one.
Hey Anthony, I really feel for you being in Ballarat, nice place in summer, but damn cold in winter and as the citizens of other rival Victorian Provincial cities always claim, its situation normal for the weather to be dismal and raining in Ballarat!
I just hope that some in Ballarat extend the hand of kindness and escort you out for a nice meal in front of a roaring log fire, and a glass of excellent Port to be consumed, while contemplating on the ways and means of saving the world!!
Geez being originally from one of those rival Provincial cities, you could not have picked a worse place to experience “Global Warming” in Australia it always feels colder in Ballarat, snow would be a welcome warming.
Still it does have a lot of Australian union style history of the rough and tumble of Australian politics and Sovereign Hill and the nearby gold museum are o.k. – though sovereign hill in winter, with the only warming being the horse manure dropped on the gravel roadways, a bleak reminder of where the warmist’s want our world reduced to if they get their way!!
Chin up
Anthony
I know you must be exhausted by now criss-crossing Australia but I just want to say we Australians really appreciate your decision to do the tour. I’ve alerted three sons in Perth and my husband and I have booked accommodation at Coffs Harbour for next Friday’s talk. It never freezes at Coffs Harbour, can even be balmy in winter, and it’s whale-watching season as well. See you there.
REPLY: I’m not going to be able to make Coffs Harbor. My slide show will, as will David Archibald, who will present his and mine, but Coffs Harbor was a last minute addition after everything already firmed up. Coffs Harbor travel was an impossible scheduling scenario for me to get back in Sydney in time to catch my plane back to the states, which was scheduled weeks ago. I’m sorry. – Anthony
Breezy in Ballarat, eh? I think I’ll have to head back to Australia soon (permanently!) as it’s raining oil here in northern Florida.
Mentioning the cold makes me think of the Sun, who is starting to do its disappearing act (yes Leif, I will gladly answer any questions you may have about this ~ wink, wink):
http://www.lmsal.com/solarsoft/latest_events/AIA20100626_103908_0193_2048.png
DocWat says:
June 26, 2010 at 2:28 am
I’ll bet the Sun emits microwave energy. How much? Why aren’t we roasting like hot dogs? Sven??
Have a look at the sun spectrum. They end it at about 2.5 microns. Microwaves start at one centimeter. Extending the plot to microwaves frequencies is possible, but it will be a very small part of the spectrum and will be absorbed by the atmosphere anyway..
http://bouman.chem.georgetown.edu/S02/lect23/Solar_Spectrum.png
An O’Slick Trick.
Of “Experts, schmexperts” and our “age of “punctuated wrongness,”.
…-
“Strife Over Stem Cells
German Scientists Dispute Medical Breakthrough
By Cinthia Briseño
Pictures from Japanese researchers showing stem cells that can develop into various types of human tissue: (clockwise from L) Stem, cartilage, neural tissue and muscle cells.
Pictures from Japanese researchers showing stem cells that can develop into various types of human tissue: (clockwise from L) Stem, cartilage, neural tissue and muscle cells.
A German research team stunned the world in 2008 by extracting stem cells from testicular tissue. Now, though, other scientists dispute the claim. The result has been a very public back-and-forth in the pages of the scientific journal Nature — and very little certainty.
In the realm of natural sciences, it is a given that one must be precise. If a scientist makes a groundbreaking discovery, other researchers must be able to replicate the results of his, or her, work. Only then, are the findings considered truly relevant and certain.
But what happens when other researchers are not able to do so?
The current edition of highly respected journal Nature contains an example:”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,702864,00.html
…-
“The Openness Elixir
In the marketplace of ideas, progress depends on freedom—and the expectation of error
The word “slick” did not come to mind as Tony Hayward, the embattled chief executive of BP, foundered in a sea of congressional questioning this week. Never in the face of righteous political indignation did expertise look so unconvincing and so unworthy of its status. But in many respects Mr. Hayward and BP were simply unlucky: They were caught out by an event they didn’t think would happen and then compounded the problem by sounding clueless when asked to explain what went wrong or how they would fix it.
As David H. Freedman notes in “Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us—And How to Know When Not to Trust Them,” such cluelessness is all too common in our expert-mediated world. Look at all those economists who failed to predict the great crash of 2008 or the rating agencies whose metrics melted into mere wishful thinking. Realtors, who are supposed to know more than you or I about the housing market, predicted housing prices would trend up for 2008. Experts, schmexperts.
We are, as Mr. Freedman puts it, living in an age of “punctuated wrongness,” usually misled, occasionally enlightened. His goal is a broad account of this phenomenon, how it takes shape through specific problems in measurement, how it spreads through the general idiocy of crowds, and how we might identify and avoid it. Bravo!
What emerges from this infernal journey is that there are few incentives in research to acknowledge that error is to be expected and not something to be scorned or obscured. As Robert Boyle, one of the founding fathers of modern science, recognized, experimental error is part of the slow advance toward any scientific truth; you can’t have trial without error.
But the current market creates the wrong kinds of incentives for doing good research or admitting failure. Novel ideas and findings are rewarded with grants and publication, which lead to academic prestige and career advancement. Researchers have a vested interest in overstating their findings because certainty is more likely than equivocation to achieve all of the above. Thus the probability increases of producing findings that are false. As the medical mathematician John Ioannidis tells Mr. Freedman: “The facts suggest that for many, if not the majority of fields, the majority of published studies are likely to be wrong.”
The problem is that the media tend to validate these findings before they have been properly interpreted, qualified, tested, and either refuted or replicated by other experts. And once a lousy study gets public validation— think of Andrew Wakefield’s claim about autism and vaccination—it can prove almost impossible to invalidate.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704009804575309610811148630.html
Roger Carr says:
June 26, 2010 at 1:29 am “The authority of your place here on the web must be carefully guarded to preserve that authority, and to keep it a place where those people of wisdom you attract can confidentally seek to publish.”
Yes, vitally important. My parting words to Anthony after the Melbourne afternoon meeting were more or less “Please keep going. What you and Steve (McIntyre) are doing is of importance to the World”. It’s a tough call on them both, but good men come to the aid of the party.
>> Roger Carr says:
June 26, 2010 at 4:07 am
DocWat says: (June 26, 2010 at 2:15 am) I do not understand the obsession with arctic sea ice. Every week there are two or more posts here discussing arctic sea ice.
Agreed, DocWat; it encapsulates my call made in the second post on this Open Thread: “Because of that I believe an editorial board is necessary to sift the stories which bear the imprint of WUWT.”
Not an easy call, but I believe a necessary one.
<<
One of the things I like about WUWT is it's having several stories a day. Some I skip over, but so what? If you don't want to read about Arctic ice, just wait for the next story.
Roger Carr says:
June 26, 2010 at 1:29 am
“The authority of your place here on the web must be carefully guarded to preserve that authority”
Hmmmm…..I would like to see that this does NOT happen. I dont want authorithy and concensus. I like freedom better. Many small impulses working in different directions.
All these small impulses will work in different directions, and over time there is a low pass filter effect where the truth shows through and slowly moves us in the right direction.
This effect was called “The invisible Hand” by Adam Smith. It works.
O Blesséd Anthony and his Devout Followers, Greetings!
I crave three boons:
– A thread on Shale Gas technology, and the likely impacts on the world’s energy markets, geopolitics, pollution etc.
– A thread on the analysis of the MLO data-series. As the rising ‘average’ of this series is the very foundation stone of the CO2 = AGW conjecture. So, we have to be sure about it.
– A thread on the geology of the oil-spill, and to what extent it wil impact attempts to stop the leak.
Yours in anticipation,
Tony
Tom_R,
If the Arctic sea ice threads were eliminated, what would R. Gates and Villabolo have to occupy their time?
That would be a human tragedy. Please, think of the children!☺
I am curious about the currently fluctuating magnetic field of the earth. How or does this affect climate?
Here’s the summary from the late-night talk show Coast to Coast AM of Saturday night’s program:
Comments?
Brace yourselves, now there’s been another BP spill!
Anthony: on my only trip to down under, my luggage was lost also. Luggage knows when it is critical to a mission, and only goes missing then.
Anthony: I have two observations, one for you and one for general consideration.
1) I hope you are preparing for the evolution of WUWT because of its ever growing scope and influence. This is remarked on above by Roger Carr and others. I can’t recommend what you should do but, in my opinion, it is becoming a large operation which might need careful thought about its structure and operation. I hope wholeheartedly that the openness and access to all points of view continues.
2) I am interested in the ice extent issue, as are many others. The continuing arguments point how very difficult it is to predict natural events with certainty. This is true for “our side” as well as for the “other side.”
wesley bruce says:
June 26, 2010 at 2:36 am
This relates to the golf of Mexico deep water horizon situation.
With regards to the Deepwater Horizon…..
Those two men interviewed are not “knowledgeable” in the field…they are investment bankers. Since when do investment bankers know geology, engineering and drilling???
The first relief well is approximately 200′ away from the original wellbore currently and is “on target”. This is the best method of plugging the wellbore……not nuking it which introduces a whole miriad of other problems that we don’t need to deal with.
re Atomic Hairdryer: June 26, 2010 at 3:42 am
(C6H10O5 + C400H620N100O120P1S1) and (C2H5OH) = burgers and beer ??
Sounds like a good sequestration plan. ☺
/dr.bill
Was just cleaning up, was about to throw out latest issue of Mechanical Engineering mag, flipped through to see if anything worth reading, my eyes caught mention of Anthony Watts, in a letter from a Paul Williams, of Medina, Ohio. Apologies if this has been mentioned here before, if not, here’s a link:
http://memagazine.asme.org/Articles/2010/June/Letters.cfm
Scroll down to second letter.
Great work, Anthony, really appreciated, I love what you do – PJ
Smokey says:
June 26, 2010 at 5:40 am
“Brace yourselves, now there’s been another BP spill!”
GREAT find, Smokey! LMAO!