Teaching Controversial Topics 101

Jessica Ball, AKA Tuff Cookie, AKA the author of Magma Cum Laude, earlier asked a question to which I can relate: namely, how does one approach teaching a (potentially) controversial subject?

First, you want to make sure you know your stuff. Students can smell instructor uncertainty. Definately familiarize yourself as well ahead of time as you can with the textual material your students will be using. I've seen a decent student in science ed get chewed up and spat out because he was really not qualified to TA the subject matter- he didn't have to take that position, he had other options, but thought it would be "fun." I was teaching a different section of the same course, and in some ways was a bit better prepared- though not academically. The difference was I had an interest in the material, I had done plenty of reading about it on my own, and I made sure I understood it better than the students were going to be expected to. I can honestly say the same would be true on the topic of climate change- I've had little formal classwork on the subject, but it's very interesting to me, and I've done a lot of independent reading on it. Below is a list of climate and related blogs/sites I follow in RSS, and a brief sketch of the value I get from each.

Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis- This may seem like a very esoteric topic, but Arctic sea ice appears to be the most sensitive component of out planet with respect to climate change. It can be viewed as the "canary in the coal mine" or "bellwether" for the rest of the planet. And this is the go-to site for data tracking daily to long term trends in the ice pack up top. Their monthly, seasonal, and annual summaries are don't miss. And their coverage of the approach to least extent in mid-September is stunningly good and gripping.

Arctic Sea Ice Blog- This guy makes no pretense of being an "expert" (do take a moment to read the disclaimer) but he's clearly no slouch, and clearly finds the topic fascinating. He's also very good at finding important statistics and data.

Real Climate- Gotta be honest, this one is generally a bit too wonky for me. I generally skim the posts enough to get the general gist, then skip the gory details. Still, it's a good one for keeping abreast of current news.

Open Mind- One of my favorites of the bunch. There are times when the detailed approach to stats is more than I want to wade through, but generally readable. In particular, Tamino goes out of his way to bluntly take down nonsense from deniers, with Anthony Watts front and center (See "Dishonorable Mention," below).

Jeff Master's Wunderblog- Not a "climate blog" per se, but weather-focused. I think Masters would be among the first to point out meteorology and climate science are different (if related) disciplines. However, news related to climatology pops up there regularly- such as today's post on billion-plus dollar disasters and top ten meteorological events of 2012.

Dishonorable Mention: Watts Up With That? Not recommended as regular reading, but you should know what the deniers are up to... and Anthony Watts is probably the highest-profile denier out there. I often find his posts through links from take-downs, and there is a certain pleasure in reading one and spotting the fallacy (or fallacies) on one's own. The errors take on a few standard forms: misrepresentation or faulty selection of data, misunderstanding or faulty implementation of statistical methods, conflating adjustments to data (which have been debated, discussed, and finally accepted among a large community of qualified scientists as providing better accuracy) as "fudging" or "making up" data and so on. And when all else fails, fall back on ad hominem attack, which in some circles is apparently a valid debating tactic.

Continuing, it also helps to have enough confidence to flatly state "I don't know," when that's accurate. And if the question is important enough to merit it, follow though and find out- then share the answer with the class and/or questioner as seems appropriate. On the other hand, do not promise to follow through on every question. Many are trivial (there's no harm in curiosity, but it can waste a lot of time), and in many, many cases, it's as easy for the student to Google the answer as it is for you. (I love LMGTFY, but it's a bit too snarky to use on any but the most pesky student.)

Don't proselytize. Your job is to inform, not convert. My attitude with respect to evolution was "I don't much care if you 'believe in' evolution or not, but I expect you to understand why most scientists do." For example, I *understand* the tenets of Christianity pretty well- enough to discuss them intelligently- and I think that's important due to the profound cultural impacts of that belief system. That doesn't mean I believe it. Likewise, I understand the ideas, and wonderful twists of logic in "Alice in Wonderland." We each have the freedom to choose what we do and don't believe, but in an academic setting, choosing not to know the consensus in terms of facts has a price- several prices, actually. Grades, advancement, and future performance are all at stake. Letting students know you're looking for understanding, not agreement, can defuse an urge to "push back" against a perceived "agenda." Along similar lines, accept dissent calmly, but ask for reasoned supporting evidence. [Followup: was just outside for a smoke, discussing this with another IZ patron. His comment: "It's like a comparative religion class. The goal is obviously not to convert anyone to any particular religious belief system, but to get everyone to a certain level of understanding."]

I just went back to figure out exactly what the position was; don't be afraid to ask your team-teaching prof- who presumably has much more expertise and experience- for advice, especially when/if sticky situations come up.

Since many topics of this type can be bleak and depressing, find and keep success stories in reserve. How does this relate to controversy? When faced with what seems like inevitable doom, humans are tempted toward two options: fatalistic acceptance, or denial. Both lead to doing nothing. Remind students often that we actually do have quite a number of options for coping with climate change. Some will likely not work out, but some probably will. I personally would like to see more work done with mineralized carbon sequestration- that is, tying up CO2 in carbonates. In the end, if we find effective mitigation techniques, my suspicion is that it will involve a number of measures, not one "magical cure." A favorite example of mine is the ozone scare of the late 80's and early 90's. While ozone depletion is still a bit of a problem, it's getting better. We banned CFC's, and I don't think most people even noticed a blip. There are some problems with some of the replacement chemicals, so the issue is not 100% solved, but for the most part, it's a success story that the vast majority of the public never heard, or have totally forgotten.

Finally, I think the comments by others on that post are thoughtful and helpful. I'd especially like to follow up on Ron's regarding science versus policy: they are two different things. The task of science is to inform and guide policy, not create it. Sentences like "science says the consequence of doing x is y," are useful. Those like "science says we must do x,." are not. Policy has to take into account a bunch of factors like costs, human nature, practicality, benefits, and motivation, that science does not.

Good luck. As I wrote in my quick note, I don't think controversy is something to be "worried" about, but it's not a bad idea at all to be aware it could cause problems, and be thinking proactively about ways to mitigate or avoid it.

Food Fears

Following up on his NYT column on crop failures and climate change yesterday (and the apparently unrelated report on the same subject at The Guardian Saturday), Krugman notes:

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization issued an alert Tuesday that a severe drought was threatening the wheat crop in China, the world’s largest wheat producer, and was even resulting in shortages of drinking water for people and livestock.

He links to to the full NYT article here, and concludes, "If China has to import wheat, too, that’s seriously ungood."

Nope, tell everyone it's Obama's fault, and if we just cut taxes and dropped the socialism, free market forces would encourage crops to be more productive. That makes it doubleplusgood!

Followup: He also has a good post on how gradual climate change can lead to a comparatively sudden increase in extreme events... nothing new, I guess, but a nice, lucid explanation.

Sand Through the Hourglass: Bits of Geoscience

I'm feeling pretty uninspired. Between staying up too late reading (for several nights running) and what might be a mild cold- which may or may not be part and parcel with the weird, mild headaches that make me feel as if my skull is deforming like a kneaded lump of clay- I just want to go home and go to bed. But I have a backlog of interesting geology and earth science posts I've been meaning to get to, plus a couple more that came up today, so with a minimum of fuss here are some recent bits from the geoblogosphere and related news.

• Silver Fox spent much of the weekend tracking down the original Dutton quote poetically describing Basin and Range as an army of caterpillars crawling north out of Mexico. Like Ron Schott, I'm most familiar with this from the sign at Dante's View in Death Valley, but this has clearly been misquoted many more times than quoted.
• Callan has a slew of mashed-up rocks (what I personally think of as metacrappite, in my own mental categorization of rock groups, without the slightest bit of derogatory intent), in his continuing series on the geology of San Francisco. Also check out the mashed cherts; these are some of the hardest and most competent sedimentary rocks that exist, and to see them folded, spindled and mutilated like taffy should give you a profound respect for the power of the earth.
• Christmas day's EPOD was a stereopair of a beautiful snowflake. I've been meaning to transform this into a wobble-gif, but haven't got to it. I may not. Like I said at the outset...
• Cian at Point Source summarizes her highlights from the recent AGU conference. I'm intrigued by the emphasis I've seen, and not only in her post, on scientists taking a lead role in communicating on their disciplines. As I and numerous others have repeatedly noted, the journalists just aren't getting it done.
• Evelyn at Georneys has a wonderful post about a wonderful map. As familiar as this beautiful bit of cartographic art is to me, I had never realized its importance, nor how recently (alright, okay, I get it, I'm old.) it had been completed. Heartfelt thanks for clarifying, Evelyn.
• Bryan at Hot Topic summarizes a recent interview of James Hansen by Bill McKibben, highlighting the degree of confidence felt among climate scientists regarding global warming, its consequences, and how to ameliorate its effects.
• NatGeo has a gallery of images of what are thought to be collapse pits over lava tubes... on Mars.
• The Guardian has the most complete article I've seen on the reopening of Molycorp's Mountain Pass rare earths mine.
• In a semi-related bit of economic news, Krugman's column today deals with rising commodity prices in a recovering economy, on a finite planet. As I've noted before, geology and economics are much more intimately related than I think most people recognize.
• Also at The Guardian, an article that largely dismisses concerns over the recent news about Cr VI in US drinking water. He makes some valid points, and in my reading, I had already come to much the same conclusion- that the panicky reaction was overblown. However, I think the middle ground is more appropriate here. There's no reason to panic, but his level of dismissiveness is unwarranted as well. This should be of concern, and should be studied more carefully.
• Louisiana will be coming to Oregon to study hurricane storm surges. Huh? Oregon State University has one of the largest wave tanks in the world: The Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory.
• The explosion and subsequent destruction of the Deepwater Horizon, and the ensuing oil spill, made the new chairman of The House Science and Technology Committee, Ralph Hall (R-Texas), feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

  "As we saw that thing bubbling out, blossoming out – all that energy, every minute of every hour of every day of every week – that was tremendous to me," he said. "That we could deliver that kind of energy out there – even on an explosion."

  You probably don't want to read that entire article if you would prefer to be optimistic regarding science in the US in the near future.
  

Nature

News item: The Cancun Climate Conference has wound up, and some sources are trying to paint smiley faces on the fact that we've agreed to agree on ...something ...sometime.

"It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever..."

The quote is from The Terminator, of course, but it could apply just as well to the natural world. That doesn't mean it should necessarily be feared, but respected. It doesn't mean that its endless beauty shouldn't be appreciated, just that it doesn't care if we do or not, and that its just as "happy" with "ugly" as "beautiful." Our values don't apply.

And if we in our greed throw a wrench into its workings, it will have no more regrets than the T-800 about ripping our arms out of their sockets and beating us to death with them. Keep that in mind.

Christopher Booker is a Putz

Putz: n

1. Slang A fool; an idiot.

2. Vulgar Slang A penis.

Shorter version: since Climategate totally proved that climate change claims are totally false and climate science doesn't even exist and climate scientists are totally scamming the planet, totally everybody has totally forgotten about the issue, except British politicians. And, oh yeah, in case you didn't notice, it's cold again. What's up with that?

Followup: Dear me. I have been skimming Booker's idiocy at The Telegraph (UK) online for some time now, but I hadn't quite realized the sheer breadth of topics he has "debunked." Via Wikipedia, from his "Views on Science:"

Booker has repeatedly claimed that white asbestos is "chemically identical to talcum powder" and poses a "non-existent" risk to human health.

Also too, swords are chemically identical to spoons, and couldn't possibly be a concern on airliners.

On climate change Booker is a global warming skeptic...

No, he's a denier. Skeptics can be convinced by enough evidence. Booker will never be convinced, QED, he's not a skeptic.

Booker has also argued in support of intelligent design, claiming that supporters of the theory of evolution "rest their case on nothing more than blind faith and unexamined a priori assumptions"

That and a couple of hundred years of data gathering, hypothesis testing, restructuring theoretical frameworks as new information and insights became available, and debate- frequently fierce- to determine which ideas made the most sense. An awful lot of trouble, really, when you can just cut through the Gordian knot with a simple "God did it" and be done, right?

Wilson highlighted Booker's repeated endorsement of the alleged scientific expertise of John Bridle, who in 2005 was convicted under the UK's Trade Descriptions Act of making false claims about his qualifications.

So there you have it... cherry pick the data you want, choose the "experts" who make conclusions you want to come to, regardless of their actual "expertise." Cause really, in the end, credibility is all in the eye of the beholder.

Putz.

What He Said

Calamities of Nature

Rolling A Very Big And Many-Sided Die

There have been a number of stories implying that the scale and severity of the Russian drought and accompanying wildfires were in and of themselves so bad that they could only be ascribed to global warming. I have sort of winced at this idea, because as nasty as the situation is there, the whole point of the climate is to look for a long-term consistent pattern. And one, or even a few, data points, no matter how startling they may be, are not a very convincing demonstration of a pattern. So it was with some relief I read this article from CSM:

Mann said to think of the occurrence of these extreme events as rolling a loaded die. Rolling a six is like having a record-setting high temperature. With global warming, the die is loaded so that sixes come up increasingly more often — as if the numbers one, two and three were slowly being replaced with sixes.

Rolling a six, or having an extreme weather event, will become more common as the climate changes, Mann said. But rolling back-to-back sixes by chance alone will always be possible, regardless of global warming.

These double sixes, however, will come up far more often than would be expected in the absence of human-caused climate change — a trend that scientists are already seeing.

Now the nice thing about an article like that is that it clarifies the issue, shows that there is disagreement in the community and helps clarify what that disagreement is and why it exists. The problem with the former stories is that they're clear, and they're based on an understandable exaggeration. When that exaggeration is inevitably caught, it's blamed on science and scientists generally, not the specific scientist(s) and journalist(s) responsible. And as I expected, writers with denialist tendencies are all over this and other badly done reports.

The story states: “Worldwide temperature readings show that this January-June was the hottest first half of a year since record keeping began in the mid-19th century.” This implies that we are experiencing something unprecedented. Isn’t it strange that 60% of the U.S. had cooler than normal temperatures during this period. The article statement is untrue and due partially to NOAA computer programs actually manufacturing temperature readings where none exist.

Did you catch what he did there? “Worldwide temperature readings show that this January-June was the hottest first half of a year since record keeping began in the mid-19th century,” is untrue because according to this source, 60% of the US from January-July was cooler than normal.I have no reason to question the veracity of the High Plains Regional Climate Center, and I plan to look over their site when I have more time. But I find it odd that the opinionator would link to the image and not credit and link the site; it's as if in his ranting about NOAA "manufacturing" data, he didn't want anyone to notice HPRCC is part of NOAA's regional climate centers. Oh, and about that "manufacturing:" there are two maps in the National Climate Data Center's (NCDC) monthly report. Here's the first:And here's the second:Now his complaint is that NCDC/NOAA are "manufacturing" the data points in the second not present in the first, and avoids telling the reader that the first is in fact the first one shown, or even exists. "Manufacturing" implies to me "making up," and I did find this sort of startling, though I had some suspicions right away.

Sure enough, in its report, NCDC not only cites the means they're using to get the second chart, but links to the full paper. (~1 MB PDF) Yay, publicly available online peer-reviewed literature! To the extent I've been able to plow through it, it seems to confirm my guess: it adds in satellite data and interpolation. One passage says "The SST [sea surface temperatures] estimates from satellite, ships, and buoys are merged using a weighted sum of the different inputs, with weights inversely proportional to the noise estimate for each type." Now I'll grant that interpolation isn't as desirable as direct measurement, and I'm sure the algorithm isn't perfect. But it certainly isn't what came into my mind when I saw repeated uses of the phrase "manufacturing data," nor was the latter word choice accidental.

In conclusion, the author says

It didn’t take me too long to do some fact checking of this AP story. I wonder why AP or the Arizona Daily Star didn’t bother checking the facts. Could there be some political agenda in running such stories?

Nope, it doesn't take too long at all to bring up your contrarian, denialist bookmarks, and slap in a few that seem to fit, not link the NCDC you criticize, and instead use AP wire reports and press release stenographers as your straw man. Look, we know MSM science reporting is a disaster, and I appreciate that there is some value in criticism and skepticism. But if you want to go there, don't use AP as your proxy- go to the source. Fully link and credit your own sources. Be willing to engage with the ideas at hand- don't just dogmatically try to find contradictory evidence, and when you find one bit, assume that devastates the credibility of an overwhelming pile on the other side. The whole point of skepticism is not to be convinced, but to be willing to be swayed one direction or the other based on the evidence.

We are rolling a very big and many-sided die here, about eight thousand miles in diameter. I'd like to be confident we've got some kind of shot at winning this gamble.

Smoke In The Valley (From Fires in The Steppes)

I've noticed the last couple of afternoons that it has been kind of hazy here in the valley. I didn't think much about it- it often is hazy on hot summer days. Some of it is from the oxidation of dimethyl sulfide, produced by plankton at the coast. It oxidizes to sulfate, which forms aerosols and cloud condensation nuclei: haze. Some of the haze is also due to volatile compounds produced by the dense and enormous west side conifer forests. A third source during the later part of the summer is local fires- wild, or set purposely for forest or agricultural management. (Ironically, our clearest days occur in the winter- which is notoriously cloudy. But when it's clear, it's very clear.)

So the haze is no surprise. The surprise is that this haze is being blamed on the historic heat wave, drought, and associated fires... in Russia!

Haze in the Willamette Valley likely traveled all the way to Oregon from Russia, rather than over the Cascade Range from a small wildfire near the town of Sisters.

National Weather Service meteorologists say smoke from more than 500 wildfires that have burned through forests and peat bogs in Russia is being carried across the Gulf of Alaska and down to the Northwest.

On Monday, The Big Picture ran a gallery of 38 photos from the Russian fires, which I found pretty mind-boggling. But for the smoke to be making itself known halfway around the world? Wow.

Monday, August 2, 2010, By The Numbers

• Only 145 shopping days left... Christmas shop, selling seasonal decorations, opens in London department store.
• Scientific American takes pains to note that the Spirit Rover is conserving energy to keep itself at a minimum of -40 [Fahrenheit], failing to notice that -40 is the same temperature in both Fahrenheit and Celsius scales.
• Bajillions of charged particles headed toward earth as a result of a pair of ionic flatulence events on the sun yesterday... Aurora alert for tomorrow (August 3)? Go to SpaceWeather for updates, reports, observations and latest news.
• While you're looking at the sky, at least three planets- Venus, Mars and Saturn- should be easily visible after sunset for the next week or so. Even though the story is described as from Western Oregon, making allowances for your latitude and minor variations regarding where you are across the breadth of your time zone, these should work okay for the northern mid-latitudes generally.
• This week marks the "35th Anniversary of Global Warming." Pretty amazing call, given the uncertainties at the time.
• Value of a piece of gag merchandise, the Hot Wheels version of "Wonder Woman's invisible jet" (an empty box, with a jet form molded into the plastic window), a week ago: $5.00. Asking price for the same empty box today: $20.00. I'm in the wrong business.
• Is it over now? Best estimate to date of total amount of oil spilled at BP's Macondo prospect: 4.9 million barrels, or ~206 million gallons. This makes it half again as large as the previous record-holder, the Ixtoc spill of 1979.
  

So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish

From The NYT Economic Scene:

According to NASA, 2010 is on course to be the planet’s hottest year since records started in 1880. The current top 10, in descending order, are: 2005, 2007, 2009, 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2004, 2001 and 2008.

So we're getting right on that, right? Right? I mean, think about the farmers!

The intense heat and humidity that blanketed central Kansas since late last week have killed more than 2,000 cattle and one state official called the heat-related losses the worst in his 17 years on the job.

And our descendants...

The average temperature of the planet for the next several thousand years will be determined this century—by those of us living today, according to a new National Research Council report which lays out the impact of every degree of warming on outcomes ranging from sea-level rise to reduced crop yields.

With La Nina setting in, the mid-term outlook may not be as bad as the last few months,

"This year the fact that the El Nino episode has ended and is likely to transition into La Nina, which has a cooling influence on the global average temperature, it's possible that we will not end up with the warmest year as a whole."

but notice the provisional in there: it's possible this won't be the warmest year since the advent of meteorological instrumentation. Last Friday, Dr. Jeff Masters posted one on the most terrifying things I've read in a while:

June 2010 was the warmest June since record keeping began in 1880, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), and was the fourth consecutive warmest month on record. NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies rated June 2010 the third warmest June on record, behind June 1998 and June 2009. Both NOAA and NASA rated the year-to-date period, January - June, as the warmest such period on record. June 2010 global ocean temperatures were the fourth warmest on record, while land temperatures were the warmest on record. Global satellite-measured temperatures for the lowest 8 km of the atmosphere were the 2nd warmest on record in June, according to both the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH) and Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) groups. The record warmest temperatures in the lower atmosphere were recorded in 1998.

And of course it's not just the US: people and crops are being affected across the globe.

MOSCOW — A blistering heat wave has made life miserable for millions in Russia and northeastern Europe, few of whom have air conditioners, and destroyed millions of acres of Russian wheat, setting back an agricultural revival that was just reaching its stride after years of faltering efforts.

So with every single one of the ten hottest years on record falling in the last 11 years, (not counting 2010- the numbers aren't in yet, but it's very likely to fall in that ranking, even if it doesn't take first place) can we move along and address the issue? Not. Freaking. Likely.

Senate Democrats had already scaled back their plans to pursue limits on greenhouse gas emissions, like those in a bill approved by the House last year. Instead, Senate Democrats had said they would seek a cap on carbon emissions only for power plants. But even that proved overly ambitious.

“We don’t have a single Republican to work with us,” Mr. Reid said. Nice play, Senator, and I agree: the blindness of the right is stunning. But even the dems don't seem to understand that corporate profits amount to just about nothing when our food and water supplies collapse. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I have serious doubts that humanity has the intelligence, and ability to sacrifice self interest for the broader good, that it's going to take to get through this crisis. Extinction is forever, and our glorious brains and "special" relationship with the wizard in the sky don't make us immune. I'm glad I won't be the parent of one of the last generation of children, trying to explain how a few hundred lawmakers put their election prospects ahead of human survival.

If we don't make it, it will be because we don't deserve survival.

Portents of The Apocalypse

Climate change creating 'super marmots' that are bigger and more abundant

I, for one, welcome our new alpine rodent overlords.

Gotta love The Telegraph (UK) "Earth" and "Science" stories... the stories themselves are typical recycled press release material- broadly accurate, but often with some howlingly (or hysterically) bad errors (absent, as far as I can tell, in this particular story). But the editors who write the headlines seem to be under the impression they're working for the World Weekly News. I have often considered dropping these feeds from my RSS, but I guess I value the amusement factor too much.

Followup: The CSM also covers the story, albeit in more depth and with a less entertaining headline.

Mobile Building

Mobilizes ur carz, then divides by zero.

Via Jeff Masters' Weather Underground, where he notes that 8-11 inches fell on Oklahoma City yesterday. This post is particularly notable, however, for the skill with which he finds the line of clarity between climate change sensationalism and the shoulder-shrugging "we can't attribute any single event to climate change." This is the well-played final paragraph of the relevant section, "Flooding and Global Warming:"

We cannot say that any of this year's flooding disasters were definitely due to global warming, and part of the reason for this year's numerous U.S. flooding disasters is simply bad luck. However, higher temperatures do cause an increased chance of heavy precipitation events, and it is likely that the flooding in some of this year's U.S. flooding disasters were significantly enhanced by the presence of more water vapor in the air due to global warming. We can expect a large increase in flooding disasters in the U.S. and worldwide if the climate continues to warm as expected.

Another section of interest to me today was "Funding issues threaten hundreds of streamgages."

According to the USGS web site, river stage data from 292 streamgages has been discontinued recently, or is scheduled for elimination in the near future due to budget cuts. In Tennessee, 16 streamflow gages with records going back up to 85 years will stop collecting data on July 1 because of budget cuts. Five gages in Arkansas are slated for elimination this year. Hardest hit will be Pennsylvania, which will lose 30 of its 258 streamgages. With over 50 people dead from two flooding disasters already this year, now hardly seems to be the time to be skimping on monitoring river flow levels by cutting funding for hundreds of streamgages.

Yeah, what he said. It's hard for me to believe that a nation with a population of about 116 million, and resources to maintain a streamgage in 1925, and now with a population of about 308 million, no longer has the resources to maintain and monitor those gages.

Medusaceratops lokii and Other Recent Geo-Trivia

I know it's frowned upon to combine Greek and Latin roots to create new science terms, but is it OK to combine Roman and Norse mythological characters to create new scientific names?

The stunning new species has been identified as Medusaceratops lokii, a nod to two freakish mythological beings that inspired Michael Ryan -- the dinosaur's Ottawa-born co-discoverer-- when it came time to assign a name to the creature.

You can see a rendering of this very strange looking creature at Paleoblog.Any geology person worth his or her halite luvs them some Far Side. And this has to be one of the favorite geology panels from that comic, from 1982. It's hardly news, first being officially used in 1993, but it's news to me that "thagomizer" is actually the official term for the arrays of spikes at the end of Stegosaurus tails. The comic below came to my attention via Swans on Tea.
Via Andrew Revkin at the NYT Dot Earth blog, I learned that the total amount of oil in the reservoir that is currently vomiting into the Gulf of Mexico amounts to trivia:

BP officials have estimated it contains no more than 100 million barrels of oil. That’s five days and change worth of American demand for this precious fuel.

Note that's a maximum. I'll try to do a more meaty post on the spill, but there's an awful lot of information, and it's painful and infuriating for me to go through.

This hurricane season is shaping up to be the worst since 2005, perhaps comparable.

The hurricane season of 2010 is upon us. With unprecedented sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic, El Niño gone and possibly transitioning to La Niña, a massive oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, a million earthquake refugees in Haiti at the mercy of a hurricane strike, and an ever-increasing number of people living on our coasts, the arrival of this year's hurricane season comes with an unusually ominous tone. NOAA is forecasting a very active and possibly hyperactive season, and Dr. Bill Gray has said he expects "a hell of a year."

"2010 hurricane season seen more active than feared." Whew! That's a... say what? "Worse!?!?" Guess what? Haiti's not prepared.

This was picked up by Geology Rocks:
from Good Will Job Hunting, URL Hire Me Because I'm Smart, with the comment,

The Earth’s altitudes are bimodally distributed — there is lots of terrain just above sea level, and lots of terrain 2 miles below sea level (the “abyssal plain”).

Weird, huh?

Well, no, not really. This distribution is an easily predictable result of having two different kinds of crust over a plastic (but solid) mantle. Continental crust is thick and comparatively low density; oceanic crust is thin and comparatively high density. I'm sure this was kind of weird looking fifty years ago before the development of plate tectonic theory, but someone who has a middle school level understanding of geology at this point shouldn't find the above diagram the least bit mysterious. It is very cool, though.

Exciting news about my home ground, from my home ground:

America's Pacific Northwest has a 37% chance of being hit by a magnitude 8 or larger earthquake in the next 50 years, a new study shows. That's more than double previous estimates of a 10-15% risk, says Chris Goldfinger, a marine geologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

I'm curious to see how this stands up to verification and critical review.

Speaking of Oregon, it's official: NOAA is here.This is very big news for Newport, about an hour across the Coast Range. OSU has a world-class school of Oceanography, Jane Lubchenco is from OSU, and Newport, along with most of the Oregon Coast, has been slammed pretty hard economically over the last 20 years, by both loss of logging jobs and fisheries restrictions. Tourism has helped, but not enough. Good on ya, Newport!

I don't do Twitter; nothing against it, and there are a couple of accounts that I check from time to time, but there's just too much other stuff for me to read and check on. So I was aware of this contest, but wasn't paying any attention to it. "Stephen Fry crowns most beautiful tweet at Hay Festival" Imagine my surprise to find it was a geology-related winner! And here it is:

The winning tweet read: "I believe we can build a better world! Of course, it'll take a whole lot of rock, water & dirt. Also, not sure where to put it."

Warm Water Worries

Dr. Jeff Masters, at the Weather Underground's Wunderblog, points out that the primary area for Atlantic hurricane development is experiencing record sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies.Why is that of importance?

The high April SST anomaly does not bode well for the coming hurricane season. The three past seasons with record warm April SST anomalies all had abnormally high numbers of intense hurricanes. Past hurricane seasons that had high March SST anomalies include 1969 (0.90°C anomaly), 2005 (1.19°C anomaly), and 1958 (0.97°C anomaly). These three years had 5, 7, and 5 intense hurricanes, respectively. Just two intense hurricanes occur in an average year.

And if I'm reading that map right, currently the SST's are 0.5 to 1°C higher than 2005... the year of Katrina. Hurricane season officially starts in a bit more than two weeks, then ramps up over the summer.

I really, really hope they get that damned well capped quickly.

Not That This Will Sway the Climategate Cranks

Via everywhere, but this clip is from the NYT:

LONDON (AP) — A parliamentary panel investigating allegations that scientists at one of the world’s leading climate research centers misrepresented data related to global warming announced Wednesday that it had found no evidence to support that charge.

But the panel, the Science and Technology Committee of the British House of Commons, did fault scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and its director, Prof. Phil Jones, for the way they handled freedom of information requests from skeptics challenging the evidence of climate change.

For anyone who's actually been paying attention to a variety of sources, and not depending on Faux News or Watt's Up With That, this should be no surprise. But color me skeptical that anyone arguing "global warming is just a scam" will be swayed by mere evidence. You know, it's a badly under-reported bit of information that the amount of money going to climate research totally dwarfs the profits of Exxon-Mobil.

Fresh Mountain Air

Beautiful satellite image of Mauna Loa at NASA's Earth Observatory site, with contours drawn in. Look at those lovely flows! But what's particularly interesting about this post is the discussion of why the Mauna Loa Observatory is such a good location for measuring the CO2 content of the atmosphere, and how emissions of that gas are filtered out of the data accumulated there. Essentially, the prevailing winds only rarely carry emissions from the summit to the observatory, and when they do, it's obvious what's happening. Those data points are simply not counted; what they're looking for is long-term averages and trends, not spikes.

What He Said:

From the LA Times, via Oregon Live:

The Earth has its own set of rules, solidly grounded in laws of physics and chemistry and emergent principles of geology and biology. Unlike our economic model, these are not artificial constructs. They are real, and they govern. Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, tornadoes, 100-year floods, massive wildfires and disease epidemics are dramatic examples of parts of nature, neither all service nor all harm, creating and destroying, and governed by rules that are indifferent to humans. Our anthropocentric economic model for interacting with the world ignores and is proving to be incompatible with Earth's rules, and is therefore on a direct collision course with them.

(...)

Recent measurements of unprecedented, directional changes in the vital signs of Earth suggest that we may have already staved in our lifeboat's hull, causing changes beyond the ability of Earth's biogeochemical forces to maintain balance. The quasi-steady state that makes our lives possible may be disappearing before our eyes. We are in direct conflict with Earth's rules.

This has been my position for a couple of decades at least, though I could never have stated it as eloquently as the authors. (Bruce E. Mahall is a professor of ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. F. Herbert Bormann, a professor emeritus at Yale University, is one of the founders of the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study.) Unfortunately, I have become increasingly pessimistic that we as a culture are capable of abandoning our old paradigms- economic, religious, philosophical and scientific, as described in the essay- in time to save our asses. I'm certain we as a species could do it, but ingrained habit looks like it's going to prevent it.

The Cost of Climate Denialism

The news on climate change over the last few months has been devastating, and I haven't felt capable of writing anything sensible on the topic. The intentionally ignorant deniers have apparently claimed victory in the midst of what was globally the first or second warmest January on record (first for the southern hemisphere, and I've seen claims of both for the planet as a whole), at the end of the warmest decade on record. Arctic ice extent at the beginning of February was at near record lows...... and well below the 2 standard deviation range from the two previous decades (1979-2000). The report for last month will be issued in the next few days, and from my occasional perusal of the site's daily charts, winter 09-10 looks to be roughly on par with winter 06-07, the record holder for minimum ice extent thus far.

The point is, the above are facts. They're not predictions. They're not the work of a giggling evil scientist hunched over his spreadsheets in a dimly lit lab, with steamy CO2 vapor coming out of flasks of colored water with dry ice in them.

To the people who are whining, "But it's cold! We have snow! We never get Snow!" I say STFU. I have quite a bit of sympathy with the east coast and Europe, but weather- even a full season of it- is NOT climate. Would it make any difference to your perception if I argued that climate change is happening even faster than we thought because western Oregon had it's warmest January on record, and it's looking like the warmest February too? It shouldn't. Those months at that location are single data points in an enormous set extending over many locations and a period of decades.

One recent bit that really got my attention- not in a good way- was the spin given to the widely publicized "admission" by Phil Jones that there was no warming from 1995 to present. Except it wasn't an "admission," it was a statement of fact: given that 15 year window, he could not, at the 95% confidence level, say that warming was occurring. Once again it's the confusion of "significance" in the statistical sense and effect size. And yes, the effect is there: the trend has been .12 degrees warmer each decade, or almost 0.2 degrees Celsius over the last 15 years. Another way of putting this is that it is as likely that the warming trend is 0.24 degrees as it is 0 degrees per decade. But the most likely trend is 0.12 degrees. Here's the actual quote from Skeptical Science:

BBC: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming

Phil Jones: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

BBC: How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?

Phil Jones: I'm 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 - there's evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.

Swans On Tea posted the above chart yesterday (the .15 trend is the result of using a specific data set), and I've seen similar arguments elsewhere. George Will has been one of the most vocal and visible deniers in the US. Of course he ran with this, and of course the illiterate morons at WaPo didn't think to check his facts or representations thereof. That was the op-ed that was so jaw-clenchingly infuriating that I just couldn't take it any more.

For the sake of your children, for the sake of society, and if you're young, for your own sake, if you don't have a clue how science and statistics works, shut your fucking yap. Your opinion IS NOT of equivalent worth compared to those who have spent lifetimes studying the relevant disciplines. Can you say with absolute certainty that if you load a pistol, stick the barrel in your mouth, and pull the trigger, that your brain will soon afterward exit the back of your skull? No, of course you can't: guns sometimes misfire, shells are sometimes duds. But statistically, following the above procedure would be pretty damned stupid, wouldn't it?

The question is not whether the climate is warming or not: it is. That's a simple fact. The question is how certain do we need to be before we act. Do you want 95%? 99? 99.9? A tenth of a percent is my guesstimation of your chances of surviving as a result of a misfire. (You're actually much more likely to survive by flinching.)

And, oh, by the way, here's what I set out to mention before I got off onto a rant: the Arctic is being increasingly militarized as a result of warming unlocking mineral resources. And because of denialism, the US risks losing access to resources we should control, or military confrontation if we try to push our claims.

Major melting has spurred Russia, Canada, Denmark (via Greenland), and Norway into a new gold rush, except this time it’s about staking claim to huge reservoirs of natural gas, petroleum, and untold deposits of minerals previously inaccessible because of the polar ice shield. Much of the sub-sea Arctic wealth will of necessity be transported by ships because thawing tundra will be too unstable for pipelines. The South Koreans anticipated this more than a decade ago, building giant vessels to secure a big share of the shipping market.

Sadly, when the claims of the ignorant and unthinking have equal weight compared to those of the informed and educated, this is the result: such a society fumbles and falls behind others. If you want to call that elitist, fine. I'd rather be called elitist than proclaim myself an idiot.

Bobbing for Amperage

KATU is reporting that the first US wave-powered electricity generating complex is under construction near Reedsport, Oregon. I had read a few years back that OSU's College of Engineering was undertaking research at this site, but I didn't realize that the decision had been made to move to commercial development.

The wage-energy farm will work like this:

• Energy is drawn from waves at the ocean's surface through a network of buoys set up along the coast.
• The buoys convert the wave power to electricity.
• Submerged cables send the energy to shore.

However, there are drawbacks with this type of energy harvest. The buoys can sink or end up on the beach, creating a tangled mess. Plus, commercial fishers and crabbers get closed out of wave-energy areas as those become no-fish zones.

The development site was on the lot of a large lumber mill that had closed some years before. Pre-existing high-load power lines, in place to supply the necessary electrical input in the past, saved the expense of installing such lines for potential output from the proposed facility. A brief description of the technology being used is posted at Wikipedia. If I recall, the original design involved a magnet bobbing inside a coil as the waves passed. In the map below, the timber mill site is on the seaward side of the "101" icon near the middle, and partially obscured by it. I wanted to zoom out enough to include a bit of the actual coastline.

View Larger Map (This is showing up as the intended map in preview, but as the Mallorca map I posted last Friday when I look at on my blog. What are you seeing?)

The particular article that I had read probably came out about the same time as this one; the emphasis on proactive community engage is similar.

Dr. George W. Taylor, Chief Executive Officer of OPT, said, "PNGC Power makes an important contribution to the energy requirements of the Northwest, and we are very pleased to work with them in connection with the Reedsport OPT Wave Park. It is important that these initial phases of the project be done in close coordination with, and respect for, the various state and local organizations with interests in the wave park. PNGC has demonstrated that vision and practice, and we appreciate their cooperation and support."

The Oregon Coast is rugged and beautiful, and in the past communities there have depended primarily on fisheries and lumber as their major employers. For a variety of reasons, these two industries have been slammed hard during the past 30 years. A number of other job types have gained in importance, but coast towns are still struggling- particularly in the climate of the last couple of years. So to convince these hard-working and rugged citizens ahead of time that jobs in the electrical industry would make up for locking them out of (I'm guessing) a few square miles of prime fishing grounds struck me as a very smart move.

Now this is of interest to me, not because I think it'll be wildly successful: I don't. I think it's more likely to end up being too expensive- particularly in maintenance costs- and uncompetitive against other sources. But I don't know and neither does anyone else. So even though this is beyond the preliminary test stages, and toeing over into commercial development, it's still very much experimental. But now the experiment is economic rather than technological.

And I very much like that. I'd like to see many more such experiments with other renewable technologies. Many, even most, may turn out to be economic failures, but we won't find the successes until we try many different ones.

Note to Self...

...Remember to open the windows a few inches tomorrow morning. Today's forecast is for showers and a high of 56. It is, and has been for much of the day, gloriously sunny. The current temperature is 62, according to NWS/NOAA. It'll probably get a bit warmer. The forecast for the next three days is for morning fog, then clear skies, with highs near 60. My own sense from the pattern I'm seeing is that we're looking at mid 60's; I suspect many forecasters don't want to be too optimistic. I have no expertise, no reputation to ruin, so I'm guessing it's actually going to be a bit warmer than forecast, as it is today.

Time to turn out some of the stale winter air in the apartment.

As I've mentioned several times, this is an unusually mild winter, as is often the case during El Nino years in the PNW. But even for an El Nino year, this one has been warm. How warm? Well, as is my wont, I took a stroll around today and took pictures of spring flowers. I'm a little stunned.
Bluebells are at least a couple of weeks early.
Most if not all of these will grow, like, um, spring flowers, if you click on them.
Daffodils are a couple of weeks early as well.
In a neighbor's yard.
Crocuses generally bloom about this time, but these have been blooming for several weeks, at least.
Miniature Iris normally blooms sometime in March.
Pansies start early, so this isn't too surprising, but again, these have been blooming for a month or so.
A nice show of crocuses and some irises just opening.
Lens Flare!
More daffodils opening in front of some lavender. Lavender blooms for most of the growing season, let's say March to September, if it has water. (Our summers are quite arid.)
As you can see though, this one is blooming maybe a month early. For some reason, blooger insists on uploading this rotated to a vertical format. I have run into this issue before, and have no clue why it happens or how to fix it.
Tulips are up; typically at this point, they're just little green nubbins. They look as if they may bloom in the next 2 or 3 weeks. I would normally expect them to start late March to early April.
Dandelions... meh. No biggie. I think that unless it's actually well below freezing, with a bit of persistence, one could find a blooming dandelion any day of the year when there's a bit of sunshine in Corvallis. They seem to set buds, then hold them for warm, dry and sunny days. What strikes me is how freaking many of them there are open right now.
Myrtle
I don't know what this is called, but it's a heavily used landscaping plant in Oregon.

(Followup, 2/17: Celina tells me this is wisteria. I'm glad to finally connect the name to the plant; I've heard the name countless times, but not known what it was.)
Rhododendrons are almost purely a mid to late spring term bloomer... April to June.
Camellia generally start in mid-March.
A different angle on the blossom in the lower left of the previous picture.
I loved the vibrant colors on this bud on the same bush.
And another clump of very confused rhodies.

So is this due to climate change? No. It's due to a somewhat predictable stretch of abnormally warm weather. The east coast has been hammered by an abnormally snowy winter, and I haven't felt that there has been any reasonable amount of attention paid to the fact that the PNW has been balmy to the point of bizarre. I expect the simple reason is that this hasn't caused suffering and disruption, as has the cold snowy weather in the east. But while the planet as a whole may be a bit warmer or colder from one year to another, my sense is that at any given time abnormally cold in one place is balanced against abnormally warm in another.

What climate involves is looking at long term trends. The idiocy of "It's cold, therefore global warming is a hoax," boggles my mind.

There have been a number of fine articles on this topic in the last day or two. One example is "The Dunning-Kruger Effect and the Climate Debate," at Skeptical Science.

One of the best titles for a scientific paper has to be the Ig Nobel prize winning "Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments". The paper compares people's skill levels to their own assessment of their abilities. In hindsight, the result seems self-evident. Unskilled people lack the skill to rate their own level of competence. This leads to the unfortunate result that unskilled people rate themselves higher than more competent people. The phenonemon is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, named after the paper's authors, and is often seen in the climate debate. There are many with a cursory understanding who believe they're discovered fundamental flaws in climate science that have somehow been overlooked or ignored by climate scientists. Some take this a step further and believe they're being deceived.

Before anyone takes offense, let me begin with some disclaimers. I'm not saying the Dunning-Kruger effect is limited to one side of the debate. It's a universal human condition not confined to a particular ideology. When I first got into climate science discussions, I made my fair share of over-confident yet naive statements. As my understanding grew, I came to realise the complexities of climate science and how much more I have to learn (as predicted by Dunning and Kruger). I'm also not saying all skeptic arguments are a result of the Dunning-Kruger effect. However, a few examples demonstrate how the Dunning-Kruger effect can lead one astray.

The author skillfully dissects a comment left by a reader who tries to make the case that global warming is a hoax, since the Mauna Loa CO2 measurements are often taken as a proxy for global CO2 levels, the peak is volcanic and emits CO2, therefore the data are skewed upwards. The whole thing is worth reading.

I have taken enough classes in atmospheric science to comprehend how gawd-awfully complex it is, and avoid getting entangled in any substantive discussions on the topic. That doesn't stop me from puncturing obvious gasbags, though. And it gives me yet another excuse to gloat over the beautiful climate that I inhabit.