Mass media

Often we here about energy shortage, followed by energy conservation.  In my opinion it’s the dumbest two statements anyone can make in polite conversation without being punched in the nose.   Almost equally as often, I’m referred to as an extremist myself. So what does that mean?

From Wikipedia the total non-renewable reserve is:

The estimates of remaining non-renewable worldwide energy resources vary, with the remaining fossil fuels totaling an estimated 0.4 YJ (1 YJ = 10²⁴J)

Renewable energy as a phrase, is equally as physics ignorant as flying by lifting up on your feet, or hooking a generator up to the back tires of your car to power the front.  Thanks to public education, it is as mainstream a term as recycling.

Two Years Old

The Air Vent turned two last month.  It has been a lot of blogging.  Here are the stats as of today:

In Search of Cooling Trends

This is a repost from the ‘digging in the clay’ blog by Verity Jones, re-posted by request.   I’m not sure the purpose of looking for cooling stations results in what they were hoping for, but the results are fairly thorough and readers may find them interesting.  I’m certain the globe has warmed — a little.   What makes this interesting to me, is that quite a few stations haven’t captured the same trend.

Anyway, it’s well written, here you go.

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Posted on September 1, 2010 by Verity Jones

by Verity Jones and Tony Brown (Tonyb)

Back in October Tony asked me to help with a big idea.  Searching Norwegian climate site Rimfrost (www.rimfrost.no) Tony had found many climate stations all over the world with a cooling trend in temperatures over at least the last thirty years – which is significant in climate terms.  You see Tony had a grand vision of a website with blue dots on a map representing these “cooling stations”, where clicking on the dots brought up a graph of the data and the wonderful cooling trend.  Would this not persuade people to look again at the notion of worldwide global warming?

Figure 1. Map showing stations on Tony’s “Cooling List” – stations which appear to have a cooling trend (>30 years) to present (data source: www.rimfrost.no Oct-Dec 2009; Earth image source: Dave Pape)

I asked Tony how many stations he had in mind. “Oh two hundred or so…”  He suggested breaking it down into bite-sized chunks and sending me sets of ten at a time.  I was to compare the data with that on the GISS site and/or those of national met agencies where available to verify the source, and produce graphs to a standard template.

Uh oh.

Steve M may have found the holy grail for climate skeptics.  We don’t know what is in this data, and I’m guessing that neither do most climatologists and it covers 70 percent of the earth.  What if the historic ocean temp trend is modified significantly by manual or algorithmic adjustment – I’m not saying it was, but it wouldn’t shock me after reading the discussions in the UEA emails. Link below.

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ICOADS – Hawaii

Although the formatting of the SST datasets needs to be completely freshened up, once again, before commenting, I commend the SST collaters for honoring their data by ensuring the preservation of comprehensive metadata – as opposed to their cousins at CRU and GISS. Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any statistical analyses of SST measurements – by this, I mean, where the authors analyse the actual bias of changing measurement systems and provenance. (Although Thomson et al [Nature 2007] challenged earlier bucket adjustments, they didn’t do the sort of patient data analysis that the field cries out for.

The statistical problems are by no means easy. As I mentioned the other day, I’ve collated data from a few gridcells in the Pacific (one pair at Honiara near Bougainville and one pair at Hawaii.) Today I’ll illustrate the nature of the problem with a graph that took me a long time to articulate. [Click for a larger version]. I’ll explain below.

DeWitt Payne – FARIMA Mann 08

I’m sure I freaked out some of the science minded around here with my posts on Lomborg and Lee. It’s just a blog though and it’s about whatever catches my attention next.  You are all welcome to contribute and dilute my opinions at your whim.  DeWitt Payne, is very much science first, and he’s done something which is very interesting.  Unfortunately, getting the documentation/post from him is sometimes like pulling teeth. LL

I’m going back to science stuff for a while, unless someone drops another crazy link on a thread.  Basically, after some time the politics of climate become so sickeningly bad that it’s impossible to listen to.

What DeWitt discovered/revealed was that with a different red noise model matched to the Mann08 proxy data than I used in my posts, he was able to retain 31 percent of the series, even though they had zero signal.

DeWitt Payne said

September 1, 2010 at 8:00 pm e

After a few false starts with the loop and array indexes, I created 1209 synthetic random series with the same parameters as the Mann infilled data with an ARFIMA (1,d,1) model. There were 4 series that returned AR coefficients greater than 1 and one with an AR coefficient less than -1. I set those coefficients to 0.999 and -0.999 so I wouldn’t see warnings about non-stationary series. <b>I still get acceptance of 31% of the no signal series, i.e. a Hockey Stick. That’s after scaling all the series to a mean of zero and an sd of 1. </b>I’ll have to try not scaling, but if I don’t scale, the average over all series is not zero. But then maybe it shouldn’t be. Adding the signal 1:1 with the noise, the acceptance was 80%. At a ratio of 5x noise to signal, the acceptance was about 40% with the usual behavior of squashing the ‘reconstructed’ sine wave signal relative to the calibration period.

Gilderoy Lomborg – Magical Me

Global Warming Dissenter Bjorn Lomborg (Sort of) Has a Change of Heart

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Has climate skeptics’ favorite Danish statistician, Bjørn Lomborg, changed his stance? In the forthcoming book edited by Lomborg, Smart Solutions to Climate Change, he calls climate change one of the world’s “chief concerns” and suggests investing $100 billion annually on climate change solutions.

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Lomborg, the Gilderoy Lockhart of present day climate science, possesses the only website with a dozen pictures of himself posing for the camera (here you go ladies) and a cute little zero in his name.   He’s supposed to be the favorite of skeptics, but I know of precisely zero science oriented skeptics whom have ever mentioned his work in a positive light here before.  Not that there wasn’t someone in the past two years.  He started his career goals of fame years ago on the wrong side of the issue, a greenpeace activist or something.  Then he changed to being skeptical that global warming was the worlds biggest problem (if that counts), now he wants the evil high tax solution, still without a well defined problem.

Bjorn Lomborg is now urging world leaders to invest heavily in clean energy Photo: ABBIE TRAYLER-SMITH

Lockhart, Magical me book signing.

He’s made a career of being wrong though, so the media picked up their man and splashed his picture on every article for his new book which I guess makes this claim.