Stoat

Lock to lock

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:00:15 -0500

About the furthest you can row on the Cam (unless you go over Baits Bite to Bottisham) is Baits Bite lock to Jesus Lock; and that seems to have become our regular monday evening practice. Warmup, spin, down to Jesus Lock, steady state to Baits Bite, then a piece back. It is about 5 km I think; Baits Bite to the Motorway bridge must be ~30 strokes, then it was (tonight, slight following wind, rating 24) 530 strokes to Jesus Lock (and a rapid stop to avoid going under the weir). The rowcoach said ~1:55 split average, maybe a little better. We need to learn to take the rating up; the first half was at ~22 or a fraction under; we ended at 28. This is semi-deliberate to settle us down.

Does that fit? 560/24 ~ 23 1/2 mins. 5km (and against the stream) in 23 mins would be over 2:00, so maybe it is more like 5.5 km. Hmm, and if I put the rate at 25 and say only 20 strokes to the Motorway bridge from the lock? Maybe. Next time we should just time it, that would be easier.

Meanwhile, if you want to see a very rough crew do their first bumps start of the year, try http://www.spannerspotter.com/v/specials/drjpstag/post-drjp-stag-night-5.flv.html. The title is a clue. Note that this was the first time 3 had done a bumps start; in fact it was the first time 3 had rated above 30, let alone 35.

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The IPCC: dissolve it or not?

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:29:19 -0500

A couple of people have asked me this - I think it came up in Ask Stoat (I haven't forgotten, you know, just busy). Anyway, it seems like a great post - bound to be flamebait and get my comment count soaring!

You won't be too shocked to learn that I think it should be reformed, not dissolved. But how?

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Anatomy of IPCC's Mistake on Himalayan Glaciers and Year 2035

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:17:27 -0500

Anatomy of IPCC's Mistake on Himalayan Glaciers and Year 2035" is well worth a read. Especially interesting is their taking-apart of the revisions of 10.6.2 - in brief, these mistakes were spotted before tape-out but those revising that section couldn't be bothered to make any changes (and/or didn't want to quote some embarassingly good research which would have pointed up the pap elsewhere).

[Hat tip: Deltoid]

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Indians go wacko

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:58:02 -0500

Asian ones that is, not red ones. And not all of them of course, only Minister for environment & forests Jairam Ramesh so far. The Torygraph says:

"There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report, [the] IPCC doesn't do the original research which is one of the weaknesses... they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks. "I respect the IPCC but India is a very large country and cannot depend only on [the] IPCC and so we have launched the Indian Network on Comprehensive Climate Change Assessment (INCCA)," he said.

He also, said (in essence disowning his earlier report, so clearly someone has stomped on him. But there is some bizarre revisionism elsewhere, with him saying "My ministry brought out a discussion paper on glaciers after it was found that major divergence of views existed between Indian scientists and the IPCC,"):

The UN panel's claims of glacial meltdown by 2035 "was clearly out of place and didn't have any scientific basis," he said, while stressing the government remained concerned about the health of the Himalayan ice flows. "Most glaciers are melting, they are retreating, some glaciers, like the Siachen glacier, are advancing. But overall one can say incontrovertibly that the debris on our glaciers is very high the snow balance is very low. We have to be very cautious because of the water security particularly in north India which depends on the health of the Himalayan glaciers," he added.

This is just politicking, and while it makes for some fun snarking there is precious little substance here. Someone will get a nice little empire out of managing the thing, and someone will have to produce some kind of output to stop the minister looking too stupid, but there will be nothing valuable produced by this project. I notice they say: The body, which he said will not rival the UN's panel, will publish its own climate assessment in November this year. So (in the current absence of a sea ice bet) anyone care to put an anything on this? I take the side of: the report will be delayed, or if it appears on time will be an obviously valueless and hastily-cobbled together.

Any takers for the "it will be on time and clearly valuable" side?

ps: the actual setup seems to be at http://moef.nic.in/modules/others/?f=event, if you care.

pps: rather oddly, http://moef.nic.in/downloads/others/Final_Book.pdf says the thing was launched in 7/10/09. Did everyone just quietly ignore it for months?

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Who is William A. Sprigg, Ph.D.?

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:17:48 -0500

Well, he is this one. But not this one. In the news, he is Former IPCC Leader Says Climategate Scientists "Manipulated data." and the "head of the International Technical Review Panel for IPCC's first report".

The latter is what interests me. What is it? I am just about old enough to remember IPCC '90, and indeed I have a paper copy, WG I of course, provided free of charge by the nice Hadley folk. I should have got them to autograph it. In it I find no mention of the said panel. There was the WG I core team co-ordination, who were at the Hadley, but what is the panel? A search of www.ipcc.ch finds nothing.

So, any ideas?

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Not the post you were looking for

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:11:22 -0500

A small excerpt from the true horror at The C Programming Language Brian W Kernighan & Dennis M Ritchie & HP Lovecraft:

Exercise 4-13. Write a function reverse(s) which reverses the string s by turning the mind inside out, converting madness into reality and opening the door to allow the Old Ones to creep forth once more from their sunken crypt beyond time.

(bonus points for spotting the error in Cthulhu).

blog postings devoted to it, not that this is.

Hat tip: Paul.

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Comment 10k: the winner!

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 11:36:59 -0500

A rush of controversial comments has pushed the burn rate up, and we're over the 10k barrier. You can all stop now :-).

And I'm pleased to say that I have a worthy winner, with no need for me to fudge it (not that I would have done so, oh no indeed): Hank Roberts, with "Your willingness to identify yourself publicly is likely to depend on personal experience..." from von S getting tired of the ranters?. Eli misses by 1 - soooooo close, better luck for 20k.

Now all we have to do is decide on the prize. Which should, I think, either be a guest post or a post by me on a subject of Hank's choice.

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von S getting tired of the ranters?

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:55:06 -0500

Klimazwiebel is on my reader list, but I don't usually bother with the comments. It looks a bit like the septics are disappointed with him. And he with them: And, damn it, give your names, when making strong statements. When you have an opinion, then you should have also a name. Still, there are some good comments over there (Mike Hulme was there, though he had little to say when I looked).

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Do not trust the Torygraph, for it is Tory

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:53:55 -0500

Obvious enough you would have though, but some still fall for it. UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article is the latest excitement.

Breathlessly, they reveal:

It can be revealed that the IPCC report made use of 16 non-peer reviewed WWF reports. One claim, which stated that coral reefs near mangrove forests contained up to 25 times more fish numbers than those without mangroves nearby, quoted a feature article on the WWF website. In fact the data contained within the WWF article originated from a paper published in 2004 in the respected journal Nature. In another example a WWF paper on forest fires was used to illustrate the impact of reduced rainfall in the Amazon rainforest, but the data was from another Nature paper published in 1999. When The Sunday Telegraph contacted the lead scientists behind the two papers in Nature, they expressed surprise that their research was not cited directly but said the IPCC had accurately represented their work.

So, whilst quoting WWF rather than the paper direct is silly, the actual science was correctly represented. Not the kind of technical detail that the Torygraph's audience is going to be interested in, I fear. So is there better? Well the main lead is:

In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information. However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them

It is WG II again, of course. specifically, Table 1.2. Selected observed effects due to changes in the cryosphere produced by warming which includes a line for loss of ice climbs, in Andes, Alps, Africa. Exactly as you'd expect, this is sourced to climbers and mountain guides, who oddly enough know about this kind of stuff. Unlike the Torygraph, which in a determined bid to prove that they really are an utter pile of twats, says Experts claim that loss of ice climbs are a poor indicator of a reduction in mountain ice as climbers can knock ice down and damage ice falls with their axes and crampons.

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Hurrah: Copenhagen dampens banks' green commitment

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:31:42 -0500

Says the Grauniad. Not the "Hurrah", I added that. The Grauniad doesn't come out for it being good or bad news. But I think it is. Emissions trading is a waste of time and an enormous waste of money, promoted mostly by those who hope to get rich on it.

Carbon Tax Now.

My previous post refers.

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How I found glaring errors in Einstein's calculations?

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:58:50 -0500

Three posts in one day. And all of such high quality. You lucky people.

Pascal has a go at explaining the std.nutters. Some of it is the usual correct stuff, but some of it is wrong: What you need, over and above all that, is constant social interaction with other practising scientists. Oral tradition and daily exposure to other scientists' everyday decisions are indispensable. That sounds fairly plausible, doesn't it? Until you think of Newton. Or indeed, of Einstein.

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Sea ice again?

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:54:44 -0500

At some point I need to decide if I'll re-start the by-now-traditional sea ice bet for the summer. Before we start arguing over the details, remember that there is a lot of inter-annual variablity so we need to disagree *a lot* to have a meaningful bet. But at least one person has said in the comments that they feel "worried" by this years ice, so that suggests pessimism that I can exploit!

Any thoughts about what you might want to bet about, please leave a comment. My default position is going to be "will fit the 1979-2009 slope extrapolated to 2010". Bear in mind that this isn't a forecast - it is some kind of rough idea. If I frecall, RMG thought ~0.5 Msqkm was about the right uncertainty.

Oh, and here is a pointer to http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm to get you started.

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Airbourne fraction, again

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:52:10 -0500

This was an ask stoat question, and probably a fairly easy one, so I'll have a go.

First of all, what is it? AF (ie, Airbo(u)rne Fraction, is the proportion of human emitted CO2 that stays in the atmosphere, the rest being sunk in land or ocean. Now it is important not to confuse the "proportion that stays in the atmosphere" with "the concentration in the atmosphere" otherwise you get silly little skeptics running around thinking that "airbourne fraction is constant" means that CO2 has stopped increasing. Sigh. However, I see that last time I looked at this I was having to slap down the other side who seemed to think that AF was rapidly rising to 100%. Sigh #2.

Having poked around a bit after the recent Knorr paper, I find that skeptical science seems to have done a pretty good job on the story in general, so I don't think there is any need to explain that side much more (or, you can have mt and Eli). But since I've started this post I'd better find something to say. And that is... two things:

First off, there does seem to be some "pressure" to find increasing AF. That it should increase doesn't seem to be a strong scientific prediction, but it wouldn't be very surprising given increasing human emissions and possible degredation of sinks. And if it was increasing, that make future CO2 predictions more exciting. Which brings me on to the second point:

As someone commented, AF itself isn't a very physical variable. The real physical variables are the sources and the sinks. What we can measure fairly easily are sources (fossil fuel use well; deforestation harder) and the concentration. From those you can compute the sinks and the AF. Or you can try to estimate the sinks directly but that is imprecise. But now suppose you need to predict *future* CO2 levels (and if you want to project future climate change, you do need to). You can run your economic models forwards and deduce emissions, but modelling the sinks is hard (you can stuff them all into a coupled GCM with carbon model, and the Hadley folk at least can do that, but I'm not sure how accurate it is thought to be). So it is an awful lot easier just to use the constant scaling factor of AF to deduce future CO2 levels. And so you have this "tuning knob" and what value should it be? Since AF ~ 0.5, I think most people use a half, which seems about fair - you don't know its future value accurately, but then you're guessing at the emissions too, so it all washes out togther. But of course, if you knew that AF was going up, you could get to higher CO2 levels earlier. That would be bad, wouldn't it?

[Update: per L in the comment "Some folks talk about GHGs running away a bit, what with all the forest fires and permafrost melting -- this would also show up as an increased AF, wouldn't it". More easily, it would show up as yet another thing you can measure, the year-by-year change in CO2 levels. Which was what the earlier post, and its graph, was about. Which shows that nothing too wildly exciting is occurring.

ps: we're up to comment ~9,800. Nearly at the majic 10k, for which there will be a Prize! -W]

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Grave face

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:31:54 -0500

Going through the photo backlog. From Jenny's village.

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Himalayan glaciers to disappear by... when?

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:09:22 -0500

Reader enragedparrot asks the rather sensible question, which appears to have been somewhat neglected in the vast war of words of 2035, 2350, and quite what is the source for what: if 2035 is badly wrong, what is the right date?

The answer, of course, is that I don't know. But I may be able to tell you something useful along the way. If you've seen a better answer, please point me at it.

[Dragged from the comments: http://web.hwr.arizona.edu/~gleonard/2009Dec-FallAGU-Soot-PressConference-Backgrounder-Kargel.pdf is excellent -W]

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