The Bishop and glamour

The Bishop and glamour have a relationship roughly akin to that enjoyed by a divorced couple. We can go for weeks and months without ever setting eyes on each other but, just occasionally, a meeting, or rather a confrontation, is forced upon us by social necessity. Something to be endured rather than enjoyed.

Last night was one of those occasions, as we were the slightly nervous recipients of an invitation to a book launch in Edinburgh.  Our friend Gillian has written a novel, and it has been published by a real publisher. Cor! So, having hoovered the dust from the shoulders of my city jacket (which mercifully still just about fits) and having levered myself into a not-too-rumpled pair of smart trousers (which, alas, had shrunk rather since their last outing) we headed off in the episcopal courtesy car for an evening of metropolitan sfistication.

And it was all very pleasant in fact. The Bishop did feel a little out of place amongst the legal and literary set, but having consumed rather more of the free wine than is perhaps strictly necessary for a man of the cloth, managed to relax enough to enjoy himself. As far as I can recall, I managed not to disgrace myself either.

The book? It's a legal thriller set in Edinburgh featuring a detective called Alice Rice.  It's had a very good review from Alexander McCall Smith, and there seems to be a bit of a buzz developing around it. I reckon it's going to be a great success.

You can get it from Amazon here. 

Climate creationists

OK, so you know the score. Carbon dioxide is on the loose and we're all going to hell in a handcart. In fact WE'RE ALL DOOMED! Scientists have been overwhelmed by a consensus (does that hurt?) and are yelling for politicians to do something about it. Meanwhile a small group of fruitcakes are trying to undermine efforts to save the planet.

A small group of fruitcakes. 

These are called the sceptics, and they are HERETICS. They're going to hell in a handcart too, but nobody will talk to them when they get there, on account of them having been global warming deniers. They are BAD PEOPLE, but fortunately it's easy to spot them because they all have fistfulls of petrodollars stuffed in their pockets and they all work for oil companies, except the ones who don't and you can still spot them because of the petrodollars. So let's remember this people...

 

So the fruitcakes (may they rot in hell) are evil and they're like creationists. They spout their wicked lies, without a shred of scientific evidence to back them up, and disseminate them through the popular press - which everyone knows is owned by RUPERT MURDOCH. He is, of course, a puppet whose strings are pulled by BIG OIL. Yes, the popular press - like Proceedings of the Royal Society A - a grubby tabloid if ever there was one- or Geophysical Research Letters, all big-breasted ladies and even larger lies.

And now these creationist loons have got themselves a website. It's called Climate Audit and it's a magnet for every half-cut reactionary fruitloop fruitcake on the planet. Here they chant their neanderthal mantras and spew their evil bile. Just listen to this:

While I was reading about rotated varimax PCA in connection with Rob Wilson’s article, I came across R.W. Houghton and Y.M. Tourre, 1992, Characteristics of Low-Frequency Sea Surface Temperature Fluctuations in the Tropical Atlantic, Journal of Climate Volume 5, Issue 7 (July 1992) pp. 765–772 url. They observed that a PC analysis applied to Atlantic SSTs yielded a dipole in the 2nd EOF. Although this article is not discussed in Vimont and Kossin’s discussion of the Atlantic Multidecadal Mode, both articles seem to be probing similar data - with the Atlantic Multidecadal Mode looking very comparable to the dipole of Houghton and Toure.

How can anyone think that these people are scientists? Any right-thinking person can see at a glance that what is being talked about is THE OVERTHROW OF GLOBAL CIVILISATION! I mean, look at it! BURN THEM AND BURN THEM NOW!

But wait, a real scientist has actually entered the heretics' lair! Rob Wilson of the University of Edinburgh has gone to confront these loons on their own ground. Ha! Our very own Richard Dawkins taking apart the illiterate creationists with his razor sharp mind. Just enjoy this ripping apart of their stupid faith...

 For DWJ2006, I compiled essentially a mean series of these data. The resultant time-series is essentially the same although with a slightly weaker r2 with GOA temperatures. In this study, I undertook nested PCA. Meaning, that PC regression was undertaken over multiple time-steps (i.e. as the shorter series left the data-set) to allow the quantification of the reduction in calibrated signal going back in time. This is not possible if all the data are averaged together, although, I will admit that one could do nested averaging at every time-step. I used PCA as it quantified nicely the regional differences in growth. I would mention a couple of papers where I have utilised a nested averaging approach, but you guys are busy enough trashing this paper and I do not want to give you more work.

You see what happens when these creationists are confronted with a real scientist? Someone who understands logic and the scientific method? And having reduced them to a quivering wreck with his laser-beam logic he delivers the coup de grace with this devastating parting shot...

Thank you for taking the trouble to read the paper. Please feel free to submit any ‘issues’ that you may have to Climate Dynamics, and I will gladly address them through the peer review process.

 And so end all creationists...

Quote of the day

Slow news day

Not inspired to write anything very much. Been mucking about with Photoshop. Ended up with Patsy Hewitt looking like something out of Bo Selecta. Hope you like it.

 

Dendrochronology

I'm currently reading Oliver Rackham's "Woodlands".  While the dust jacket says that he's one of Britain's best known naturalists, Rackham's is hardly a name that is often cited around most British breakfast tables. This is a pity, because he has written some masterful books, including the seminal History of the Countryside. His books are full of wonderful, arcane knowledge about the British landscape and the way land use has changed over the years. Woodland and trees turn out to be wonderfully counterintuitive. For example the presence of an ancient tree in a wood is a strong indicator that the wood is not ancient. This is because in woods, trees are felled on a regular basis. So if you see an ancient tree in a wood, it probably means that a wood has grown up around an a single ancient tree. I find that rather wonderful.

Rackham is a botanist: his specialisms are trees and woodlands - as a fellow of All Souls Corpus Christi Cambridge he is an acknowledged authority on his subject - which is why I was amused to read his thoughts on dendrochronology and paleoclimatology. It's possible that I may be inferring something into his words which is in fact not there. But I can't help but get a feeling of a gentle sarcasm, a wise old man raising an eyebrow at the antics of the young.

Tree rings have other uses. Because weather varies from region to region, the provenance of a timber can sometimes be determined: if the sequence matches a master curve from Poland rather than England, this is evidence that the sample is of Baltic oak. By removing year-to-year variation, leaving the long-term trends, it has been possible in America to use growth rates as a measure of climate change.

To get a result one normally measures at least 100 rings, preferably from each of several contemporary trees or timbers. Tree rings are affected by other factors besides weather, such as defoliating caterpillars. In view of the statistical 'noise' introduced by unknown factors, it is surprising that the method has been so successful and so seldom at odds with dating by other means. 

[Emphasis is mine] 

Budget quotes

"So to reward savers, pensioners and hard working families, my aim now and in the next Parliament is to ensure that more of savers', pensioners' and working people's income, now taxed at the 22 pence rate, should be taxed at the lower 10 pence rate. And I propose to make a start today with a one billion pounds a year tax cut [...]

A measure which will benefit 25 million taxpayers."

Gordon Brown 2001

"So to punish savers, pensioners and hard working families, my aim now and in the next Parliament is to ensure that more of savers', pensioners' and working people's income, now taxed at the 10 pence rate, should be taxed at the higher 20 pence rate. And I propose to make a start today with a one billion pounds a year tax rise. [...]

A measure which will harm 25 million taxpayers."

Gordon Brown 2007 (or his thought process, at least).

Climate sceptics on Five Live

Prmoninent climate sceptics Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder were interviewed on Radio Five Live about their new book on the cosmic ray theory of climate change. The programme is archived here and should be available until the weekend. The interview starts around 1hr 55min in.

The Golden Arrow affair

Iain Dale is all over the Golden arrow affair - he's now onto his fourth update in as many days.

I wonder why the BBC hasn't mentioned it? 

The BBC: all the news that's good for you. 

EU travel bans

Tim Worstall has conducted a thorough, and thoroughly admirable fisking of the Independent's risible "50 reasons to praise the EU".

At number 18 the Independent would have us believe that we should love Brussels because of "Europe-wide travel bans on tyrants such as Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe".

"So?", replies TW. He might better still have responded "Bollocks!", (as he does to several of the other spurious claims of the Indy. Why? I hear you ask. Because of this:

Edward Chindori-Chininga, one of more than 100 Mugabe regime figures banned from traveling to the EU was observed slipping out of Brussels. He received a visa simply by omitting his middle name on the application, according to the Telegraph.

 (H/T Belmont Club)

But, I hear you say, this was just an isolated error.

Not so. The Telegraph also tells us that

Mr Chindori-Chininga is believed to be a regular visitor to France despite the EU travel sanctions.

Indeed, and didn't that dear little socialist, Mr Mugabe visit Paris a few years ago despite the travel ban? Certainly the EU was in favour of the visit.  I can't remember if the British government managed to veto it or not. Mugabe certainly went to Rome  at one point too. 

Bollocks it is, therefore. Or as TW might ask: don't these people have editors? 

Three rubbish thoughts

Three thoughts occurred to me today, as I was trying to squeeze a bag of rubbish into our overflowing wheelie bin. The reason it is overfilled is that Mrs Bishop forgot to put the bin out last week when she was doing the school run.

The first thought was this: if we are to move to fortnightly rubbish collections, and I forget to put my wheelie bin out, does that mean I could have four weeks worth of rubbish sitting outside? In mid summer?  A health hazard, surely?

The second thought was this:  how many bin men will be laid off as a result of only having to collect the rubbish fortnightly? What savings have been acheived in those councils (like Stephen Tall's Oxford) which have already instituted fortnightly collections?

The last thought was this: is the whole thing actually a way for the councils to deliver a worse service for the same cost, thus helping to secure their pensions?

God I'm getting cynical. 

Who said this?

I saw this somewhere, and can't remember who said it. The exact words escape me but it was along the lines of what I've shown above.  

Jock Coats and the Anglosphere

I was completely taken aback by something Jock Coats penned today. Jock, for those who don't visit his blog, is one of those rare beasts: a relatively liberal Liberal Democrat; someone who you could imagine not throwing money at the bureaucracy or, on a good day, perhaps even trying his hand at a little discreet liberalisation.

Or at least so I thought, until I read his posting on Britain's role in the world.

Jock has been pondering the way we treat people in the developing world and the claims made in The Great Global Warming Swindle that environmentalists are preventing development in poor countries so as to save us all from the spectre of climate change.

[W]e should put the Commonwealth, far more so than either Europe or transatlantic polity, at the core of our foreign and international development policy for the twenty-first century. Nearly sixty years ago, Churchill suggested that Britain's post-war role in the world ought to be as a link between Europe, America and the Commonwealth. We seem to have put a lot of emphasis on the former two, but for a variety of reasons seem to have quietly dropped the latter.

Well, yes, this is the Anglosphere idea, at least to a large extent - open ourselves up to these countries which have ties of history and culture, the common law tradition and so on. But why, we might ask, have we failed to emphasise the Commonwealth? I'm surprised that I need to point this out. It's the EU innit? We are not allowed to trade openly with the Commonwealth because Brussels says so. And what's the point in having emphasising our relations with someone we can't even trade freely with?

Yes, the intervening decades have seen many upheavals of independence from Empire and those newly "emancipated" nations struggling and jostling to find their position in the world. But let's face it, we are only where we are because of them. Because of the way we colonised them and took from them what we wanted, what would make us materially rich.

The Commonwealth could be a model, modern community of nations, with members from every continent and from every stratum of economic development on the planet, from the very richest to the very poorest, working together under a common aim of redistributing the common wealth within it to ensure that all its peoples attain their full potential.

I'm right with him here, up until that last bit. Redistributing the common wealth? Does he mean this? Has he completely taken leave of his senses? Surely he realises that "redistribution" impoverishes everyone? And is he aware that the "wealth" in the word "commonwealth" has the meaning of "well-being" rather than anything to do with money.

The whole piece makes no sense. We can't have more meaningful relations with the Commonwealth because we're not allowed to, and it would appear that even if we could Jock would want to make base our new relationship around socialism or reparations.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Sceptics win a round of the climate debate

There was a debate held in the US last night (I think) on the subject of climate change. There were some big hitters on both sides, including Richard Lindzen and Philip Stott for the heretics and Gavin Sshmidt and Richard Somerville for the orthodox. There's a transcript up here, which I haven't had a chance to look at yet.

What I did find interesting was the results of the polls held before and after the debate which showed a marked shift towards the sceptic position.

Global warming is not a crisis Date 3/14/2007 Votes Online Poll Before Debate After Debate For 54.76 % 29.88 % 46.22 % Against 41.94 % 57.32 % 42.22 % Undecided 3.30 % 12.80 % 11.56 %

This suggests strongly that when people are exposed to the sceptic position, they form a completely different view of the truth of the global warming hypothesis. 

Carbon dioxide removal

A commenter at Tim Worstall reminds me of a cunning masterplan I developed in a moment of idleness some years ago. If the problem is that a load of carbon stored in an inert form under the ground has been converted to CO2, then the sensible solution is to get it back into an inert form again. Luis Enrique, puts it thusly:

 It would appear to (ignorant) me that a good way of reducing atmospheric C02 would be to replicate the process of how it got underground - i.e. growing lots of trees, cutting them down and burying them as landfill and growing more. repeat. Which is kind of why I no longer care about buying paper from managed forests then chucking it in the bin. Am I making an error here?

I must say this looks flawless to me. Maybe we don't need send our economy back to the dark ages.

So it's OK! We're not doomed after all! 

That 800 year lag

One of the most striking claims of the Great Global Warming Swindle was that in the historic climate record,  the temperature rise preceded the rise in CO2 by approximately 800 years. On the face of it, this is pretty good evidence that temperature is driving CO2 rises rather than the other way round, which is exactly what the heretics claimed in the programme. As far as I can see, its existence is largely undisputed (although I have been pointed to one dissenter).

The orthodox response to this is that CO₂ is a feedback mechanism. Something causes CO₂ to rise. Because CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, it warms the earth, which raises CO₂ levels, which warms the earth further and so on. My initial objection to this was that the cycle should feed back exponentially. Apparently the answer to this is that the supply of CO₂ is l finite, so when it runs out the feedback loop is broken. But nobody actually knows what causes the rise in CO₂ anyway, so we're in the dark as to the details.

From my perspective, this all looks somewhat dodgy. Both methods rely on an initial warming of the earth to produce CO₂ (by a mechanism which isn't understood). The heretical case is that that's the end of the story. Warming produces CO₂. (I assume they argue that any warming from the CO2 is small because, relative to water vapour, the contribution of CO2 to the greenhouse effect is small). The orthodox case, however, imposes a CO₂ feedback on the initial process. This, however, requires another process to prevent the feedback spiralling out of control - one which is inextricably mixed up with whatever started the whole cycle off in the first place.

Which seems, I must say, a tad unconvincing. Certainly not something I'd like to rely on before I took drastic action. The orthodox case seems to fall foul of Occam's razor. 

I must say, I feel certain there must be more to it than this, so if anyone can enlighten me, I'm always keen to hear.  Why is the the heretical case not considered more plausible? What is the flaw in their case which requires imposition of a feedback loop?

As always, I should point out that I'm an interested amateur rather than a professional scientist, and there is a possibility I've got either camp's arguments (and probably both) completely wrong.