A sense of scale

A palate cleanser... a new and highly accurate video depicting a trip from Tibet to the ends of our event horizon, 13.5 billion lightyears away.  Be sure to use the High Def option.



It reminds me of the earlier Powers of Ten video.  This one not only goes out, but takes us down past the atomic nucleus.  Each square is either a factor of ten larger or smaller than the last square.



Enjoy!

p.s., I will figure out how to make the template wider when I get a few moments.

Now here's some climate change

More than a decade ago, this ScienceDaily article reported some impressive climate change.

The evidence from the greenhouse gas bubbles indicates temperatures from the end of the Younger Dryas Period to the beginning of the Holocene some 12,500 years ago rose about 20 degrees Fahrenheit in a 50-year period in Antarctica, much of it in several major leaps lasting less than a decade.

Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is what Mama Nature can do; 20 degrees F in 50 years.  And it wasn't restricted to the Antarctic.  Similar changes happened in the Greenland according to the ice core data.

Here is the home of the Taylor Dome Ice Core Project.

UPDATE: I found a nice PNAS paper on Ice Core evidence of abrupt climate change.

How can Ice Cores tell us the temperature?

NASA's earth Observatory has a quick explanation of how Oxygen isotope ratios can be used as a proxy for temperature.

Water molecules containing light oxygen evaporate slightly more readily than water molecules containing a heavy oxygen atom. At the same time, water vapor molecules containing the heavy variety of oxygen condense more readily.

A quick tour of ice core hockey sticks.

A narration of hockey sticks over time, using ice core data.

Hockey Sticks are de rigueur for AGW

Well, de rigueur isn't quite the right word.  A Hockey Stick graph is essential to the claim of AGW.  The A up front, Anthropomorphic, requires that we know humans are causing most of the warming.  If mama Nature can change world average temperature[0] faster than is currently happening, well, we can't know with certainty that humans are causing the warming.  The Mann hockey stick was the proof positive of AGW -- before it was debunked.  Now, AGW proponents argue hockey sticks don't matter.

UPDATE: Mann and crew published a paper in 2008 building the hockey stick using a wider data set.  Of course, this was before we found out that Dr. Mann was happy to play games with his graphs and data sets, so I'm not really sure how much trust we should extend to this latest effort until it has been vetted by actual disinterested statisticians.  Somehow, peer-review has gone seriously awry in the climate science field.

In case you, gentle reader, want to build your own hockey stick -- perhaps using pseudorandom red noise, perhaps using temperature data -- here is a nice intro to the art of making hockey sticks via statistical analysis.  Try it, and you will learn something about the whole sausage making process.  Plus, you'll have a nice hockey stick at the end, and you will understand why.


[0] - whatever that statistical creature is defined to be

An oldie but a goodie

Dr. Derek Lowe writes about Climategate and scientific conduct shortly after the story broke.  Read the whole thing for a reasoned and rational prespective by a practicing scientist.  One quote...

I do not want the future of the world economy riding on this. And what's more, it appears that the CRU no longer has much of their original raw data. It appears to have been tossed over twenty years ago. What we have left, as far as I can see, is a large data set of partially unknown origin, which has been adjusted by various people over the years in undocumented ways. If this is not the case, I would very much like the CRU to explain why not, and in great detail. And I do not wish to hear from people who wish to pretend that everything's just fine.

 Exactly so.

Liquids down, people

This is not a keyboard and screen safe post.  From RealClearPolitics:

When leaked e-mails recently exposed talk of manipulating scientific evidence on global warming, Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at The National Center for Atmospheric Research, argued that skeptics and other evildoers had cherry-picked and presented his comments out of context.

To rectify this injustice, I sent Trenberth (and NCAR) a Freedom of Information Act request asking for his e-mail correspondences with other renowned climate scientists in an effort to help contextualize what they've been talking about.

Surely the tragically uninformed among us could use some perspective on these innocuous comments by Trenberth: "We can't account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can't"; "we are (not) close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter."

 I'll let you guess at the response from NCAR.