Staff climatologist Big Toe reading the thermometers today in the Inkstain World Headquarters weather station. His first assignment is to analyze data from the IWH thermometers as relates to the official National Weather Service readings. We are attempting to resolve uncertainties about the “urban heat island effect.”
Today’s IWH high was 81. At the Weather Service, the high was 73. Big Toe has concluded, based on this data point, that the urban heat island effect is real.
It’s bad enough when the science establishment charges for access to the loading dock, but Shelley Batts’ experience is even worse. Intrigued by a paper in The Science of Food, she blogged it, including a graph and data table from the paper. For which sin she was threatened with legal action for violation of copyright. The whole notion of “fair use” under U.S. copyright law is so murky that you should distrust anyone who claims they can actually tell you what it is. But, fair use or not, this is just dumb. (Hat tip Avelino. Loading dock jargon discussed previously here.)
Update: Happy resolution.
I can’t figure out how to embed a YouTube video (WordPress/TinyMCE insists on editing my html until it doesn’t work) so you’ll just have to click through to enjoy It’s a Wonderful Life in Los Alamos.
Down in the comments, Slinger points to Peter Ford’s Christian Science Monitor story on China’s greenhouse gas reduction noises:
With China’s carbon footprint expected to outsize America’s within a year, officials in Beijing appear to be backing away from their view that global warming is a Western problem that developed countries must solve.
While still insisting on their right to industrialize hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty, Chinese leaders are showing the first tentative signs of readiness to accept mandatory emissions-reductions targets. And they are setting themselves all kinds of green goals.
As the world’s No. 2 greenhouse-gas culprit – closing in on the 6 billion tons of CO2 produced by the US annually – China is under pressure both from other nations and from its own scientists’ predictions of a potentially catastrophic future if global warming is not curbed.
“Climate change has become a huge challenge to China’s social and economic sustained development,” Zheng Guoguang, head of the China Meteorological Administration, said Monday. “China is determined to mitigate and respond to climate change as a responsible nation.”
(As an aside, Peter Spotts and the other Monitor staffers do an excellent job on this topic, and they’ve recently set up a site to collect their work. New Mexicans who click through will see the fabulous moustache of our own snowpack guy Richard Armijo.)
I’ve been increasingly concerned about the rigor I’m able to offer here, so I recently made the decision to add a climatologist to the Inkstain staff.
Big Toe has a Masters Degree in Science, and has read several of the books on the desk behind me.
This map from Platts says it all. You can’t make a dent in greenhouse gas emissions without tackling the China problem.
One of PZ Myers’ criticisms of the whole idea of framing scientific communication is the lack of specifics about how to implement the ideas Matt Nisbet and Chris Mooney are pushing. I’ve been feeling as well that the whole discussion has been a bit lacking in the way of concrete examples (Gavin’s attempt to anchor by example notwithstanding).
This morning, over at the WorkBlog, I wrote about what is, to me, an intriguing example that raises questions about the argument Chris and Matt are pushing. It’s a story from the Joliet Herald News about a public meeting regarding the U.S. Department of Energy’s Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. If you read through the story, you see the key opponents using what seem to me to be framing strategies. The DOE official uses the “nuclear power can play a key role in meeting our nation’s energy needs” frame. The project’s critic frames it thusly: “We are all electricity addicts.”
But if you read the story, you find a third frame, which appears to have been chosen by the reporter: the nuclear transportation safety frame.
How can a scientist be successful framing, as Matt and Chris suggest they must, if the news media doesn’t play along? And what is and should be the role of the news media in choosing the frames to highlight?
I’ve got no answer here. The floor’s open for discussion.
It was beautiful this morning, and I didn’t need my car today for work, so I rode. I did not, however, check the weather forecast re the return trip. When I looked up the weather at 4 p.m. and saw 25 mph (40 kph) winds out of the south, with stiffer winds forecast by the time I would have been riding home, I needed a plan B. My commute takes me essentially due south.
There’s a reasonably convenient bus route, but I’ve been wanting to try a commute on the new RailRunner. There’s a stop a couple of miles from my work, and the train runs in to downtown. From there, just a three mile ride up heart attack hill (note to Chantal: I was wearing relatively sensible boy shoes) to get home. That means total bike miles are really just a mile shorter than riding direct. But that wind!
The numbers:
By car, 15 minutes one way.
By bike this morning: 40 minutes (with a tailwind)
The return commute: 14 minutes to the train station by bike, 10 minutes on the train, 22 minutes home from downtown, plus incidental waiting around – you don’t wanna cut things too close. Bonus points: riding the train is fun. And I loves me that hill.
William Connolley stumbles into the minefield that is defining the Australian drought:
Australia hasn’t got a mega-drought, only a 10-15% reduction in rainfall.
Many commenters complain, mostly offering up the absolutely useless evidence offered by alarmist news stories from the Australian press. Lab Lemming nails it by noting that drought is best defined by societal impact, not raw measures of precipitation falling from the sky.
By that measure, the lack of precipitation and warmer temperatures is colliding with a growing population and agricultural industry. But by any measure, it’s been darn dry over the last six years or so.
Our big iris bloom is getting underway – my favorite garden time of the year. And, based on previous phenology, right on schedule.
