Another reminder that, while we all try to furiously explain that the hockey stick doesn’t matter all that much, or that solar variability isn’t really a deal killer, or that we shouldn’t be too concerned that the ocean is actually cooling, out beyong the science skirmishes where people have ignored the climate wars, accepted the scientific consensus and promised to act on it, Kyoto doesn’t seem to be working real well.
Bread Mold Query
Shirley has a bread mold question:
hello,
we are doing a bread molds lab, but we found the bread are turning into liquid after one week. why?
by the way, we poured salt, sugar and water on them respectively.
thanks a lot!
I’m afraid I’m no help, but perhaps if you have any suggestions, you could leave them in the comments on that post?
Thanks.
Geek Humor
Seen in a Sandia Labs parking lot, a bright red bumper sticker that read…
If this sticker is blue, you’re driving too fast.
Global Cooling
This has already been hashed out in some detail over on Roger Pielke Sr.’s blog, but the Lyman et al. paper on ocean heat content is out:
We observe a net loss of 3.2 (±1.1) × 1022 J of heat from the upper ocean between 2003 and 2005. Using a broad array of in situ ocean measurements, we present annual estimates of global upper-ocean heat content anomaly from 1993 through 2005. Including the recent downturn, the average warming rate for the entire 13-year period is 0.33 ± 0.23 W/m2 (of the Earth’s total surface area). A new estimate of sampling error in the heat content record suggests that both the recent and previous global cooling events are significant and unlikely to be artifacts of inadequate ocean sampling.
Name That Paper
A pair of papers on the relationship between solar variability and climate have been all the rage in the media and climate wars blogosphere over the last week or so.
One, by Foukal et al., got the big headlines: “Study acquits sun of climate change.” Blame the humans! And it was in Nature!
The other, by Scafetta and West, came out a day letter and raised questions about whether climate models are understimating the solar contribution. Sadly, it didn’t get much press (It wasn’t in Nature!), but Benny Peiser gave it a good ride, saying that if Scafetta and West are right, it “would present serious trouble for the IPCC.”
So here’s a quiz for readers. Below the fold are quotes from each of the papers. Try to guess which quote is from which paper:
Free Shipping Worldwide!
I’m no marketing expert, but it seems to me that Dead Sea Cosmetics is a less than optimal name.
Out of Nowhere
A weird musical moment: I’m listening to this old scratchy bad Charlie Parker album I bought on a discount rack, and I realize I’m listening to the theme from Star Trek. It’s a song called “Out of Nowhere.” The CD box doesn’t say when it was recorded, but Charlie Parker died in 1955, so I’m guessing he didn’t write the Star Trek theme music.
Apparently among music types this is a well-known example of, umm, appropriation.
Trusting in Statistics
My friend Luis, who was smart before he started going to law school, has an interesting discussion of the expansion of the open source model:
There is no guarantee, but community practices evolve to make it statistically likely that help (or bug fixing, or whatever) will occur. The internet makes this possible- whereas in the past if you wanted free advice, you had to have a close friend with the right skills free time, you can now draw from a much broader pool of people. If that pool is large enough (and in software, it appears to be) then it is a statistical matter that one of them is likely to have both the right skills and the right amount of free time.
The question Luis poses: where else (the law?) has/will this also occur?
Rain
I’ve been a bit of a slug about rounding up my rainfall data, but I finally got around to totalling things up from The Amazing Monsoon. Here are the numbers:
| Month | Avg. | NWS | My house |
| June | 0.61 | 1.14 | 0.99 |
| July | 1.38 | 3.55 | 3.76 |
| August | 1.42 | 3.74 | 5.80 |
(Avg. is the National Weather Service’s long term average, NWS is the reading at the weather service office, which is at a similar elevational gradient to my house, my house is my house.)
The Public Scientist
I can humbly say “I knew Andrew Dessler before….” 🙂
I stumbled across him a few years back when he co-authored a paper with Ken Minschwaner, an atmospheric physics guy here in New Mexico, so the roots of our conversation predate my obsession with climate change.
Now Andrew’s made the big time (“I define success as being interviewed by The Houston Chronicle’s SciGuy, Eric Berger,” Andrews said on his blog.). In the Berger interview, Andrews makes an important point about the lack of incentive for scientists to play a public role:
why don’t more scientists engage the public in a broader way? There are a lot of risks when scientists do that. There’s a risk that their work will be misinterpreted. There’s a risk that they feel they will be negatively perceived by their colleagues. There’s no real reward in the academic system for being someone who goes out and talks to the general public. I think that’s a real problem with the tenure-university system, we don’t get rewarded for outreach. You get rewarded for publications and grants. So, you know there are these downsides, and there’s not a lot of upsides.
This is unfortunate. I acknowledge a bias here. I need scientists willing to do what Dessler does, or I’ve got nothing to write in the newspaper. But I also think it’s important that scientists communicate with the public about what they’re doing.