More Hockey

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Yet another report on the hockey stick is out, (see here and here and here) and it says….

OK, can we just stipulate that Mike Mann’s 1998 and 1999 papers were really totally completely wrong and that one time he wore a tie that didn’t really match his shirt and looked really bad on television and also I heard that he’s a really bad tipper and also my neighbor said Mann’s got a cousin who’s in the state penitentiary but I don’t know if that’s really true but that’s what my neighbor said and anyway can we get back to discussing climate science?

Modeling Agriculture

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Interesting paper in GRL by Lobell et al. suggesting that temperature under doubled CO2 could be cooler in irrigated regions than the climate models suggest. Because of the relatively small area of the planet under irrigation, the overall effect is small, but the potential effect on food-production seems worthy of better understanding:

The reduction of warming is less than 25% of the temperature increase modeled for doubled CO2 in most regions; thus greenhouse warming will still be dominant. However, the results indicate that land use interactions may be an important component of climate change uncertainty in some agricultural regions. While irrigated lands comprise only ~2% of the land surface, they contribute over 40% of global food production. Climate changes in these regions are therefore particularly important to society despite their relatively small contribution to average global climate.

Jan?

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Rumors running wild in the cycling press that Jan Ullrich, kicked out of the Tour under the cloud of a doping investigation, has donned a fake beard and is showing up among the screaming throng, trying to hex the remaining riders:
diablo

A Promising New Climate Blog

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One of my frustrations with the climate blogging world is the relative abundance of climate wars-type discussion and the relative dearth of discussion of climate science. Sean Davis has started a new blog that looks promising in this regard: Head in a Cloud. Great early discussion, including a nice piece by Andrew Dessler on work he’s doing on deep convection in the lower stratosphere (convection is another one of those topics that came up in one of those maddeningly science-free discussions in the comments here a while back – Andrew adds some actual science).

More Floyd

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Bike racing – not the kind of weekend jaunts we do around here, but the real deal European racing scene – is fucking crazy. I mean, we as fans should feel this deep and abiding guilt about what we demand of “our” athletes. The doping is only part of it. Think of the most exciting thing in bike racing – the mountain stages in a race like Le Tour. What is it that we love most? The brilliant attack, the beaten face of he who could not respond, the ultimate pain we see in the faces of our champions. What is it Phil says over and over and over”

“He’s suffering like he never suffered before.”

We love that. I love that.

Daniel Coyle made that abundantly clear in “Lance Armstrong’s War,” made me feel this vague discomfort. Coyle’s back with the Floyd Landis story:

Landis jokes about his hip a lot. As Kay puts it, he’s a one-man comedy show. During my visit last month, the Floyd show consisted mostly of vivid, darkly funny monologues, most of which spring from his hourly epiphanies.

‘‘I got it!’’ Landis said. ‘‘When this is over, I’ll have the surgeons give me my old hip, and I’ll sell it on eBay. I’ll mount it on a trophy.’’ He pantomimed lying on a stretcher, talking to an invisible surgeon. ‘‘Excuse me, could I please get a to-go bag?’’

‘‘I need a cane!’’ he blurted out another time. ‘‘I’m going to show up at the tour with a cane, diamond tipped. Or maybe I should just go straight to the wheelchair. Motorized, with rims. Now that would be classic: drive up to the start, get out of my wheelchair and get on the bike! Yes!’’

The guy can barely walk. He can’t climb stairs. He can only mount the bike from one side.

This is gonna be a great bike race. Go Floyd.

Matt Busby = Bowie Poag? Michael Fumento?

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Some months ago I blogged in puzzlement over what might connect Matt Busby, Doris Day, B.B. King, etc.

A commenter who goes by “total info” popped in this morning with the answer:

Those three people were all replaced by doubles upon their deaths, like Paul McCartney.

This kind of activity is perpetrated by intelligence outfits like the CIA and perpetuated by media outlets like the BBC.

Hope this helps.

Thanks, total, yes it does. I was not aware of this particular CIA/BBC plot. Though Dave, wise in the ways of the football underworld, offers an alternative hypothesis:

So far everyone is correct. Matt Busby was a famous manager at Manchester United but he retired and joined the CIA and is still alive (despite what the BBC says). He currently assumes the last name “Fumento” and lives somewhere in the U.S.

And he was the walrus.

I believe Dave’s on to something here. Goo goo g’ joob. Or perhaps, as Dave suggests, rather than Michael Fumento, Matt Busby is really Bowie Poag?

Makin’ it Rain

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Fascinating paper in GRL suggesting that the massive Three Gorges Dam in China is making rain more in the mountains to the west, and rain less in the area of the dam itself:

The independent satellite data sets and numerical simulation clearly indicate that the land use change associated with the TGD construction has increased the precipitation in the region between Daba and Qinling mountains and reduced the precipitation in the vicinity of the TGD after the TGD water level abruptly rose from 66 to 135 m in June 2003. This study suggests that the climatic effect of the TGD is on the regional scale (~100 km) rather than on the local scale (~10 km) as projected in previous studies.

This is another example of the importance of the sort of land use change effect that Roger Pielke Sr. is always on about.

Wu et al., Three Gorges Dam affects regional precipitation, GRL, Vol. 33, L13806, doi:10.1029/2006GL026780, 20

More Floyd

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The bike racing web’s crackling with the Floyd news:

American Tour de France favorite Floyd Landis (Phonak) will hold a press conference on Monday to respond to press reports that he is suffering from a degenerative condition that could threaten his career and may undergo hip surgery following this year’s race.

Landis, sitting second in the Tour de France behind race leader Sergei Gontchar (T-Mobile), will meet the press on Monday afternoon at his team hotel in Bordeaux, where the 4500-strong Tour entourage is based for an official rest day.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere

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Since last November, I’ve been spending odd bits of time here and there hanging out with a group of bright teenagers who do math competitions. They’re a wonderful bunch of kids, nurtured by a great group of adults. (Journal photographer Marla Brose has been working on this with me since the beginning, and her pictures are great. Unfortunately not on the web yet.)

My story:

Jack Ingalls jumped up to the whiteboard and grabbed a fist full of colored pens.
“There’s a really elegant solution,” the Sandia Prep eighth-grader said as he began sketching out the answer to a math problem.

Switching between red, green and blue, Ingalls drew a series of circles, squares and triangles and explained the simple way out of what sounded like an impossible tangle of a problem:

You’ve got a deck of cards with a triangle, circle or square on each card, and each one is red, green or blue, and the colors are either light, medium or dark, so how many possible combinations of three cards are there which …

The problem went on, and to a visitor unfamiliar with the terrain, Ingalls’ solution sounded every bit as tangled as the problem.

But not to the students around the table. They grasped its elegance.

“Rule number one,” said Bill Cordwell, a Sandia Labs physicist and the informal math coach for the Saturday morning gathering in the Manzano High School library: “Don’t get intimidated by an impossible-sounding problem.”

The Ride

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We rode one of my absolute favorite stretches of Albuquerque-area road this morning.

It’s in the Manzano Mountains, the road leading east from Oak Flat Picnic Area, a twisting gentle descent through the woods that lets a slowpoke like me feel really fast without being so steep that you end up going scary fast. The forest is beautiful and cool, the road is nicely banked, there’s very little traffic.

Of course you’ve got to climb up into the mountains to get there. Anything else would be a cheat. But the ride up South 14 (actually now numbered 337, but everyone still calls it “South 14”) isn’t all that steep, and the whole thing makes for a pleasant day in the saddle.

The New Mexico Touring Society’s Oak Flat page shows a number of routes in the, area, though you’ve got to head east at Oak Flat – it’s on their map, but not highlighted – for the fun twisty bits.

(Props to the NMTS people for an amazing web resource of Albuquerque-area rides. It’s another one of those fabulous Internet treasures – people who know something useful generously using the Interweb to share it.)