Fair-ish and Balanced-ish

 
Quote of the Day

It's not wise to try to parody wingers. You risk ending up with new, disturbing friends that are hard to safely and tactfully get rid of.

--Zizka, in the comments of this thread.
posted by Ken at 6:43 PM

 
Death of the Dinosaurs - A New Theory

What killed the dinosaurs is a question which interests many. It now seems that a asteroid strike played a contributing role, however, how exactly it did this is a matter for debate. Firestorms, global warming and global cooling have all been suggested. Now a new theory has been proposed.

This theory is primarily based on two different observations; the pattern of extinction among vertebrates, and the discovery of tiny particles known as spherules at the K-T boundary (this is a geological layer which was caused by the asteroid impact).

It appears that the event which killed the dinosaurs didn't kill at random. While the dinosaurs died, many other groups survived. The survivors include fish, amphibians, lizards, snakes, turtles, crocodiles, birds and mammals (placental, monotreme, multituberculate, Gondwanatherian, dryolestoid and marsupials).

Spherules, on the other hand, are "formed from ejecta particles as they melt and incandesce on reentry". They have been found all over the world (well, techically, there are many unsampled areas of the global, but they have been found in places like New Zealand which are pretty far from the impact) at the K-T boundary.

So how do these two obervations link together? The authors suggest that the asteroid through massive quantities of material into the upper atmosphere. They then heated up emitting large amounts of infra-red radiation. The authors write:

The intense IR radiation would have originated from the entire sky. Darkness would have been eliminated worldwide for several hours and shadows curtailed. Shadowing effects would have been restricted to a direct proportion of the fraction of the sky blocked by a massive object. An organism at the foot of a lengthy vertical cliff, for example, would have been spared radiation from just under half the sky. It would not have been sufficient to shelter in a gully, under an isolated tree, or even uder a sparsely forested canopy. Life confined to Earth's surface would have perished well before incineration. After ignition temperature was reached, fires would not have spread from one area to another in the usual way. Rather fires would have ignited nearly simultaneously at places having available fuel... The fires (on land with sufficient fuel) would have been especially intense because IR radiation coming from the entire sky continued to add heat even as the fires burned.

Sounds pretty bad. Fortunally, it is possible to live through a intense IR blast lasting a couple of hours + associated firestorm. The key is to get something between you and radiation. Soil and water are both quite good at this. So animals which burrow, or swim can survive. Meanwhile, animals which can't die. This was pretty bad news for the dinosaurs. Mammals, lizards, birds and so on, survived the initial firestorm. This in itself doesn't mean an escape from extinction, but rather, it does give the species a fighting change.

Source: Douglas Robertson, Malcolm McKenna, Owen Toon, Sylvia Hope and Jason Lillegraven Survival in the first hours of the Cenozoic GSA Bulletin May/June 2004. Pages 760 - 768).
posted by Ken at 7:40 PM

 
More on Castles and Henderson

Long time readers of this blog will be aware that the criticisms of the economic modeling of the IPCC's various scenarios by Ian Castles and David Henderson have been covered a number of times. Now, a (peer reviewed, incidentally) article has appeared (or more precisely, a preprint has appeared on the journal's website) in Climatic Change by Bjart Holtsmark and Knut Alfsen of Statistics Norway (PPP Correction of the IPCC Emission Scenarios - Does It Matter?).

The authors point out that while using market exchange rates does increase the income differences between rich and poor countries, this increase is effectively neutralised because the same market exchange rates also overstate the emission-intensity gap.

What this boils down to is this; market exchange rates aren't a good indicator when comparing standards of living in different countries, however, this doesn't make a difference to the economic modeling used by the IPCC.

Of course, this hasn't stopped people, such as Alan Wood (economics editor of The Australian) taking everything which Castles and Henderson produce as gospel.
posted by Ken at 7:09 PM

 
A Change in Opinion

Ken Parish, who I have debated with in the past on global warming, has had a change of heart.
posted by Ken at 4:04 PM

 
Sarin Found in Iraq

Apparently the suspected sarin containing artillery shell which was found in Iraq is real.

Thank gods for that. Had it been full of explosives, the two soldiers who sustained minor injuries would probably be dead when the shell exploded.

This is simply another illustration of why chemical weapons don't deserve to belong in the WMD category - at least not until military grade explosives are added.
posted by Ken at 7:02 PM

 
Iraq and Early Tasmanian History

While flipping through The Australian today, I came across a article on the death rates in Iraq. This immediately caused me to flash back to the Keith Windschuttle debates. The topic of death rates came up then. I had a large post on the death rates in Tasmania (which one of Windschuttles friends called a nun's picnic) vs. other violent places here. The relevent part of that post reads as following:

As mentioned in my post below, Windschuttle's work has a significant number of flaws. I've been commenting on this over at the Armadillo, and I thought it would be interesting to see what the consequences would be if Windschuttle was right about the Tasmania Aborigine population, but Willis was correct about the number of Aboriginal deaths.

About here, I should point out that this post is heavily based off the work of Mark Finnane and H. A. Willis, whose papers are linked to in the post below this one.

To replicate Finnane's work, with Willis's numbers we get the following result:

Assuming a constant population of 2000 from 1803 to 1834, we get a death rate of about 300 - 540 /100,000 (Willis allows for considerable uncertainty in the accounts).

This compares with Finnane's figure of around 190 / 100,000 for the same time period.

Now what happens when we look at the 1828 to 1834 period (where Windschuttle assumes that the population had shrunk to around 500).

With this time period we get death rates of 3700 - 4900 / 100,000 (this compares to the Finnane figure of around 2000).

Now, it's important to note that these figures are very biased towards low death rates for two reasons.

* Not all deaths would have been recorded, and
* These calculations assume a constant population - as the population was declining, the average population over the time period is significantly lower than the population at the start of the time period.

So with these conservative figures in mind, how do they compare with some other numbers:

The United States general has a murder rate in the region of 9 - 10 / 100,000.
Medieval historians are surprised when the murder rate reaches the 10 - 60 / 100,000.
Assuming that Australia had a population of around 5 million in 1914, and suffered 60,000 deaths in World War I, the death rate would be 240 / 100,000.
According to the Cambodian Genocide Project, during the Khmer Rouge regime, about 1.7 million died out of a population of 8 million. This gives a death rate of about 4300 / 100,000.

From The Oz's article, the death rate in Baghdad is about 76 / 100,000.

To help out the warbloggers, perhaps they might to use this slogan; Iraq, significantly less dangerous than a nun's picnic.
posted by Ken at 8:00 PM

 
Around the World

Tim Lambert is on the warpath, and has a couple of posts on global warming skeptic Ross McKitrick here, here and here.

My pick of McKitrick's litany of errors is this; when trying to calculate temperature trends from a number of stations McKitrick replaced months when no data was reported with a reading of zero degrees. This is the sort of error that high school students shouldn't make. But McKitrick isn't a high school student. He is a Professor of Economics. Very very poor.

On the other hand, McKitrick has supplied plenty of evidence to back up a comparison by the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, which puts global warming skeptics in the same category as flat-earthers.

Elsewhere in the blogosphere, John Quiggin has posts on the Copenhagen Consensus and nuclear power as a solution for reducing global warming.
posted by Ken at 7:41 PM

 
Speaking of Peusdoscience

Check out the comments on this post of Tim Lambert's.
posted by Ken at 7:59 PM

 
Scientific Authority

Hans Erren has objected (posted into the comments below) to my post below by stating:

The complete scientific community has already read what Spencer has written, even before the Nature paper was published.

My note: That's news. The complete scientific community... Methinks Hans doesn't know what he's talking about.

You may want to read about the peer pressure or bandwaggon fallacy here:
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/bandwagon.html

Description of Bandwagon
The Bandwagon is a fallacy in which a threat of rejection by one's peers (or peer pressure) is substituted for evidence in an "argument." This line of "reasoning" has the following form:

Person P is pressured by his/her peers or threatened with rejection.
Therefore person P's claim X is false.

Needless to say, I have a very different view to Hans on this subject. My first forays into debating science on the internet, didn't concern global warming, but rather creationism and evolution. From this, I developed a strong respect for the peer review process. When I moved onto global warming, it didn't take long for me to realise that

The EvoWiki entry on peer review includes the following quote:

If a scientist submits an article to such a journal, the editor will pick other scientists knowledgeable with regard to that subject and send the article to them to decide whether it's fit to be published.

Peer review prevents really bad articles from being published in the journals in question. To find really bad science in written form, you need to look for it either in books or in non-peer-reviewed journals - or, of course, the internet.

And that is exactly what peer review is. It's a hurdle which all scientific papers must pass. It isn't a particular high hurdle, but it's a hurdle which is a pretty big killer for peusdoscientists. If global warming skeptics want to be taken seriously by the scientific community, they should start trying to publish in scientific journals and quit whining about peer review as censorship.

A good example of how peer review would help a global warming skeptic, is this article by John Daly. It contains this sentence fragment:

Using tree rings as a basis for assessing past temperature changes back to the year 1,000 AD, supplemented by other proxies from more recent centuries...

which is complete rubbish. The other proxies listed in the paper which Daly is attacking go back past 1000 AD. Peer review should catch mistakes like this (incidentally, when I emailed Daly about this (and other) errors he, for all intents and purposes, ignored my criticisms - so much for his "open review").

So, how does peer review cope with unexpected results which overturn accepted dogma? This post, on Panda's Thumb, gives an example. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't censored. More relevant to global warming, Spencer and Christy original paper which claimed that the troposphere was cooling, wasn't censored either.

PS. And just for fun, while searching for some links for this, I came across this unrelated post and loved it so much, I just had to throw it in; Uh-oh. Evolutionists discover two more gaps in the fossil record!.
posted by Ken at 6:40 PM

 
Spencer's Reaction To The New Tropospheric Temperature Trend

The Nature paper which I linked to below has created its own little mini-firestorm.

Quark Soup probably has the best collection of links. What follows is my own interpretation of events.

Roy Spencer (who is one the original authors on the first paper to try and reconstruct tropospheric temperature trends from satellite data) has published an article in Tech Central Station on the recent paper who's abstract is included in the post below. Basically Spencer isn't a fan of the new paper. Most of his article is simply pathetic whining.

Somehow he appears to feel that Nature should have got him (or his co-author, John Christy) to review the new paper. He isn't the only expert in the field - in fact, experts have been finding mistakes in his work for many years now. There is no reason why he should be picked to review a paper like this. There is more along these lines, as he complains about the scientific journals Nature and Science.

However, his article does have an interesting point. He claims to have identified an error the new papers methodology. I'm not explain this error in detail, rather you should click on the link and read Spencers account of it.

I don't have an opinion on whether or not the error is significant (or even real), however, what I find interesting is where he has chosen to publish his rebuttal. Tech Central Station, has a reputation for being a lot things, scientific is one of them. The best place to publish his rebuttal would be in letter to Nature. By publishing in TCS, Spencer has ensured that the audience is mostly composed of rightwingers who are interested in science, but not particularly proficient. Very few of them will read the original papers. Even fewer will understand it. By publishing in Nature Spencer would reach an audience that contains real experts who can examine his claims, additionally Fu and co-workers would get a chance to reply.

This can bring many benefits. For example, if one reads the new paper, one important point which they will become aware of, is that the authors where aware of the problem which Spencer mentions (somehow he forgot to mention this in TCS piece). The comment attached to this post gives more details.

Roy Spencer has done some great work with satellite data, but he risks destroying his reputation in the scientific community, unless he submits his criticisms to a scientific journal.
posted by Ken at 4:50 PM