Hard hitting global and local news
NASA Watch yesterday had posts and comments about a memo issued by NASA suspending all educational and public outreach activities From:    NASA Chief Financial Officer and the NASA Chief of Staff Subject:  Guidance for Education and Public Outreach (EPO) Activities Under Sequestration .
My "prediction": Tolkien was a wrestler Off topic, but still a prediction in that I don’t know the answer: Â I think Tolkien wrestled in his youth. When you read his description of armed combat, it’s pretty simple and somewhat vague, but when it becomes unarmed combat, suddenly every single motion gets described and punching takes a distant second place to grappling. Maybe it’s out there somewhere, but I’ve looked around and not read much about Tolkien’s athleticism – some brief mention of tennis and rugby at Oxford, but that’s about it.
Back at the beginning of time, well, to be honest Rabett Run, but did anything exist before, Eli had two excellent rants ( Rant I and Rant II ) about textbook prices and the machinations of the publishers. As you may have noticed in the US when your kid goes to college, the price of General Chemistry textbooks has shattered the $200 barrier. On the other hand, in markets where students are free to buy their own books, the price is much lower. For example, the International paperback edition (you can only get the hardcover in the US) costs ~$80 list and you can get it discounted. It is even less expensive in less expensive countries, which brings Eli to the law.
Shameless self-promotion, Part Two So the contest of Solutions for Planetary Stability continues, and both of the solutions I entered (former blog posts) have made it to the finalist stage.
Eli Rabett Eli Rabett Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional. His colleagues are smart, but they have a curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves.
Eli Rabett Eli Rabett Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional.
Too many takedowns to count for David Rose who doesn’t realize that short-term fluctuations in temperature tell you little about long term trends. The latest case is that according to one computer model, the temperature sequence ending in 2012 is close to the bottom edge of the statistical uncertainty range, a point where there’s only supposed to be a 5% chance that random variation produces a temperature below the modeled range.
UPDATE: An English version of Jos Hagelaars Dutch post is now available on Our Changing Climate. Eli appreciates their recognition that this indeed is the Wheelchair Curve Jos Hagelaar s splicing of the Shakun, Marcott, HadCRUT4 and CMIP5 A1B temperature anomaly reconstructions is clearly going to become iconic . Icons, like the hockey stick, need names. Eli was playing around with a few, the beach chair, the Barca lounger the airplane seat, none quite fit, until the Rabett thought about what we are doing to our world Oh yes, FWIW, the spike at the end is the instrumental record and the CMIP5 models of our future based on our current behavior and has nothing to do with how accurate the Marcott reconstruction is at recent times. Indeed that is the strength of Hagelaar’s wheelchair, that it uses multiple sources to give us the big picture in one figure.
Jos Hagelaars has spliced together Shakun et al, Marcott et al, HadCRUT4 and the A1B scenario Hogelaars points out that Marcott pretty much agrees with previous work where there is overlap and it is indeed a wonder how many posts that Willard Tony’s gang is generating on this. As for climate audit, well in Jos’ words the “statistical wonderboy McIntyre blogs merrily along. The reader would otherwise come to the conclusion that humans strongly influencing the climate, and of course that is not exactly desirable.” An important point in Marcott is that it pretty well delineates the start of the Anthropocene , about 150 years ago, when we added the blade to the hockey stick Google does a fair job translating and Eli will not step on Jos and Bart’s toes by attempting same (Dutch is close enough to German that Eli can Grok it given incentive)