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James Fallows thinks about the ten year anniversary of the Iraq invasion. He says he’d like to hear from the liberal war hawks and what they’ve learned. I don’t quite fit that category – not always a liberal for one thing, and was undecided rather than a supporter of the war.
While no one was looking the sun has gone cold, more precisely the sun gods have decreased total solar irradiation by about 4 W/m 2 to 1360.8 + 0.5 W/m 2 from 1365.4 + 1.3 W/m 2 ERB is the Earth Radiation Budget instrument, ACRIM is the Active Cavity Radiometer Irradiation Monitor, SORCE is the Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment carrying the TIM, Total Irradiation Monitor. The rest is left to the industrious reader. What happened was that apertures in earlier instruments were not properly chosen, allowing excess light to be scattered into the sensor (right side of the figure below) resulting in higher TSI being measured. The magnitude of the effect was determined in a purpose built testing facility at LASP. The error is not without consequences As Kopp and Lean point out, A nonzero average global net radiation at the top of the atmosphere is indicative of Earth’s thermal disequilibrium imposed by climate forcing. But whereas the current planetary imbalance is nominally 0.85 W/m 2 [Hansen et al., 2005], estimates of this quantity from space‐based measurements range from 3 to 7 W/m 2 SORCE/TIM’s lower TSI value reduces this discrepancy by 1 W/m 2 [Loeb et al., 2009].
I’ve really enjoyed Chris Mooney’s Point of Inquiry podcasts, so it’s too bad the latest one with pro-GMO activist Mark Lynas failed to wrestle significantly with real arguments about GMOs (Chris, you talk about GMOs too much to say you don’t want to delve into technical issues). One interesting issue did come out of the podcast – at one point Lynas says the Union of Concerned Scientists’ rejection of the National Academy of Sciences position on GMOs is a contradiction of UCS arguments that we should rely on the consensus opinion on climate change
Tuesday, March 05, 2013 Posted by EliRabett Rabett Run Subscribe Rabett Run Posts Posts Comments Comments Contributors 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
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
There appears to be a lot of Bayesian thumb sucking going on, maybe the first was Eli’s duo with Socrates , and, of course the bunnies know that James has been going on about uniform priors , and there is always Andrew Gelman . Now some, not Eli to be sure, might think that the recent election also gave a strong push to priors and p values and such. Nate Silver of the NYTimes blog five thirty eight has a book out which is reviewed in Science by Sam Wang and Ben Campbell, who also are in the election prognostication business. Silver, of course, is another guy with a Bayesian hammer looking for statistical nails and finding them all about. Eli thought a couple of paragraphs towards the end capture what the Rabett has been trying to beat into bunnies heads. Our biggest criticism of the book is that although statistics and Bayesian inference are powerful ideas, they are not a cure all. In his enthusiasm for the good Reverend, Silver has stuffed a fair bit into the same Procrustean bed. Silver uses the old fox-hedgehog analogy, saying that foxes (including himself) use many ideas, whereas hedgehogs focus on one subject only. But here he is a hedgehog with one big idea:statistics.
Saturday, March 02, 2013 Posted by EliRabett Rabett Run Subscribe Rabett Run Posts Posts Comments Comments Contributors 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. His colleagues are smart, but they have a curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves
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Nothing, Nothing At All A while ago, one Gerhard Wisnewski was trying to somehow, but not really, blame the Weasel, for the German Wikipedia agreeing that the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) was no more a source of reliable information than, say Willis Eschenbach and that links that cited EIKE were verboten. Eli and the Weasel flipped them off, but Willis thinks that Wisnewski’s best was worth posting on the world’s funniest science denial site . Before the comments wandered off into the libertarian shrubbery even Russell would have a hard time keeping up with the queer. Nothing surprises me as regards that weasel (sic) character! Wall, first and coming revolution spring immediately to mind! Carrick would insist that was a love note In writing a short Wikipedia article on New Zealand Climate Science I referred to Professor Bellamy as a renowned botanist, which of course he is. That bastard Connolley changed that to television presenter. Herr Prof