Olympics have started – blogging will be light

July 28, 2012

London 2012 has begun.

London 2012

A pretty good start with the opening ceremony last night. The  industrial revolution and the molten metal and the rise of the rings was superb.

Execution was fine but  I thought the NHS section was ill conceived and Mr. Bean was a little self-indulgent. The Queen and James Bond was actually nondescript. It was an impressive bit of film making – but only because it was the Queen. Her corgis did well. Home crowd of course but not a very “sporting” reception for some of the “unknown countries”. Excusable because some of the “countries” were not countries at all.

The “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” sorted under “F” was ridiculous but that can be put down to the IOC rather than to the London organisers.

The Beijing opening ceremony was far more spectacular but humourless. Some of the London themes were more “socialist” than at Beijing. Beijing was trying to hide its “socialism” while London seemed to be doing the opposite. The ceremony had some humour – but some of which fell flat.

The raising of the rings in London though will stick in my memory.

Blogging will be extremely light for the next 3 weeks.

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Oh Calcutta!!

July 26, 2012

I finished my schooling in Calcutta and in spite of all its problems and challenges it holds special memories for me.

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Further confirmation that carbon dioxide lags temperature by hundreds of years

July 24, 2012

I find the blithe assumption – based on supposition and without any evidence – that carbon dioxide has any significant impact on climate, perhaps the most irritating part of the politically correct global warming dogma. I have no objection to it being a hypothesis but it is not rational to take such an hypothesis as fact just  “because there is no other explanation”. In fact, solar effects provide most of the “missing” explanation but since solar effects cannot be put down to man and clearly this is politically incorrect!!

Historical data of ice ages shows that carbon dioxide changes lag temperature changes and previously it seemed that the lag might be as long as 700 – 1000 years. Researchers from the University of Copenhagen have published a new paper. The paper suggests that the lag was more likely a few hundred years and less than 400 years. But lag it was. I draw two main conclusions:

  1. That carbon dioxide variations in the past were primarily caused by temperature changes and not the other way around, and
  2. That the degassing of the oceans following a temperature rise caused an increase in carbon dioxide  in just a few hundred years.

Of course this does not prove that increasing carbon dioxide emissions cannot influence temperature. But what it does show is that the primary link between temperature and CO2  is that temperature leads CO2 concentration.

Given that

  1. there have been no “temperature runaways” in the past where the subsequent increase of  CO2 concentration has provided a positive feedback to the initial temperature rise and
  2. given that in any system which tends to an equilibrium the effect tends to neutralise the cause,

I find it more plausible that increasing CO2 concentration may well have contributed to neutralising the temperature increase which caused the CO2 emission in the first place.

The greatest climate change the world has seen in the last 100,000 years was the transition from the ice age to the warm interglacial period. New research from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen indicates that, contrary to previous opinion, the rise in temperature and the rise in the atmospheric CO2 follow each other closely in terms of time. The results have been published in the scientific journal, Climate of the Past. …

It had previously been thought that as the temperature began to rise at the end of the ice age approximately 19,000 years ago, an increase in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere followed with a delay of up to 1,000 years.

“Our analyses of ice cores from the ice sheet in Antarctica shows that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere follows the rise in Antarctic temperatures very closely and is staggered by a few hundred years at most,” explains Sune Olander Rasmussen, Associate Professor and centre coordinator at the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.

Tightened constraints on the time-lag between Antarctic temperature and CO2during the last deglaciation by J. B. Pedro, S. O. Rasmussen, and T. D. van Ommen Clim. Past, 8, 1213-1221, 2012

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Breivik and Holmes and guns and massacres

July 23, 2012

A year ago Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people in Norway. He used home made explosives and firearms.

Two days ago James Holmes killed 12 in Aurora, Colorado. He used firearms to kill but also had explosives.

My perception is that the number of lone individuals carrying out these murderous rampages is increasing. And I wonder if suicide bombers are not part of the same social phenomenon.

Banning the sale of firearms or the ingredients for making explosives to individuals would not have influenced their murderous intentions. Controlling the sale of firearms may have hindered them somewhat in the scale of the execution of their intentions. If firearms were not available to them they would probably have used other methods (explosives most likely) to fulfil their intentions.

It is possible that there have always been such individuals who wish to attack the society they live in. I suspect that our societies themselves create the stresses which take some individuals over the edge. And we don’t really know what these are. But I can’t help thinking that the focus on the availability of firearms is a red herring. It is not access to firearms that creates these individuals or which causes them to undertake their murderous rampages. But while the solution will finally lie in understanding and preventing the development of people with such murderous intentions, controlling the sale of guns may well be a necessary step along the way. Restricting the availability of the tools available to implement a massacre may perhaps restrict the scale of some of these massacres.

But banning the sale of guns – by itself – will not prevent the intention to massacre. All laws banning certain kinds of behaviour are fundamentally coercive and inevitably attack “freedoms of the individual”. They can – at best – be a stop-gap measure to be used while addressing the causes of the “unwanted” behaviour. And if these causes are neither understood or addressed then these coercive laws quickly degenerate to become oppressive laws used by majorities against minorities. Controlling the sale of guns only makes sense if the causes of the lone “berserker” are also addressed.

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A Geographical quiz

July 20, 2012

It took me some time to figure this out (while on an 8 hour flight). Perhaps it will be obvious and very simple for others.

A prize for the first correct answer/explanation of this table !!

Answer next week (if somebody doesn’t get it before then).

??????????

Geographical Trivia

Update – The explanation is here: Explanation

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Breaking weather records from a century ago only shows that it was hotter before CO2 emissions began

July 14, 2012

I am off again on an assignment for a few days and blogging will be light.

It’s summer and where I’m going torrential rain or blistering sunshine with temperatures over 45 °C  are quite normal for this time of year. If it is raining the temperature may be down to 25°C. So I’m prepared for a possible variation of some 20 deg C. It’s just weather.

I note the usual summer stories from around the world of heat waves in some places and “coldest” Junes in a 100 years in others. Some farmers are complaining about droughts and others are complaining about floods. Where societies have ignored repairs or have not built up their infrastructure to match the changing concentrations of urban populations – disasters occur. But I also note that when parts of the US declares that they have just had the hottest period for 50 years or 100 years or whatever and that this is “proof” of global warming they conveniently forget that 50 years ago or 100 years ago or whenever, man-made emissions of carbon dioxide were orders of magnitude lower. When weather records from a hundred years ago are broken it only proves that it was hotter/colder/stormier/wetter/drier or whatever long before the modern industrial age and before any significant man man-made carbon dioxide emissions.  Breaking an old record only shows cyclic behaviour – not “runaway” behaviour!

It’s summer and people are on vacation and journalists are looking for stories and the silly season has begun!

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Spain to tax renewable energy

July 13, 2012

Yet another unwanted consequence of having subsidies in the first place.

First the Spanish Government encouraged a “renewables boom” by providing feed-in tariffs which were obscenely generous (about 4 times higher than the going rate) and irresistible to developers.  This was only one of the many acts of profligacy which has led to the current crisis.

And now the Spanish Government is to try and redress the balance by imposing “a levy to spread the expense of closing a gap between costs and revenue in the country’s electricity business, which has racked up debts of 25 billion euros” . Since the largest gap between true cost and revenue is of course with solar and wind plants they will be hardest hit by the levy.

Bloomberg:

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Higgs Boson may not have been found after all. Just a PR exercise?

July 12, 2012

Is this some new way to ensure that funding continues?

First some very high profile publicity to announce some fantastic new discovery – which then gradually gets debunked over the next few months but at a much lower level of interest. But the initial high-profile announcements probably help to maintain the perceptions necessary to ensure funding. The low profile debunking does not register. It seems to be getting to be a habit for CERN.

Last September the CERN PR apparatus went into overdrive with the announcements that FTL neutrinos may have been found. FTL particles were announced with great fanfare only to be debunked later. And by November the story had died but the publicity had no doubt helped to bolster the perception that CERN is important.

A few days ago the CERN PR operations went into full swing. Advance warnings of an “Important Announcement” were disseminated widely. Background information was spread to all the media. Physicists around the world were interviewed about what the Higgs Boson was and what the discovery would mean. It was not long before the new “discovery” was being hailed as “the most important scientific discovery of the 21st Century, and on par with Copernicus’s discovery that the sun is the center of our solar system”.  And now just one week later it appears that whatever was found may not be the Higgs Boson and may not even be a separate particle at all.

I am naturally cynical about the extravagant trappings that sometimes surround “big science” but lately CERN’s PR seems more impressive than any physics they do:

CERN PR in action: Rolf Heuer, CERN Director General (C), Fabiola Gianotti, ATLAS experiment spokesperson (L), and Joe Incandela, a spokesman of the CMS experiment, look at a screen during a scientific seminar to deliver the latest update in the search for the Higgs boson at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Meyrin near Geneva July 4, 2012. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

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Apple dumps “green” certification in favour of design freedom

July 10, 2012

It was inevitable!

Wall Street Journal:

Apple has pulled its products off the U.S. government-backed registration of environmentally friendly electronics.

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Solar influence confirmed by new high-res reconstruction of 2000 years of climate in northern Europe

July 10, 2012

It’s the sun of course and it cannot be ignored – even by the IPCC.

A new paper in Nature Climate Change shows that

“Solar insolation changes, resulting from long-term oscillations of orbital configurations, are an important driver of Holocene climate.

The forcing is substantial over the past 2,000 years, up to four times as large as the 1.6 W m−2 net anthropogenic forcing since 1750, but the trend varies considerably over time, space and with season. Using numerous high-latitude proxy records, slow orbital changes have recently been shown to gradually force boreal summer temperature cooling over the common era. Here, we present new evidence based on maximum latewood density data from northern Scandinavia, indicating that this cooling trend was stronger (−0.31 °C per 1,000 years, ±0.03 °C) than previously reported, and demonstrate that this signature is missing in published tree-ring proxy records. The long-term trend now revealed in maximum latewood density data is in line with coupled general circulation models indicating albedo-driven feedback mechanisms and substantial summer cooling over the past two millennia in northern boreal and Arctic latitudes. These findings, together with the missing orbital signature in published dendrochronological records, suggest that large-scale near-surface air-temperature reconstructions relying on tree-ring data may underestimate pre-instrumental temperatures including warmth during Medieval and Roman times.

Orbital forcing of tree-ring data by Jan Esper, David C. Frank, Mauri Timonen, Eduardo Zorita, Rob J. S. Wilson, Jürg Luterbacher, Steffen Holzkämper, Nils Fischer, Sebastian Wagner, Daniel Nievergelt, Anne Verstege & Ulf Büntgen Nature Climate Change (2012) doi:10.1038/nclimate1589 

Received 27 March 2012  Accepted 15 May 2012  Published online 08 July 2012

image Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU)

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