February 28, 2012
An interesting paper from Curry et al. providing further evidence of a relationship between melting ice in the Arctic regions and widespread cold outbreaks in the Northern Hemisphere. Forcing mechanisms are all the rage where feedback loops lead to runaway effects. In general – in my experience with things technical – natural feedback loops are most often self-correcting. Sometimes they may appear in the short-term to amplify effects but in the long-term they drive back to an equilibrium condition. If feedback mechanisms are not known or if the true cycle-time of the feedback is unknown then short-term effects can be misleading.
Jiping Liu, Judith A. Curry, Huijun Wang, Mirong Song, and Radley M. Horton. Impact of declining Arctic sea ice on winter snowfall. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February 27, 2012 DOI:10.1073/pnas.1114910109
Newswise:
Since the level of Arctic sea ice set a new record low in 2007, significantly above-normal winter snow cover has been seen in large parts of the northern United States, northwestern and central Europe, and northern and central China. During the winters of 2009-2010 and 2010-2011, the Northern Hemisphere measured its second and third largest snow cover levels on record.
“Our study demonstrates that the decrease in Arctic sea ice area is linked to changes in the winter Northern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation,” said Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech. “The circulation changes result in more frequent episodes of atmospheric blocking patterns, which lead to increased cold surges and snow over large parts of the northern continents.”
Tags: Arctic, atmospheric blocking, feedback mechanisms, ice melting, Northern Hemisphere, Polar Regions, Sea ice, self-correction
Posted in Climate, Science, Weather | Comments Off on Self-correcting feedback mechanisms? When warming leads to cooling
February 27, 2012
Thai show elephants
The Thai Government relies heavily on the $2 billion tourist industry which in turn uses elephants as a focus for attracting tourists. But most of these “show” elephants (estimated to be 100- 200 per year) are captured as young calves by poachers who kill their mothers when trying to protect their calves. But the Thai Government which makes all the politically correct noises about protecting elephants is reluctant to disturb the poachers and the tourist industry. So when poachers are threatened the Thai Government (ironically through its National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation Department) rushes to their defence.
The Age: A partly Australian-funded wildlife rescue foundation whose chief spoke out about the illegal poaching of baby elephants in Thailand has been raided and had 103 animals taken away by Thai parks officials. … witnesses say many of the animals, including endangered species, were injured during the raids on the Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand centre by up to 100 armed men, some of whom wore balaclavas to hide their identities.
The raids over four days followed claims by the organisation’s founder and director, Edwin Wiek, that more than half the elephants in tourist camps across Thailand had been illegally caught in the wild when they were young, sometimes by poachers who shot their mothers or other members of their herd that tried to protect them. …….
Thailand’s National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation Department said the animals were seized because the foundation failed to produce paperwork showing they were being kept legally. “We need to enforce Thai laws that have been issued to protect those animals,” said the department’s director-general, Damrong Pidech.
Ironically many of the animals seized were originally rescued from government centres and will now find themselves back in these centres.
Tags: elephant poaching, Poaching, Thailand, Tourism
Posted in Business, Corruption, Environment, Thailand | Comments Off on Thai Government rushes in to protect elephant poachers
February 27, 2012
Patrick Dunleavy (Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science) and Chris Gilson (Managing Editor of the EUROPP blog) discuss social scientists’ obligation to spread their research to the wider world and how blogging can help academics break out of restrictive publishing loops.
Five minutes with Patrick Dunleavy and Chris Gilson
One of the recurring themes (from many different contributors) on the Impact of Social Science blog is that a new paradigm of research communications has grown up – one that de-emphasizes the traditional journals route, and re-prioritizes faster, real-time academic communication in which blogs play a critical intermediate role. They link to research reports and articles on the one hand, and they are linked to from Twitter, Facebook and Google+ news-streams and communities. So in research terms blogging is quite simply, one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now.
But in addition, social scientists have an obligation to society to contribute their observations to the wider world – and at the moment that’s often being done in ramshackle and impoverished ways, in pointlessly obscure or charged-for forums, in language where you need to look up every second word in Wikipedia, with acres of ‘dead-on-arrival’ data in unreadable tables, and all delivered over bizarrely long-winded timescales. So the public pay for all our research, and then we shunt back to them a few press releases and a lot of out-of-date academic junk.
Blogging (supported by academic tweeting) helps academics break out of all these loops. It’s quick to do in real time. It taps academic expertise when it’s relevant, and so lets academics look forward and speculate in evidence-based ways. It communicates bottom-line results and ‘take aways’ in clear language, yet with due regard to methods issues and quality of evidence. …..
(my emphasis)
Tags: Blog, Research, Social science
Posted in Media, Science, Social Science | Comments Off on LSE on Blogging: “Blogging is .. one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now”
February 26, 2012
Fakegate enriches language!
gleick, n, a vain and inept person
to gleick, v, to forge ineptly
Peter was a gleick, Peter is a gleick, Peter will always be a gleick.
Peter gleicked, Peter is gleicking, Peter will gleick.
It trips of the tongue very nicely.
Fakegate and Peter Gleick’s inept (but “heroic”) escapades are the source of much amusement over at Climate Audit. One reader, a Dr. UK has found a very apposite quotation from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
Bottom (wearing the head of an ass): Nay, I can gleek upon occasion.
Titania:Thou art as wise as thou art beautiful.
But there are many contenders for the role of Titania! Monbiot and Laden lead the list.
To gleick, or not to gleick ..
Peter (soliloquy):
To gleick, or not to gleick, that is the question:
Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Heartland,
Or to take Fakes against a Sea of Truths,
And by publishing end them:
(with apologies to WS)
Tags: Climate Audit, climate change, ethics, Fakegate, global warming, Heartland Institute, Laden, Monbiot, Peter Gleick
Posted in Academic misconduct, Alarmism, Corruption, Ethics, scientific misconduct | 1 Comment »
February 26, 2012
A stone car with two axles and 4 wheels dating from about 7,500 years ago has been found near the North Kurdish town of Qoser. It would seem to be earliest known evidence of a wheeled vehicle.
7,500 year old stone car from Qoser
Tags: earliest wheeled vehicle, Kızıltepe, Neolithic, Stone Age, stone car, Wheel
Posted in Anthropology, Archeology | Comments Off on Earliest evidence of the wheel? 7,500 year old toy “car” found
February 25, 2012
The plagiarism by Prof. CNR Rao (Science Advisor to the Indian PM) and Prof. SB Krupanidhi of the Indian Institute of Science which was the subject of an earlier post seems to be growing. It extends at least to 2 more papers as revealed by a commenter, x1, on Rahul Siddharthan’s blog post and as reported in the Calcutta Telegraph.
==========================
UPDATE!! The body-count is growing and has now reached 5 papers. The intrepid sherlock here is again X1. (Comments 50 & 51)
Perhaps it is time for the PM to side-line this Scientific Advisor. At best he is a lazy and not very conscientious supervisor and at worst his ethical standards are sadly lacking. Keeping him on sends the clear message to the entire Indian scientific community that
- ethical standards are not that important,
- copying a few paragraphs without attribution is not such a big deal and can just be glossed over, and
- supervisors bear no responsibility or liability for what their students get up to and can pass the buck downwards
===========================
Neither CNR Rao nor SB Krupanidhi come out of this very well. Their competence to supervise research leaves much to be desired. Krupanidhi, particularly, seems not even to believe that plagiarism is a serious breach of ethics.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: C. N. R. Rao, Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Krupanidhi, Plagiarism, Scientific misconduct
Posted in Academic misconduct, India, Science, scientific misconduct | 5 Comments »
February 25, 2012
Joerg Zwirner has been following this for some time at his AbnormalScience blog. Retraction Watch also posted about this. But it has now reached the ORI and even the main-stream media.
Yet another case of a Person of Indian Origin (PIO), Dr. Bharat B Aggarwal of the MD Anderson Cancer Center, being suspected of massive scientific misconduct this time at the University of Texas. Apparently 65 papers are being reviewed for the manipulation of images.
Deccan Herald:
A prominent Indian-American researcher at (the) University of Texas is under scanner for alleged falsification and fabrication in various publications regarding cancer fighting properties of plants.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Abnormal Science, Bharat B Aggarwal, image manipulation, M D Anderson Cancer Center, ORI, Scientific misconduct, University of Texas at Austin
Posted in Academic misconduct, Medicine, Science, scientific misconduct | Comments Off on Prominent Indian-American researcher being investigated at the University of Texas
February 24, 2012
Insurance companies are in the business of making perceived risks seem much larger than actual risk. Their profits are directly impacted by increasing the risk perceptions of the party seeking insurance. It is not surprising that they exaggerate the dangers of whatever is being insured against. To be “alarmist” for an insurance company is just good marketing. However much of their marketing and publicity is presented under the cloak of “scientific research”. Any report from an insurance company about future risks and purporting to be an “objective” or “scientific” study needs to be discounted and taken with a very large shovel of salt. Yet, the media often swallow such publicity and merely reproduce their reports with little effort to see through the conflicts of interest.
I have posted earlier about Munich Re and their attempts to suggest that global warming will increase the frequency of natural disasters. Anything to increase the perceptions of risk.
Now JunkScience reports on the case of Kerry Emanuel and his alarmist positions and his connections to Insurance companies:
Based on a request for investigation from JunkScience.com, Nature has forced MIT’s Kerry Emanuel to disclose his employment with insurance companies as a conflict of interest.
In the Feb. 14 Nature Climate Change study “Physically based assessment of hurricane surge threat under climate change,” of which Emanuel is a co-author, the “Additional Interests” section disclosed:
The authors declare no competing financial interests. However, in the interests of transparency we confirm that one of us, Kerry Emanuel, is on the boards of two property and casualty companies: Homesite and Bunker Hill, and also on the board of the AlphaCat Fund, an investment fund dealing with re-insurance transactions. In all three cases, Dr Emanuel receives fixed fees but owns no stocks or shares. Dr Emanuel does not stand to make any personal financial gain through these directorships as a consequence of the reported findings.
There was obvious reluctance in the disclosure from the wording (“no competing financial interests” even though insurance companies are gaming global warming alarmism) to the fact that, despite our asking, we had to find out about the disclosure on our own initiative — i.e., after our initial exchange with Nature, the journal editors stopped communicating with us.
JunkScience also reported that the Consumer Federation of America says in a new report:
…. Although insurers have become adept at shifting the cost of catastrophe losses to others, they still use catastrophic weather events to advocate for measures that would shift risk even more, such as higher rates, or putting more policyholders in pools or created taxpayer-supported entities. Thus, many consumers exposed to catastrophe weather risk are also vulnerable to insurer attempts to unjustifiably increase rates or hollow out coverage…
Tags: climate change, Consumer Federation of America, Insurance, Insurance and alarmism, JunkScience, Kerry Emanuel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nature
Posted in Alarmism, Business | Comments Off on Insurance Companies and alarmism
February 24, 2012
Global Warming: How to approach the science
pdf > RSLindzen-HouseOfCommons-2012
Seminar at the House of Commons Committee Rooms
Westminster, London
22nd February 2012
RA Lindzen: “‘Global Warming’ refers to an obscure statistical quantity, globally averaged temperature anomaly, the small residue of far larger and mostly uncorrelated local anomalies. This quantity is highly uncertain, but may be on the order of 0.7C over the past 150 years. This quantity is always varying at this level and there have been periods of both warming and cooling on virtually all time scales.
……… …. while I avoid making forecasts for tenths of a degree change in globally averaged temperature anomaly, I am quite willing to state that unprecedented climate catastrophes are not on the horizon though in several thousand years we may return to an ice age.”
Tags: global warming, House of Commons of the United Kingdom, Richard Lindzen
Posted in Alarmism, Climate | Comments Off on Richard Lindzen’s address at the UK House of Commons
February 23, 2012
I have yet to come across a case where Alarmism and the invocation of the Precautionary Principle to spend billions has been justified. The Precautionary Principle itself is flawed and is usually invoked to justify actions in favour of a political ideology which go against common sense. There are no principles involved. For example the billions spent on “preventing” the alleged Y2K meltdown were shown to have been essentially unnecessary when countries which just did not have the money to spend suffered no significant ill-effects (Ukraine and Romania for example).
The Precautionary Principle: An activist is walking down the street snapping his fingers continuously. A guy stops him and asks, “Why are you snapping your fingers all the time?” The activist answers, “To keep wild elephants away.” “That’s ridiculous!”, says the guy. The activist replies, “Oh, yeah? You don’t see any wild elephants around do you?”
The AGW othodoxy is following the same path where trillions are being spent in following political objectives which have no basis and go against common sense.
Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT has been addressing the UK House of Commons.
The Independent: Is catastrophic global warming, like the Millenium Bug, a mistake?
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: AGW, Alarmism, global warming, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Precautionary Principle, Richard Lindzen
Posted in Alarmism, Climate | Comments Off on Spending billions for no return: AGW alarmism going the way of the Y2K panic
The k2p blog 