gregladen | January 14, 2016I'm going to make this simple. The primary season has not started yet. It starts in a few weeks. Everything we are doing now is pre-Primary. Not one person has put pen to checkmark in a voting booth.
Once that process starts, everything changes. Suddenly there is more polling in downstream states. Starting before the first primaries, but then ramping up as we head towards states that matter (and no, Iowa and New Hampshire don't matter despite what you may have been told). Same with campaigning. We've seen a few debates, there's been a lot of speeches, but you ain't seen nothing yet. And…
gregladen | January 14, 2016Four elements are being added to the Periodic Table of the Elements. (I'm going to need a new shower curtain). These elements have been "known" for a long time, but are only now being added for reasons explained in the video below.
Meanwhile, have you read The Periodic Kingdom: A Journey Into The Land Of The Chemical Elements, or The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements? Great books. Not current, but then again, the Periodic Table has been around for quite a while.
And now the video:
gregladen | January 14, 2016The Nevada state government has just ruined solar energy in their state. From here,
Although Nevada is one of the sunniest places in the world, there has recently been a dark cloud hovering over the rooftop solar industry in the state. Just before Christmas, Nevada’s public utility commission (PUC) gave the state’s only power company, NV Energy, permission to charge higher rates and fees to solar panel users – a move that immediately shattered the rooftop solar industry’s business model.
In addition to the new monthly fee, ... customers ... will get less back from the utility for energy…
gregladen | January 14, 2016A new paper just published in Nature has made a bit of a stir because it has been interpreted as suggesting that global warming has the benefit of avoidance of an Ice Age that was just about to happen. However, the paper does not actually say that, and we already knew that we may have avoided the next ice age, possibly by human activities dating back to the 19th century or before. Also, the paper actually addresses a different question, an important one, but one that may be a bit esoteric for may interested parties.
First, the esoteric question. Simply put, over the last two million years…
gregladen | January 13, 2016According to Jeff Masters at Wunderblog, "The earliest named storm on record in the Central Pacific, Hurricane Pali, formed on January 7."
The storm is out in the middle of the ocean, west of Kiribati:
The reason this storm formed off season is a combination of high sea surface temperatures because of global warming and, on top of this, extra high sea surface temperatures because of El Nino. In a sense, this year is preview of what things will be like all the time, more or less, as an "average" globally-warmed year catches up to an El Niño year.
gregladen | January 13, 2016Tropical Storm Alex has formed in the Atlantic ocean. It is not entirely unprecedented to have a tropical storm form totally off season like this, but it is very rare. This happened mainly because of record high sea surface temperatures in the region.
The sea surface temperature is not enough to make a hurricane. But you know what they say about the weather -- under conditions of global warming -- wait a few years and that will happen.
Increasingly the world's oceans are losing track of their tropical storm seasons. Expect a future where tropical cyclones (hurricanes, etc.) can form over a…
gregladen | January 13, 2016Truth or Truthiness: Distinguishing Fact from Fiction by Learning to Think Like a Data Scientist is a new book by Howard Wainer that can serve as a manual for how to be a good skeptic.
Wainer is a statistician, formerly with the famous Educational Testing Service, and a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is well known for his work in statistics and data presentation.
You know what "truthiness" is. It is a term coined by Stephen Colbert in 2005 to refer to assertions that are clearly true because of how they look, feel, smell, but that are in fact, not…
gregladen | January 12, 2016A worthy Kickstarter science related project is afoot.
Face it. Most science is done on the command line. When it is not, we call it "science by spreadsheet" or name it by some other epithet.
Much of that is done on Linux or Linux like computers, but that actually includes Macs, and if you must, it can be done on Windows.
Bioinformatics, climate simulations, basic statistics using the r language, fancy math things using the appropriate python library, making graphs with gnuplot, and even producing nice looking results for dissimnation to our geeky peers using LaTex. Science-related…
gregladen | January 11, 2016... maybe they'll actually do something about them.
Remember the Democratic and Republican party debates that were held just before that major international meeting about climate change, participated in by every country in the world? Of course you do. Do you remember the candidates' responses to the questions about climate change posed during those debates? No, you don't. Not a single question about climate change, or any other big science issue, was asked.
When we think about the big science issues, climate change is often one of the main topics that comes first to mind. But there are many…
gregladen | January 8, 2016Last December, the United States Senate subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, headed by Ted Cruz, held a hearing to which they invited a gaggle of climate change deniers and one good guy to testify about how the science on climate change is all wrong. I wrote about it here. The strangest aspect of this hearing was probably shock jock Mark Steyn's use of the venue to argue his case in a civil law suit pertaining to his apparently libelous behavior. But there was another feature of this hearing worth noting. Both the deniers, in particular John Christy, and Senator Cruz…
gregladen | January 8, 2016The Time Scales of Political and Climate Change Matter
The US is engaged in the laborious process of electing a new leader, who will likely be President for 8 years. Climate change has finally become an issue in US electoral politics. The climate policies of the next US President, and the Congress, will have a direct impact on the climate, because those policies will affect how much fossil carbon is put into the atmosphere over coming decades. So it is vital to consider what the climate may do during the next administration and the longer period that will include that administration’s…
gregladen | January 6, 2016... and not in a good way.
The Arctic has, of course, been warming in step with anthropogenic global warming, plus more. This phenomenon has probably increased disruption to global weather systems, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, over the last decade or so.
But something somewhat novel is happening this year, presumably as a result of global warming combined with a strong El Nino. Storms are bringing extra warm conditions to the Arctic. A few days ago, the North Pole was above freezing, and over the next few days we are expecting more warm conditions in the Arctic Circle. See this…
gregladen | January 6, 2016Warm waters around Florida have resulted in a growth of the population of Portuguese Man-of-War, or should that be Portuguese Men-of-War, an organism commonly confused with jellyfish (because they look just like jellyfish).
The PMOWs have a sting, roughly equivalent in pain level to a bee sting, and best treated at such. Do not urinate on your PMOW sting (save your urine for an actual jellyfish sting).
There are reports of many PMOWs washing up, with numerous swimmers suffering stings. The stinging tentacles, even after they fall off, are a hazard, and barefoot beachcombers can…
gregladen | January 5, 2016By now you are probably aware of the major flooding that happened over the last several days in Missouri. Larry Lazar gave us a guest post detailing his personal experiences in Eureka, where the flooding was extensive. This flooding is not over, but is simply moving down stream in the Mississippi watershed. It will take several days before this is over.
We are long past the days when one can honestly say “you can’t attribute a given weather event to climate change.” Climate is weather long term, and weather is climate in the here and now. Climate has changed because of anthropogenic global…
gregladen | January 4, 2016The year that just finished, 2015, was the warmest year recorded in the instrumental record. The actual data for December is not officially available yet, but my friend and colleague John Abraham keeps track of the global surface temperature daily and has done an amazing job at estimating the final temperature anomaly value that is eventually reported in each of several databases. He has provided a graph using his estimated value, above.
There are two major contributing factors, maybe three depending on how you count everything, to 2015 being the warmest year. The main factor is, of course…
gregladen | January 3, 2016This is a review of the Kindle Fire with 7" Display and Special Offers by Amazon. In short, this is a tablet/eReader that a lot of people will want, as long as certain needs are extant and certain expectations understood. I have one, and I'm very happy with it. It would take very little convincing for me to get a second one.
One of the main reasons to give serious thought to getting one of these is the fact that it will put you back a mere fifty bucks.
Don't expect a brilliant tablet for fifty bucks. You may want a nice full blown Android tablet, or if you prefer, an iPad. That will cost…
gregladen | January 1, 2016Despite the devastating storms across the country the last few weeks, NASA is forecasting the worst is yet to come. Michael Mann, author of "Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change" joins to discuss.
gregladen | January 1, 2016Minecraft is a gaming world. Or, if you like, a "sandbox." This is a three dimensional world in which characters do things, all sorts of things. The context for the world of Minecraft is very open ended. The player builds things, moves things, gets things, does things, in a way that makes any one gamer's game potentially very different from any other gamer's game.
You can buy Minecraft in various forms such as an XBox 360 version. It comes in Lego form (for example, this), and you can get a Minecraft cloud server version at Minecraft.net.
If you install Minecraft from Minecraft.net (about…
gregladen | December 31, 2015This is a guest post by Larry Lazar.
If you have had the news on the last day or two you may have seen stories and images about the Missouri floods. Many of those images are from Eureka (where we live), Pacific (where my wife Kellie works) and Valley Park (which is on my commute to work). That picture of the submerged McDonald's you may have seen on the news is in Union, Missouri, about 20 miles to the southwest of Eureka
We are dry, mostly, and doing okay. The basement was flooded during the initial 3 day rain event due to a failed sump pump and a couple downspouts that came unattached from…
gregladen | December 29, 2015The following is a list of posts on this blog that report new climate change research, usually but not always from the peer reviewed literature, or posts that are longer essays intended to give context to ongoing climate change research. The first few posts are from December 2014, which addresses the fact that “year end summaries” tend to be written during December, or even before, so December of any given year gets the shaft.
December 2014 - How scientists unraveled the El Niño mystery
December 2014 - New Research on Tree Rings as Indicators of Past Climate
December 2014 - Global…