gregladen | October 8, 2014This is an endorsement by Climate Hawks Vote, which I support.
We’re working our way through scoring Senate Democrats on climate leadership, using the same lodestar that we’ve used on House Democrats: who’s leading on climate by engaging the public? It’s slow going - results might not be final until mid-October or later. However, given the intense interest in certain races, we’re releasing a few scores early. Jeanne Shaheen has earned a high score, and thus our endorsement, for her deep commitment to energy efficiency.
Jeanne Shaheen, New Hampshire Senator, has earned a very high score on our…
gregladen | October 8, 2014This is an endorsement by Climate Hawks Vote, which I support.
We’re endorsing climate hawk Shenna Bellows to be the next Senator from Maine because business as usual is no longer good enough in the face of a local and worldwide crisis. Long-time incumbent Susan Collins admits the existence of a problem, to her credit; but far from proposing credible solutions, her actions range from policy homeopathy to delay to active hindrance.
While working on our sophisticated scorecard measuring leadership - not just votes - on climate for Senate Democrats, we are also tracking four Senate Republicans…
gregladen | October 8, 2014UPDATE: They killed the dog.
UPDATE: I'm adding this here because it is my current post on Ebola. Thomas Eric Duncan, the person who became symptomatic with Ebola in Dallas, had died at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital (according to news alerts).
A nurse's assistant in Spain caring for Spanish nationals returned with Ebola from West Africa contracted the disease, gaining the dubious distinction of being the first person to be infected with Ebola outside of that disease's normal range in West Africa, Central Africa and western East Africa. There is speculation that she contracted the…
gregladen | October 7, 2014What is the role of the ocean's abyss in global warming?1
I’ve already posted on a study published in Nature Climate change that shows that the amount of extra global warming related heat in the Southern Oceans is greater than previously thought. There is another paper in the same journal by Llovel et al, “Deep-ocean contribution to sea level and energy budget not detectable over the past decade.” This paper verifies previous research that the oceans absorb a lot of the excess heat, but looks specifically at the ocean below 2,000 meters, which the paper referrs to in places as "deep" but that…
gregladen | October 7, 2014Last Sunday, I interviewed climate scientist Michael Mann on Atheist Talk Radio. I do occasional interviews there on science related topics (see this list of previous shows).
You can listen to the interview here:
Play Now
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Minnesota Atheists for giving me the opportunity to do these science interviews, which are admittedly different from the usual topics covered by the show.
Prior to the show, I wrote a post indicating that we would be doing this interview, noting that people were welcome to past questions I might ask Mann during the interview. I…
gregladen | October 7, 2014This video is supposed to be some kind of funny parody but it looks just like my life so I don't get it!
gregladen | October 6, 2014The sun warms the Earth's surface. Additional greenhouse gases and associated positive feedbacks (like, additional additional greenhouse gasses) increase that effect. So, it gets warmer, and by "it" we mean the "surface" of the Earth. This is usually measured as the temperature near the surface across the land and the surface of the sea (Sea Surface Temperature or SST). But over 90% of the heat added by global warming goes into the ocean.
We know how much heat goes into the ocean (other than SST) two ways. One is direct measurements using equipment that samples water at depth, and the…
gregladen | October 5, 2014We really only know things work when we test them to the limit and see what it takes to make them fail, or nearly fail. All those air planes and space ships and regular shops and nice cars that usually don't fail have a pedigree of prototypes or prototypes of parts that were pushed until they broke. Chickens fired into running Boeing 757 engines with a special Chicken Cannon. Crash dummies driving vehicles into specially built walls. Rocket engines exploding on test ranges. But many systems are never tested that way, and really can't be. We build the systems and convince those who need…
gregladen | October 4, 2014I used Google N-gram Viewer to inspect the occurrence of the word "Ebola" in the Google-indexed literature. A few instances of Ebola came up earlier than the disease being known, so I figured they were references to the place name in Zaire/Congo, after which the disease is named. And that was in fact the case. But, of handful of early instances I checked out, two were interesting.
The Ngram is above. Note that I have smoothing set to zero, which I recommend, and I've got the date set for early on in the use of the term so pre-disease uses are more visible.
The two interesting instances I…
gregladen | October 4, 2014The Ubuntu 14.10 Release October 23, 2014
Ubuntu 14.10 will be released shortly and I know you are chomping at the bit and want to know all about it.
There is some important news, for some, and there is some exciting news for others, and there is some boring news, and frankly, some bad news.
Before diving into the shallow pool of Ubuntu 14.10 (shallow in a good way) I want to go over some other ground first. I want to address this question:
"I have installed Linux and I don't like the default desktop. How do I change that without ruining stuff?"
If you are a long time Linux user you know…
gregladen | October 3, 2014The American Meteorological Society, in it’s Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS), has released a report called “Explaining Extreme Events of 2013 from a Climate Perspective.” Three studies looked at excessive heat in Australia, three at drought or dry conditions in California, and 14 looked at various other extreme events (though some of those events may overlap or be related) for a total of about 15 different phenomena.
There was a pattern in the results. The studies looking at heat all suggested a link to anthropogenic global warming (AGW). This is not surprising because…
gregladen | October 2, 2014According to popular literature (some fiction, some not) and movies, Ebola can cause havoc, infecting thousands of people, killing over half of them, and threatening an entire nation if it were to become airborne. Turns out that's not true. Ebola can do all those things without becoming airborne. In several nations.
The confusion caused by this misconception is further enhanced in a more subtle way. Since the Hollywood version of Ebola (or some other similar disease) indicates that it is dangerous because it becomes airborne, we see constant claims today on the Internet that Ebola must be…
gregladen | October 2, 2014First, let’s look at the situation in West Africa, because that is way more important than anything going on in the US right now. The WHO has said two things about this. First, if there is not a full intervention, there may be hundreds of thousands or even millions of cases of Ebola several months from now (cumulatively). Second, with full intervention they can stop this epidemic.
What is full intervention? They say that full intervention is the development and manufacture of an effective vaccine, and the deployment of that vaccine to a very large percentage of the affected population.…
gregladen | September 30, 2014I'm not going to talk about Mark Steyn, other than to say that if you know who Rush Limbaugh is, Mark Steyn is a bit to the right and a tad more obnoxious, but not as smart.
You can find out more by clicking here, using the Climate Change Science Search Engine.
I'm also not going to say much about Judith Curry except that, unlike Steyn, she was a regular scientist who did climate science. Over time the material she has written, both in peer reviewed journals and on her blog, has become increasingly aligned with those who are highly skeptical that global warming is real. She has a theory…
gregladen | September 30, 2014This discussion has been going on for some time, and a handful of recent events have prompted me to jump into it (beyond a simple comment or two). First, I saw a bunch of yammering among various biology teachers about this topic. Then Michael Osterholm wrote a well intentioned but seemingly deeply flawed opinion at the New York Times, then Dina Fine Maron wrote an excellent piece at Scientific American deconstructing Osterholm's piece, then the latter two (and more) were summarized and expanded on in a post by Ann Reid at the NCSE.
Here, I will expand on this by applying first principles…
gregladen | September 29, 2014As you know, I do the occasional science-related interview on Minnesota Atheist Talk Radio, on Radio AM 950. (See this for a list of all, or at least most, of the work I've done with that show.)
On Sunday October 5th at the ungodly hour of 9:00 AM Central Time, I'll be interviewing Michael Mann, and Mike Haubrich will host. There is plenty to talk about but if you have a specific topic you'd like to see covered, or a specific question, feel free to note it below in the comments section.
It is also possible to call in or send an email to the station during the show. Listen to the show…
gregladen | September 29, 2014This is about the law suit filed by Michael Mann against the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the National Review, Mark Steyn, and Rand Simberg because of accusations they made that were actionable. Michael Halpern summarized:
Competitive Enterprise Institute’s space technology and policy analyst, Rand Simberg, recently wrote a blog post in which he compared Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann to former university football coach and convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky. CEI published the post on its own blog, and the National Review decided it was appropriate to pass along. Michael…
gregladen | September 28, 2014The Arctic Sea is covered with ice during the winter, and some of it melts off every summer. Over recent years the amount of melt has been increasing. This is the time of year we may want to look at Arctic Sea ice because by late September it has reached its annual minimum and is starting to reform.
Looking at JUST surface area, which is one indicator of how warm the Arctic has become with Global Warming, we can see (above) that this years march of melting has been extreme, hugging the two standard deviation limit for all of the data from 1979 to 2010 (almost the present).
Here you can…
gregladen | September 27, 2014I want to put a solar panel on my roof so that I am releasing less greenhouse gas into the environment. But then I hear that manufacturing solar panels causes the release of greenhouse gasses, so I have to subtract that from the good I think I'm doing. But then I realize that the people who are making the solar panels have to change their method so they release less greenhouse gas into the environment.
We hear this argument all the time (for example, here). You think you are doing something "green" but it really isn't green because yadayadayada. I am suspicious of these arguments because…