Hitchens

Stunning fly-over of earth

A time-lapse video produced from photographs taken from the International Space Station. For the best view click on the Full Screen button at the bottom right.




The shooting locations given by NASA, in order of appearance, are:

1. Aurora Borealis Pass over the United States at night
2. Aurora Borealis and eastern United States at night
3. Aurora Australis from Madagascar to south-west of Australia
4. Aurora Australis south of Australia
5. North-west coast of United States to Central South America at night
6. Aurora Australis from the Southern to the Northern Pacific Ocean
7. Halfway around the world
8. Night pass over Central Africa and the Middle East
9. Evening pass over the Sahara Desert and the Middle East
10. Pass over Canada and Central United States at night
11. Pass over Southern California to Hudson Bay
12. Islands in the Philippine Sea at night
13. Pass over Eastern Asia to Philippine Sea and Guam
14. Views of the Mideast at night
15. Night Pass over Mediterranean Sea
16. Aurora Borealis and the United States at night
17. Aurora Australis over Indian Ocean
18. Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia at night

How to avoid the truth about climate change

The video below is a talk by Dr. Barry Bickmore about methods people use to avoid the truth about climate change.

On his blog Bickmore introduced the video as follows:

I gave a talk called “How to Avoid the Truth About Climate Change” for the College of Science and Health at Utah Valley University. For those of you who aren’t familiar with me, I am a Republican and a geochemist who, until a few years ago, was quite skeptical about the idea that humans are causing significant climate change.

In the presentation, I briefly talked about how I had made the transition from being a climate change “skeptic” to being an outspoken advocate of mainstream climate science. I then discussed how it is that people like me can so effectively avoid the truth about climate change.

Killer apps of prosperity

The graphic below shows that per capita income of China and India were similar with those of Britain and the US up to 1850, after which the income of US and Britain exponentially increased.


Nial Ferguson attributes the divergence between the West and the Rest to six institutions developed in the West, that using modern computer terminology, he calls, Killer Apps. The six killer apps are listed below.

The "killer apps" are:
1. Competition
2. The Scientific Revolution
3. Property Rights
4. Modern Medicine
5. The Consumer Society
6. The Work Ethic

According to Ferguson, the development of these institutions in Western Europe answers the question: “Why, beginning around 1500, did a few small polities on the western end of the Eurasian landmass come to dominate the rest of the world?”

Like the modern variety, these killer apps can be downloaded - they can be used by other societies. The developing societies are using some of them and the Great Divergence is re-converging.

The Denial Tango

Earnestly pointing our the absurdity, dishonesty and nonsense of those who deny the reality of Human Caused Climate change is necessary, ( see for example here, here, here, here, here and here but sometimes the only response is to laugh.



“Denial Tango”, by Men with Day Jobs

You say the planet’s warming, but I’m convinced it’s not
Last Tuesday it was rather cool, today it’s not so hot
And if it’s getting hotter, I’m sure it’s not by much
Prob’ly due to sunspots, volcanoes or some such
Or maybe it’s the Chinese, that make more smoke than us
I know there’s many more of them, so let them catch the bus
One thing I am sure of, no need to make a fuss
Fire up those smokey chimneys and sing

Denial … I’m in denial
Don’t talk to me of independent studies or scientific trial
I’m in denial … deep in denial
And as the waters rise around me I’ll just hold my breath and say
It isn’t so

I call myself a skeptic, And I believe it’s so
I’m skeptical of anything, I just don’t wanna know
Don’t give me CSIRO or IPCC
I want some wacky viscount with an architect’s degree
He says it’ was much hotter X million years ago
I know that killed a lot of dinosaurs but they were rather slow
It’s just a lot of scientists that think they’re in the know
But I know I know better, let’s sing:

Denial … I’m in denial
When I see those eco-nazis, I raise my arm and shout Sieg Heil
I’m in denial … deep in denial
And as the waters rise around me I’ll just hold my breath and say
It isn’t so

Those fires are not raging, No floods deluge the land
Those hurricanes and tornadoes are just flashes in the pan
The animals are doing fine, No species dying out
And half the bloody climate isn’t choking in drought
The ice is not receding, from either polar cap
I’d go with Tony Abbott, It’s just a load of crap
This round-the-world disaster is an evil greedy trap
‘Cause everybody knows the world is flat

Denial … I’m in denial
Don’t talk to me of independent studies or scientific trial
I’m in denial … deep in denial
And as the waters rise around me I’ll just hold my breath and say
It isn’t so … oh no

As the waters rise around me I’ll just hold my breath and say
It isn’t so … oh no

Don’t wanna know
As the waters rise around me I’ll just hold my breath and say… glug glug glug

Climate Trends

The climate deniers work hard on convincing the uninformed that the planet is cooling or at least not warming. They take advantage of the noisiness of the global temperature record. It is possible to prove almost anything if you keep to short term trends in the record.

Here is a graph that I produced to illustrate the problem of using short term periods to make conclusions about climate trends. More detail (including how I created the graph can be found in this post.

From Climate

The technique that the deniers use is eloquently illustrated by the animation below. A good name for it is Going Down the Up Escalator.




The data used is from the Berkely Earth Surface Temperature group (BEST). It was fairly difficult to produce a declining value for the last decade from the data. See the link above for an explanation.


link
The conservative U.K. newspaper the Daily Mail in London published an article Monday blasting Muller’s research, claiming that his Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures (BEST) project produces a graph that — rather than showing increased global warming — shows that warming has stalled over the last decade.

“That’s incorrect,” Muller said Monday morning. “I mean, what they have done is an old trick. It’s how to lie with statistics, right? And scientists can’t do that because 10 years from now, they’ll look back on my publications and say, ‘Was he right?’ But a journalist can lie with statistics. They can choose a little piece of the data and prove what they want, carefully cutting out the end. If I wanted to do this, I could demonstrate, for example, with the same data set that from 1980 to 1995 that it’s equally flat. You can find little realms where it’s equally flat. What that tells me is that 15 years is not enough to be able to tell whether it’s warming or not. And so when they take 13 years, and they say based on that they can reach a conclusion based on our data set, I think they’re playing that same game and the fact that we can find that back in 1980, the same effect, when we know it wasn’t warming simply shows that that method doesn’t work. But no scientist could do that because he’d be discredited for lying with statistics. Newspapers can do that because 10 years from now, nobody will remember that they showed that.”

Tamino