Quotulatiousness

August 19, 2012

The end of the world is nigh

Filed under: Books, Environment, Media, Randomness — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:07

Sell all your posessions! Live for the now! Repent your sins! Or, as Matt Ridley suggests, keep calm and carry on:

This is the question posed by the website 2012apocalypse.net. “super volcanos? pestilence and disease? asteroids? comets? antichrist? global warming? nuclear war?” the site’s authors are impressively open-minded about the cause of the catastrophe that is coming at 11:11 pm on December 21 this year. but they have no doubt it will happen. after all, not only does the Mayan Long Count calendar end that day, but “the sun will be aligned with the center of the Milky Way for the first time in about 26,000 years.”

When the sun rises on December 22, as it surely will, do not expect apologies or even a rethink. No matter how often apocalyptic predictions fail to come true, another one soon arrives. And the prophets of apocalypse always draw a following — from the 100,000 Millerites who took to the hills in 1843, awaiting the end of the world, to the thousands who believed in Harold Camping, the Christian radio broadcaster who forecast the final rapture in both 1994 and 2011.

Religious zealots hardly have a monopoly on apocalyptic thinking. Consider some of the environmental cataclysms that so many experts promised were inevitable. Best-selling economist Robert Heilbroner in 1974: “The outlook for man, I believe, is painful, difficult, perhaps desperate, and the hope that can be held out for his future prospects seem to be very slim indeed.” Or best-selling ecologist Paul Ehrlich in 1968: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s [“and 1980s” was added in a later edition] the world will undergo famines — hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked on now … nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” Or Jimmy Carter in a televised speech in 1977: “We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.”

Predictions of global famine and the end of oil in the 1970s proved just as wrong as end-of-the-world forecasts from millennialist priests. Yet there is no sign that experts are becoming more cautious about apocalyptic promises. If anything, the rhetoric has ramped up in recent years. Echoing the Mayan calendar folk, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock one minute closer to midnight at the start of 2012, commenting: “The global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe from changes in Earth’s atmosphere.”

August 14, 2012

Ethanol: starving the third world, by government policy

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Food, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:47

Jeffrey Tucker on the absurd and cruel implications of a government mandate:

Corn prices are officially through the roof, spiking to record highs. It’s been headed this way through six years of crazy volatility. Now the spike is undeniable. At the same time, crop yields are lower they have been since 1995.

Everyone blames the drought, as if the market can’t normally handle a supply change. The real problem is that the corn market is fundamentally misshaped by government interventions that have made a mess of this and many more markets. The distortions are never contained, but spread and spread.

[. . .]

“Corn is the single most important commodity for retail food,” Richard Volpe, an economist for the USDA told the Los Angeles Times. “Corn is either directly or indirectly in about three-quarters of all food consumers buy.”

Fine, then, answer me this, Mr. Government Economist Man: Why is 40% of the corn crop being burned up in our gas tanks? The answer is a Soviet-like, fascist-like, stupid-like government mandate. It is actually relatively new. It came about in 2005 and 2007. It mixes nearly all the gas we can buy with a sticky product now in rather short supply.

Of all the government regulations I’ve looked at in detail over the last 10 years, the ethanol mandate is, by far, the worst. There are no grounds on which it is defensible. None!

Like so many government initiatives, this was supposed to do something good: reduce the consumption of fossil fuel for gasoline production by substituting a proportion of ethanol. While gas was expensive and ethanol was cheap this might make sense — but when ethanol becomes more expensive, and the raw material used to produce the ethanol would be far better used for food and feedstock, the whole policy becomes an act in the theatre of the absurd.

August 13, 2012

The problems of conducting science-by-press-release

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

At sp!ked, Ben Pile explains why the first casualties in the climate change debate are usually the facts:

In plain sight of the fact that the melting was neither unexpected nor unprecedented, environmental journalists the world over picked up the story and ran with it. In the Guardian, Suzanne Goldenberg, wrote: ‘The Greenland ice sheet melted at a faster rate this month than at any other time in recorded history, with virtually the entire ice sheet showing signs of thaw.’

As I have noted elsewhere, Guardian journalists have a fetish for stories about melting ice. In September last year, following an unusually low measurement of Arctic sea-ice extent, Damian Carrington wrote: ‘Ice is the white flag being waved by our planet, under fire from the atmospheric attack being mounted by humanity.’ But the low measurement of sea ice that Carrington pointed to disagreed with at least five other continuous measurements of the Arctic, and was thus unreliable. This kind of over-reaction to scientific developments are facile attempts to turn science into stories of political intrigue. When images of the Arctic taken by US spy satellites were declassified in 2009, the headline of an article by Goldenberg and Carrington proclaimed that ‘the secret evidence of global warming Bush tried to hide’ had been ‘revealed’.

The rash of excited articles about the dying cryosphere caused some surprising corrective responses from voices within climate research. Malte Humpert from the Arctic Institute Centre wrote a stinging response to the headline histrionics. ‘The Greenland ice sheet, which is up to 3000+ metres thick, is not “melting away”, did not “melt in four days”, it is not “melting fast”, and Greenland did not “lose 97 per cent of its surface ice layer”.’ Humpert continued: ‘Most articles also exaggerated the importance of the melt event on global sea levels by explaining how sea levels would rise by up to 7.2 metres if the ice sheet were to melt.’

Similarly, Mark Brandon, a sea-ice scientist at the Open University, reproduced an interesting series of tweets and links to articles that showed the development of the current panic about ice, beginning with (alleged) comedian Marcus Brigstocke’s misconception of the story. To Brigstocke, an ‘unprecedented’ melt was the proverbial canary in the coal mine — a harbinger of doom. But as Brandon and his colleagues pointed out, it was a bit soon to be calling time on the human race. This was just weather.

Did China peak in 2008?

Filed under: China, Economics, Environment — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:53

Walter Russell Mead wonders if the Chinese economy actually hit its peak in 2008 and will not be able to get back to that level of performance:

According to The Diplomat, the long term outlook is even more depressing. China will have to confront a series of structural challenges if it is to continue to achieve the kind of dynamic growth that lifted the country from economic backwater to emerging great power in just three decades.

The most obvious challenge is demographics. A RAND study observed that the proportion of the Chinese population of working age peaked in 2011 and began slowing this year. The share of the elderly population is rising. Healthcare and pension costs will soar as a result. So will labor costs. Investment and savings will diminish. In short, China may face the prospect, unknown in human history, of growing old before it gets rich.

The environment presents another dilemma. Like many rapidly industrializing economies, China sacrificed environmental protection at the altar of economic growth. But the effects of this approach have taken a toll: already, argues The Diplomat, ”Water and air pollution today cause 750,000 premature deaths and around 8 percent of GDP.” And as Via Meadia recently pointed out, the political costs of this approach are starting to mount as well. An outbreak of NIMBYism has forced many local officials to cancel major industrial projects as ordinary Chinese citizens demand an end to environmentally unsound development.

Of greater concern is that China has backed away from market reforms in the last decade and embraced a version of “state capitalism” that emphasizes the state far more than it does capitalism. But as state-run entities have become more powerful, their political backers — and financial beneficiaries — have an even greater stake in blocking attempts at reform.

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, for the link.

August 11, 2012

Environmentalism versus ecology

Filed under: Environment, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:09

An interesting interview with Dr. Patrick Moore:

Cotto: One of the gravest concerns you have cited with the modern environmentalist movement is its increasingly ideological nature. Some might say that this, in fact, is a positive development. How would you beg to differ?

Dr. Moore: Ideology is negative in so far as it tends to divide people into warring camps with no possible resolution. My late Greenpeace friend Bob Hunter suggested early on that in order for environmentalism to become a mass movement, it would have to be based on ideology, or as he called it “popular mythology,” because “not everybody can be a Ph.D. ecologist.” I have never accepted organized religion and note all the evils perpetuated in the name of “God is on our side” I do believe in just wars such as the armed struggle to end apartheid. But that was not based on religion but rather on human rights.

For example it has become part of environmental ideology, as stated by Bill McKibben in the current Rolling Stone, that the fossil fuel industries are “Public Enemy Number One.” Oil is particularly vilified as evidenced by high-profile campaigns to stop pipelines, drilling, tankers, oil sands, and anything else to do with producing or transporting oil. Oil is responsible for 36% of global energy and is therefore the most important source of energy to support our civilization. If it is the aim of “environmentalists” to stop fossil fuel production and use, end fracking, end coal mining, end the use of oil, then they are promoting a policy that would have disastrous consequences for human civilization and the environment. If we stopped using fossil fuel today, or by 2020 as Al Gore proposes, at least half the human population would perish and there wouldn’t be a tree left on the planet with a year, as people struggled to find enough energy to stay alive.

[. . .]

Cotto: In the past, you have said that human activity is not the only cause for climate change. What do you believe is the greatest contributing factor?

Dr. Moore: First, we don’t know precisely how the many factors affecting climate contribute and interact in producing the earth’s climate at any given time. The cause of the onset of Ice-Ages, one of which we are presently experiencing, is a puzzle we don’t fully understand. I explain in my presentations that as a scientist who is fully qualified to understand climate change, I seem dumber than the people who say they “know” the answers because I do not profess to know the future, especially of something so complicated as the global climate.

One thing is certain, there is no “scientific proof” as the term is generally understood, that human emissions are the main cause of climate change today. Even the IPCC only claims that it is “very likely” (a judgement, in their own words, not a proof) that human emissions are responsible for “most” of the warming “since the mid-20th century” (1950). Therefore they are not claiming that humans caused the 0.4C warming between 1910-1940, but they are claiming that we are the main cause of the 0.4C warming between 1970 and 2000. Yet they provide no opinion as to what did cause the warming between 1910-1940. There is a logical inconsistency here that has never been addressed. It is also important to note that the IPCC does not speak of “catastrophe”, that is left to the fanatics and perpetual doom-sayers.

August 10, 2012

Drink some rainwater, go to jail

Filed under: Environment, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

A 1925 law still applies in Oregon:

You just can’t make this stuff up. A man in Oregon is currently in jail serving a thirty day term – along with a $1500 fine – for collecting rainwater and snow melt on his own property for drinking and household use. You think I’m kidding? I’m not.

    Gary Harrington, the Oregon man convicted of collecting rainwater and snow runoff on his rural property surrendered Wednesday morning to begin serving his 30-day, jail sentence in Medford, Ore.

    “I’m sacrificing my liberty so we can stand up as a country and stand for our liberty,” Harrington told a small crowd of people gathered outside of the Jackson County (Ore.) Jail.

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, who said “This is just a little weird […] But does the fact that I can see the point of the law — preventing people from messing with a watershed area, I guess — mean that I’ve consumed the nanny state kool-aid?”.

August 9, 2012

KittyCam project proves they are cute, cuddly … and deadly

Filed under: Environment, Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:40

Do you let your cat out into the great outdoors? If you’re fond of other small creatures, you may want to reconsider that policy:

Those cute kittens whose faces are peer from endless posts on Pinterest are actually predators, and a third of those trailed in a county in Georgia are wandering around outdoors capturing and killing other animals.

The army of assassins was discovered by folks from the University of Georgia and the National Geographic Society, who strapped video cameras around the necks of 60 cats to record their atrocities for a year in a project known as KittyCam.

[. . .]

“In Athens-Clarke County, we found that about 30 per cent of the sampled cats were successful in capturing and killing prey, and that those cats averaged about one kill for every 17 hours outdoors or 2.1 kills per week.

[. . .]

“If we extrapolate the results of this study across the country and include feral cats, we find that cats are likely killing more than four billion animals per year, including at least 500 million birds,” Dr George Fenwick, president of American Bird Conservancy, cried indignantly.

“Cat predation is one of the reasons why one in three American bird species are in decline.”

August 2, 2012

The real reason behind the war on the humble plastic bag

Filed under: Environment, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:54

Tom Bailey explains that the reasons we’ve been given for the renewed attacks on plastic bags are not the real reason for the ongoing struggle:

Individually, a plastic bag weighs about eight grams. In total, we use about 10 billion of them a year, adding up to around 80,000 tonnes of plastic bags. A large number, perhaps, but not when compared with total municipal waste. The total amount of household waste produced each year is 29.6million tonnes. This means that plastic bags make up a mere 0.27 per cent of what we all throw away every year. This percentage would become even smaller if we were to include commercial and industrial waste in our calculations.

The total amount of oil used to produce plastic bags is also exaggerated, considering that most plastic bags are made using naphtha, a part of crude oil that isn’t used for much else and would probably be burnt away otherwise.

So what’s going on here? Why the panic about a simple little bag? The assault on plastic bags is really an assault on consumerism. There is a prevailing view among the green and mighty that consumerism is bad. It is portrayed as being a modern-day vice, devoid of meaning, something which atomises society, corrupting us through crude materialism and distracting us from more important issues.

Plastic bags are an outward reflection of the ease with which people can buy goods and take them home. People now have the disposable income to enter a shop unexpectedly and buy a load of stuff, and plastic bags mean they can rest assured they they will have the means to carry their purchases. How often do people returning home from work decide, on a whim, to make a quick stop at Tesco Express to buy a few items of food? How frequently, perhaps on a journey past Oxford Street, are we drawn into a sale by a piece of attractive clobber? Such nonchalant consumption would be made more difficult, perhaps more expensive, without shops’ provision of handy, free plastic bags.

I guess I must be a puppet of “Big Plastic”, as I’ve posted about this issue a few times already.

August 1, 2012

Climate science as religion, complete with confession and absolution

Filed under: Environment, Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:41

In sp!ked, Rob Lyons explains why the “climate skeptic” credentials of Professor Richard A Muller don’t quite add up, and helpfully provides a guide to the larger skeptic community:

There has been much rejoicing among eco-commentators. Leo Hickman in the Guardian declared: ‘So, that’s it then. The climate wars are over. Climate sceptics have accepted the main tenets of climate science — that the world is warming and that humans are largely to blame — and we can all now get on to debating the real issue at hand: what, if anything, do we do about it?’ However, Hickman had to add ‘If only’. Apparently, while Muller is the right kind of sceptic, some pesky critics just won’t accept the ‘facts’. ‘The power of his findings lay in the journey he has undertaken to arrive at his conclusions’, suggests Hickman, but clearly some people don’t get it.

It sounds like a powerful argument: someone who has publicly taken a position for a few years, before putting up his hands and effectively saying: ‘You know what? I was wrong, and my fellow travellers were wrong, and we should just fall into line with the mainstream view.’ The conversion analogy is a good one. Here, instead of the unbeliever falling at the preacher’s feet and accepting Jesus into their lives, no longer able to resist the power of the Lord, we have the sceptic allowing the IPCC to drive out the devil of climate-change denial from within his soul.

Except, like many a modern faith healer’s performance, there’s something dodgy about this widespread interpretation. For starters, Muller was hardly what you would call a climate-change sceptic. By and large, he has been very accepting of the IPCC’s view of the problem of climate change. His claim to being a sceptic seems to relate to his acceptance that the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, which was the centrepiece of the IPCC’s 2001 report and suggested that current temperatures are unprecedented, was simply the product of some sloppy science.

In spite of the media attempts to blacken the reputations of everyone who fails to fall into line with the IPCC’s orthodoxy, there are many different strains of disagreement with the official line:

But to a certain extent, this is all a false debate. There is no either/or. The leading climate sceptics all accept that humans have had some influence on the world’s climate. The argument is about how much human influence there is and what should be done about it.

Alarmists would argue that greenhouse-gas emissions are threatening to cook the planet and ultimately threaten humanity’s survival. At the very least, they see devastating destruction arising from global warming. For them, the only answer is the rapid decarbonisation of the world economy. Since the world is currently reliant on carbon-based fuels, this could mean an end to the drive for economic growth and the reorganisation of the economy and global politics. Anyone who disagrees is a ‘denier’. Some alarmists seriously suggest that debate should end now and anyone who continues to question the ‘consensus’ should be punished.

A few individuals aside, most climate sceptics think the world is moderately warmer than before, that humans have had some effect, but that most of the variation is natural and not particularly worrisome. Another band of sceptics — those who might be called ‘policy sceptics’, like Bjorn Lomborg and Roger Pielke Jr — broadly accept the IPCC’s view of temperature change and its causes. However, they think that the answer lies in devoting resources to technological development in the short term rather than a costly and probably futile attempt to decarbonise the world overnight. But even such policy disagreement is too much for the alarmists, who regularly pillory Lomborg in particular, yet it gets dressed up as ‘scientific fact’.

July 31, 2012

The BEST model: still science-by-press-release

Filed under: Environment, Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:02

Andrew Orlowski on the latest PR offensive by Dr Richard Muller of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project:

Richard Muller’s Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project, which began with goodwill from all corners of the climate debate, has made a series of bold announcements (without benefit of peer review) to the effect that global warming is definitely serious and definitely caused by humans. This has aroused derision among formerly supportive climate sceptics, caused an eminent climatologist to abandon the project, and even drawn criticism from generally alarmism-sympathetic media commentators.

Muller, professor of physics at UC Berkeley, is often regarded as a climate sceptic because he has frequently criticised the techniques used by climate scientists in the past and because he accepted funding for BEST from libertarian oil billionaire Charles Koch. When BEST launched in the wake of Climategate, it vowed to be “an independent, non-political, non-partisan group”, with Muller promising that “there will be no spin, whatever we find”. Critics of the existing temperature establishment, including well known sceptics Anthony Watts and Doug Keenan, welcomed it.

However each announcement has been aggressively trialled in the press not only before the peer review process had judged them ready for publication — which may not be a major issue — but also before anyone outside the BEST project could examine the papers at all. This requires the ordinary reader to take BEST’s accompanying press releases on blind faith — which is not a barrier for some journalists, but is far short of acceptable practice.

July 30, 2012

Mongolian eco-toilet scheme quietly closed down

Filed under: Asia, Environment, Health, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:38

From the Guardian:

The ecological toilets installed at Daxing were the design of Sweden’s Stockholm Environment Institute — about five million people use the model worldwide. In China, they are manufactured in the south-coast city of Chaozhou and cost about 700 or 800 yuan (US$100-125). Unlike normal toilets, they separate urine and excrement. In short, you aim your urine at the urine bowl and it is piped to an underground storage tank. And when you sit down, an excrement receptacle automatically pops out. You pull a lever to sprinkle some sawdust over your waste, and then when you stand up it flips over and everything is dumped down an excrement pipe to a tank in the basement. The tank is emptied two or three times monthly.

No water is used for flushing in either case — the cistern is full of sawdust, which residents collect from an office on-site. The toilets are designed to save water, prevent odours, and turn excrement into fertiliser. Fans blow air out of the pipes to the roof, and this is meant to ensure that smells do not enter the apartments.

Yan’s family just couldn’t get used to it. The toilet smelled bad from day one, they said: there was a stench of ammonia throughout the house, sometimes enough to make their eyes water as soon as they stepped into the bathroom. “I could hardly eat at home, and felt miserable on my way back after work,” said Yan. So the family usually ended up eating at Yan’s sister’s house. And their relatives didn’t want to visit.

The excrement bowls, which need to rotate, started to break. Every single house had to have the bowls repaired, and in 60% of households they needed to be replaced frequently. In 2007, Yan’s toilet was changed for one with a retractable tray, but the smells didn’t improve.

If your source data is flawed, your conclusions are useless

Filed under: Environment, Media, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:30

James Delingpole on the recent paper from Anthony Watts and his co-authors:

Have a look at this chart. It tells you pretty much all you need to know about the much-anticipated scoop by Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That?

What it means, in a nutshell, is that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — the US government body in charge of America’s temperature record, has systematically exaggerated the extent of late 20th century global warming. In fact, it has doubled it.

Is this a case of deliberate fraud by Warmist scientists hell bent on keeping their funding gravy train rolling? Well, after what we saw in Climategate anything is possible. (I mean it’s not like NOAA is run by hard-left eco activists, is it?) But I think more likely it is a case of confirmation bias. The Warmists who comprise the climate scientist establishment spend so much time communicating with other warmists and so little time paying attention to the views of dissenting scientists such as Henrik Svensmark — or Fred Singer or Richard Lindzen or indeed Anthony Watts — that it simply hasn’t occurred to them that their temperature records need adjusting downwards not upwards.

What Watts has conclusively demonstrated is that most of the weather stations in the US are so poorly sited that their temperature data is unreliable. Around 90 per cent have had their temperature readings skewed by the Urban Heat Island effect. While he has suspected this for some time what he has been unable to do until his latest, landmark paper (co-authored with Evan Jones of New York, Stephen McIntyre of Toronto, Canada, and Dr. John R. Christy from the Department of Atmospheric Science, University of Alabama, Huntsville) is to put precise figures on the degree of distortion involved.

July 18, 2012

What is the best way to demonstrate care for the future?

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:29

According to Steven Landsburg, the answer is to cut capital taxes, and he makes a good case:

There are only three things you and I can do to make the future world a better place. First, we can consume less, leaving more resources behind. Second, we can work harder, planting trees, building factories and writing poems that will live on after we’re gone. Third, we can innovate, advancing science and technology so that our children’s children’s children can make better use of the resources they inherit.

As it happens, there’s one key policy variable that drives all three of these things, and that’s the tax rate on capital income (which includes interest, dividends, corporate income and capital gains). Capital taxes are a disincentive to save, and when people don’t save they consume instead. Capital taxes are a disincentive to work and a disincentive to innovate.

This is not a plea for lowering taxes in general, and it’s not a plea for making the tax system either more or less progressive. (If you want to soak the rich, there are plenty of things to tax besides capital.) As a matter of fact, this isn’t even a plea for lowering taxes on capital. It’s simply an observation that if your goal is to leave a better world for our descendants, then your best bet is to support lower capital taxes.

H/T to Tim Harford for the link.

July 16, 2012

If this forecast is accurate, we’ll all be nostalgic for global warming

Filed under: Britain, Environment — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:05

In his Telegraph column on the current weather in Britain (and what it may or may not do to the Olympic schedule), Boris Johnson shares a long range weather forecast that is chilling — literally:

I have just been on the blower to my old chum, Piers Corbyn, the world’s foremost meteorological soothsayer, and he sounds like Jeremiah with an ingrown toenail. This is the same Corbyn, with a first-class degree in physics, who decisively beat the Met Office in 2010 and accurately forecast the cold and snowy winter — and I am afraid he has been bearish about this summer from sometime in February or March.

According to Piers and his team at Weather Action, we all underestimate the role of the sun. This is set to be just about the wettest July on record, he says, and that is mainly because of things taking place in the nuclear fireball millions of miles away from earth. “Sometime too bright the eye of heaven shines,” says the Poet, and often is his gold complexion dimmed. This is one of the dim moments. The old boy is suffering from some kind of solar acne, called “coronal holes”, and on July 12 he apparently emitted a colossal flare — a cosmic spurt of X-rays and other charged particles; and, by a process that we (or at least I) do not fully understand — perhaps because rain droplets form more easily when there are charged particles around — this distemper in the celestial orb is helping to cause the current inundations.

For the sake of completeness, and so that no one can later accuse me of concealing the bad news (what did he know about the weather, and when did he know it?), I should say that Piers has a general thesis that the current phase of grim weather — cold, snowy winters and wet summers — is just the prelude to something yet more bracing. We are heading, he says, for a mini Ice Age. These wet Julys and frosty Januaries are part of the opening drum roll of a cold period that will set in over the next decades.

Some say it will be upon us by 2045, some say by 2030. Looking at the pattern of the last few years, Piers Corbyn now thinks it could be sooner than that. He does not say that sabretooth tigers will roam the streets of Newcastle. He does not say that the Thames will freeze at London Bridge and that we will have fairs on the ice — unlikely, given how fast the river flows these days. But he does believe that it will get nippier, and that we will see the kind of cold period last experienced in the late 17th century and early 18th century.

July 15, 2012

Individual data points are less important than trends

Filed under: Environment, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:06

Remember the summer of 2001? It was a media feeding frenzy on the highly appropriate topic of sharks: shark attacks in US coastal waters were the third-most reported news item. But the media was calling attention to a “trend” of increasing shark attacks that didn’t actually exist. 2001 was actually a lower than average year for shark attacks. Warren Mayer explains the similarities between 2001’s “Summer of the Shark” and 2012’s heat wave:

This summer we have been absolutely bombarded with stories about the summer heat wave in the United States. The constant drumbeat of this coverage is being jumped on by many as evidence of catastrophic man-made global warming.

[. . .]

Trend, you say? Doesn’t a 100-year high temperature in and of itself imply warming? Certainly not. I believe this will prove to be an exaggeration, but for a moment let’s assume that this heat wave has created the hottest June in 100 years for half the Continental US. That seems pretty extreme, right? But the Continental US is about 2.5% of the world’s land mass. Just by math, in a stochastic system with a stable mean, a land area of this size somewhere should have a 100-year high month about five times a year! One data point about one small patch of the Earth having a hot month tells us nothing about trends.

[. . .]

What the Summer of the Shark needed, and what this summer’s US heatwave needs, is a little context. Specifically, if we are going to talk about supposed “trends”, then we should look at the data series in question over time. So let’s do so.

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