Two posts on the politics of global warming.

Article: The Continued Farce

A brief review of a half century of environmental hysteria: DDT, over-population, resource depletion, global cooling, global warming. Then a note on the totalitarian tendencies of the global warming advocates.

Article: Settled Science Catches Up with Steyn

The warming hiatus is reviewed. Global warming advocates are busy converting the hiatus into 30-year cycles of warming and cooling to explain the hiatus away.

But again, the models were not able to predict these cycles. The cycles have been evident to anyone who looks at how the climate has changed over the last 150 years. But they were never incorporated into the models, so the models failed.

Science Links 8/30/14

Article: Yellowstone Supervolcano Eruption would be Large, but not as Catastrophic as previously thought

Researchers have revealed after creating a new computer simulation called Ash3D at the US Geological Survey (USGS) that the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano would spew ash several feet thick in some areas. However, it is also true that the eruption will not be as catastrophic as being claimed by some previous reports.
"It's a crazy thing to think about because none of us have ever seen an eruption like Yellowstone. It would be two or three orders of magnitude more ash than we've been able to observe", said study lead author Larry Mastin, a USGS hydrologist, in a statement reported by Inquisitr.

The blast would be big and ash will engulf the states surrounding Yellowstone National Park.

Article: New Study Offers Clues to Swift Arctic Extinction

Seven hundred years ago, the Dorset people disappeared from the Arctic. The last of the Paleo-Eskimos, the Dorset had dominated eastern Canada and Greenland for centuries, hunting seal and walrus through holes in the ice and practicing shamanistic rituals with ornate carvings and masks.

They lived there for more than 4,000 years, then disappeared in a matter of decades.

The Dorset people were a genetically distinct group, and they were different from the modern Inuit people.

Usually, when one group displaces another, one group assimilates the other. The first group leaves genetic evidence in the other group.

It is possible that the Inuit themselves wiped out the Dorset people. The article does not talk about any overlap between the two peoples.

Article: Forum: Against Empathy

A long article about empathy focused on emotional empathy. The author is writing a book against empathy, especially as a guide to policy.

It refers to the process of experiencing the world as others do, or at least as you think they do. To empathize with someone is to put yourself in her shoes, to feel her pain. 

Empathy is a one-on-one connection.

Most people see the benefits of empathy as akin to the evils of racism: too obvious to require justification. I think this is a mistake. I have argued elsewhere that certain features of empathy make it a poor guide to social policy. Empathy is biased; we are more prone to feel empathy for attractive people and for those who look like us or share our ethnic or national background. And empathy is narrow; it connects us to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data. 

Empathy is too narrow, focusing on one person at a time.

In light of these features, our public decisions will be fairer and more moral once we put empathy aside. Our policies are improved when we appreciate that a hundred deaths are worse than one, even if we know the name of the one, and when we acknowledge that the life of someone in a faraway country is worth as much as the life a neighbor, even if our emotions pull us in a different direction. Without empathy, we are better able to grasp the importance of vaccinating children and responding to climate change. These acts impose costs on real people in the here and now for the sake of abstract future benefits, so tackling them may require overriding empathetic responses that favor the comfort and well being of individuals today. 

Effective social policy requires doing things that can be painful to others. The actual administration of a vaccine is painful, and side effects can be annoying to painful. If one operates only on emotional empathy, it would be hard to vaccinate one's child. Or have a life-saving operation done on the same child.

The cause of autism?

Article: Scientists discover people with autism have too many brain 'connections'

As a baby develops, the brain undergoes a burst of synapse formation, the connections between different nerves. Then, over time, these synapses are "pruned" back, retaining the necessary ones.

My guess is that this may be related to why it is easier for someone who hears, and learns to speak, a language when they are young rather than when they are older. The connections are all there, but as someone ages they are lost.

The Columbia University scientists examined the brains of 26 autistic children and young people aged two to 20 who had died from a variety of causes 

By late childhood, the researchers found that spine density had dropped by about half in the healthy brains, but by only 16 per cent in the brains of autistic individuals. 

Lead researcher Professor David Sulzer said: ‘It's the first time that anyone has looked for, and seen, a lack of pruning during development of children with autism, although lower numbers of synapses in some brain areas have been detected in brains from older patients and in mice with autistic-like behaviours.' 

He added: ‘While people usually think of learning as requiring formation of new synapses, the removal of inappropriate synapses may be just as important.

Australia Government Climate Office Accused Of Manipulating Temperature Data

The original article is linked in the article below, but is behind a pay wall.

AUSTRALIAN MET OFFICE ACCUSED OF MANIPULATING TEMPERATURE RECORDS

Linking article: Australia Government Climate Office Accused Of Manipulating Temperature Data

Dr. Jennifer Marohasey claims the BOM’s adjusted temperature records are “propaganda” and not science, according to the Australian. Marohasey said she analyzed raw temperature data from places across Australia and compared them to BOM data.
The result: the BOM’s adjusted data creates an artificial warming trend. Marohasey said BOM adjustments changed Aussie temperature records from a slight cooling trend to one of “dramatic warming” over the past century.

BOM claims that the data needed to be "homogenized" to account for changes in practices, instrumentation, etc. over the last 100 years. However, the homogenization meant that recent temperatures had to be consistently increased, even if no need could be shown for those changes.

BOM has rejected Dr Marohasy’s claims and said the agency had used world’s best practice and a peer reviewed process to modify the physical temperature records that had been recorded at weather stations across the country.

"Peer review" here is useless. Group-thinkers have to group-think. This is what politicized scientist expect to find and they "found it."

"Best practice" here is again useless. Is it best practice to decrease temperatures from early in the century and increase them late in the century to create a warming trend of 2.5 degrees per century? And to create one out of data that shows a slight cooling trend?

Dr Marohasy said she had found examples where there had been no change in instrumentation or siting and no inconsistency with nearby stations but there had been a dramatic change in temperature trend towards warming after homogenisation.
She said that at Amberley in Queensland, homogenisation had resulted in a change in the temperature trend from one of cooling to dramatic warming.
She calculated homogenisation had changed a cooling trend in the minimum temperature of 1C per century at Amberley into a warming trend of 2.5C. This was despite there being no change in location or instrumentation.

Various people have noted that NOAA in the US has done the same thing with its data.

New theory could kill the multiverse

Article: Radical New Theory Could Kill the Multiverse Hypothesis

I cannot summarize this article like I normally do and quoting will not work well.

Physicists want to understand the universe: its elementary particles, the forces that control them, where the universe came from, what were the earliest moments of the universe like, etc.

Create one hypothesis to answer one set of questions and it causes problems with another set.

A group of physicist are exploring, in math and discussions, a new idea that, if I am reading this correctly, mass and length are not fundamental properties, but emergent ones. That is, they emerge from something called "scale-symmetry breaking." This explains some things, like "inflation" shortly after the big bang, but it has its own issues.

Sorry, I do not understand it.

What I like is the ramifications. All the new (and new-old) ways of looking at all the different connections.

And the sad death of the idea of multiverses.

Let us observe a moment of silence for what one person called the "death of thousand SF plotlines."

Global warming has little to do with global warming

Article: Global Warming Has Little to Do With Global Warming

Archives: Joe Bastardi

For years, Joe Bastardi was the weatherman on my "news" radio station. He is also, very clearly, a global warming "skeptic."

Over the last year, he has published a series of articles on the global warming and its politics. See the "archives" link, above.

This is his last one, because he has said everything he can and because he believes that the definitive experiment to show who is right on the global warming controversy is underway: the NASA satellites that measure global temperatures.

He sides with those that hypothesize that most of global warming we have experienced is natural and due to 30 year cycles in the way heat is processed in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Both were in a  "warming" phase between 1978 and 2008, but with no additional warming after 1998 due to the fact that world temperatures had already adapted to the heat flow. The Pacific Ocean has been in a "cooling" phase since then and the Atlantic Ocean is about to enter it, as well.

With both oceans cooling, global temperatures should decrease.

Global warming models have failed to predict the current 16 year global warming hiatus. They predict temperatures should have been warming and will warm in future due to increasing CO2.

Two hypotheses. predicting opposite things. Bastardi's view is that one will be proven wrong in the next few years.

It is possible that they both be partly right. We could be in a hiatus because two major climate change factors are pulling in opposite directions.

It is also possible that they are both wrong, and the sun has much more influence on recent climate shifts than we can currently account for in our theories and models

The second part of the article gives a quick overview of the enormous amount of money that is buying global warming activism (with links). And I am including money to scientists that have to tie global warming/climate change into their research, even if the link is tenuous.

Economically, anything that is subsidized will increase.

The link between incomes and criminal behavior

Article: A disturbing study of the link between incomes and criminal behaviour

Using the rich troves of personal data which Scandinavian governments collect about their citizens....

Before I get into the article, doesn't this sound a bit creepy?

“POVERTY”, wrote Aristotle, “is the parent of crime.” But was he right? Certainly, poverty and crime are associated. And the idea that a lack of income might drive someone to misdeeds sounds plausible. 

One of the things that I frequently note is that "correlation does mean causation." That is, just because two events occur in tandem does not mean that one causes the other.

First, coincident do happen. And, second, both may be caused by something else entirely.

Using the rich troves of personal data which Scandinavian governments collect about their citizens, Mr Sariaslan and his team were able to study more than half a million children born in Sweden between 1989 and 1993. The records they consulted contained information about these people’s educational attainments, annual family incomes and criminal convictions. They also enabled the researchers to identify everybody’s siblings.

Children, now between 21 and 25 years old. And looking at the behavior of older and younger siblings.

He found, to no one’s surprise, that teenagers who had grown up in families whose earnings were among the bottom fifth were seven times more likely to be convicted of violent crimes, and twice as likely to be convicted of drug offences, as those whose family incomes were in the top fifth.

He showed evidence of the correlation that Aristotle noted 2300 years ago.

What did surprise him was that when he looked at families which had started poor and got richer, the younger children—those born into relative affluence—were just as likely to misbehave when they were teenagers as their elder siblings had been. Family income was not, per se, the determining factor.

So, simply increasing the family's income did not reduce the tendency of criminal behavior in the younger siblings. Why not?

That suggests two, not mutually exclusive, possibilities. One is that a family’s culture, once established, is “sticky”—that you can, to put it crudely, take the kid out of the neighbourhood, but not the neighbourhood out of the kid. Given, for example, children’s propensity to emulate elder siblings whom they admire, that sounds perfectly plausible. 

This is the "nurture" part of the "nature versus nurture" question. Research shows that there seems to be a 50:50 split. That is, about 50% of human behavior seems to be driving by environmental factors, including upbringing.

The other possibility is that genes which predispose to criminal behaviour (several studies suggest such genes exist) are more common at the bottom of society than at the top, perhaps because the lack of impulse-control they engender also tends to reduce someone’s earning capacity.

And the other 50% is due to genetic hardwiring.

Neither of these conclusions is likely to be welcome to social reformers. The first suggests that merely topping up people’s incomes, though it may well be a good idea for other reasons, will not by itself address questions of bad behaviour. 

Throwing money at the problem will not solve the problem.

The second raises the possibility that the problem of intergenerational poverty may be self-reinforcing, particularly in rich countries like Sweden where the winnowing effects of education and the need for high levels of skill in many jobs will favour those who can control their behaviour, and not those who rely on too many chemical crutches to get them through the day.