Snow in US. Spring in Greenland

Snow now possible in all 50 states

[Via CEJournal]

Negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation is back — with a vengeance

Incredibly enough, snow is forecast for Thursday night and Friday during the day, stretching all the way from Dallas across the Deep South to Tallahassee in the Florida Panhandle.

If this storm develops as forecast, all 50 states could have some snow cover as of Friday, according to Patrick Marsh of the National Severe Storms Laboratory, quoted in USA Today.

Just as strange, temperatures in parts of Greenland are reaching 40 degrees — and in one spot even 50. There’s also a 30 percent chance of rain — not snow — forecast for the southeastern part of the island. (To check the weather in various locations in Greenland, see this Weather Underground page.)

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Like in December and January, the Arctic Oscillation is reaching record lows. In fact, the standard figure that NOAA puts out does not display just how low this AO is:

I had to dig around to find a better chart. Here it is with the predictions for the next week or so:

The 2 week prediction indicates that the current negative cycle could last until the end of February with longer times at negative values than in December. Wow! Greenland could be toasty.

Here is how this negative cycle compares with others, back to 1950:

The period we are going through may be one of the longest deepest periods seen since 1950. (I wonder if there were big East Coast snow storms in 1969?)

A quick Google search finds that the Lindsay Storm shut down New York for 3 days in February 1969. Called the Lindsay storm because the Mayor , John Lindsay, did such a poor job overseeing snow removal.

Too much middle to work through

by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

More on Microsoft’s organizational clusterfuck and their struggle to innovate
[Via Edible Apple]

Last week, former Microsoft VP Dick Brass penned a fascinating op-ed for the New York Times where he described why a company like Microsoft, despite having a plethora of extremely smart engineers, has been unable to innovate in proportion to its talent level.

Brass described an organizational structure within Microsoft that actually worked against innovation, with various product groups within the company competing against one another, and sometimes even sabotaging the efforts of rival teams.

Building on that, Joe Wilcox of betanews talked to a number of former Microsoft employees who shed even more light on a corporate infrastructure that has seemingly gotten too big for its own good.

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Increasing the number of steps between upper management and lower is a sure way to decrease innovation and rapid adoption of change. I’ve written at SpreadingScience how human social networks collapse the number of steps in a way that make it easy for information to move between any two people in a small number of steps.

I don’t have figures on how many middle managers Microsoft now employs. But various former, and even some current, employees say that their number of “reports” — meaning people they report to — has increased by five to seven managers above them during 2000. Typically that works out to double or more the layers of middle management over the decade.

“When I started at MSFT in 1996, there were six people between me and [Microsoft cofounder] Bill Gates,” Boris said. “In 2009, there were 13 people between me and [Microsoft CEO] Steve Ballmer.” Fred said, “the number of managers between me and the CEO went from six to 10,” during the last decade. Another long-time Microsoftie, whom I’ll call Barry, saw his reports go from six to 12.

Human social interactions are based on small world networks, ones where people tend to connect the ‘popular’ people.The interesting thing about such networks is that they scale – adding more people has very little effect on how many steps are needed to move information from one person to another. It also means that is someone leaves, it is still really easy to find another path.

That is one reason why the INternet uses a small-world network. Hierarchies do not scale, which is why Microsoft is losing any competitive edge it has.

They need to collapse the networks, not increase them if they want to maintain any competitiveness, I wonder how many layers Google has.

Windows and Office

In Case You Had Any Doubts About Where Microsoft’s Profit Comes From

[Via Daring Fireball]

Nice chart from Alley Insider, showing Microsoft’s operating profit by division.

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Not much change but it is interesting to see just how much comes from each and why getting Windows 7 out was so important. It makes it easy to see why they are thinking of bring Office to the iPad. A whole new market with added profits.

Now that would be smart.

Only way to compete. Give it away.

by Yutaka Tsutano

Amazon may compete with Apple iPad by giving away free Kindles
[Via AppleInsider]

As Amazon’s e-book business continues to evolve in the wake of the Apple iPad announcement, a new rumor suggests the company is exploring the possibility of giving a Kindle reader to its best customers.

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An interesting business strategy. How will they do this to make sure someone does not sign up for Prime ($79) for one year and then drop it? That would be a tricky hurdle.

I’m a Prime customer and not only is it nice to get rapid shipping, it also means that I can upgrade to really fast (1 or 2 day shipping) when I need to for usually only a couple of bucks. A free Kindle might be cure but I think I am still going with an iPad.

Particularly when I will be able to use it to display my Keynote presentations on a laser-driven ShowWX pico projector. Add a couple of portable speakers and I can present almost anytime, anywhere. All for a total weight of 2.75 pounds.

My MacBook Pro weighs 6.6 pounds by itself. Now you know why I am looking forward to the iPad! And so is my back.

“…our understanding of the fundamental physical science behind climate change is sound”

Certainty on the Science of Climate Change
[Via Science Progress]

“A wait-and-see policy,” on climate change, observed Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Dr. Joseph Romm on Wednesday, “may mean waiting until it’s too late.” Romm was speaking at a CAP event on “The Science of Climate Change,” and was joined by Dr. Chris Field, the director of the department of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science and the Working Group II Co-Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and Dr. Michael MacCracken, the chief scientist for climate change programs at the Climate Institute.

Human activity generates heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide that are warming the planet and changing the climate. In framing the conversation, Romm summarized an MIT study concluding that on our current emissions path, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide will more than double from pre-industrial levels and the median temperature increase at the Earth’s surface in the 2090s could be 5.2˚C, or nearly 10˚F. “We’re talking about a completely different planet,” he said.

MacCracken emphasized during his panel presentation that our understanding of the fundamental physical science behind climate change is sound and has been for decades. In fact, the idea that human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide could warm the planet is more than a century old—the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius explained the concept in 1896. The first official report submitted to a U.S. president on the impact of atmospheric carbon dioxide arrived on Lyndon B. Johnson’s desk in 1965.

Human-generated emissions enhance the natural greenhouse effect and disrupt the planet’s carbon cycle, MacCracken explained. Observations of carbon dioxide levels since the middle of the 20th century show a clear annual oscillation: concentrations of the gas go up and down with the “seasonal breathing” of the biosphere. Part of that cycle is plants absorbing carbon from the air during spring and summer and releasing it during the fall and winter; part of it is ocean absorption. But increasing human emissions mean that the cycle is no longer balanced, and the concentration of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere is climbing steadily. “We’ve had a huge subsidy for our carbon,” Field said, because so much of it absorbed by “sinks” on land and in the water.

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A very nice explanation of the breadth and depth of information regarding climate change that is available. I have read the Arrhenius paper. It provides an estimate of global temperatures based on increasing or decreasing carbon dioxide levels. No one has shown that his basic premise is wrong – increasing carbon dioxide levels increase the global temperatures.

Theories, especially ones dealing with complex systems such as climate or evolution, survive because they are the best explanation for a huge amount of data, generated in a wide range of specialties. They survive because they are the best explanation for the world around us, until a better theory comes along.

So, instead of arguing about a minor paragraph in a informationally dense document, or adding Gate to every little thing, denialists should work at coming up with a better theory than AGW that explains all the data better. So far, they have not.