“The level of deception by the WSJ authors and others like them is absolutely astonishing to me.”

Bickmore on the WSJ response
[Via RealClimate]

Guest commentary from Barry Bickmore (repost)

The Wall Street Journal posted yet another op-ed by 16 scientists and engineers, which even include a few climate scientists(!!!). Here is the editor’s note to explain the context.

Editor’s Note: The authors of the following letter, listed below, are also the signatories of“No Need to Panic About Global Warming,” an op-ed that appeared in the Journal on January 27. This letter responds to criticisms of the op-ed made by Kevin Trenberth and 37 others in a letter published Feb. 1, and by Robert Byer of the American Physical Society in a letter published Feb. 6.

A relative sent me the article, asking for my thoughts on it. Here’s what I said in response.

Hi [Name Removed],

I don’t have time to do a full reply, but I’ll take apart a few of their main points.

1. The WSJ authors’ main point is that if the data doesn’t conform to predictions, the theory is “falsified”. They claim to show that global mean temperature data hasn’t conformed to climate model predictions, and so the models are falsified.
2. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But let’s look at the graph. They have a temperature plot, which wiggles all over the place, and then they have 4 straight lines that are supposed to represent the model predictions. The line for the IPCC First Assessment Report is clearly way off, but back in 1990 the climate models didn’t include important things like ocean circulation, so that’s hardly surprising. The lines for the next 3 IPCC reports are very similar to one another, though. What the authors don’t tell you is that the lines they plot are really just the average long-term slopes of a bunch of different models. The individual models actually predict that the temperature will go up and down for a few years at a time, but the long-term slope (30 years or more) will be about what those straight lines say. Given that these lines are supposed to be average, long-term slopes, take a look at the temperature data and try to estimate whether the overall slope of the data is similar to the slopes of those three lines (from the 1995, 2001, and 2007 IPCC reports). If you were to calculate the slope of the data WITH error bars, the model predictions would very likely be in that range.

 


Comparison of the spread of actual IPCC projections (2007) with observations of annual mean temperatures

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Cherrypicking data. Misusing graphs. Lack of proper error bars. Misunderstanding of statistics. Misleading rhetoric.

Are these the tools of legitimate scientists working to uncover the secrets of the world around us? Or are they closer to unethical lawyerly tricks to convince people?

Again and again, denialists use the same things when they publish. They chose the set of data that best fits their narrative – even though there are 3 major sets to choose from, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.  They ignore error bars or statistics and use arbitrary start dates – trying to make the published data much more definite than real scientists feel comfortable with.

They make rhetorical appeals to things that have no scientific basis – there is a conspiracy. Of course, they themselves participate in no conspiracy. They are only publishing in the WSJ out of their own personal ethics. I wonder who is funding most of them?

The fact that the publishing requirements for the WSJ and a respectable journal are light years apart never enters into their pleas. The fact is that their arguments do not hold up under scientific review so publishing in the WSJ is all they have.

They do not care about affecting scientific change at all. They care about social change. They deny the science because its consequences interferes too much with their social views.

They just cover up their denialism in scientific terms. But the science they espouse just does not stand up to any real scientific scrutiny.

That is why deception is required and not too surprisingly the Wall Street Journal agrees.

I will add Bickmore’s blog to my newsfeed,thogh. Enjoyable read.

Delaware dictates which non-US websites can remain in business

Verisign Seizes .com Domain Registered via Foreign Registrar on Behalf of US Authorities
[Via Daring Fireball]

Mark Jeftovic, writing on the EasyDNS blog:

But at the end of the day what has happened is that US law (in fact, Maryland state law) as been imposed on a .com domain operating outside the USA, which is the subtext we were very worried about when we commented on SOPA. Even though SOPA is currently in limbo, the reality that US law can now be asserted over all domains registered under .com, .net, org, .biz and maybe .info (Afilias is headquartered in Ireland by operates out of the US).

This is no longer a doom-and-gloom theory by some guy in a tin foil hat. It just happened.

This is just awful.

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We are now entering a place that could destroy the Internet as we know it. When local governments can dictate what is on the web – even ones run from other countries and never spend a time in the US – then where do we go?

Any state could potentially make almost anything illegal – say anonymity – and shut a website down. Sure, it could be taken to the Supreme Court but that’ll take time and money.

Seizing domains without a trial should not be legal. But it is and will increasingly harm our ability to use the Web.

Plants change based on what parents exposed to

Plants have a memory of pests that spans generations
[Via Ars Technica]

In the age of industrial agriculture, seeds are often purchased in bulk from corporate growers that use heavy doses of pesticides. They then travel many miles to a farm where climate, soil and pest conditions are dramatically different. As a result, crops often encounter new ailments that never impacted first generation seed plants, which may have been protected from the most troublesome invaders.

This might not be the best approach, based on three studies published in the February issue of Plant Physiology. Not only does adversity in the parent generation appear to make the seed stronger, but it primes plants to fight the specific ailments that plagued their parents.

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What these experiments show (and both papers are Open Access so you can read them also) is that the offspring of plants that are attacked by pests are more resistant to those pests. Something about the attack of the plants alters their genetic material in some way that gets passed onto the offspring. Even if the genetic material itself does not change.

This is what we define as epigenetic change. We are just now getting a handle on it.

Your genes are not all and exposure to environmental processes have been shown to effect epigenetic factors. Now we have direct scientific proof.

This is important stuff to understand. I’ve written about the importance of diversity in a species. As I wrote though, natural selection actually tries to drive a species towards the ‘best’ form. It removes those that don’t work and in many ways acts to reduce diversity.

Evolution depends on wide genetic diversity of a species coupled with removal of that diversity by natural selection. These contradictory steps can be easily solved by a couple of mechanisms.

One is that most mutations are not selective in the current environment. So they can be maintained and spread amongst a species. But if the environment changes, these diverse sequences may now become selective.

Thus, at the moment, height in of little consequence to human survival and it not really selected against. Unless you live in an environment of limited resources. Then small stature becomes important and selected for.

Another way it to hide a large array of diversity inside the genome but keep those genes silenced in ways to escape selection. That is apparently what is happening here.

New genes to provide resistance are not being created. The expression of genes already present are being altered. The plants have hidden a tremendous amount of diversity within their genome giving them a plasticity not seen it we look at one gene-one activity.

So some cellular process is at work here, opening up hidden genetic diversity and pathways that had not been previously available to selection.

And what is cool is that they have an initial idea of what cellular processes are involved – small RNAs.

When they used mutant plants that could not make small RNAs, the memory effect was gone. The offspring reacted just as the parents did.

The thing to recognize here is not that new mutations are involved or whole new processes. It is all still due to which genes get turned on when.

The importance of small RNAs  for control of gene expression has only recently been observed. Here, for the first time, we have evidence that they represent part of an epigenetic process

We know that they can affect human metabolism. It will be interesting to see if they can affect humans across generations.

It could well be that there is actually tremendous diversity hidden in our genes just waiting for the right – or wrong – environment to present itself. And this diversity then gets expressed in our offspring.

The President forces me to retract some things

by John-Morgan

How Obama Ignored The NDAA’s Military Custody Provision |
[Via TPMMuckraker]

The Obama administration issued procedures late Tuesday on their interpretation of the provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which required some terrorism suspects to be held in military custody. In short, the guidelines make it nearly impossible for a terrorism suspect to end up in the hands of the military.

[More]

Back in December I wrote about some of the worrying aspects of this bill. I was worried that Congress was going to give the President way too much power. And it still might to some future President.

But the current President took a different approach. He took the military detainment aspects of the law and added to many regulations to it as to prevent it ever being misused.

This is an instance when regulations can be used for good. They prevent the law from being mis-used or gamed in ways to hurt us all.

So at least this law will not be used currently to further an Imperial President. Congress’s inability to do the people’s work will not be used to harm them.

Not quite a useful as a line-item veto, I bet, but creating regulations that prevent action is as old as anything we have in our government. Here it actually does some good.

Feeling sorry for the poor rich

by sanchom

Are the Rich Completely Undeserving of Sympathy? –
[Via Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic]

I saw a fair amount of chortling this morning about this Bloomberg piece on wealthy financial-industry types who are having to cut back because of plummeting bonuses.  And to be sure, some of the cuts are in the “Call me a Waaaah-mbulance” category:  can’t go to Aspen any more?  Had to cut back that three-bedroom summer rental to only one month?  Why yes, that is the sound of the world’s smallest violin playing a dirge.

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All this shows is that many people making a ton of money are not very smart. Just as are many people making little.

We used to assume that wealth meant you either had some brains or were born into a family that once used to have brains.

But a lot of these wealthy seem to have fallen into wealth without a lot of self-awareness of what that really entails.

So, they make $300,000 but have $200,000 in fixed costs. See that is worse for them when their salaries drop to $125,000. Poor rich guys.

Not very smart, unless they had been socking that $100,000 extra away every year. It seems like most of them squandered that on vacations and such.

Because if they had been socking away even $50,000 a year for a while, they would have liquid savings to tide them over as they made a decision on selling the house.

What this article states is we should feel sorry for people who squandered their riches, who lived month-tomonth just like a poor person does.

A poor person has no choice. Someone making $300,000 made all sorts of choices.

And I bet there are many more people making $300,000 who are weathering this because they were aware enough to take precautions. But we don’t hear about them in the papers.

Ants never get much press.

“People who don’t have money don’t understand the stress”

by petesimon

Wall Street Bonus Drop Means Trading Aspen for Discount Cereal
[Via Bloomberg]

Andrew Schiff was sitting in a traffic jam in California this month after giving a speech at an investment conference about gold. He turned off the satellite radio, got out of the car and screamed a profanity.

“I’m not Zen at all, and when I’m freaking out about the situation, where I’m stuck like a rat in a trap on a highway with no way to get out, it’s very hard,” Schiff, director of marketing for broker-dealer Euro Pacific Capital Inc., said in an interview.

Schiff, 46, is facing another kind of jam this year: Paid a lower bonus, he said the $350,000 he earns, enough to put him in the country’s top 1 percent by income, doesn’t cover his family’s private-school tuition, a Kent, Connecticut, summer rental and the upgrade they would like from their 1,200-square- foot Brooklyn duplex. “I feel stuck,” Schiff said. “The New York that I wanted to have is still just beyond my reach.”

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The money quote is the title of this post. See, they only got at most $125,000 for a bonus and they are now crumbling under the economic pressures. Wow!

15% of the people in the US are in poverty and they do not understand stress?

Now I know most wealthy people do not think this way; that the press goes out and finds jerks that are happy to make themselves look like heartless bastards.

Of course, these bastards are really easy to find on Wall Street. It is like this point of view is a factor in their job choice.

What was interesting is the comment from the one guy who stated that Wall Street people do not save. If true that is astounding.

More than anyone they should understand the ups and downs of the system. This lack of saving would also explain their worry.

If they expanded their lifestyle to fit their income but do not have extra to save, then they too are living from month to month, just like a poor person who has no savings.

Of course, the difference is you are an idiot if you make $500,000 a year and do not save for the bad times.

At one time our household made enough to place us in the top 5% of US incomes. We stayed in the same small house and socked away as much as we could. We did eventually move to a larger house but put the money we made from selling the previous house into the new one to keep our equity high.

Over the last 10 years, our income dropped but the money we socked away helped keep us afloat. And even with the housing bubble burst, we still have large amounts of equity in the house we can eventually capture if we need to.

That is how you are supposed to do it. But not, apparently not many working in the financial sectors do it.

Aesop explained it quite well.

Wall Street is full of grasshoppers with nary an ant it appears. Or more likely, the ants are more worried about dealing with things than to give lots of quotes to the press.

UPDATE: Wealth and ethics may not match

Does being wealthy make you unethical? New research suggests it does
[Via Ars Technica]

In this week’s PNAS, researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of Toronto tackle a topic that is bound to spark controversy. I’ll let the title speak for itself: “Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior.” The paper describes the results of seven studies—two field studies and five experimental tests—that sought to explore how socioeconomic status (SES) correlates with behavior that most of us would consider ethical.

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Drivers of big expensive cares are more likely to be jerks than people with cheap cars. Nice to see ‘proof’ of what we knew.

More likely to steal, to cheat and to lie.

What I always want to see in these types of studies are the error bars and statistics. Are the populations of ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ sharply divided into two groups by the studies or is there overlap? How many people and how many cars, for example, would help get a feeling for this.

And how easy is it to adjust the behavior?

Unfortunately, the paper is behind a pay wall. So I went online to look for it and found it from one of the authors. I’ll have to look at it in more detail.

UPDATE: I’ve looked at the paper more. First, it has a pre-arranged editor. One of the things PNAS does is allow its members to oversee the review process. This is different than other journals where the editorial process is mostly unknown to the submittors. While not a death blow, PNAS has had a history of some very odd papers and sometimes this was due to the editorial process.

So, while PNAS is actually a very good journal it has had some previous problems. It has done a lot to clean this up but it is something to just keep an eye on.

I’m going to be very skeptical of this paper, especially based on the huge PR its publication has entailed. For example, they had people grade cars on a scale of 1-5 (poor to wealthy) and then grade their driving behavior. They did this twice but there are no error bars anywhere in the publication so I am a little leery of not only the grading mechanism but also the choice of intersections, reproducibility in other cities than San Francisco, etc.

Just one possible example – as I mentioned above – they may just have chosen one intersection where a lot of jerks with expensive cars just happened to live. There may not be any correlation to wealth at all here. Why not go to an intersection in a rich residential area of town and an intersection in a poor residential area.? That way the types of cars used are not as important.

The other sociological studies seem off in similar ways. WHile I am not an expert, I really do not feel that this is a definitive paper on the issue, no matter how the media tries to spin it.

“I don’t think they were ever not evil”

The Little Boy Who Cried ‘Don’t Be Evil’
[Via Daring Fireball]

Nick Bilton on Google’s stream of privacy incidents:

“The past two months have been unprecedented; there has never been anything like it at the company,” said Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of the blog Search Engine Land, who has closely covered Google since the company began. “They are a big company, and any big company is always going to have something happen that they don’t expect. But these things keep happening where you can’t even trust their word.”

When I asked Mr. Sullivan if Google was now too big not to be evil, he said, “I don’t think they were ever not evil.”

Google says nothing has changed.

Exactly.

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What a complete turn around for their brand. A couple of years ago, Google was trusted to be the company that did things differently, that cared about its users and vowed not to do evil.

Now that trust is gone and people question whether they were just chumps to believe Google to begin with.

When your brand is based on trust  – without trust, who would believe their search results, for example – you had better wory when people stop trusting you. Losing sight of the customer’s needs and views is usually a one-way street to bankruptcy.

With pragmatic, both sides win

by dwhartwig

Right versus pragmatic
[Via Marco.org]

At a previous job, the shared men’s bathroom for the floor was laid out like this:

(Please excuse my drawing skills.)

When we were done doing our business, this is the path we’d take:

Many people don’t like touching bathroom doorknobs after washing their hands. (Understandable.) But some of them dislike it so much that they’ll take their paper towel over to the door, turn the knob with it, and throw it on the floor while exiting.

By the end of the day, there would be paper towels all over the floor by the door.

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Telling people the right thing to do is to use the trash can does not solve the problem. Putting up notes telling them to do the right thing does not solve the problem.

The users believe they have their own ‘right’ reasons for doing what they do. This sets up the classic zero-sum game – for one side to be right and to win, the other side has to be shown to be wrong and to lose.

While, if they just moved the waste bin over by the door, everyone wins – a non-zero, positive sum solution.

One thing people need to do is to look at whether the situation is best resolved by making one group a winner and one group a loser, or whether both groups winning is better.

Perhaps the media companies might realize that calling their biggest fans pirates and loser may not be a winning strategy. Perhaps a more pragmatic solution would work better.

Unfortunately, these corporations act as pragmatically as Theodoric of York. Bleeding, leaches, boiled sheep’s urine and wormings. That sounds about their level of understanding.

Why do groups care more about workers in China than they do for workers in the US?

by Garments and Alterations

Miserable working conditions in ecommerce packing facilities
[Via Boing Boing]

Mother Jones‘s Mac McClelland goes underground at an unnamed ecommerce packing facility in a rural American town and reports on the terrible, back-breaking working conditions that are compounded by continuous verbal abuse, unsafe working conditions, mandatory overtime, and humiliating disciplinary procedures.

At lunch, the most common question, aside from “Which offensive dick-shaped product did you handle the most of today?” is “Why are you here?” like in prison. A guy in his mid-20s says he’s from Chicago, came to this state for a full-time job in the city an hour away from here because “Chicago’s going down.” His other job doesn’t pay especially well, so he’s here—pulling 10.5-hour shifts and commuting two hours a day—anytime he’s not there. One guy says he’s a writer; he applies for grants in his time off from the warehouse. A middle-aged lady near me used to be a bookkeeper. She’s a peak-season hire, worked here last year during Christmas, too. “What do you do the rest of the year?” I ask. “Collect unemployment!” she says, and laughs the sad laugh you laugh when you’re saying something really unfunny. All around us in the break room, mothers frantically call home. “Hi, baby!” you can hear them say; coos to children echo around the walls the moment lunch begins. It’s brave of these women to keep their phones in the break room, where theft is so high—they can’t keep them in their cars if they want to use them during the day, because we aren’t supposed to leave the premises without permission, and they can’t take them onto the warehouse floor, because “nothing but the clothes on your backs” is allowed on the warehouse floor (anything on your person that Amalgamated sells can be confiscated—”And what does Amalgamated sell?” they asked us in training. “Everything!”). I suppose that if I were responsible for a child, I would have no choice but to risk leaving my phone in here, too. But the mothers make it quick. “How are you doing?” “Is everything okay?” “Did you eat something?” “I love you!” and then they’re off the phone and eating as fast as the rest of us. Lunch is 29 minutes and 59 seconds—we’ve been reminded of this: “Lunch is not 30 minutes and 1 second”—that’s a penalty-point-earning offense—and that includes the time to get through the metal detectors and use the disgustingly overcrowded bathroom—the suggestion board hosts several pleas that someone do something about that smell—and time to stand in line to clock out and back in. So we chew quickly, and are often still chewing as we run back to our stations.

[More]

All sorts of folderol about Foxconn and China but none of them seemed to be a poorly treated as these American workers.

A previous article talked about the inhumane conditions at another warehouse. THey work them as temps and the can them shortly before they can become full time. The workers have to pay for their own (required) badges. They had to work in enclosed spaces without air conditioning in over 90 degree weather. And no talking.

This latest report details even more the things done. Mandatory overtime with two 15  minute breaks. Given goal impossible to meet and then harassed for not meeting them. Desperate 60 year olds trying to hold on their job along with twenty-somethings. Making about $300 a week after taxes.

I bet if this warehouse was in China, there would be all sorts of group working to make things better. We’d be seeing petition drives and TV programs during sweeps.  But here, these modern day sweat shops are simply ignored.

Perhaps if we started to take notice, things might change. Unless we care more about CHinese workers than our own.

We have seen this all before – graphically, if somewhat metaphorically, displayed in Fritz lang’s Classic, Metropolis.

Eighty years later and we are still learning the same lessons. Or, rather, not learning them. We still feed our young to Moloch, even while we complain about how awful China is.

No more waiting rooms?

by matthew.devalle

Hospital Live-Tweets Open-Heart Surgery
[Via Discovery News - Top Stories]

Memorial Hermann Medical Center tweets surgical updates, Twitpic photos and a helmet-cam video feed.

[More]

Sitting in a small room waiting for the results of a loved one’s surgery is one of life’s toughest tasks. Now we can stay abreast of the surgery via Twitter.

Will this be a boon or a bane? I imagine that it could be nasty if a mistake is made or something critical happens. It’ll be interesting to see how this progresses.

The US now lives in 2002

An American Decade Lost to the Recession
[Via Big Think]

What’s the Latest Development? The US economy is now ten years behind where it might have been but for the global recession. Using seven economic indicators, a new report from the Economist details how many years the world has lost due to the global recession, country by country. In the US, S&P stock levels have recovered but over 13 years, some investors have made no capital gains. Due to the mortgage crisis, American households have lost a whopping $9.2 trillion. The current national unemployment level of 8.3% is the same as it was in 1983.

[More]

Looks like the only major countries worse than the US are Iceland and Greece. Not a good pair. Britain is only back to 2004 and Germany is back to 2009.

But things do look like they are turning around. Hope this lasts.

Some dreams do come true

Life Correction | Reddit
[Via danielmiessler.com]

When I arrived at her wedding, her mom greeted me.

“Oh, are you THE Conc?” she said. I was a bit shocked. “I don’t think so” I replied. Her mom said “Yes, you’re her friend from college. She talks about you all the time! She would LOVE to see you before the ceremony.” So her mom takes my hand and leads me to the bridal room. Cool.

As soon as I entered the back room, my heart completely stopped. Standing in front of me wasn’t the frumpy girl I remembered. Instead, it was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Long gone were the silly haircut and bib overalls — replaced by an elegant, sexy, and stunning woman. Standing there in her bridal gown, she took my breath away.

And in that split second, time stopped. Every moment of our lives shot through my head. All the smiles, the laughs, the late night walks around campus. All the pieces of our relationship suddenly lined up made perfect sense. And in the ultimate clarity of that moment, I had the most awful realization of my entire life.

THIS was the woman I was supposed to marry. I was absolutely certain. There was not a doubt in my mind.

via reddit.com

Smile.

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Read the whole thing. One of the reasons I like reading reddit is getting these sorts of personal stories. Magic really does sometimes happen and they have pictures to prove it.

Real scientists giving background on real science

by cliff1066™

NOAA Video Town Hall Series on the Climate Change Challenge
[Via Age of Engagement | Big Think]

This week, NOAA’s Climate Service and Climate Watch magazine launched a video short course and lecture series featuring a diversity of world class experts explaining the major scientific, social, and ethical challenges related to climate change. I was honored to be able to contribute to the series with a lecture focused on new directions for climate change communication and public engagement.

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The videos present a great Climate Change 101. It may take some time but the material I have seen is great.

The first one on the history of the science is very helpful. It provides a nice view of the starts and stops of climate science as it tried to create a modern view of our world. He really brings out the personalities involved in creating our current understanding of the science behind climate change – an understanding that goes back to 1938.

And the last one on communication is also useful.

The propaganda business

Merchants of Doubt: Nicotine is Not Addictive = Climate Change Is Not Real
[Via Age of Engagement | Big Think]

The Climate Reality Project has produced online video short linking effectively for viewers the parallels between the tobacco industry’s attempts to lie and downplay the threat of smoking with conservative advocates’ efforts to downplay the reality and threat of climate change.  The video translates the narrative from Naomi Oreskes’ and Erik Conway’s book Merchants of Doubt.

[More]

Here is the video:

Just remember that some of the same people and institutes that took money form the tobacco companies to produce non-scientific work are now involved in the climate debate.

Sure, this time they may be doing things right but I would be very skeptical of anything considering who is funding them. They produced misleading material before for their masters and they continue to do it.

Their industry is propaganda and they use doubt to carry it out. They exist to mislead, lie and convey the information that their sponsors wish.