Physics be damned

This is really getting quite amusing.

A new paper published in Nature claims to have uncovered an almighty cock-up in the sea surface temperature record just after the Second World War. Previously the temperature records showed a sharp fall, but it turns out that this was wrong. According to the authors:

It turns out that the mysterious drop is due to differences in the way that British and US ships’ crews measured the sea surface temperature (SST) in the 1940s.

Only a few SST measurements were made during wartime, and almost exclusively by US ships. Then, in the summer of 1945, British ships resumed measurements. But whereas US crews had measured the temperature of the intake water used for cooling the ships’ engines, British crews collected water in buckets from the sea for their measurements. When these uninsulated buckets were hauled from the ocean, the temperature probe would get a little colder as a result of the cooling effect of evaporation. US measurements, on the other hand, yielded slightly higher temperatures due to the warm engine-room environment.

The standard logbook entries made at the time contain no information about how the measurements were taken, so the cause was overlooked, says David Thompson, first author on the paper and an atmospheric scientist at the State University of Colorado in Boulder. As a result, the bias — which, although small, was large enough to produce the sharp drop in global mean temperature — was never adjusted for.

Bravo. And the paper gets the full headline treatment in Nature, with editorials on two of the Nature Group's websites.

The only thing is that this cock-up was pointed out nearly two years ago at Climate Audit. As expected, neither the authors or Nature's leader writers acknowledge their debt to Steve McIntyre, a fact which rather gives the lie to their executive editor's claims that Nature is "of the highest quality and independent". I've noted before that they refuse to link to Climate Audit, while being happy to point their readers to environmentalist writers, so this kind of claim is becoming increasingly ridiculous.

Meanwhile, the implications of these findings are starting to sink in. We should remember in passing that the sea surface record is much more important than the land records, because the sea is such a large proportion of the world's surface. Now, all those climate models, which we are told are based on fundamental physics, have included calculations based on the effects of aerosols - pollution in layman's terms - which allow the models to reproduce the post-war temperature drop. The argument goes that all there was a lot of pollution around in the post-war period which depressed temperatures. Now, of course, the temperature drop turns out to be a mistake, the modellers are going to have to start to explain away why their post-war reconstructions are so much lower than the recorded temperatures. Their alternative is to suddenly discover that the effect of aerosols is not as great as previously thought or that aerosol concentrations were lower, but this will just make it look as if they just throw anything into the models which seems to give the "right" answer, and physics be damned.

Bet hedging

Latest news from the climate world

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center has announced that projected climate conditions point to a near- or above-normal hurricane season in the Atlantic Basin this year. The Atlantic hurricane season begins officially on 1 June.

So, if the season is anything other than very benign, NOAA can claim "We told you so" and "See? We can predict hurricanes after all!" and "Now you have to believe our predictions of impending doom".

Lots of good stuff around this morning

Is it just me, or are there a lot of interesting blog posts around this morning. Try these, for example:

Eamonn Butler on why plastic bags are better than paper ones, and why lots of packaging is better than none.

The Englishman on why hedgehogs are in decline.

EU Referendum on why we should be expecting power outages next winter. 

Who'd read a newspaper these days? (Although having said that, it's worth reading this article in the Telegraph about the EU's latest attempt to crush dissent).

Flown the coop?

The Spectator says that US Intelligence has located Osama bin Laden in the Karakoram.

Presumably we can conclude that he's not there any longer, either because he's flown the coop, or because the Americans have captured him already.

Nobody would be silly enough to let on that they knew where he was, before they'd caught him.

Would they? 

Desperation sets in

The Labour party is seriously worried. How else to explain Dennis MacShane's article in the Telegraph today calling for lower taxes and a smaller state.

A government should be no different. Labour should not be frightened of being a party that leaves more money in the pockets of hard-working individuals, starting with those at the lower end of the income scale. A Labour government that got serious about weaning its bureaucracy and clients off dependency on the citizen's money would find itself popular again.

This is about as convincing as a turkey suddenly declaring that it was in favour of Christmas all along and could someone pass the cranberry jelly. 

Lefty think-tank in sensible suggestion shocker

This actually looks like a semi-sensible idea. The Institute for Public Policy Research is calling for the long school summer holidays to be done away with, and replaced with more frequent, but shorter, holidays.

Ms Sodha told BBC Radio 5 Live that the current structure of the school year was a relic from the time when children were needed to help out on family farms during the summer fruit-picking season.

She said there were two strong arguments for making a change.

"The first is that children regress with respect to their academic skills. Their reading and maths skills tend to decline when they're away from school and this is particularly true for children from poorer backgrounds.

"And that actually brings us on to the second reason. Not all children have the same access to out of school activities during the summer holidays and kids from more advantaged backgrounds are the ones who are most likely to get to go to these activities.

Of course, in a sane world, school holidays would be set by headteachers in response to parental demand. The IPPR report shows that its authors are still stuck in a 1940s top-down mindset and assume that a one-size-fits-all solution imposed from the centre will be successful. This is a pity as Ms Sodha looks as though she's not long out of university, and one might have hoped that someone so young might have some ideas more in keeping with the 21st century - decentralised decision-making, consumer power and so on.

However, gut feel suggests that there are probably more parents who will be for this change than against it, and there are obvious economic advantages to the tourism industry from having demand spread more evenly through the year rather than having everyone going at the same time. Given that all the main political parties seem to be set on continuing the madness of state education, a small sensible step is probably as much as we can hope for.  

Ice sheet breakup - a biologist's view

One of the most prominent of the harrabinieri at the BBC (apart from Roger himself) is David Shukman,  the environment correspondent who seems to spend most of his life flying off to exotic locations to promote the green cause.

His most recent article is about some Canadian scientists who have found evidence that the Ward Hunt ice shelf is breaking up. He quotes Dr Derek Mueller of the Trent University, Ontario:

"I was astonished to see these new cracks. It means the ice shelf is disintegrating, the pieces are pinned together like a jigsaw but could float away."

Pretty frightening stuff then. And just in case we don't understand the point that he's making, David Shukman tells us

The fate of the vast ice blocks is seen as a key indicator of climate change.

I'm certainly terrified.

Let's find out some more about the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf then. Wikipedia has a page dedicated to Ward Hunt, which is "the largest ice shelf in the Arctic". It was discovered in 1875, although at that time it formed part of a larger ice shelf which broke up during the twentieth century. No doubt that was itself a portent of global warming to come.

And what's this?

The Ward Hunt ice sheet began breaking up approximately 100 years ago.

David? Why doesn't your article mention this?  Isn't this relevant? 

Let's be charitable though. Maybe Dr Mueller didn't tell you. Maybe he forgot, although let's face it, it's odd for a scientist to forget such a simple fact about his specialism.

Except it isn't really his specialism. After obtaining his bachelor's degree in biology, he studied polar algae for eight years and only recently has he switched to studying the effect of climate change on ice shelves. He's not even faculty at Trent University - he's a post-doctoral researcher. So to describe him as an expert on ice shelves would appear to be pushing a point. Perhaps this is why he was astonished by the cracks he found.

It may be that David Shukman just reckons he reliably toes the environmentalist party line. How else to explain the fact that this post-doctoral researcher has now been honoured with two Shukman reports on his work in the Arctic?

Eamonn Butler

Doctors and lawyers - gangsters the lot of them.

Climate Audit, potted history

Steve McIntyre has posted a presentation he made recently which is an excellent potted history of the Hockey Stick story. It's not too technical so it's suitable for anyone new to the subject.

It's a very large file though (11MB) 

What a day!

I had a simply amazing morning today.

I had dropped off daughter and son No.1 at school and was taking son No.2 back to the car, when we decided to play Pooh-sticks at a little bridge just down the road from the school. As we leant over the side of the bridge something swam out from underneath us. I was speechless for a couple of seconds before my brain could work out what it was I was seeing.

It was an otter! Broad daylight, bold as brass. The river is only about a foot deep - a burn would be a better description. He (or perhaps she) paddled upstream a bit, and as we ran along the pavement to catch up, did an about turn and paddled back again. A few minutes later, he did another about-turn and headed back upstream. He hid under another bridge for a short time and then crept out, much to the delight of the crowd of toddlers who had were by now watching from above. He eyed the children for a couple of seconds - just a little cockily, I thought - then he headed off upstream and disappeared into the undergrowth.

What a wonderful experience. Reminds me why I spurn the delights of big city living.

More Illiberal Democrats

Amazing to read that a Liberal Democrat peer, Lord Carlise, is arguing that national security is a civil liberty is truly remarkable.

Will Nick Clegg throw him out of the party? 

Wait for it...

Carlotta wonders about the impact of the Birmingham starved child case on home education. Word has started to get around that the poor child had been taken out of school ten weeks ago following a campaign of bullying. I heard the family's MP on the radio this morning saying that parents weren't allowed to take their children out of school in this way. This will have been a surprise to the thousands of families who have done just that, and demonstrates once again the traditional talent of MPs to sound off at considerable length on subjects about which they are entirely ignorant - the law is quite clear that if you want to educate your children yourself, you can.

Since the news broke, there has been some relief for home educators with the news that the family had received a visit from the local authority home-ed inspectors, who had noted nothing out of the ordinary. This rather undermines the arguments, which are surely coming soon, that home educators should be obliged to accept regular inspections from local authorities to ensure that they're not abusing their kids - at the moment they are free to tell the local authority to take a running jump. People will say that in order to avoid tragedies like this there is no alternative to change. "It's for the children!", will be the refrain - an arugment that, for most people in the UK, seems to trump all others .

Let's hope that the political tide of change that seems to be strengthening at the moment, brings with it a realisation that civil liberties are just a bit too important to be thrown away on irrational, emotional argument like this. The idea that you cannot live your life with your family, without officers of the state coming to check that you haven't committed some heinous crime against them, is dangerous and is frankly untenable in a free society.

If we are still a free society, that is. 

Sensitittivy training

Is that how you spell it? (via Donald Clark) 

Who goes unarmed these days?

The Graun says that a third of young people living in cities thinks it's acceptable to carry a knife for self-defence.

One in three young people living in cities thinks it is acceptable to carry a knife in self-defence because violence is so rife, according to research revealed today. Teenagers and twenty-somethings have lost faith in politicians, the police or schools to protect them and increasingly believe they need to be armed to defend themselves against people of their own age. Nearly half said they knew someone who had been a victim of knife crime.

And with depressing predictability they wheel out the old fallacy about carrying a knife making you more at risk of being a victim of crime - it's far more likely that people at risk of being a victim of crime decide to arm themselves with knives, which is the point of the article in the first place. 

It's odd to think that we seem to be approaching the situation where criminals go armed and chidren go armed but law-abiding adults don't. Isn't this the wrong way round?   

Very cool add in for Firefox

I've just got myself a very cool add-in for Firefox called Hyperwords. This is what I've been looking for for ages. Select a bit of text and you get a pop-up menu which will take you anywhere on the internet you want to go - Wikipedia, search engines, shops, Technorati, you name it. Select a number and you can do currency conversions on it, you can tag things in delicious.

The menus are configurable, so you only get the functionality you want, and there's all sorts of clever tailoring you can do as well. 

Well worth a look for Firefox users.