Likely: latest Atlantic hurricane-free date at least since 1941

Originally posted on September 4th. Now, 5 days later, it seems that no currently active systems will grow to a hurricane so the records will be broken – a new record at least since 1941, indeed.

Remotely related: Henrik Svensmark et al. have a new paper (press release) on cosmoclimatology in PLA, experimentally arguing that the UV rays increase the aerosol production from ozone, sulfur dioxide, vapor by the same factor even for nuclei above 50 nm of diameter – which may already be called cloud condensation nuclei. This strengthens his claims that the cosmic rays influence the climate and falsifies some theories about the chemistry of the atmosphere. Via WUWT. See previous TRF text on cosmoclimatology.

I have manually checked the dates of formation of the first hurricanes on Wikipedia pages about the 1851 Atlantic hurricane season (older, sparser data, are available at most on the "one page per decade" basis) through the 2013 Atlantic hurricane season. You should be able to manually edit the year in the URL to get to all the other pages.

This is what I found.

The first 2013 Atlantic hurricane hasn't started to form yet; only two 20-30 percent "glimpses" of a possible depression can be seen and they're likely to be destroyed by their collision with the land (and if they won't be, they will still be too weak for a hurricane). It's September 4th. The probability is therefore high that this situation will continue past September 9th, i.e. next Monday. If that's so, 2013 will beat 2002 (Sep 9th) and the "most recent" hurricane season that could beat our present are 1941 (Sep 17th), 1922 (Sep 13th), 1914 and 1907 (the only two recorded hurricane-free seasons with 1 and 5 named storms, respectively), 1905 (Oct 1st), 1877 (Sep 14th), and 1876 (Sep 12th).




For the sake of convenience, let me mention the first "hurricane birth date" for less spectacular years which were nevertheless late in the season: 1937 (Sep 9th), 1931 (Sep 6th), 1920 (Sep 7th), 1912 (Sep 10th), 1865, 1857 (both Sep 6th). Some seasons were very weak – 1952, 1939, 1930 – but some hurricanes materialized by the end of August, anyway.

Most of the years see the first hurricane forming sometime in July. August births of the first hurricanes are rarer, much like the beginning in September or, on the contrary, June (or even May). Several out-of-the-official-season hurricanes in January etc. mess up with the calendar and I was overlooking them (treating them as if they didn't occur).




See also an Accuweather and WUWT articles about the possibly looming new record.

After the unusually vigorous 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, we were drowning in predictions of ever stronger and ever more frequent hurricanes. A statistical evaluation of the 2006-2013 seasons shows that all the hurricane-related data randomly fluctuate in the usual intervals we have been used to for quite some time. These numbers are very volatile but there's no indication that something is increasing and everything suggests that 2005 was an exceptional year that is unlikely to be repeated often.

So far, we don't know for sure whether the late earliest 2002 hurricane date will be beaten – I would bet that it probably will – and whether 2013 will join the shortlist of hurricaneless seasons (1914 and 1907: how many TRF readers remember those years?) – chances for Yes and No seem comparable to me. And yes, I think it's more likely than not that at least one hurricane was overlooked either in 1907 or 1914, due to the absence of satellites and similar devices, so it's perfectly plausible that the ongoing season will actually be the weakest one since 1851 (unless a hurricane will materialize).

But what is clear is that the absence of any unusually strong hurricane activity after 2005 is just another example of the spectacular failures of the climate alarmists. Like with other failures, they never learn any lesson. They only cherry-pick the data that agree with their scientifically pathological opinion that a dangerous climate change should be underway and simply switch to something else whenever the clash of their idea with the data becomes too self-evident.

Whenever it becomes indisputable that the data have falsified a particular prediction of their "dangerous climate change" framework – and be almost sure that the data ultimately rule out every single one of them – they just switch to something else in which the data aren't sufficiently detailed which is why sufficiently spun, cherry-picked anecdotes may be temporarily used to replace the data. This approach is unscientific and despicable.

It's not too important scientifically or socially whether the first 2013 Atlantic hurricane starts to form before September 9th but I will be personally checking what's going on above the Atlantic Ocean, just for the fun of it. Will you?

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Yo-yo banned in Syria

Blamed for drought by Muslims

BEIRUT (Syria), [date]. Drought and severe cold is disastrously affecting the cattle in Syria, and the Muslim chiefs at Damascus have attributed the wrath of the heavens to the recent introduction of the yo-yo.

They say that while the people are praying for rain to come down from above the yo-yo goes down, and before reaching the ground springs up through the subtle pull of the string.




The chiefs interviewed the Prime Minister, and exposed the evil influence of yo-yos, so they were immediately banned.




Today the police paraded the streets and confiscated the yo-yos from everyone they saw playing with them.

---

Source: Barrier Miner (Broken Hill, New South Wales: 1888 - 1954), 23 January 1933

The censored date at the top was January 21st. I changed "Moslems" to "Muslims" so that it's not clear from the beginning that the text is ancient. Educated readers realized that anyway because Beirut hasn't belonged to "Syria" since 1943 (the correct name of the state should have been The French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon, anyway) and because Muslim chiefs will only return to command police in Damascus after the possibly looming war.

At any rate, the similarity with the IPCC-backed religion cannot be overlooked. People see two things happening at about the same time (one of them has been happening for billions of years but they don't care), they decide that correlation and even coincidence is the same thing as causation, and the rest is just about making sure that the law enforcement forces enforce this deep life-saving insight. ;-)

The yo-yos probably resemble the rain droplets. Before they can reach the ground thanks to the gravity of the prayers, the force from an evil string returns them to the clouds. The springs, if any, stretched between the clouds and the rain droplets may look too weak but that's OK because they're surely strengthened by positive feedbacks. The debate is over.

Thanks to Steve Goddard for the URL

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Did soot melt glaciers in the 19th century?

Media including NBC focused our attention to a paper in PNAS,

End of the Little Ice Age in the Alps forced by industrial black carbon

by Thomas Painter and 5 co-authors from Caltech, Michigan, Innsbruck, Davis, and Boulder. The claim is easy: the post-little-ice-age melting of glaciers in the 19th century started well before CO2 could possibly matter which is inconvenient so a different explanation has to be found. The explanation is dirty snow from the industrial revolution.



Well, I find it plausible. Throughout the late 18th and the whole 19th century, they didn't care about the clean air at all. In some sense, they were happy people who hadn't devoured the apple of knowledge yet.




Just imagine: their lives could have been shortened by a year or a few years due to soot and other pollutants. But the advantage was that they didn't have to be constantly afraid of, or paranoic about, the dirty air. They could build without any environmental restrictions. They could freely live in these environments, too. I often tend to think that our modern obsession with the environmental standards brought us more unhappiness than benefits.




So there was enough soot around. Soot makes snow dirty. Dirty snow is darker and absorbs more light. That's why it heats up and melts. Moreover, the melting point of a mixed compound is generally lower – such mixtures tend to be liquid at temperatures at which pure compounds may still be solid crystals.

So the only question was whether enough soot was produced and whether it could get sufficiently far to affect the Alps because, you know, soot isn't gas so it can't just mix with the rest of the atmosphere. Soot is made of solid carbon particles, stupid.



Emil Škoda's factory in my hometown of Pilsen in the 1880s. Check that the number of chimneys grew by 1938 as shown by a stamp from June 1938 released shortly before the Third Reich began to damage Czechoslovakia. The stamp clearly shows that before the war, they were still immensely proud about all the pollution.

The paper talks about forcings between 9 and 35 watts per square meters. This is vastly higher than the "dangerous" forcing often attributed to the doubling of CO2, 3.7 watts per square meter (this is an IPCC-approved number, I am not saying anything controversial at all: only the translation of this forcing to a temperature change is controversial because it also depends on the sensitivity). Nevertheless, this soot effect which is between 3 and 10 times stronger than the effect of all the CO2 that we have added and will add between 1750 and 2100 (distant future!), even though it could have been created within one 19th century industrial season, is apparently quantitatively discussed in the climatological literature for the first time.

Just try to appreciate how immensely irrational this situation is. We were (and to a lesser extent, we still are) bombarded by kilotons of would-be scary junk about the threats posed by carbon dioxide, we are encouraged to pay trillions of dollars or even to qualitatively change our lifestyle. But an effect – an obvious effect in schoolkids' eyes – that seems to be 3-10 times stronger hasn't been really discussed or quantified for all the decades when the "climate change" hysteria was around and when researchers into this "problem" were getting tens of billions of dollars for investigating it. They just missed a 3-10 times stronger effect than their pet effect. They missed many other things, too.



While I find it plausible that soot mattered for the glaciers in the Alps, I think that more solid papers have to be written before we can be sufficiently certain about it to care about the research at all. But at the end, I am unlikely to believe that soot is the right explanation for most of these changes to the glaciers that occurred in recent millennia.

For example, the glaciers were probably nearly absent in the Alps – some mountains in the Roman Empire – 2,000 years ago. Was this absence due to man-made soot, too? Well, we might be underestimating the industrial activity of the Roman Empire – I actually do believe that in many surprising respects, they could compete with us. But just the overall human population was too small. The whole Roman Empire had 50+ million people during Augustus' reign. Well over 500 million live on the territory today. I have some trouble to imagine that they produced much more than 10 times more soot etc. per capita than we do today but it's not quite impossible, I think. The empire had to build on lots of very primitive, environmentally unfriendly "industry".

If we penetrate deeper into the history, then at some point, the soot from fires ignited by men becomes indistinguishable from soot from natural fires and similar events; the human addition gets lost in the natural background.

OK, fine, we have largely eliminated industrial soot pollution from our lives. We can't really eliminate or substantially and discontinuously lower CO2 emissions because it's so essential for industrial as well as biological processes. But should we? The total accumulative effect of man-emitted CO2 through three centuries of the industrial revolution may be 10-30 percent of the soot effect claimed in this paper, an effect that our 19th century ancestors didn't even know (and care) about. Even though soot was harmful for health, unlike CO2, they survived just well and their work built solid foundations for the truly remarkable strengthening and modernization of the human civilization that we've been witnessing since the 20th century.

So no, except for a dozen of specialists in the world, people on the Earth just shouldn't care about CO2 emissions for a second. It's stupid. The climate is affected by lots of factors. Some of them are purely natural, some of them are man-made, and some of them are mixed because some fires and other processes result(ed) from the cooperation of humans and Nature. Some of the contributions are understood, others are less understood, a big fraction of the important effects isn't understood at all. It is completely silly to tear one of the minor effect (a half-understood man-made contribution) out of context and promote it to something that even non-climatologists should care about just because this minor contribution is closest to their normal lives.



Off-topic: Microsoft sensibly bought Nokia's cell phone branch for $7 billion, and before Steve Ballmer retires, he is offering us a new product, Windows 1.0. LOL.

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The 50 to 1 project

Topher (*1982) is the commercial brand of an Australian host and filmmaker who had 6 siblings, was educated at home, and decided that movies – and later movies about political issues etc. – were his real passion. Using some "amateurish" money, including some funds from Lord Monckton – as I understand it – he shot a series of interviews with skeptics called

The 50 to 1 Project

Thanks to Anthony W. and Honza U. for leading me to watch some of the videos. The ideas, graphics, and especially the content look very good. The videos include a 10-minute introductory video and interviews with Nova, Evans, Watts, Essex, Laframboise, Morano, Singer, and Ergas. Evans' interview is the one that I have listened to most carefully (Honza recommended me 9:30-12:00 of that video).

However, I was intrigued by the particular figure "50 to 1" that is used as the title of the project. It's supposed to say that "the price of mitigation exceeds the price of adaption by the factor of 50". Where did the number 50 come from? I quickly learned that it was extracted from the 2006 Stern report. In some counting, mitigation would cost 80% of the GDP while adaptation would cost 1.6%.

Well, nice, and given some interpretations, plausible. However, the Stern report was complete junk as a piece of economics (especially because of the totally unrealistic treatment of the discount rate) and one may get any number he wants. It seems bizarre to me when skeptics borrow such numbers from such badly constructed pillars of alarmism – even if the number from the alarmist report proves that the attempts to "wrestle" with the climate change are a preposterous waste of efforts and resources, anyway.




What does it exactly mean that the mitigation is 50 times more costly? To make the ratio well-defined, you have to specify what you mean by the "money spent for mitigation" and the "money spent for adaptation" (and I am neglecting the fact that we would have to compare two very different and non-interacting worlds, a rich one and a poor one, and one dollar in one of the worlds isn't easily converted to dollars in the other world). Both quantities are hard to define (what is included and what is not?) and both quantities, especially the first one, heavily depend on people's decisions so they can't be "objectively" quantified in advance.




The real issue is that the climate is inseparable from the weather and using existing technologies, one can't control the weather at every place of the globe for any realistic price. So the price for "full mitigation" is de facto infinite. Let me tell you an example what I mean. A category 5 hurricane is a weather phenomenon but it does contribute to the "climate" – the weather averaged over a few decades etc. – so you may also count it as the climate phenomenon. A full-fledged program of "mitigation" could also require that there won't be any Category 5 hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean anymore. I am not aware of a miraculous technology by which we could afford something like that today – or in the following decades. Even if you just decided to "ban" any hurricane that is stronger than all the hurricanes on the record, and that clearly could be interpreted as a sign of "climate change" if one decides to do so, you would have to pay an infinite price to be "sure".

But if you can't prevent some strong hurricanes or other potentially harmful weather phenomena, it can always be said that you haven't mitigated the climate phenomena that matter. You may always waste more money for "mitigation" but their effect on the things that matter will be negligible and perhaps negative. To summarize, the "price of mitigation" is a completely arbitrary number. It's really "the amount of money that people are willing to waste for no benefits that are described by meaningless phrases about global warming". It can be millions, it can be billions, it can be trillions, it can be quadrillions of dollars.

You can't really stop the weather phenomena now or in any foreseeable future. Even if you decided to regulate only the global mean temperature – which isn't really a too important quantity for anything that people are doing – you will fail. For dozens of trillions of dollars, you could suck the CO2 from the atmosphere and reduce the concentration of 400 ppm to something like 150 ppm at which plants stop growing. For various estimates of the sensitivity, such a reduction of CO2 could lower the temperature by one or several degrees.

But at some moment, Nature will bring us larger variations. In the year 60,000 AD, a new ice age will likely peak and the global mean temperature may be up to 10 °C lower than today. You won't be able to compensate this cooling by an increase of CO2 because you could need up to 5-10 doublings, to raise the CO2 concentration from 400 ppm at least above 10,000 ppm, but the atmosphere would become uncomfortable for breathing. (There would be many advantages, too.) More importantly, you won't really find the appropriate amount of carbon to burn anywhere. Also, the Earth will fight back by absorbing the excess CO2 (it's doing so today, devouring 2 ppm from the atmosphere every year). The higher it is, the more quickly it absorbs it. We won't be able to reach 10,000 ppm of CO2 by man-made emissions. Chances are that even 1000 ppm is too much for us to reach. In a few centuries, fossil fuels will "peak" in some definition and the CO2 will peak at a comparable moment. Maybe at 600 ppm, maybe at 1500 ppm, no one knows and it's not really important.

My broader point is that it is impossible, at least with the currently foreseeable technologies, to prevent the changes of the climate even if you nonsensically reduce the the concept of the climate to the global mean temperature only. So the "price of mitigation" is a quantity only encodes how much money people are going to waste for some verbally "justified" nonsense but the goal, the "mitigation", will not be achieved. It can't be achieved locally. It can't even be achieved when you talk about a single global quantity, at least not for an extended period of time.

The "price of adaptation" is somewhat less arbitrary but it's still largely ill-defined. People are adapting to changes, anyway. As I wrote in the paragraphs above, people will have to adapt and prepare for weather phenomena even if they would gain the control over the global mean temperature. So the "price of mitigation" still includes the "price of adaptation" because adaptation will always be needed, too.

Now, you may ask: Which expenses may be included into the "price of adaptation"? I don't know of an algorithm to separate the expenses to those that are about "adaptation" and those that are not. When you buy a heating system for your home, you are adapting and preparing your household for the likely drop of the temperature in the winter. The seasons are mostly natural and predictable – a winter is bound to happen sometime between November and March so you have to be ready and it's not about "climate change" – except that you can say the same thing about slower oscillations of the ocean-atmospheric coupled system, too. El Niños and La Niñas are almost guaranteed to occur sometime in the next and every 5 years (both of them). So it's also normal to get ready for these ENSO episodes. With various frequencies, hurricanes, drought, floods, and many other phenomena are guaranteed to arrive, too. The expenses meant to protect us and our assets from these things are always "partly climatic".

The separation of expenses to those linked to "adaptation" and those independent of "adaptation" is about hundreds of arbitrary administrative choices, too. At the end, the societies will adapt whether they invest any special money or not. Assuming that the mankind won't go extinct in the next 100 or 200 years, and it won't, it will be able to say that it will have adapted to the changes. If the mother of a family in the third world that is increasingly starving undergoes abortion, it is a way of adaptation, too. Another question is whether the mankind will be able to see that it could be better off if it will have made some or different investments (whatever is the right tense here). But a shrunk population or luxurious expenses is a way of adaptation, too.

My broader point here is that it makes no sense to ask whether the mankind has adapted or not. Whatever it has done, it has adapted as long as it survives. And of course that it will survive under the business-as-usual, at least if we neglect some non-climatic, more dangerous threats. For this reason, it's not possible to quantify the "price of adaptation" in any way.

So I would never find it appropriate to politicize expenses as "payments for mitigation" or "payments for adaptation". It's a nonsensical way of looking at things. We will adapt whatever we do and we will never mitigate weather phenomena whatever we do. If we make some expenses, we must have more specific reasons to do so than just "adaptation". We may want to make a city resilient towards 500-year floods, for example. But there will always be some phenomena that will leave us unprepared. It's a law of Nature. You (and societies) can't protect themselves against "every threat".

OK, I've spent way too much time with this ill-defined topic.

David Evans was asked a question that I am also asked quite often – how it was possible that so many scientists pay lip service to the global warming orthodoxy if the data seem to clearly show that there's no justification for fear. Do they abandon the scientific method? Sadly, yes, Evans answers. More importantly, he says that the scientists are also humans and they need to have jobs, to feed themselves, spouses, or kids, in some cases, and they just know that being incompatible with the CO2 ideology could be a threat for this kind of personal safety.

I assure you that these considerations are damn real and important.

At Harvard, my specialization wasn't linked to the climate in any direct way and the climate wasn't even in the top 5 of the "sensitive questions" that turned me into a foe of the prevailing left-wing academic establishment (be sure that feminism, blackism, and other demagogic victimisms were more important – and at some moment, even my opposition to the anti-physics attacks by crackpots such as Woit and Smolin must have become politically incorrect by itself because similar left-wing jerks largely "own" the broader academic environment, too). However, even when it comes to this utterly silly and unimportant topic – the global warming propaganda – I was made very sure that my inconvenient knowledge would have been enough to make my life in the Academia insufferable.



The most intense realization of this fact came when a Marxist slut – or what is precisely the politically correct term for her – called Naomi Oreskes was visiting Harvard. She had some friendly encounters with an important theoretical physicist, a nice guy and top expert who was left-wing but I would never consider him a true left-wing zealot (a highly pragmatic chap, in a sense). She learned that I publicly declared her work on the "scientific consensus" to be rubbish. So she sent some e-blackmail to me with copies resent to all senior names at Harvard whom she knew and considered important (the recipient list included the heads of Harvard's climate and Earth-sciences-related institutes and some senior physicists in my department: all of those remained silent as far as I could see). The e-blackmail "argued" that I was spitting on the 50-year-long work by the best scientists of the history (she meant crappy fraudsters like Michael Mann and herself) and something had to be done about it.

Just imagine what would happen if a conservative senior visiting professor bullied a young progressive female junior faculty member by resending his hateful threats requiring to "comply" with his preferred ideology to a collection of powerful white old men. Once the story would be leaked, The New York Times and 10 other major left-wing newspapers wouldn't write about anything else than this nationwide scandal for months. When exactly the same thing happens with the political sides switched, I simply had to suffer. I had no realistic defense against the slut's bullying. Try to write letters by the mouse pointer in the Flash above so that you avoid the shark. ;-)

Now imagine what changes if you take the story above and replace a string theorist with a junior faculty member who is doing research of climatology and adjacent disciplines. Obviously, the amount, frequency, and urgency of the threats will increase by an order (or orders) of magnitude. The elimination from the system is pretty much guaranteed if he or she is publicly against the orthodoxy. Moreover, imagine that most such young folks can't really afford to sacrifice a year of income, unlike me.

The Academia is so contaminated by dishonest and aggressive ideologues who can't really be removed from the system – many of them have tenure – that you can't or you shouldn't realistically hope that in the coming years, the atmosphere in the Academia when it comes to climate change will substantially change. Instead, what we must hope for is that the broader society gets educated and realizes that the community of scholars as it exists in the real world today simply cannot and shouldn't be trusted when it comes to any politically sensitive questions. When the Academia notices that its status will have changed, it may change its weights, too. But the initial impulse simply has to operate outside the Academia.

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Pacific waters as an excuse for the warming hiatus

Most of the mainstream media offered us a bizarre "story" in the recent two or three days. The absence of global warming in recent years – well, it's really 17 years now – has been "explained" by the Pacific waters. Problem solved, the belief in the global warming ideology may continue unchallenged, we're de facto told.



PDO: warm and cool phase

The claims are based on the paper by Kosaka and Xie in Nature,

Recent global-warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling,

which is bad enough but I will mostly focus on the journalists' added spin which is even worse. The Guardian's Fiona Harvey will be used as my sample but the comments below are applicable almost universally.




The first paragraph says that it's the Pacific Ocean that "slowed" the global warming and the second paragraph tells us why this research is supposed to be important:

Their work is a big step forward in helping to solve the greatest puzzle of current climate change research – why global average surface temperatures, while still on an upward trend, have risen more slowly in the past 10 to fifteen years than previously.

I had to laugh. The most important insight of the "modern" climate science research is that the world is warming and the greatest puzzle is why it's not true according to observations. Incidentally, it is not true that one may still find a "warming trend" in the last 10-15 years. One only finds noise and in various subintervals, the cooling and warming trends are about equally represented, as shown many times on this blog and elsewhere.

If you expect that half a degree or a degree Celsius of warming per decade is now inevitable, e.g. because you were brainwashed by the AGW charlatans or because your brain has been damaged in a similar sad accident, then the absence of the warming may look like a "great puzzle". But what about the approach not to be brainwashed by unscientific superstitions? Isn't it a bit more rational approach? In that case, there's no puzzle. The temperatures are doing what they have always been doing: fluctuate by one or two tenths of a degree each decade in pretty random directions; after all, we know it from the historical data from decades when the man-made CO2 concentration was vastly lower than today that the temperatures were doing nothing less than that. CO2 may add a contribution but it's just small enough so that the CO2-induced change remains more or less negligible relatively to the natural variability for 20 years if not much longer than that.

Isn't it a more convincing explanation than the program to identify a huge puzzle and then to "solve" it by naming a culprit?




But I had to laugh throughout Harvey's article, it's just so utterly stupid and irrational. You would say that some analysis of the role of the Pacific Ocean will be presented as the research of a factor that influences the climate as a whole. Instead, we're repeatedly told that what the paper studies is the ocean's influence on the pause in global warming. This completely silly formulation – sometimes with the word "hiatus" replacing "pause" – is repeated many times in the article. It's a classic example of a tail wagging the dog. Climatology – and this paper – studies or should study the climate (which is pretty much equally likely to change in both directions, as empirically shown all the time), not "global warming" or even "hiatuses in this non-existent global warming". But a lie repeated 100 times becomes the truth according to the key beliefs of Fiona Harvey.

However, what I found most comical is the suggestion – permeating Harvey's text and pretty much all similar articles – that the "bad guy" has been found so everything is fine now. It's the evil Pacific Ocean. I can't believe my eyes because a reader must have IQ below 70 to buy this cheap trick. Is it likely that such humans or, more generally, primates have learned to read the Guardian? It is sort of hard to believe.

In reality, these AGW scammers have claimed that the global mean temperature is

1. important,
2. predictable.

It's neither important nor predictable but they have simply made a prediction 20 years ago (and similarly in more recent years) and the prediction has totally failed. The warming in the 20 years wasn't 0.6 °C as predicted but pretty much zero. The error is 100 percent. It is a complete failure. The theory claiming that the global mean temperature is predictable in the 20-year horizon that makes these particular predictions must be thrown to the trash bin immediately if you're doing science. If those who have made the predictions haven't contributed anything substantially better, they must be thrown to the trash bin, too. If they don't fit the trash bin, they must be at least humanely shot into their skulls. It's that simple. It's called science, stupid.

Instead, we're sold stories about the Pacific Ocean as a "justification" of the failure. It's no justification. If you totally screw your understanding of the Pacific Ocean, it pretty much means that you screwed your understanding of the climate on most of the globe. The Pacific Ocean covers one third of the Earth's ocean. In fact, this largest ocean's area exceeds the area of all lands on Earth. It's in no way negligible.

So even if you just consider the Pacific Ocean's contribution to the global average of the temperatures, it is a huge contribution that can't be overlooked. The Pacific Ocean was this large and this important even 20 years ago – even millions of years ago. It is no "news" that the Pacific Ocean was important. The global mean temperatures were always meant to include the contribution of the Pacific temperatures with the appropriate weights. It was the global mean temperature that did include the Pacific contribution that the global warming ideology advocates claimed to predict. They just failed. One may try to isolate which parts of the Earth had larger errors than others but it's mostly silly because every sensible person agrees that regional temperature trends can't be predicted for 20 years in advance with currently available tools. That's why you can't really say that "just the Pacific" predictions failed. Moreover, the predictions of every region are based on the same ideas so if one region empirically shows you that you misunderstand how it works, you probably misunderstand how every region works.

Now, despite the huge size, the actual temperature of the Pacific Ocean temperature isn't that important for almost any humans. But almost every elementary school alumnus knew about this fact 20 years ago, too. Nevertheless, the Pacific temperatures have been included in the "important" quantity called the global warming temperature – mainly because the contemporary climatologists are obliged to be obsessed with the greenhouse effect that operates more or less equally on every square mile of the globe. The obsessive focus on the (for the actual climate change not too important) global mean temperature that uniformly depends on each square mile of the globe has always been a key meme of the global warming ideology. You can't just throw it away and claim that nothing about the ideology has to be changed. If you change this thing, you are really proving that it has been rubbish from the beginning.

One may always cherry-pick 1/3 or even 2/3 of the globe where the disagreement with the models is smaller than it is in the rest. But if you claim that a quantity is the most important and you completely fail in predicting it, you have just failed. In scientific disciplines that may be counted as hard science and that have corresponding standards, a hypothesis is really eliminated once any clear disagreement of its predictions with the reality is found. One wrong prediction is enough to falsify an idea. If you want to be satisfied with the agreement between the rough observations of 1/2 of the numbers (that you may cherry-pick a posteriori) and your predictions, then any hypothesis will end up as "viable".

Moreover, the Pacific Ocean influences the globe by more than just this large area that "directly" influences the global temperature averages. The Pacific Ocean is the cradle of the El Niño/La Niña ENSO oscillations which have been known for quite some time to be the dominant contribution to the interannual temperature variability. If the global mean temperature changes significantly from one year to the next, chances are very high that it has something to do with the El Niños or La Niñas.

The Pacific Ocean is important at the decadal scale, too. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation describes one of the most important regional degrees of freedom – if not the most important one (AMO is a possible competitor) – that changes at the timescale comparable to tens of years. In fact, both El Niños and PDOs are mentioned by many of the articles. But they're not able or willing to deduce the most obvious consequence of all these insights, and it is the following:

The more you use natural variations such as El Niño, PDO etc. to explain what's actually going on and what's being observed, the more important the natural drivers become, the more irrelevant the CO2 gets, the more the skeptics who claim that the climate change is mostly natural are shown to be right (many skeptics have talked about the important influence of the ocean cycles and patterns for many decades and most skeptics today are well aware about the tight PDO-global-temperature correlation in the last 100 years), and the more discredited the AGW doctrine becomes along with its defenders.

Is that really so difficult for Fiona Harvey to understand this trivial point? Do we have to read all the garbage about CO2 that manifestly has nothing to do with any of the important observations or insights and not even with these not-so-important observations of the recent events in the Pacific Ocean?

Even average U.S. and EU politicians are beginning to understand what the hiatus means (why not journalists in the Guardian?) and they want a credible explanation in the IPCC AR5 summary that will be out in one month from now.

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Lindzen's talk at DDP meeting

Alarming Global Warming: What Happens to Science in the Public Square

See also a written version of the talk in a journal...

Willie Soon sent us the newly posted video at the bottom, a 56-minute-long talk by Richard Lindzen at the (July) 2012 DDP meeting (Long Island Hotel And Conference Center). DDP stands for "Doctors for Disaster Preparedness" that sounds silly, the talk is 1 year old, and there has already been a 2013 DDP meeting.




But the talk still looked interesting enough to me which is why I thought it was a good idea to increase the video's visibility and you may watch it here, too.




So here we go. From the YouTube video page:

From DDP 30th Annual Meeting, July 2012. Professor Lindzen is a dynamical meteorologist with interests in the broad topics of climate, planetary waves, monsoon meteorology, planetary atmospheres, and hydrodynamic instability. His research involves studies of the role of the tropics in mid-latitude weather and global heat transport, the moisture budget and its role in global change, the origins of ice ages, seasonal effects in atmospheric transport, stratospheric waves, and the observational determination of climate sensitivity.




He has made major contributions to the development of the current theory for the Hadley Circulation, which dominates the atmospheric transport of heat and momentum from the tropics to higher latitudes, and has advanced the understanding of the role of small scale gravity waves in producing the reversal of global temperature gradients at the mesopause, and provided accepted explanations for atmospheric tides and the quasi-biennial oscillation of the tropical stratosphere. He pioneered the study of how ozone photochemistry, radiative transfer, and dynamics interact with each other. He is currently studying what determines the pole-to-equator temperature difference, the nonlinear equilibration of baroclinic instability, and the contribution of such instabilities to global heat transport. He has also been developing a new approach to air-sea interaction in the tropics, and is actively involved in parameterizing the role of cumulus convection in heating and drying the atmosphere and in generating upper level cirrus clouds. He has developed models for the Earth's climate with specific concern for the stability of the ice caps, the sensitivity to increases in CO2, the origin of the 100,000-year cycle in glaciation, and the maintenance of regional variations in climate. Prof. Lindzen is a recipient of the AMS's Meisinger and Charney Awards, the AGU's Macelwane Medal, and the Leo Huss Walin Prize. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Meteorological Society. He is a corresponding member of the NAS Committee on Human Rights, and has been a member of the NRC Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate and the Council of the AMS. He has also been a consultant to the Global Modeling and Simulation Group at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He earned a Ph.D. at Harvard University.

Lindzen begins with some funny comments on why he would visit a conference of prepared doctors for the first time, how their talk seem to be catchy, and so on. Then he discusses how problematic it is to identify science with institutions. These days, the connection is almost automatic, anyway, with government's monopoly in external funding in fields like climatology. This has worrisome consequences for the potential ethical erosion. Lindzen said that many others have said it, you don't need Lindzen to tell you such things.

Nevertheless, he says lots of things about these social issues surrounding science, anyway. One of the texts he recommended was The Blueprint by Peter Thiel (Paypal, FB), Max Levchin, and Garry Kasparov (chess) that Thiel was working on when I and Lindzen met him 3 years ago. But the book hasn't been released, as far as I can see.

Lindzen tells us about the context of similar "moral" movements, more precisely about science that is "politically useful". About 100 years ago, the counterpart of global warming was eugenics because all the people expressed their high moral standards by supporting eugenics just like many do it with global warming today. To make it "work", one needs powerful advocacy groups talking about science all the time, simplistic depictions, events to be "interpreted", and scientists flattered by public attention in sufficient numbers to produce the science "demanded by the public".

He shows a cartoon with the vicious triangle of scientists (making ambiguous statements), journalists (conversion to alarmist declarations), politicians (responding to the alarm by paying scientists), and so on. Scientists in faraway disciplines (psychology, political science...) are happy to have some "action" in science. Ordinary people have sense, academics don't. Some amazingly meaningless, AGW-motivated research projects that got $200k or $400k are mentioned.

Lysenko wasn't an evil man, we hear. He was a mediocre man who just used the opportunity to be influential. Millions of casualties of agricultural failures were a side effect. Similar comments apply to the people in eugenics (e.g. Harry Laughlin) and people like Mann and Jones in the climate science. Lindzen remembers the era when "climatology" was only used for record keepers, an underappreciated group of workers. Well, that has changed. They morphed into "leading scientists". Obviously, they want to maintain the new situation – and invites others to improve their status, too. People have been joining the bandwagon to be promoted. The "politically useful" transformation of science inevitably leads to the loss of quality, promotion of incompetence, and the disappearance of logic itself.

Examples. Correlation isn't causation despite stupid women with accolades. Global mean temperature isn't an important driver of the temperature but just the residue in a calculation of things that actually matter for the climate change (equator-pole difference is more important). By the way, the IPCC models incorrectly predicted the behavior of the equator-pole difference. This has consequences because one can't derive the Eocene (56-34 Myears ago) from these models!

The temperature is quickly oscillating. The annual etc. average is much lower than these oscillations, essentially zero although not quite zero. It's not exciting but if you change the scale, you can make it look exciting. ;-) Lindzen also shows how you can't feel global warming – and how certain things about the weather may be accurately predicted through a trick. He also shows that the recent and 70-year-older temperature graphs for 30 years are almost the same. Which one is global warming?

The annual temperatures contain residues and/of many other effects. Lindzen has been pointing out that an independent evaluation of the sensitivity was needed. Almost all empirically based methods suggest that the sensitivity is below 1 °C; IPCC insists on 3 °C, anyway. Even the temperature record is really consistent with a much lower sensitivity.

AGW is a mess and has been costly to the society and damaging for science. The question is How do we get out of it? In the case of eugenics, immigration gave the stimulative events, some genetics was the science behind it. The movement was discredited by the Nazis but some of it survived through the 1960s. Lysenkoism was supported by the whole USSR machinery but the opposition actually remained strong throughout the era and omnipresent behind the borders. Stalin's death helped by Khruschev was actually a Lysenko fan and allowed him to continue in his position. Lysenko didn't need to fight for his job which is ironically the reason why the movement faded away.

Global warming differs in 2 ways from eugenics and Lysenkoism. Unlike the two older examples, it has become a religion. Many people found the meaning of their lives by saving the planet through watching their carbon footprint. ;-) Fun WSJ cartoon with a lazy boy on the couch: Isn't it enough that I am saving the planet? ;-)

The second difference is that the propagation of AGW is global, unlike Lysenkoism, and it has devoured more or less all of institutionalized science. However, cracks exist. The claims are becoming increasingly indefensible. ClimateGate showed a pathology, regardless of attempted whitewashes. Groups including physicists are heard as skeptics and official statements from Norway, India etc. happened to be clearly non-alarmist. Even Ralph Cicerone (NAS) has denounced the climate catastrophicism. Their retreat has hopefully begun. It's plausible that similar movements have a natural lifetime about 30 years.

Questions: the last 14 minutes...

A participant points out that the laymen don't distinguish scientists and science. Five PhDs publishing something make the report "scientific". Lindzen agrees: no doubts about it. But there's no clue what to do about it. This problem clearly damages all of science. No ways to wrestle with it without a public pissing match. ;-)

Another guy praises Dick as a "compensator" for the institutional voice of his MIT and the Boston establishment. Is it possible for a PhD candidate or someone who wants tenure in Greater Boston to be critical? You can't say it openly, Dick says. A young person couldn't make a career if he were openly critical of global warming, Lindzen repeats it. (I assure you that I've gone through quite some terror at Harvard due to my AGW skepticism as well, partly because of the role of visiting aggressive outsiders and Marxist sluts such as Naomi Oreskes – which was, of course, just a tiny portion of my positions that are viewed as "politically incorrect" by the insane establishment not only in that area.) Gerard Roe of the Milankovitch fame is an example of a silent skeptic who can do fine – he adds a sentence or two that he kindly hopes that the kind reader understands that the paper, while it says nothing about CO2, doesn't rule its effects out. Other examples.

Also, you need to bring the money to be promoted at universities so your grant applications can't openly say skeptical things, either. Lindzen also mentions that South Korea doesn't mind, for example, as he learned from his Korean postdoc collaborator (probably Choi). However, Dick's Chilean ex-student can't come out because Chile is much more politically correct (that's probably true especially for countries that try to "undo" the sins of clearly right-wing regimes from their history). A French collaborator can say anything because he has no intention to stay in the field. ;-)

The third man crisply summarized a comment by Dick – fluctuations away from the mean are more important than the fluctuations of the mean. Sea level and health impact of daily cycles are clear examples (heart attacks increase with the night-day difference). Death rates numbers to support the thesis... This man actually says that heart attacks are reduced by 3-5% because of the reduction of the diurnal temperature fluctuations caused by CO2. Dick doesn't believe it and neither do I because the CO2 is changing the temperature almost by the same amount at night and during the day and its contributions to the day-night temperature difference is even smaller than its contribution to the overall mean which is tiny by itself. Lindzen points out that the reasoning is illogical because the global mean temperature, which is a residue, is presented as the cause etc.

Fourth man asks about the meaninglessness of the global average – which are problematic because of abandoned and new stations etc. Dick Lindzen says that once you get obsessed about tenths of degrees, these details really matter. Pissing contests on whether those things matter but Dick wisely says: this is not what the climate is about.

Dick confirms the fifth man's comments about the large changes that historically occurred – ice ages – relatively to the negligible recent ones. He explains that the ice ages are driven by the summer insolation over the Arctic. These influences require changes by hundreds of watts per meter square meter; CO2 doubling is about 3 watts per square meter. The global mean is actually unaffected in those cycles. Thus, talking about the global average only throws the baby out with the bath water and returns science by decades if not generations.

The sixth man points out that Dick is Emeritus, will it change his activities? Dick hopes so. ;-)

The seventh man says a joke, a medical analogy with the obsession about the temperature change. Dick says that if the body weren't fluctuating in its temperature on short timescales, it couldn't be stable on the long time scales. We've forgotten it and started to treat change as a bad thing instead of an indication of stability.

Read More

RSS: a negative temperature trend in 16.67 years

Before you open this blog entry, you should make sure that all the nuclear power plants in your country are operational. You may need them because the text below contains a really long table (with 415 lines or so) which will be processed as \(\rm\LaTeX\) using MathJax. ;-)

About two years ago, Kevin Trenberth and others promoted a paper (Ben Santer and 16 co-authors, 2011) that claimed that one needs 17 years – what a precision – to determine the existence of a global warming trend. The purpose of the paper was to inject some patience to the minds of the alarmists and the undecided – 15 years of "no warming" isn't enough to notice the absence of any warming because you need 17 and not 15 years. Your humble correspondent wrote a tirade explaining that people like Santer and Trenberth were numerologists because there can obviously be nothing special about the 17-year-long interval. The whole continuum of the frequencies contributes to the temperature change and all the confidence levels etc. are depending on the duration continuously. There's no sharp "magic deadline" after which a hypothetical trend "must" show up.



At any rate, my preferred temperature record – the satellite-based RSS AMSU dataset – has approached a point in which the global warming trend in the recent 17 years is statistically insignificant and negligible. In fact, if you include the latest 200 months i.e. 16 years and 8 months (from December 1996 through July 2013 included) into your calculation of linear regression, you get a negative warming trend!




Yes, a particular episode that helps the trend to be negative is the (globally warmer) El Niño of the century in 1997-1998 that occurred 15+ years ago.

In shorter recent intervals, the negative warming trends are about as widespread as the positive ones. In other words, the data from the 17 recent years show no noticeable temperature trend, in one way or another. Chances are high that by the end of 2013, the recent interval in which the temperature trend will be tiny and negative (i.e. a negligible global cooling) will actually extend to the full 17 years. With some sensible conventions for statistical significance, one would conclude that the record in the last 20 years or so shows no statistically significant trend in the global temperature. Compare this absence of a trend in the real world with the hysterical hype about "global warming" in the very same 20-year-long interval.




The table below contains the temperature trends in Celsius degrees per century (rounded to one hundredth) calculated by linear regression applied to the RSS AMSU dataset for all intervals whose length is between 415 and 2 months. The minus signs in the middle column indicate that we're returning a certain number of months into the past. For your convenience, I emphasize the multiples of twelve as whole years – see the number in the first column.

Because the laymen and occasional thinkers about these linear regression results are often horrified by the following observation, let me clarify it again. If you look at the table, it becomes clear that the absolute value of the temperature trend is severely increasing as you go towards shorter, more recent intervals (near the bottom of the table).

This fact does not mean that something is getting crazy about the climate. The larger absolute values of the trend are a consequence of evaluating shorter periods of time, not a consequence of evaluating more recent intervals. When the period of time is shorter, then the calculated trend is clearly dominated by high-frequency, fast, nearly random changes of the weather – i.e. by noise of a sort – while the role of a hypothetical underlying trend – if one exists at all – gets suppressed.

For example, the last line says that the temperature trend between June 2013 and July 2013 is –83 Celsius degrees per century. This doesn't mean that all of us will freeze soon and the Earth will drop below the absolute zero in several centuries from now. ;-) Such an extrapolation is of course completely illegitimate because the temperature doesn't change uniformly and linearly by any stretch of imagination. It's chaotically oscillating up and down and the shorter intervals of time you consider, the more inappropriate it becomes to extrapolate the trend from the short interval to a very long one! However, I would kindly point out that it's wrong to extrapolate the temperature trend even from 30-year or 100-year – or any other – intervals in the future, too.

A way to think about the behavior is to approximate the temperature by a random walk (or, using equivalent words, Brownian motion or red noise) which is a qualitatively realistic model to describe the behavior of the temperatures at certain timescales. Such a random walk has no underlying trend whatsoever but after \(t\) months, the temperature changes by something comparable to \(\pm C\sqrt{t}\) in average. The longer time you allow the climate to change, the more its temperature will change although the change will be far smaller than the change expected from proportionality.

If you divide this change by the length of the interval, \(t\), you obtain a temperature trend of order \(\pm C / \sqrt{t}\) which goes to infinity for really short intervals of time. And that's what you will see in the table below, too.

Finally, here is the long table of temperature trends. It's plausible that you may have to wait for half a minute for your browser and the Javascript in it to convert the table to a nice \(\rm\LaTeX\) output. I found this "export as \(\rm\LaTeX\)" to be the simplest way to reprint the result from Mathematica to the blog's HTML source.\[
\begin{array}{|c|c|c|}
\hline \text{#years}&\text{#months}&{}^\circ {\rm C}/\text{century}\\
\hline
\text{} & -415 & 1.29 \\
\text{} & -414 & 1.28 \\
\text{} & -413 & 1.28 \\
\text{} & -412 & 1.28 \\
\text{} & -411 & 1.27 \\
\text{} & -410 & 1.27 \\
\text{} & -409 & 1.27 \\
34 & -408 & 1.27 \\
\text{} & -407 & 1.27 \\
\text{} & -406 & 1.27 \\
\text{} & -405 & 1.28 \\
\text{} & -404 & 1.29 \\
\text{} & -403 & 1.3 \\
\text{} & -402 & 1.3 \\
\text{} & -401 & 1.31 \\
\text{} & -400 & 1.32 \\
\text{} & -399 & 1.32 \\
\text{} & -398 & 1.33 \\
\text{} & -397 & 1.34 \\
33 & -396 & 1.35 \\
\text{} & -395 & 1.36 \\
\text{} & -394 & 1.36 \\
\text{} & -393 & 1.37 \\
\text{} & -392 & 1.37 \\
\text{} & -391 & 1.37 \\
\text{} & -390 & 1.39 \\
\text{} & -389 & 1.4 \\
\text{} & -388 & 1.41 \\
\text{} & -387 & 1.42 \\
\text{} & -386 & 1.42 \\
\text{} & -385 & 1.43 \\
32 & -384 & 1.43 \\
\text{} & -383 & 1.44 \\
\text{} & -382 & 1.44 \\
\text{} & -381 & 1.44 \\
\text{} & -380 & 1.44 \\
\text{} & -379 & 1.46 \\
\text{} & -378 & 1.45 \\
\text{} & -377 & 1.46 \\
\text{} & -376 & 1.45 \\
\text{} & -375 & 1.45 \\
\text{} & -374 & 1.45 \\
\text{} & -373 & 1.44 \\
31 & -372 & 1.43 \\
\text{} & -371 & 1.43 \\
\text{} & -370 & 1.43 \\
\text{} & -369 & 1.42 \\
\text{} & -368 & 1.42 \\
\text{} & -367 & 1.42 \\
\text{} & -366 & 1.43 \\
\text{} & -365 & 1.44 \\
\text{} & -364 & 1.46 \\
\text{} & -363 & 1.48 \\
\text{} & -362 & 1.49 \\
\text{} & -361 & 1.49 \\
30 & -360 & 1.5 \\
\text{} & -359 & 1.51 \\
\text{} & -358 & 1.52 \\
\text{} & -357 & 1.53 \\
\text{} & -356 & 1.54 \\
\text{} & -355 & 1.53 \\
\text{} & -354 & 1.52 \\
\text{} & -353 & 1.52 \\
\text{} & -352 & 1.52 \\
\text{} & -351 & 1.51 \\
\text{} & -350 & 1.51 \\
\text{} & -349 & 1.5 \\
29 & -348 & 1.5 \\
\text{} & -347 & 1.49 \\
\text{} & -346 & 1.47 \\
\text{} & -345 & 1.47 \\
\text{} & -344 & 1.46 \\
\text{} & -343 & 1.44 \\
\text{} & -342 & 1.43 \\
\text{} & -341 & 1.42 \\
\text{} & -340 & 1.4 \\
\text{} & -339 & 1.39 \\
\text{} & -338 & 1.37 \\
\text{} & -337 & 1.35 \\
28 & -336 & 1.33 \\
\text{} & -335 & 1.32 \\
\text{} & -334 & 1.31 \\
\text{} & -333 & 1.3 \\
\text{} & -332 & 1.29 \\
\text{} & -331 & 1.28 \\
\text{} & -330 & 1.28 \\
\text{} & -329 & 1.27 \\
\text{} & -328 & 1.26 \\
\text{} & -327 & 1.26 \\
\text{} & -326 & 1.25 \\
\text{} & -325 & 1.24 \\
27 & -324 & 1.23 \\
\text{} & -323 & 1.22 \\
\text{} & -322 & 1.21 \\
\text{} & -321 & 1.19 \\
\text{} & -320 & 1.18 \\
\text{} & -319 & 1.18 \\
\text{} & -318 & 1.19 \\
\text{} & -317 & 1.2 \\
\text{} & -316 & 1.19 \\
\text{} & -315 & 1.2 \\
\text{} & -314 & 1.2 \\
\text{} & -313 & 1.21 \\
26 & -312 & 1.22 \\
\text{} & -311 & 1.22 \\
\text{} & -310 & 1.22 \\
\text{} & -309 & 1.23 \\
\text{} & -308 & 1.25 \\
\text{} & -307 & 1.27 \\
\text{} & -306 & 1.29 \\
\text{} & -305 & 1.29 \\
\text{} & -304 & 1.3 \\
\text{} & -303 & 1.31 \\
\text{} & -302 & 1.32 \\
\text{} & -301 & 1.33 \\
25 & -300 & 1.34 \\
\text{} & -299 & 1.35 \\
\text{} & -298 & 1.37 \\
\text{} & -297 & 1.36 \\
\text{} & -296 & 1.36 \\
\text{} & -295 & 1.34 \\
\text{} & -294 & 1.32 \\
\text{} & -293 & 1.3 \\
\text{} & -292 & 1.28 \\
\text{} & -291 & 1.27 \\
\text{} & -290 & 1.25 \\
\text{} & -289 & 1.24 \\
24 & -288 & 1.23 \\
\text{} & -287 & 1.22 \\
\text{} & -286 & 1.22 \\
\text{} & -285 & 1.21 \\
\text{} & -284 & 1.21 \\
\text{} & -283 & 1.2 \\
\text{} & -282 & 1.19 \\
\text{} & -281 & 1.18 \\
\text{} & -280 & 1.19 \\
\text{} & -279 & 1.2 \\
\text{} & -278 & 1.2 \\
\text{} & -277 & 1.21 \\
23 & -276 & 1.2 \\
\text{} & -275 & 1.2 \\
\text{} & -274 & 1.2 \\
\text{} & -273 & 1.2 \\
\text{} & -272 & 1.23 \\
\text{} & -271 & 1.25 \\
\text{} & -270 & 1.26 \\
\text{} & -269 & 1.26 \\
\text{} & -268 & 1.28 \\
\text{} & -267 & 1.29 \\
\text{} & -266 & 1.3 \\
\text{} & -265 & 1.33 \\
22 & -264 & 1.34 \\
\text{} & -263 & 1.35 \\
\text{} & -262 & 1.35 \\
\text{} & -261 & 1.34 \\
\text{} & -260 & 1.33 \\
\text{} & -259 & 1.3 \\
\text{} & -258 & 1.3 \\
\text{} & -257 & 1.28 \\
\text{} & -256 & 1.27 \\
\text{} & -255 & 1.25 \\
\text{} & -254 & 1.23 \\
\text{} & -253 & 1.2 \\
21 & -252 & 1.16 \\
\text{} & -251 & 1.11 \\
\text{} & -250 & 1.06 \\
\text{} & -249 & 1.03 \\
\text{} & -248 & 1.01 \\
\text{} & -247 & 0.97 \\
\text{} & -246 & 0.93 \\
\text{} & -245 & 0.9 \\
\text{} & -244 & 0.85 \\
\text{} & -243 & 0.81 \\
\text{} & -242 & 0.79 \\
\text{} & -241 & 0.77 \\
20 & -240 & 0.75 \\
\text{} & -239 & 0.71 \\
\text{} & -238 & 0.66 \\
\text{} & -237 & 0.64 \\
\text{} & -236 & 0.61 \\
\text{} & -235 & 0.6 \\
\text{} & -234 & 0.58 \\
\text{} & -233 & 0.55 \\
\text{} & -232 & 0.53 \\
\text{} & -231 & 0.49 \\
\text{} & -230 & 0.47 \\
\text{} & -229 & 0.46 \\
19 & -228 & 0.44 \\
\text{} & -227 & 0.43 \\
\text{} & -226 & 0.42 \\
\text{} & -225 & 0.38 \\
\text{} & -224 & 0.37 \\
\text{} & -223 & 0.36 \\
\text{} & -222 & 0.36 \\
\text{} & -221 & 0.35 \\
\text{} & -220 & 0.33 \\
\text{} & -219 & 0.34 \\
\text{} & -218 & 0.33 \\
\text{} & -217 & 0.32 \\
18 & -216 & 0.3 \\
\text{} & -215 & 0.31 \\
\text{} & -214 & 0.33 \\
\text{} & -213 & 0.33 \\
\text{} & -212 & 0.33 \\
\text{} & -211 & 0.29 \\
\text{} & -210 & 0.25 \\
\text{} & -209 & 0.24 \\
\text{} & -208 & 0.22 \\
\text{} & -207 & 0.17 \\
\text{} & -206 & 0.13 \\
\text{} & -205 & 0.09 \\
17 & -204 & 0.07 \\
\text{} & -203 & 0.04 \\
\text{} & -202 & 0.03 \\
\text{} & -201 & 0.01 \\
\text{} & -200 & -0.02 \\
\text{} & -199 & -0.07 \\
\text{} & -198 & -0.13 \\
\text{} & -197 & -0.16 \\
\text{} & -196 & -0.21 \\
\text{} & -195 & -0.27 \\
\text{} & -194 & -0.32 \\
\text{} & -193 & -0.37 \\
16 & -192 & -0.39 \\
\text{} & -191 & -0.41 \\
\text{} & -190 & -0.43 \\
\text{} & -189 & -0.44 \\
\text{} & -188 & -0.46 \\
\text{} & -187 & -0.46 \\
\text{} & -186 & -0.41 \\
\text{} & -185 & -0.31 \\
\text{} & -184 & -0.24 \\
\text{} & -183 & -0.11 \\
\text{} & -182 & -0.02 \\
\text{} & -181 & 0.05 \\
15 & -180 & 0.14 \\
\text{} & -179 & 0.22 \\
\text{} & -178 & 0.28 \\
\text{} & -177 & 0.34 \\
\text{} & -176 & 0.34 \\
\text{} & -175 & 0.36 \\
\text{} & -174 & 0.36 \\
\text{} & -173 & 0.38 \\
\text{} & -172 & 0.33 \\
\text{} & -171 & 0.33 \\
\text{} & -170 & 0.3 \\
\text{} & -169 & 0.23 \\
14 & -168 & 0.2 \\
\text{} & -167 & 0.15 \\
\text{} & -166 & 0.13 \\
\text{} & -165 & 0.1 \\
\text{} & -164 & 0.05 \\
\text{} & -163 & 0.02 \\
\text{} & -162 & -0.06 \\
\text{} & -161 & -0.09 \\
\text{} & -160 & -0.12 \\
\text{} & -159 & -0.12 \\
\text{} & -158 & -0.14 \\
\text{} & -157 & -0.18 \\
13 & -156 & -0.23 \\
\text{} & -155 & -0.31 \\
\text{} & -154 & -0.35 \\
\text{} & -153 & -0.4 \\
\text{} & -152 & -0.48 \\
\text{} & -151 & -0.56 \\
\text{} & -150 & -0.62 \\
\text{} & -149 & -0.67 \\
\text{} & -148 & -0.71 \\
\text{} & -147 & -0.69 \\
\text{} & -146 & -0.68 \\
\text{} & -145 & -0.74 \\
12 & -144 & -0.78 \\
\text{} & -143 & -0.73 \\
\text{} & -142 & -0.76 \\
\text{} & -141 & -0.75 \\
\text{} & -140 & -0.74 \\
\text{} & -139 & -0.74 \\
\text{} & -138 & -0.71 \\
\text{} & -137 & -0.65 \\
\text{} & -136 & -0.63 \\
\text{} & -135 & -0.59 \\
\text{} & -134 & -0.57 \\
\text{} & -133 & -0.52 \\
11 & -132 & -0.48 \\
\text{} & -131 & -0.47 \\
\text{} & -130 & -0.46 \\
\text{} & -129 & -0.53 \\
\text{} & -128 & -0.53 \\
\text{} & -127 & -0.56 \\
\text{} & -126 & -0.48 \\
\text{} & -125 & -0.46 \\
\text{} & -124 & -0.47 \\
\text{} & -123 & -0.46 \\
\text{} & -122 & -0.42 \\
\text{} & -121 & -0.48 \\
10 & -120 & -0.47 \\
\text{} & -119 & -0.47 \\
\text{} & -118 & -0.44 \\
\text{} & -117 & -0.35 \\
\text{} & -116 & -0.3 \\
\text{} & -115 & -0.19 \\
\text{} & -114 & -0.15 \\
\text{} & -113 & -0.11 \\
\text{} & -112 & 0. \\
\text{} & -111 & 0.02 \\
\text{} & -110 & -0.02 \\
\text{} & -109 & -0.11 \\
9 & -108 & -0.26 \\
\text{} & -107 & -0.37 \\
\text{} & -106 & -0.4 \\
\text{} & -105 & -0.39 \\
\text{} & -104 & -0.42 \\
\text{} & -103 & -0.52 \\
\text{} & -102 & -0.4 \\
\text{} & -101 & -0.34 \\
\text{} & -100 & -0.29 \\
\text{} & -99 & -0.12 \\
\text{} & -98 & -0.09 \\
\text{} & -97 & -0.07 \\
8 & -96 & 0.03 \\
\text{} & -95 & 0.05 \\
\text{} & -94 & 0.19 \\
\text{} & -93 & 0.33 \\
\text{} & -92 & 0.42 \\
\text{} & -91 & 0.37 \\
\text{} & -90 & 0.39 \\
\text{} & -89 & 0.42 \\
\text{} & -88 & 0.47 \\
\text{} & -87 & 0.49 \\
\text{} & -86 & 0.36 \\
\text{} & -85 & 0.31 \\
7 & -84 & 0.32 \\
\text{} & -83 & 0.34 \\
\text{} & -82 & 0.44 \\
\text{} & -81 & 0.56 \\
\text{} & -80 & 0.54 \\
\text{} & -79 & 0.63 \\
\text{} & -78 & 1.04 \\
\text{} & -77 & 1.22 \\
\text{} & -76 & 1.43 \\
\text{} & -75 & 1.58 \\
\text{} & -74 & 1.6 \\
\text{} & -73 & 1.63 \\
6 & -72 & 1.75 \\
\text{} & -71 & 1.97 \\
\text{} & -70 & 2.09 \\
\text{} & -69 & 2.17 \\
\text{} & -68 & 2.12 \\
\text{} & -67 & 1.96 \\
\text{} & -66 & 1.5 \\
\text{} & -65 & 1.08 \\
\text{} & -64 & 0.79 \\
\text{} & -63 & 0.44 \\
\text{} & -62 & -0.23 \\
\text{} & -61 & -0.78 \\
5 & -60 & -1.16 \\
\text{} & -59 & -1.61 \\
\text{} & -58 & -1.85 \\
\text{} & -57 & -2.13 \\
\text{} & -56 & -2.34 \\
\text{} & -55 & -2.73 \\
\text{} & -54 & -2.9 \\
\text{} & -53 & -3.24 \\
\text{} & -52 & -3.72 \\
\text{} & -51 & -4.2 \\
\text{} & -50 & -5.07 \\
\text{} & -49 & -6.15 \\
4 & -48 & -6.36 \\
\text{} & -47 & -6.87 \\
\text{} & -46 & -6.65 \\
\text{} & -45 & -6.99 \\
\text{} & -44 & -7.25 \\
\text{} & -43 & -8.02 \\
\text{} & -42 & -7.22 \\
\text{} & -41 & -6.6 \\
\text{} & -40 & -5.52 \\
\text{} & -39 & -4.69 \\
\text{} & -38 & -3.57 \\
\text{} & -37 & -2.44 \\
3 & -36 & -0.7 \\
\text{} & -35 & 1.3 \\
\text{} & -34 & 3.37 \\
\text{} & -33 & 4.41 \\
\text{} & -32 & 5.73 \\
\text{} & -31 & 6.55 \\
\text{} & -30 & 6.39 \\
\text{} & -29 & 5.86 \\
\text{} & -28 & 4.39 \\
\text{} & -27 & 3.9 \\
\text{} & -26 & 3.46 \\
\text{} & -25 & 4.92 \\
2 & -24 & 7.15 \\
\text{} & -23 & 9.34 \\
\text{} & -22 & 12.06 \\
\text{} & -21 & 12.06 \\
\text{} & -20 & 10.79 \\
\text{} & -19 & 10.65 \\
\text{} & -18 & 6.15 \\
\text{} & -17 & -1.91 \\
\text{} & -16 & -7.49 \\
\text{} & -15 & -6.54 \\
\text{} & -14 & -8.89 \\
\text{} & -13 & -7.27 \\
1 & -12 & -8.63 \\
\text{} & -11 & -10.59 \\
\text{} & -10 & -3.05 \\
\text{} & -9 & 2.12 \\
\text{} & -8 & -0.67 \\
\text{} & -7 & -22.67 \\
\text{} & -6 & 10.9 \\
\text{} & -5 & 12.72 \\
\text{} & -4 & 19.32 \\
\text{} & -3 & 49.8 \\
\text{} & -2 & -82.8 \\ \hline
\end{array}

\]

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Aspects of Al Gore's lies on category 6 hurricanes

Two days ago, Al Gore gave an interview to the Washington Post

Al Gore explains why he’s optimistic about stopping global warming

in which he pretended to be optimistic that unhinged alarmists like himself may still morph from the hopeless dirty losers such as himself to winners. With his characteristic diplomacy, the former future U.S. president compared climate realists to champions of apartheid, to homophobes, and to an alcoholic father who explodes whenever the elephant in the room (more precisely, ethanol in the bottle) is being mentioned which is why his relatives prefer to be silent.



But it was his scientific contributions that led to the most widespread reactions:

Al Gore: ...Would there be hurricanes and floods and droughts without man-made global warming? Of course. But they’re stronger now. The extreme events are more extreme. The hurricane scale used to be 1-5 and now they’re adding a 6. The fingerprint of man-made global warming is all over these storms and extreme weather events.

Remarkably enough, pretty much all the climate writers on all sides of the conflict agreed – while using various words for the same proposition – that Gore is a shameful lying mongrel who should splash himself into a toilet.

Aside from expected critics such as Anthony Watts, Marc Morano, the Wall Street Journal, the Hill, Newsmax, Politico, The National Review, and many others, even the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang, The Union of Concerned Scientists and Climate Skeptics' Dogs, and their likes pointed out that Gore's claim was a science fiction that isn't backed by any credible enough experts.




One must still understand that the separation of hurricanes into categories, the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale, is a matter of human conventions. But the experts doing these things are simply not adding any new category. Ultimately, the most important reason is that the hurricanes (and all other local weather phenomena!) are doing what they have always been doing and there's no reason for any change of the classification because we don't observe any fingerprint of any qualitative change, in a striking contrast with the claims by alarmist liars such as Al Gore.

Wikipedia's two paragraphs on Category 6 hurricanes actually tell you pretty much all the facts you need to know to understand the situation.




After some strong enough hurricanes, e.g. in 2005, various people proposed to create a new category 6 for the hurricanes. None of these people has ever been influential or successful. In the current terminology, Category 5 hurricanes include all the hurricanes with winds above 70 meters per second. If you allow me to simplify a table, the speeds in meters per second are:

Category 1: 33-42 m/s
Category 2: 43-49 m/s
Category 3: 50-58 m/s
Category 4: 58-70 m/s
Category 5: 70-∞ m/s

I hope you are able to translate the speeds to kph (km/h) or kn (knots). For each of the speeds, one may almost reliably predict the normal central pressure (lower than one atmosphere and decreasing with the category!) although it's an independent quantity and doesn't enter the primary definition of the scale.

Sorry that for some categories, the borderline speed is the same and for others, 1 m/s was added. They know how to round it and classify it in the marginal cases although the outcome may often be affected by the error margin, anyway.

At any rate, there is some minimal speed for which a tropical storm may be called a hurricane and the borderline speeds increase by roughly 10 m/s per category. Don't ask me why it's not uniform. But if you do ask me, it's because they wanted to associate the categories with the impact on man-made structures. But the final category (5) includes all the storms above a critical value.

Robert Simpson, a co-author of the Saffir-Simpson scale and a scientist who is now over 100 years old, gives a simple reason why it's a bad idea to introduce a higher category – even though you may find it natural to introduce an arbitrarily high category: he claims that the final category is rupturing buildings independently of the engineering methods that were used to construct it so there's no good reason to finely discriminate. I am a bit skeptical about the claim that the men can't design better materials and structures that simply withstand greater winds than the minimal Category 5 hurricane winds (in other words, I am probably more optimistic about the abilities of the new technologies) but I hope that he has some reasons to make this general claim.

However, there's another reason why the new category isn't even being considered. The number of such "Category 5 hurricanes on steroids" in the record is too small. Among the 35 Atlantic Category 5 hurricanes on the current record, 17 exceeded 78 m/s and 8 exceeded 80 m/s. You see that near 80 m/s, the number of storms seems to be dropping quickly. Similar decrease is seen in the Eastern Pacific hurricanes. Recall that the Northwestern Pacific tropical storms are usually classified with a different terminology than this scale and one talks about typhoons and supertyphoons etc. that have independent definitions.

If you introduced a new boundary near 80 m/s for the Atlantic hurricanes, the classification of Category 5 vs Category 6 would finely depend on the speed (on accidents, roughly speaking), and this extra splitting wouldn't be too useful, anyway. If the borderline speed were much higher than 80 m/s, you would probably be left with no or almost no hurricanes in the new group. If you're looking forward to some very strong hurricanes in their new class and you need some terminology to talk about them, why don't you directly talk about their speed? Try to make people excited while they are waiting for the first 85+ m/s Atlantic hurricane (that would mildly beat Camille 1969 and Allen 1980: you will probably never see one). Such an ad hoc threshold speed surely sounds less sexy than a new category but meritocratically speaking, this topic of the top hurricanes isn't sexy so you shouldn't try to pretend that it is. After all, the strongest hurricanes are remembered not according to their modest differences in the speed but according to their location and impact (a slower hurricane may be much more influential than a faster one) and these things are so dependent on the culture that no objective assignment to the categories could be done according to such criteria (but the classification should be objective so that we know that the distribution isn't changing with the human mood).

An essential fact to notice is that nothing seems to be visibly changing about the distribution of the tropical storms and hurricanes into the categories. Saffir and Simpson did some work in evaluating the data and dividing the hurricanes into useful categories and because the statistical data is pretty much the same (but more extensive) today, they would probably end up with the same results today, too.

None of the hurricane data shows a clear, statistically significant trend. Statistically insignificant trends may be positive and negative depending on what you precisely quantify and how. Theoretically, there exists a good fundamental reason – often emphasized by Richard Lindzen – why one should expect fewer hurricanes and weaker hurricanes in a warmer world (which we're very slowly entering, according to some claims and according to linear regression in the last 30 or 100 years): a warming occurs primarily in the polar regions that were and still are much colder than the equatorial zone (due to various polar e.g. ice-albedo feedbacks) and that's why the globally widespread warming trend also means that the polar-equatorial temperature difference decreases. But this difference – locally speaking, the gradient – is one of the main causes that power the storms (not only tropical storms) so if it goes down, so should the frequency and strength of the tropical cyclones.

It's plausible that someone has built a climate model that produces the opposite result but it's almost certainly an artifact of some numerical (or conceptual!) defects of the models (if I avoid justifiable accusations of fudging). Because there doesn't exist any theoretical, computerized-oracle-independent argument why the hurricanes should be getting stronger or more frequent, we should use Occam's razor and ignore such a complicated extra hypothetical trend until we have a reason to think otherwise.

At any rate, no one in the world of experts is proposing anything such as a sixth category for the hurricanes. It's too bad that Al Gore began to think that any lie that goes in the alarmist direction is excusable. I sincerely hope that his lying dirty mouth will start to be broken into many small bloody pieces whenever he says something comparably outrageous so that by the time he possesses one last tooth, he learns to speak the truth, at least sometimes. Unfortunately, most Americans are cowards who are afraid of beating scumbags such as Al Gore on the street while a minority of Americans even sympathizes with similar scumbags. Yes, I sort of preferred the America from the Westerns where Category 6 assholes such as Al Gore are finally shot by the heroes.

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95 percent confidence: in HEP vs IPCC

When I saw some reports about the IPCC's 95 percent "certainty" that the global warming is mostly man-made, I couldn't avoid thinking about the huge difference between hard sciences (such as particle physics) and soft sciences (such as the contemporary climatology).

Reuters saw documents saying something like that:

Drafts seen by Reuters of the study by the U.N. panel of experts, due to be published next month, say it is at least 95 percent likely that human activities - chiefly the burning of fossil fuels - are the main cause of warming since the 1950s.

That is up from at least 90 percent in the last report in 2007, 66 percent in 2001, and just over 50 in 1995, steadily squeezing out the arguments by a small minority of scientists that natural variations in the climate might be to blame.

This figure was discussed by Watts Up With That and The Hockey Schtick (via Climate Depot).

I am stunned how underwhelming such statements are and my being stunned has several levels.




What do I mean?

• First of all, the figure 95% isn't really calculated in any way. It's literally pulled out of the air. The gullible audience of the IPCC is supposed to believe that the IPCC members are shamans with supernatural skills and if they vote about and approve a figure they randomly invent, it's a deep and accurate truth one should worship. But there are no shamans in the real world and most of the IPCC members not only fail to be shamans but they also fail to be competent scientists.
  
  
• Even if the figure 95% were credible, it's just painfully low. I will discuss some analogies in high-energy physics below.
  
  
• Even if the figure 95% were credible, calculated, and replaced by a much higher figure, the statement we have "learned" is completely unspectacular, pretty much inconsequential, and unworthy of spending another dollar. Yet, some people seem to think that this unspectacular statement directly implies that we should throw hundreds of billions of dollars out of the window.

Let me say a few more words about these three points.




First, the figure 95% isn't being calculated from anything.

In particle physics, statements or findings that are "95% certain" are usually referred to as "2-sigma deviations" from the null hypothesis. The numbers 95% and 2 may be translated to each other using the precise maths of the normal distribution (or a more accurate distribution, whenever it is relevant).

The number of standard deviations, 2, is calculated from the experimental data in a straightforward fashion. There's a clearly defined calculation that may be done by a computer. You insert the theoretical predictions from the null hypothesis, the measured data, and the program may calculated how much the observed values deviates from the predicted value and how likely it is for such a large or larger deviation to occur by chance.

The climate scientists and green activists in the IPCC act like shamans who vote about a figure. You could offer an excuse. The climate is a complex system and the conclusions are being based not on one well-defined measurement but on numerous branches of the empirical data. Each branch gives you some "feeling" and you sort of accumulate these feelings and guess the final answers and the numerical value of the confidence level, too. A more precise accumulation of the "feeling" is obtained if many people smoke together – this is called the "consensus science".

However, you should understand that this is no real excuse. Instead, it is a confirmation that the final figure simply cannot be taken seriously. If you don't have any single experiment or a single collection of measurements that is strong enough to nontrivially support your hypothesis, then it's too bad.

Of course that you may try to combine several not quite convincing datasets in order to increase the confidence level above the confidence level of each individual dataset. But when you do so, you are at risk that the datasets aren't really quite independent (the signs of a higher temperature in regions and across the globe surely fail to be independent as well) so the increased confidence level calculated from the assumption of their independence may be a heavy overestimate. Moreover, you can be reasonably accused of cherry-picking the datasets that agree with your predetermined conclusions – and from the censorship of the datasets that don't support your "cause". Of course that I think that both accusations are true descriptions of the IPCC's work.

Also, the shamans boast that their guessed "certainty" has grown from 1.8 sigma to 2.0 sigma from 2007 when the previous IPCC report was released. Just six years and they were able to increase their guessed signal from 1.8 sigma to 2.0 sigma. It's so impressive! ;-)

So the numerical value isn't a result of science. It's a result of shamanism. But even if the IPCC were able to calculate the figure 95% using a legitimate scientific procedure, there's the second problem:

The confidence level 95% is just incredibly low.

As I said, the 95% confidence level is known as the 2-sigma confidence in hard sciences such as particle physics. Particle physics experiments have brought us hundreds of 2-sigma excesses – and lots of much larger (more confident) excesses – and a vast majority of them turned out to be flukes. When more data were accumulated, these excesses just went away. Such things inevitably occur all the time.

Because people keep on looking for new effects, they inevitably encounter flukes that look like a new effect but the effect actually doesn't exist. A priori, a new effect is always a pretty unlikely thing so if you look at the history of particle physics, most of the 2-sigma deviations were really flukes – results of coincidences that shouldn't have been paid any attention to.

Particle physicists start to seriously look at deviations when they reach something like the 3-sigma level or 99.7%. The conventional threshold of discovery is 5 sigmas which means approximately 99.9999% certainty.

But imagine that in the 6th IPCC report, the shamans replace their guesswork by a calculation of the confidence level based on some empirical data; and that the confidence level will increase to 99.9999% so that it becomes convincing. There will still be one problem:

The claim that we 95% believe to be right is completely innocent, unspectacular, and mostly inconsequential.

To see what I mean, look at the proposition that is known with the not-really-calculated 95% not-really-certainty:

Human activities - chiefly the burning of fossil fuels - are the main cause of warming since the 1950s.

What does it exactly mean? Since the 1950s, i.e. in the last 60 years, the 5-year-averaged temperatures jumped by something like 0.5 °C. The "holy" proposition above doesn't even say that the human activities are responsible for more than one-half of this figure i.e. for more than 0.25 °C – which is a completely negligible and practically undetectable temperature change, anyway.

Instead, the vague proposition above only says that the human activities are the "main cause" which probably means that the magnitude of the contribution from human activities is the largest ones, exceeding every other single contribution (it's being implicitly assumed in the proposition above that the contributions may be "naturally" and "objectively" separated to piles, which is also nonsense, but let's assume that they can).

But if this is the right interpretation, the human contributions could have been just 0.1 °C (perhaps with the minus sign) and its absolute value was just larger than the absolute value of the ten subleading sub-0.1 °C contributions from natural processes. All of them happened to add up to 0.5 °C.

So the proposition that we "know" with the 95% certainty (where the figure 95% was guessed by shamans) is compatible with the assumption that the human activities changed the temperature by a practically undetectable amount in the last 60 years – in fact, this interpretation is still likely if we assume the basic quoted proposition to be right.

Just try to combine all the vices in your mind: the confidence level is a guesswork, it is extremely low, and the "known" proposition doesn't really imply anything you could possibly care about.

How could a rational person spend a single dollar on a campaign that is primarily motivated by the proposition, one that suffers from the three basic lethal diseases? The answer is, of course, that no rational person is paying any real attention to this campaign.

Let me offer you a particle physics counterpart of the situation.



In one of the LHC searches for the microscopic black holes, someone finds a small bump that may be interpreted as the production of several small black holes by the LHC. He can't really calculate that it is a 2-sigma excess because no well-defined channel produces such an excess. But he combines his and his colleagues' feeling about many graphs and they say that in some combination penetrating all of their research, they see an excess that is comparable to a 2-sigma excess so that they are 95% certain that the LHC has produced a small black hole.

However, the hypothesis that the black hole of this mass is produced doesn't really agree with all the other data – which seem to falsify it. So they invent that the black holes produced by the LHC may be non-standard. In fact, they don't Hawking-evaporate. And because they don't evaporate, they may be produced in the rest frame and devour the Earth.

Fine, so these scientists and their friends urge the Earth to stop the LHC, X-ray machines, and every other device in the world where particles are accelerated to higher energies because there's a risk that the destructive black hole they have discovered with 95% certainty will destroy life on Earth along with the planet itself. This scenario doesn't really follow from the proposition they have "not quite proven" to be 95% certain but a danger doesn't follow from the proposition in the IPCC case, either. Hundreds of billions of dollars have to be paid every year to fight against the danger pointed out by the brave 2-sigma particle physicists.

Do you see how crazy it is? It sounds as a joke, a really stupid one. This would not be remotely possible in particle physics. A psychiatrist would be immediately ordered for the particle physics experimenters who would offer this story. However, the IPCC is doing the exactly isomorphic thing. No one has isolated them in an asylum yet and there even exist people who take this stuff seriously.

We don't live in a scientific world.

Off-topic: ghettos in the U.S.

Below is a picture of Greater Boston; see the background map to compare (switch).



CTRL/click above to open a zoomed in image in a new tab.

Boston and Cambridge are so multi-culti and they're embedded in the would-be uniform American melting pot. Still, they are composed of ghettos. One pixel is one person from the 2010 census. Can you find the Chinatown? Yup, it's the red place in the vertical center. Can you guess where the blacks and hispanics (green and yellow) live relatively to the Chinatown? Yes, it's in the South Boston.

Get to this zoomable map that can show you the whole U.S. and every town and region in it. Via Pig.

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