Things heat up
Climate change and the Fourth IPCC Assessment Report have indeed become the hot thing. Eli has noticed posts and comments all over the net, and not just in the usual places. Climate centered blogs and wanna be blorgs are breeding like Rabetts. Anyone with their ears in the wind can sense a policy earthquake coming. The mice are getting twitchy, the Rabetts have lost their paymasters and can't find a carrot to feed the bunnies and Richard Lindzen is publishing the Godwin's Law Daily. But how, dear readers can we show this.
It occurred to the lab bunnies that Technorati had an interesting tool for this, a way of plotting the number of posts on any subject within the last year. To keep things cool, Eli only looked at blogs with "a lot of authority", you can play with the pull down menu to look at all blogs, etc. Searching on IPCC is perhaps the most interesting, with a big surge when the WG I report was released, and smaller ones for WG II and WG III
"Climate change" also shows the WG I release date peak. Interestingly both graphs show a peak in early December. Anymouse remember what happened then?
And finally we have greenhouse gas.
A warning to the lab bunnies: This tool is not reliable beyond 180 days. You can check this by searching on common terms such as rabbit, mouse, green, etc. Evidently Technorati has been adding capacity or a lot more folk are joining in, kind of like CB radio.
Saturday, May 05, 2007
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15 comments:
Here's Roger Pielke's chart for the past 180 days.
Some of those may refer to Senior, of course, but I would guess that most refer to Junior.
Oh this is too much. Now take the Pielke quotes and divide them by the number of peer-reviewed journal articles over the same time.
Then do the same for some real scientists like Ben Santer or Tom Wigley or Lonnie Thompson. Ya' know, guys who actually publish and don't spend their time hawking opinions to the press.
This algorithm needs a name....maybe the Pielke Factor, or the scientist's "Pielkieness".
Mus musculus anonymous
One quick thing. In answer to the Rabett's question: December was the IPCC meeting, and there was a flurry of reports over "leaked" documents from that meeting.
Mus musculus anonymouse
Those of you who are connoiseurs of numpties, as well as how to peddle world class propaganda, will be interested in this article in the Observer Review section this Sunday.
It's stuff about and interview with Lord Monckton.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2073267,00.html
The mans cheek ensures that in less gentle times, I would have to duel him and make him eat his words.
A choice example is this:
"Two things are evident from all this. The first is that Monckton has done the homework. When I mention Naomi Oreskes's famous evaluation of 928 articles referencing 'climate change' that 'proved' the consensus of catastrophe among scientists, he announces not only that he has read the 928 articles in question and would argue 'only 1 per cent explicitly predict doom, while 3 per cent are specifically sceptical of apocalyptic ideas', but also that he has sent a further 8,500 related articles to be evaluated by a team of two dozen scientists across the globe."
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but the kerfuffle about Oreskes and Peiser was that Peiser claimed that lots of papers doubted the scientific concensus on global warming. Not that global warming would lead to huge catastrophes. See how he twists and lies, and the journalist, due to lack of knowledge accepts it.
Mus Muscuslous said: to calculate Pielke Factor (PF), "take the Pielke quotes and divide them by the number of peer-reviewed journal articles over the same time."
Let's see, one's Pielke factor is inversely related to the number of peer-reviewed articles and directly proportional to how many times one is quoted. Yes, that does indeed have the correct behavior.
Except, I would make one minor adjustment, since division by zero is undefined -- and otherwise, the infinities might get out of hand.
Clearly, we need to add one to the number of peer-reviewed articles to prevent that from happening (and so frequently in this case) -- a sort of Pielke Renormalization, if you will, to keep the infinities at bay.
PF = #quotes/(#PRA's + 1)
There, that should do the trick.
-- Horatio Algeranon
Thats a good idea. That would also give Monckton a Pielke factor in the region of thousands.
Eli, would you care to perform the calculations? You certainly have access to ISI to generate # of peer-reviewed articles. If you'd like, Mus musculus anonymouse could generate media quote #, since said mouse has access to Nexis.
However, we must decide on the scientists to evaluate. I'm all for Roger Pielke Jr., Ben Santer, Michael Mann, Lonnie Thompson, Evan Mills, and Chris Landsea.
We must also ensure that the peer-reviewed articles are germane to reason why said "expert" is being quoted.
Could we also archive the data to allow others to comment?
Mus musculus anonymouse
Perhaps there is a simpler way of calculating Pielke factor.
Take the posts per day for a particular day for "any authority" and divide that by the number for "a lot of authority" + 0.1
That way, if the number for "a lot of authority" is zero, the PF will just be the number for "any authority" multiplied by 10.
So, for example, for May 4, "Roger Pielke, JR" has a PF of 3/ 0.1 = 30
Of course, PF will then change daily, but we can also calculate a monthly average PF and track how this average changes over time. I'm not sure what it will tell us, but it may tell us something.
--Horatio Algeranon
We should also throw in a few skeptics (McIntyre, Michaels, Singer) to sort of see how they fit in. I'm sure that their Pielkie Factor is off the charts.
But we should be careful and scientific about these claims.
McIntyre has a PF of 11 for May 4, using the formula
PF= #posts["any authority"]/(#posts["a lot of authority"]+0.1)
Actually, if that is divided by RP's number for the same day (30) --or perhaps an average for the same week -- you get the Normalized Pielke Factor (NPF), which for McIntyre is then 11/30.
While that may not seem high, we must remember that Climate Audit may be included on the "a lot of authority" list which may bias the PF downward. Such self-references would ideally be omitted from the calculation, but that would take way too much time (and as it is, it already takes way too much time -- an wasted time at that)
I suppose one way to deal with the latter problem would be to simply assume that they are going to actually subtract one from the "a lot of authority" total for those who have their own "authoritative blog". So, presumably that would apply to people like Mann, Schmidt, McIntyre, et al, but not people like James Hansen.
By the way, the PF for "Elmer Fudd" on may 1 is 35 (with NPF=35/30), so we can start to get a feel for what the numbers mean (maybe).
Dear Editor, May 9/07
Recent research by Henrik Svensmark and his group at the Danish National
Space Center points to the real cause of the recent warming trend. In a
series of experiments on the formation of clouds, these scientists have
shown that fluctuations in the Sun's output cause the observed changes in the
Earth's temperature.
In the past, scientists believed the fluctuations in the Sun's output were
too small to cause the observed amount of temperature change, hence the need
to look for other causes like carbon dioxide. However, these new
experiments show that fluctuations in the Sun's output are in fact large
enough, so there is no longer a need to resort to carbon dioxide as the
cause of the recent warming trend.
The discovery of the real cause of the recent increase in the Earth's
temperature is indeed a convenient truth. It means humans are not to blame
for the increase. It also means there is absolutely nothing we can, much
less do, to correct the situation.
Thomas Laprade
480 Rupert St.
Thunder Bay, Ont.
CanadaPh. 807 3457258
Your readers might be interested in these websites.
Please paste these links in your browser.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html
http://www.unikron.com/play/play_display.cgi?speed=hi&id=canadian_values_march1
http://www.hometownannapolis.com/cgi-bin/read/2007/04_26-32/LIF
Well Eli quite enjoyed the last link, a licensed clinical pathologist repeating every last patholigical denialist troph under the sun. In short someone whose problem is not what he knows but everything that he knows is wrong.
It is not my task here to repeat any of an endless number of posts showing why all these points are, to be mild about it, very, very wrong but I can point you to resources which deal systematically with them. They are on my blogroll, Real Climate, tamino and Coby Beck's illconsidered series are quite good. Our comments on Svensmark and other provocations are perhaps a bit snarky, but what do you expect from a Rabett. A major problem with Svensmark is that formation of the initial condensation nuclei are not the rate limiting step in cloud growth as he is claiming, but rather the availability of species such as SO2 which cause the nuclei to grow.
Still to be put in the same class as the Editors is quite the compliment
Thanks for article!
Thanks for interesting article.
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