The Magic Moment

 “In every big transaction,” said Leech, “there is a magic moment during which a man has surrendered a treasure, and during which the man who is due to receive it has not yet done so. An alert lawyer will make that moment his own, possessing the treasure for a magic microsecond, taking a little of it, passing it on. If the man who is to receive the treasure is unused to wealth, has an inferiority complex and shapeless feelings of guilt, as most people do, the lawyer can often take as much as half the bundle, and still receive the recipient’s blubbering thanks.” - Kurt Vonnegut in God Bless You Mr. Rosewater

There is a type whose mission in life is to place themselves in the middle of any transaction and rip off a piece for themselves.  The farther that they can keep the two sides apart, the larger their share.  Some time, a decade ago almost to the day, Eli pointed out that this was the Honest Broker game.  Indeed, this is the sine qua non of climate policy sharks and the journalist pilot fish flossing about them.

Scientists, well most, are unused to wealth and power, suffer from imposter's syndrome and have shapeless feelings of responsibility especially if their studies lead to dour and distressing places.  Facts are value neutral, obvious implications not.  True the receivers don't suffer from any of these, but if they can be kept separated from the source, why opportunities are boundless.

And the middlemen, well in the couple of decades that Eli has been in the blogging business, there are quite a few, but always new ones.  They tend to come from political science and economics, have a weak grasp of the science, or at least are not very concerned with it if ignoring advances their persona, but hunger for access.  New ones pop up now and again.

Oliver Geden is the most recent entry.  Eli has spent some tweets and posts on him, and ATTP, well there is not much left to say after the latest deconstruction.  Geden has opened up a vein to Nature but it is a weak one, based on the idea that it's all a hall of policy mirrors, scientific knowledge is besides the point.

@Oliver_Geden @mtobis @theresphysics @drvox the goal is to make policy evidence limited, not fantasy driven.

— eli rabett (@EthonRaptor) October 10, 2015

so one should not trouble a bunny's pretty little ears because 2 C is a bridge too far

@Oliver_Geden You do have trouble differentiating between goals and accomplishments. As Mom Rabett said: Strive

— eli rabett (@EthonRaptor) July 24, 2015

Paul Price at ATTP had a good summary of who deserves the credit

Yes, let’s admit that limiting to 2ºC is already very difficult but that does not mean that the pragmatic policy is to give up on 2ºC. It should mean that the alarm is ringing very loudly to say that the ‘honest brokering’ of policy advisors like Geden has entirely failed to move policy in the direction of actually achieving the emission cuts necessary. This latest article is just another attempt to evade the culpability of ‘advisors’ like himself for this ongoing policy failure. Shooting the messenger, he wants to blame climate scientists for pointing out inconvenient truths: so much for his integrity as a policy advisor. It’s hard to see Geden’s article as anything more than another prolonged effort to keep reality from intruding on his own political preferences for climate inaction.

Still, besides the obvious intent to kidnap, there is an important point here that everybunny is missing.  The 2 C target came from the good Nordhaus, not the BTI one, early on when there were a few decades, not right now or else conditions, but willy nilly it has been adopted as a boundary, a place beyond which there be tygers, but staying inside provides at least a modicum of safety and more time to get back to 350 ppm or less.

It would be impossible and foolhardy to renegotiate this goal now.   

There simply is not time, it would open too many possibilities for delay and mischief.  2 C is simple and straightforward and easy for a policy maker to understand.  Meeting the goal will be hard, maybe even impossible, but it is a goal and the closer the world can get to the goal the better.  The further away the more catastrophic.

Pay the Tax

Tired of hearing about how the only way of dealing with climate change is to turn off the lights.  Last night, Eli heard a rapping on the window, rapping on the window, only to find Ethon who entered the dreary room where LED candles fed by the local wind turbine burnt, Eli being very carbon conscious.  Eli he said, one of the bunnies has asked me to deliver a message before the Paris COP21 opens.  He dropped a missive on the table and flew off.  Eli bent down to read. . .

Teleconferencing? But that uses electricity...!

Perhaps scientists should stop using computers, calculators, paper,any tools of the modern era.  Or anything manufactured using fossil fuel, - or wood harvested from forests,  --- or living and working in buildings and houses, -- how much energy does it take to put an earth observing satellite up? and for God's sake stop eating meat.. (well, there might be something to that..)

Bunnies, tired of"...if you're against climate change/oil drilling/pollution/urban sprawl/wars for oil... why do you have a car?"

We have a car because we've built a bassakwards transportation system that keeps most people from participating in society, having a job, even getting food -  if they don't have one.

 It's part of what we've been screaming about since the seventies, dammit.

We aren't in trouble because scientists are doing research and going to meetings, we are in trouble because we have been burning coal  and cutting down forests  for 250 years.

We're in trouble because we've allowed those made wealthy by fossil extraction to dominate our political process.

 If, by not going to a meeting, a scientist or a policy maker could stop the plane from taking off, then this line of argument would make sense. By all means, telecommute. A huge share of what we do now happens on line.  Skype works great - better all the time. But irreplaceable things happen when people meet face to  face.

So let's push for less unnecessary travel, and new types of aircraft fuel - but that is decades away.

The replacements for coal and gas fired electricity are here now, and only being held up by a dishonest political system and media, and the bullshitters who bring up these kinds of "there is no climate change because Al Gore flies in planes" distractions.

But Eli has a plan.

You can't ignore consensus, and that includes fluoride

Kind of hesitant to jump back into the fluoride food fight, but Living On Earth went there first with an attack on fluoridation. (Obligatory disclaimer:  I love LOE and listen to their podcasts religiously, but per the Blogger Commandments, I'm now highlighting them for the purposes of ankle-biting.)

The fluoride segment has a number of problems but let's start with the main one - the failure to wrestle with scientific consensus positions that water fluoridation is effective and safe  (update:  should describe the consensus as "effective, and safe enough to be highly recommended"). To be harsh about it, you could easily find a similar post on a climate denialist website - begin with a token mention of the mainstream position and then highlight something published recently that you present as an important contradiction. So what LOE failed to do was to explore the consensus and how it formed. They failed to wrestle with their opposition to the consensus - they might say they don't have a position, they're just reporting out on recent science that calls the consensus into question, but that's cherrypicking by excluding the science that reinforces the consensus. Finally they fail to wrestle with how non-experts should handle scientific consensus.

My perspective is that the non-expert's first job is to understand the consensus, including what is the consensus on the level of confidence in their various conclusions. That doesn't mean things always stay the same, but that change is an internal process - non-expert cherrypicking of outlier studies that happen all the time isn't a good way to predict a change.

What LOE focuses on is effectiveness of fluoridation and effect on IQ. For effectiveness it references a meta-analysis and says

The Cochrane Collaboration, a global network of doctors and researchers who analyze science to improve public health, suggests the evidence is not so clear. The group found earlier this year that only three studies since 1975 have established credible links between fluoridated water and cavity prevention. Again, Dr. Peckham.  

PECKHAM: Their main conclusions were that there was no evidence to suggest that it reduced inequalities in dental health, that there was no evidence to support that it had a positive effect on adult teeth, and that there was no evidence to suggest that if you stopped water fluoridation, levels of decay would increase.

LOE doesn't provide a direct link to the Cochrane, just to a Newsweek article about it. Did LOE actually read it? When you dig out the article you find there were more than three studies. Cochrane decided to exclude other studies because they compared fluoridated and non-fluoridated communities, not before/after studies of places that began fluoridation. This will become ironic about about four paragraphs from now. Cochrane says this:

Our review found that water fluoridation is effective at reducing levels of tooth decay among children. The introduction of water fluoridation resulted in children having 35% fewer decayed, missing and filled baby teeth and 26% fewer decayed, missing and filled permanent teeth. We also found that fluoridation led to a 15% increase in children with no decay in their baby teeth and a 14% increase in children with no decay in their permanent teeth. These results are based predominantly on old studies and may not be applicable today.

Within the ‘before and after’ studies we were looking for, we did not find any on the benefits of fluoridated water for adults. We found insufficient information about the effects of stopping water fluoridation. We found insufficient information to determine whether fluoridation reduces differences in tooth decay levels between children from poorer and more affluent backgrounds.

A little different from what was reported out on LOE. In particular, those of us familiar with Roger Pielke Jr.'s "work" on damages from storm events know the distinction between detection and attribution. Lots of noise doesn't mean there is no signal. And it's flatly wrong for LOE to report out insufficient evidence as "no evidence". Finally, a reality check - we know lots of children receive inadequate dental care at home and don't get to the dentist enough. These kids aren't that different from those prior to 1975 when fluoride toothpaste and dental office fluoridation became common.

So, IQ next from LOE:

GRANDJEAN: We looked at more than 20 studies from China where they had compared children exposed to high fluoride content in the water and low. And on the average, the difference in performance among those kids was seven IQ points. That’s a sizable difference. And obviously some of the kids have been exposed to substantial fluoride concentrations in water, some of them were just a little bit above what’s common in this country and, therefore, I find that evidence very worrisome, and we need to follow up and determine if there is any risk in regard to fluoride exposure under US conditions.

The China studies examined fluoride effects by, maybe you guessed it, comparing communities exposed to fluoride with communities not exposed, the same type of study Cochrane excluded as inadequate. Some of the exposure was many times the recommended US level. Some of it was also from exposure to coal pollution, and I'll gently suggest those children were dealing with more problems than just fluoride in that case.

Mainly the issue with LOE is cherrypicking. The 2010 Health Canada report, a national level consensus document, found that the Chinese studies it examined were unreliable (see section 9.1.7). The 2014 Dunedin longitudinal study found no neurological effect from fluoride (actually a slight benefit but not statistically significant).

Maybe LOE doesn't know about this research, but that points out the problem of non-experts jumping at the latest scientific blip and ignoring the consensus. There are other flaws in the LOE report and other things I don't really know about, because I'm not an expert, but I think there's a pattern.

Fluoridation and climate change aren't equivalent debates - I'd compare fluoridation more to GMOs where both sides exaggerate and oversimplify, a contrast to climate change where realistic bad scenarios are usually underplayed. My non-expert reading of the scientific consensus is there are some aspects of fluoridation that are still potentially problematic. The way to resolve those issues is through pushing for scientific progress.

Emergency kits for the holiday gift season

My annualish post below on home and car emergency kits, something that makes an excellent gift. Even if you and yours are all set, there's always maintaining and updating your kits. Most of this post is a retread; the one upgrade is an inexpensive, solar-powered lantern. 

I've found that emergency kits make highly-appreciated gifts for friends and relatives, one of those things that are on everyone's to-do list but often don't get done. If the entire kit's too expensive, you can just give a car kit, or get a part (I suggest water and water purification) and upgrade over time.

If people have had kits for a few years then it's also time to consider replacing out the food. If you or someone you know uses camping food, you might switch out the old with the new a year or two before expiration, so you can use the food before it expires. Freeze-dried food will probably last longer than the expiration date, so you might replace the older stuff but hold on to it in case the emergency lasts longer than expected.

My emphases were making them easy for me to put together, easy for people with no camping experience to use, and ones that would last as many years as possible without needing replacement or maintenance. In return I was willing to pay more, be more bulky than the minimum possible, and have limited control over food selection.

72-Hour Home kits:

• Water in plastic jugs, 3 gallons/person
• Chlorine dioxide water-purification pills (purifies 7 gallons) in case water goes bad (after 6 months, assume the water's bad), in case it's leaked away, or in case you need more water.
• Mountain House Just In Case Food Bucket, 1 per person or 2 for 3 people
• Mountain Oven Flameless Heating Kit: each kit can be used 5 times and can prepare 2 meals at a time. So 2 kits per two people in a household, but also 2 kits in a single-person household.
• Plastic silverware
• Emergency phone numbers/contact list

The above is the absolute minimum. Meals can be eaten in their pouches, so no dishes are needed. Flameless heating kits eliminate the need for cooking stoves (water has to be purified, though). Emergency meals also can be eaten with cold (purified) water although they taste bad. The food and flameless kits should be good for at least 3 or 4 years, and probably more than twice that long.

In earthquake country, your kit should be stored outside your home in case you can't get inside. So in your yard, your car, or somewhere else. The only maintenance this requires is to simply look every six months to see if the water's leaked through the seams of the plastic jugs - it happens fairly often.

Additional useful items:

• MPOWERD Inflatable Solar Lantern, 1 per person. Maybe a cheap flashlight/headlamp too.
• Spare batteries in clear plastic bag so you can see if they've become corroded over time
• Plastic tarp and cord as a rain shelter
• Swiss Army knife
• Emergency shelter, 1 per adult
• Cheap or expensive first aid kit (I went with cheap kits from the local drugstore)
• Cheap rain gear, spare shoes and clothes
• Toilet paper (in plastic bag to prevent dampness) and trowel
• Hand-crank radio/flashlight combination (can also charge cell phones)

Don't let the extras delay you from putting together the minimum.

I also made better-than-nothing emergency kits for everyone's car, in case you're stuck on the road:

Car kits:

• Liter water bottle per person (enough to keep you hydrated for a few hours until you can find a water source)
• Water purification tablets (can disinfect murky water from ditches, and you might need to) 
• Emergency shelter
• Small amount of long-lasting food (I found tins of honey-roasted peanuts that were good for four years)
• Cheap rain poncho
• Emergency contact list
• Shoes you can walk many miles in, if that's not what you normally wear
• MPOWERD Inflatable Solar Lantern, and maybe a cheap, tiny flashlight
• wool blanket (additional warmth, or traction under a spinning wheel in the mud or snow). Cheap space blanket is an alternative, but it won't give you traction.

You can do much better than this car kit, but it's something in case destroyed roads/bridges keep you from getting home for 12-24 hours.

Additional tricks for both kits: put the contact lists in their own ziplock plastic bags to reduce the chance that they'll mold/get wet over the years.

Hopefully this is all unnecessary.

Lots of great comments when I did this post in 2013 here, and a resource link at Making Light.

Prebutting the lame denier excuses for 2015

With October being a record hot month during a record hot year that will easily beat the previous record hot year, 2014, we can anticipate some lame excuses from the denialists. I thought I'd address them now.

They come down to three categories:  El Nino, margin of error and satellite cherrypicking.


El Nino:

We already heard some of it right after the 2014 record, from the predictable Bob Tisdale at Watts Up.* The argument was that if you go into the annual dataset covering the entire planet, and for that one year you remove the large area that's the warmest (in this case the North Pacific), then the rest of the planet isn't as warm as it was in previous years. I have zero doubt that he'll consider writing something like that again in a few months.

Tisdale's trick is to remove the 20% of the planet's area that happened to be extra warm in 2014 and compare it to the rest of the planet with that same 20% area removed in previous years, but the problem is that same 20% wasn't the warmest part of the planet in those previous years. A better comparison would be to remove the 20% that was warmest from every year and compare. Tisdale didn't do that for obvious reasons.

He could've done something even more obviously ridiculous though, removing the North Pacific for 2014 and then comparing the planet minus the North Pacific in 2014 to the whole planet in previous years. I have zero doubt that for 2015, if that's what someone needs to do to claim the year is cooler than previous years, then that'll happen


Margin of error:

 We have Tisdale again, at the same post. The final temperature in any dataset has a middle figure that's commonly cited and then a margin of error on either side. 2014 was more likely to be the warmest year than any previous year, but it is possible some other year was the warmest.

The 2015 record is going to be significantly higher than previous years, and it will be very probable to be the warmest year. However, the coldest temperature within the margin of error will overlap, if only slightly, with the warmest temperature margin of error for previous years. We can anticipate squawking over this possibility, too.

What deniers will ignore is that the probability of the warmest year being 2015, 2014, or 2010 will be extremely high, nearly certain. If the warmest year was nearly certainly one of the more recent years, very likely to be one of the last two years, then their claims about a climate hoax just ring pretty hollow.


Satellite cherrypicking:

We saw Ted Cruz switch to satellite cherrypicking after 2014, from previously referring to no warmth in general to then narrowly referring to satellite measurements. And he's actually picking only one satellite dataset, RSS, as the basis for saying this. We will doubtless see the same thing happen after 2015 records come out.

The denialists will be narrowly cherrypicking one dataset out of many, and then narrowly cherrypick a short time period out of that dataset to deny there's a warming trend. Since 1980, the RSS dataset shows warming around .2F/decade (updated, corrected from .2C in the original post). It takes time for climate change to be measurable, and as the link shows, satellite data is difficult to use anyway.

An amusing part of this cherrypicking comes from our friend Chris Monckton and others at Watts Up, ignoring the vast majority of temperature measurements and saying no warming trend for X number of months using RSS data, and then carefully moving the start date forward as the temperature increases. They go from saying October 1, 2014 marks exactly 18 years without warming (with cherrypicked RSS) to saying November 1, 2015 marks 18 years 9 months without warming. Monckton had to drop 4 cold months at the earlier part of the dataset to keep up the impression that it wasn't warming. At some point this won't work anymore, and then they'll probably manipulate the dataset to find a longish period with a warming rate they'll describe as "minimal".



*I could swear I blogged about Tisdale's post earlier this year, but can't find it anywhere. Maybe I saw someone else's post.

Progress on Malaria

There is excellent news on dealing with malaria in Africa.  A report in Nature from a number of public health statisticians has got a handle on how the fight is progressing.  This is no mean feat as public health records in many of the most affected African countries, are, well, sketchy.

The team, lead by Samir Bhatt (at least in the author list) found a way around this.  Rather than looking at mortality, they looked at the incidence of plasmodium falciparum infection in children between the ages of 2 and 10 across the continent using a set of reliable surveys.  These were then used to infer (think of how global temperature anomalies are inferred from individual stations).

We estimated that there were 187 (132–259) million clinical cases of P. falciparum malaria in Africa in 2015. Case incidence declined by 40% from 321 (253–427) per 1,000 persons per annum in 2000 to 192 (135–265) per 1,000 persons p.a. in 2015, with all but one of the 43 mainland endemic countries meeting the Millenium Development Goal target of reversing incidence trends by 2015, 19 (17–25) achieving a >50% decline, and 7 (6–7) declining by >75%

The figure below shows the percentage of the population infected across the continent in 2000 (red) and in 2015 (blue).

The major reduction in high percentages of infection is especially heartening, because the two reservoirs of plasmodium falciparum infection are mosquitos and people.  The protozoan parasite ping-pongs between the two.  Typically (think Walter Reed and Yellow Fever) diseases like malaria are fought by decreasing the mosquito reservoir, but if fewer people in an area are infected, the human reservoir is shrunk and the probability of the disease spreading following mosquito bites from an infected individual is decreased.

Since 2000, under the UN Millenium Development Goals, three methods of malaria suppression have been deployed, pyrethroid treated bed nets (ITN), artemisinin combination therapy (ACT), and indoor residual spraying with DDT (IRS).  Bhatt, et al find that the bed nets have had the greatest effect to date.

Bhatt, et al point out that the relative effectiveness of each of the three methods is related to when they were deployed and the effort put into their deployment

Changes in prevalence largely followed patterns of increasing ITN coverage, and ITNs were by far the most important intervention across Africa, accounting for an estimated 68 (62–72)% of the declines in PfPR seen by 2015 (Fig. 2a). We estimated ACT and IRS contributed 19 (15–24)% and 13 (11–16)% respectively, although these interventions had larger proportional contributions where their coverage was high (Extended Data Fig. 4). It is important to emphasize that these proportional contributions do not necessarily reflect the comparative effectiveness of different intervention strategies but, rather, are driven primarily by how early and at what scale the different interventions were deployed.

There is concern about each of these tools losing effectiveness.  ACT resistance has emerged in Southeast Asia for example and there is a major effort to limit it and the mosquitos are evolving in ways to decrease the effectiveness of ITNs and IRS.

New tools are being developed, for example vaccines, and using bioengineering aka Genetic Modification to create mosquitos that cannot support plasmodium falciparum.  A major need is development of an inexpensive and accurate diagnosis kit that can be deployed into all areas.  Lack of rapid diagnosis leads to underemployment (people don't get treated and are mosquito targets) or overemployment of ACTs (leads to development of resistance in the plasmodium).

Humans can take pride in meeting the UN Development Goal for malaria

Target 6.C: Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases 

• Between 2000 and 2015, the substantial expansion of malaria interventions led to a 58 per cent decline in malaria mortality rates globally. 
• Since 2000, over 6.2 million deaths from malaria were averted, primarily in children under five years of age in Sub-Saharan Africa. 
• Due to increased funding, more children are sleeping under insecticide-treated bed nets in sub-Saharan Africa.

The next time somebunny starts frothing about Agenda 21, the UN and Maurice Strong ask them what they have against successfully fighting malaria.

Things Break

A letter from the good Dutch Richard in the Economist explains things break, and cannot be put back together.  Adaptation from a disaster is not guaranteed (emphasis added)

SIR – “In the balance” (April 5th) presented a false dichotomy between being dispassionate and being alarmist about the impacts of climate change. There is nothing alarmist about the risk of extreme weather events leading to breakdowns in critical services and food systems. Such breakdowns have already accompanied, for example, the 2011 floods in Thailand and the 2010 drought in Russia. And there is nothing dispassionate about economic damage estimates that, in the words of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are “incomplete” and face “recognised limitations”. 

Rather than suggesting that the risks assessed by the IPCC are scare stories and that the overall economic costs of climate change would be manageable, The Economist could explore the assumptions used by economic models and their developers to arrive at such estimates.

One assumption is that the occurrence of impacts will automatically lead to adaptation to those impacts. The IPCC chapter, “Adaptation opportunities, constraints and limits”, shows that such optimism is not justified. Not every farmer facing crop losses has the ability to choose a different crop variety, and not all urban dwellers can move to an area where they are not exposed to floods or landslides.

The world is facing impacts of climate change precisely because it is difficult to take effective action to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. To assume that adaptation to these impacts will take place with little extra effort, at low or no cost and with immediate pay-off, is quite silly, and not a reflection of reality.

RICHARD KLEIN
IPCC author
Stockholm Environment Institute

As J. Willard Rabett incessantly points out, adaptation pushes procrastination penalties to infinity

Nuff Said

OK,

Blogger Profile has his own personal thread.  BP and anybunny else who wants to expose themselves can post here.  If BP or his next version comments elsewhere, they will be deleted

Any gloating will also be terminated.

-The Management

What to do when Eli retires

ATTP and Eli have been exploring the carbon cycle, with a few simple, but illustrative models. ATTP's attention was drawn to a recent submission to Earth System Dynamics A simple model of the anthropogenically forced CO2 cycle by Weber, Lüdeke and Weiss, which is not even wrong, worse, it is misleading.  Hans Joachim Lüdeke, the S. Fred Singer of the German denialist set seems to be making a retirement project of such things.  If you doubt your friendly bunny and Eli knows none of the readers of Rabett Run would stoop so low, there is this comment from Neven about an earlier attempt at misdirection by Herr Lüdeke-Singer

I do not dismiss them because they belong to a certain political group. I dismiss them because I have seen them lie and distort repeatedly, and never be right about anything, and never retract allegations, and never admit or correct mistakes.

and this analysis of the attempt (published in E&E and Int J. Mod Phys B, who would have guessed, not Eli to be sure), by Richard Tol during one of his rational periods. Tol points out that

Lüdeke concludes that there is no trend in the global temperature record of the past century or so, after he removed the trend by So far so good. Unfortunately, fluctuation analysis does not work on trending variables. Therefore, LLE use DETRENDED fluctuation analysis. That is, they first fit a polynomial of order two to the data, remove this trend, and study the deviations from the trend.

Having removed the trend from their data, LLE cannot answer the question: What caused the warming? They eliminated from their analysis the very thing in which they are interested.

This trick, of course is one of Tamino's top ten on this list of statistical flim flam but there is a lot more.

The abstract of the Weber paper claims that

From basic physical assumptions we derive a simple linear model of the global CO2 cycle without free parameters. It yields excellent agreement with the observations reported by the carbon dioxide information analysis center (CDIAC) as time series of atmospheric CO2 growth, of sinks in the ocean and of absorption by the biosphere. The agreement extends from the year 1850 until present (2013). Based on anthropogenic CO2 ; emission scenarios until 2150, future atmospheric CO2 concentrations are calculated. As the model shows, and depending on the emission scenario, the airborne fraction of CO2 begins to decrease in the year ∼ 2050 and becomes negative at the latest in ∼ 2130. At the same time the concentration of the atmospheric CO2 will reach a maximum between ∼ 500 and ∼ 900 ppm. As a consequence, increasing anthropogenic CO2 emissions will make the ocean and the biosphere the main reservoirs of anthropogenic CO2 in the long run. Latest in about 150 years, anthropogenic CO2 emission will no longer increase the CO2 content of atmosphere.

Now some, not Eli to be sure, might fight their war through the mathturbation, including a freshman level reprise of Euler's method for solving a simple differential equation. Eli is a visual bunny and he always looks at the figures first. His attention was drawn to Figure 5b, which purported to show the response of the atmosphere to a pulse of CO2

Weber et al attempt to model the interchange between the biosphere (b), the atmosphere (a) and the ocean (s). The grey line shows what everybunny else finds, the blue what the EIKE crew claims. To first approximation the three upper reservoirs their model treats each hold about the same amount of carbon. Fossil fuel combustion pushes carbon into the atmosphere, and that carbon is moved from the atmosphere into the biosphere and the surface ocean.

The Weber model fails because it does not consider reverse interchanges from the biosphere and the surface ocean into the atmosphere. According to Weber, et al the adjustment time is 100 years and the grey shaded regions are the responses of 15 models considered by Joos et al., 2013. One immediately notices that their atmospheric CO2 concentration declines rapidly to zero. This is possible for sequential reactions, a --> b + s but not for opposing reactions (a = b and a = s) where there are both forward and backwards reactions. A simple, straightforward kinetic model for the flow of carbon between the three reservoirs would be

Where kxy is the rate constant for moving carbon from reservoir x to y and Nx is the amount of carbon in reservoir x. n is the CO2 injected into the atmosphere at time t. If No is the total amount of CO2 in the system, at equilibrium where a steady state approximation can be applied (in other words set each of the derivatives to zero because the concentrations are not changing, the system is in equilibrium)

By inspection Weber et al’s result can only be obtained if the rate constants for transfer between the biosphere, kba, and surface ocean, ksa, to the atmosphere are zero. Nope

And then there is physics and chemistry. Even if one denies the analysis of the carbon cycle as shown above, if, as Weber, et al, claim, all of the excess carbon injected into the atmosphere is totally sequestered into biological materials after a hundred years or so, for it to stay there as required by their analysis would mean that decomposition of biological materials would not be increased by the increased amount of material.  Similarly for excess CO2 sequestered in the surface oceans. If the partial pressure of CO2 in the surface ocean is increased physics requires that the out gassing of the surface ocean would be increased.

Finally, if Weber et al, are going to try and claim that they were talking about a rapid descent of the atmospheric carbon dioxide into the deep oceans, well, there is a lot of information about that interchange, and one of the reviewers, Fortunat Joos, buries that one

Can transport processes within the ocean be approximated with a single time scale? There is the GLODAP data base on CDIAC which includes CFCs and radiocarbon data sampled over the pastdecades (Key et al., 2004). These data show that mixing time scales for the upper thermocline are decadal and mixing time scales for the deep ocean are multi-centennial. The lowest radiocarbon ratios of dissolved inorganic carbon are found in the deep Pacific with values that are about 240 permil or so lower than the atmosphere or about 200 permil lower compared to the surface ocean. This corresponds to a water age of roughly 1800 years.

Shallow is good

Last summer I took the World Bank MOOC course on climate change in Spanish (it will be offered again next year in both English and Spanish). My final presentation was on using shallow aquifers to mitigate and adapt for climate change.

Many communities located near coastal areas or on large floodplains have multiple layers of aquifers separated by clay layers. The shallowest aquifer is usually not used because of contamination risks, but it has a lot of advantages in terms of receiving recharge and requiring less energy to use, as long as you don't drink it. Australia figured this out, and a lot of other places should do the same.

Last week I finally translated and updated the presentation, including a PowerPoint on an urban shallow well/recharge system in Redwood City near Silicon Valley. For anyone interested, the English version is here, and the Spanish version here.

The only thing

The agenda of fear and hate driving conservative candidates for president today is the last thing we should do. So what to do, instead. There's Duncan Black on one side saying, do less blowing up. Kind of vague, but not meaningless. Josh Marshall on the other hand says do more blowing up of ISIS (also stop blowing up Assad, but the main thing is blow up ISIS).

I'm somewhere in between but think I'd lean more towards the pretentious one's argument. Many people have reminded Republicans that it was their invasion of Iraq that put us in this fine mess. Less remarked is that ISIS talked a big game in the caliphate's first year, but pretty much concentrated on local genocide, rape, and enslavement - we were blowing them up first before they got to Paris. Maybe people don't make this argument because of the whole genocide thing - the pretentious Duncan sure glosses over that.

I'm no expert but I read history, and in World War II neither side liked getting bombed, making efforts to retaliate more for domestic consumption than out of real strategy. From the Doolittle Raid to the V-2, the motivation basically was to strike back.

Duncan's right that blowing up ISIS creates problems, although not blowing them up in some situations allows them to create genocide. So I'd say do more blowing up when needed to stop genocide despite the risk of retaliation, but getting rid of ISIS where it has some popular support isn't our job. Especially in Iraq, the campaign in Anbar province might be going too well - the Iraqi Shiite government is succeeding in taking over Sunni areas without real Sunni participation. That sounds like a recipe for future problems, and not where the rest of the world needs to tread.

Syria is a bit different, Sunnis are fighting both ISIS and Assad. I once favored a safe zone in the northwest, assuming Turkey's government would be less-than-evil about who got through. I don't know if that could still happen - maybe. Containing ISIS while locals figure out how to handle them seems like a better approach, and it would mean less bombing than we're doing now. Maybe that would work, like Duncan says. Working with Assad would be a huge mistake and again not where the rest of the world needs to tread.

Paris was a tragedy. There are many other tragedies. Let's make things better instead of worse.

Resistors Are Cheaper Than Batteries

Sometimes there are odd thoughts that surge through Eli's brain.  Recently he was reading about a concentrated solar power plant the first phase of which had opened in Morocco.  Noor 1 will generate 160 Megwatt.  When completed, the four phase project will generate almost 500 megawatts, of course, when the sun shines, which it pretty much does all day in Ourazazate.

What is particularly interesting about this plant is that the design can source power for three hours after the sun sets, because the working fluid (an oil mixture) can be used to store thermal energy in a reservoir, and the temperature in the reservoir is high enough to drive steam turbines for up to three hours after sunset.  Moreover, substituting salts which change their phase as they cool can provide even more energy, or the same energy for a longer time.  

The characteristic of solar and wind is that when you have sun and wind you have more power than you need.  When you don't you have nothing.  The general idea is at least for small installations like houses, to bridge with batteries.

A long time ago, on sci.environment Eli, the Weasel, MT and others engaged with John McCarthy of LISP.  McCarthy was a cornucopian, and if you carefully went through his thoughts, they all came down to the price of energy being zero.

The price of solar and wind IS zero once you install the plant.  Eli has an outrageous idea.
Couple super-efficient insulation, the heat storage of phase change salts, resistors to convert waste electricity generated by wind and solar to heat and then use photothermal generators to convert the heat back to electricity when needed.  Of course, you could always use the heat directly to warm the house or cook the carrots.  The best (e.g. lab) thermoelectric materials can have efficiencies of 10-20% and nanopatterning can improve the transfer efficiency.  Just an idea.

The Surge, The Surge

It is getting warm out there and the El Nino is showing no signs of slowing down.  The Japan Meteorological Agency has a tool which shows the average monthly temperature in each month from 1890 to today.  Eli has turned this into an animated gif using imgflp.  Starting in November of 2014 until October 2015

The surge, the surge.

Lowering the Boom on Exxon

Eli was perusing the tweets and came across a back and forth that involved ATTP and a churnalist know it all by the name of Peter Hitchens.  Well no matter, you can read about that at ATTP, but amongst the drivel was a useful pointer by Willard, no not that useless scumbag Willard Tony, but Willard

Your claim is more than falsifiable - it's false, @ClarkeMicah: https://t.co/X6oUlYpGSv You're welcome, @robinince & @DaveJSixsmith

— willard (@nevaudit) November 15, 2015

which lead back to a post by Hans Custers in Our Changing Climate back in Febrary 2014.  Quite worth reading, but, the killer is down a bit in the comments we have Eli's friend Victor Venema first quoting from the post

If there are any ‘climate change skeptics’ who want to contribute to real science, they might see this as a challenge. Maybe they can come up with a research proposal, based on one of the options for falsification. Like proper scientists would do.

and then lowering the boom 

If someone at an oil company only had the slightest doubt such a challenge might be possible, he had already funded this research. If every visitor to WUWT would pay one cent, they could hire a good scientist. That they rather fund PR firms and write daily erroneous posts shows that even they know the AGW is solid.

This Night is a Time of Pain and Mourning

Ce soir c'est le moment de la douleur, des pleurs, du deuil, mais Paris est là, debout. Je sais que les Parisiens, qui vont souffrir avec ceux qui sont tombés ce soir, sauront aussi se relever pour être d'abord aux côtés des victimes, et pour montrer que cette liberté, cette liberté qu'il y a dans notre ville, cette joie de vivre qu'il y a dans notre ville, ils ne l'atteindront pas - Ann Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris

This night is a time of pain and mourning ... but Paris is still here and standing. ... The freedom, the joyful life that fills this city, [the attackers] have not touched that.

Posted without comment

Politics

1. League of Conservation Voters endorses Clinton, their earliest endorsement in 30 years. A no-brainer compared to the Republicans, but much less so compared to her party rivals. My impression of LCV is that it's a quite political organization - and speaking as a former politician, I'm not saying that as an insult. I just hope whatever political value they saw in the early endorsement, in terms of her prioritizing the environment if elected, will be worth it. This also probably has a lot to do with John Podesta as her campaign chair. Enviros are putting a lot of faith in Podesta - maybe rightly so, but he's not the one who could be president.


2. Obama killing Keystone. What I haven't seen mentioned is the union issue, that a number of unions supported the pipeline. Cooperation and conflict between environmental and union priorities is a long-running aspect of the Democratic Party scene. Rejecting Keystone despite union support is a marker for how that all plays out within current party politics.

A related issue that surprises me locally is how little union representation there is within the renewable power industry - that feels like a missed opportunity locally, and maybe more broadly.


3. Kentucky as a test of the worst-case scenario in 2017. If Republicans score their trifecta, keeping the Senate while winning the presidency, what happens to Obamacare could be partly predicted by what's happening now in Kentucky and whether the Republicans can take medical care away from people. If they can't get the political will to pull it off in Kentucky, they may find it hard to do at the federal level.

As for what happens to Obama's Clean Power Plan under this scenario, you've got me. The lawsuits will fly. I fear the worst if Republicans get the Senate and kill the filibuster.


4. Burma. I spent a lot of time there long ago, and now it looks like Suu Kyi's party will overcome the "free and unfair" election obstacles to form a government to the extent allowed by the military. Despite Suu Kyi's lionization by the outside world, the ethnic minority representatives that I knew didn't trust her. My optimistic hope is that she'll do something to help against the brutal mistreatment of ethnic and especially Muslim minorities. She faced strong internal constraints against directly confronting Burmese racism before the election, but it's reached frighteningly dangerous levels. She had better spend some of that political capital she just earned in the right way.

World Ends

at least as far as Eli is concerned.  The wort in Brussels is not cooling because of the warm evenings and the lambics and geuzes are not fermenting.  Already two vital months have been chopped off the brewing schedule and it will only get worse as temperatures increase.

Who will fund Eli's pilgrimage to Belgium before the worst happens?  Contribute to a worthy cause.

Responsible, ethical DuPont. At least compared to Exxon.

Stung by claims that their product could alter the Earth's atmosphere and be a disaster for humanity, the dominant company in the industry launched its own research project in the 1970s and 1980s, only to find out that the claims were correct.

This sounds like the Exxon story we've been hearing in recent weeks, but it works equally well for DuPont. It's an eerie and overlooked coincidence that these two industry leaders were simultaneously following parallel courses for ten years in the 70s and 80s.

The difference of course is that by 1988, DuPont came clean at the highest corporate level about what its own science confirmed. From the link above, DuPont's CEO went in the course of three weeks in March 1988 from saying there was no need for CFC emission reductions to saying they would be out of that business by the end of the century.

I should emphasize I'm only grading DuPont relative to Exxon's behavior - the ozone problem was obvious enough years earlier, and the possibility of a problem, one that could've been worse than greenhouse gas emissions, was known even earlier. Still, DuPont didn't contradict its own scientists while Exxon did.  Exxon funded denialists and its CEO said as late as 1996 that "Currently, the scientific evidence is inconclusive as to whether human activities are having a significant effect on the global climate."

If, when, tobacco-style litigation ensues against Exxon and possibly other fossil fuel companies, the strong contrast between what Exxon said and what DuPont said to their investors and the public could be a powerful legal argument.

Leaving the legal issues aside, there's also the contrast between not just the statements but also what actions the two companies took. I don't claim it would have been feasible for Exxon to plan to get out of the oil business by the year 2000 (for one thing, CFCs were only a minor part of DuPont's business). However, Exxon could have taken the lead on starting to plan alternatives, and that's another key difference between the two companies in the 1980s.

Several years prior to 1988 and the official change in tune, DuPont started developing CFC alternatives and subsequently made a good business out of the alternatives while winding down CFCs. By the early 1980s if not earlier, Exxon had a comparative advantage over other oil companies in directly understanding the climate challenge. The renewable energy business was non-existent at that time other than large hydro - Exxon could've been in at the beginning to become a major player or the major player in what today is a big business with huge growth potential.

Other oil companies like Chevron and BP have put a toe, or more than a toe, in the renewable business. Exxon could've followed the DuPont model and have been way ahead of those companies. Instead as far as I can tell Exxon does nothing.

Exxon blew the opportunity that DuPont seized, and it didn't say what DuPont said.

The Billionaires Save the Earth From Climate Scientists

A short while ago, Eli pointed to a tweet by Scott Westerfeld which explained everything.  Rueben Bolling has turned this into a cartoon

From Daily Kos

Will they be able to save the Earth and their riches before the evil Obama sells them out at the UNFCCC COP21?  Stay tuned to Rabett Run

Estopping Exxon

I was noodling over some legal background relative to Exxon today when the NY State Attorney General trumped me, announcing an investigation into whether Exxon lied to the public or its investors about the relationship between the oil business and climate.

The legal issues around investors could be interesting, with former CEO Lee Raymond pretty much stating that long-term investors should not view climate change as a scientifically-established problem for those in the carbon business. Even more interesting I think is what the AG's subpoenas end up discovering.

So while that's happening, I was looking at estoppel. Basically it's a legal tool that prevents someone who did or said bad things from relying on technicalities to escape responsibility, and instead holds them to what they said. Where it could be relevant to Exxon is if the company were to argue that statements by Lee Raymond and the denialists Exxon funded are irrelevant because everyone has access to the science of the time. A court might say that Exxon by its behavior in supporting denialism is estopped from now saying its previous denialism doesn't count.

Here are some estoppel descriptions:

"The plaintiffs pled that defendants were estopped to take advantage of the statute. The doctrine of equitable estoppel is based upon the principle that a person is held to a representation made or a position assumed when otherwise inequitable consequences would result to another who, having the right to do so under all the circumstances, has in good faith relied thereon. (Maurer v. J.C. Nichols Co., 207 Kan. 315, 485 P.2d 174 [1971].) "This court has further said:

"'The doctrine of equitable estoppel requires consistency of conduct, and a litigant is estopped and precluded from maintaining an attitude with reference to a transaction involved wholly inconsistent with his previous acts and business connection with such transaction.' (Browning v. Lefevre, 191 Kan. 397, Syl. ¶ 2, 381 P.2d 524 [1963].)

"'. . . One who asserts an estoppel must show some change in position in reliance on the adversary's misleading statement. . . .' (In re Morgan, 219 Kan. 136, 137, 546 P.2d 1394 [1976].)

"'. . . Equitable estoppel is the effect of the voluntary conduct of a person whereby he is precluded, both at law and in equity, from asserting rights against another person relying on such conduct. A party asserting equitable estoppel must show that another party, by its acts, representations, admissions, or silence when it had a duty to speak, induced it to believe certain facts existed. It must also show it rightfully relied and acted upon such belief and would now be prejudiced if the other party were permitted to deny the existence of such facts. . . .' (United American State Bank & Trust Co. v. Wild West Chrysler Plymouth, Inc., 221 Kan. 523, 527, 561 P.2d 792 [1977].)"

So if people could have in good faith relied upon statements by Raymond and the denialist organizations, then Exxon is going to have trouble saying the courts should ignore what Exxon said. Seeing as Raymond was speaking officially on behalf of Exxon, said in all seriousness about a core business interest in which Exxon asserted it had expertise, then it seems like a good faith argument could apply here.


UPDATE:  I'll add something I put in the comments -

The legal issue is that having done some of the science themselves with results that fit squarely in the mainstream consensus, Exxon was lying when it said via its CEO and via denialists it funded that the science is uncertain/the science is wrong, respectively. Supposedly this is a distinction between Exxon and other fossil fuel companies that plausibly believed their own nonsense. I'm not so sure, however.

 What truly distinguishes Exxon is that it produced science on the issue, unlike the other companies, but what's legally relevant is that it understood the overall science. We know that it understood because of the science it produced and because of internal documents being released. The other fossil fuel companies may also have understood the science - we just don't know that yet. If they did their own internal reviews, and reached the same conclusion Exxon did, they stand in the same fragile legal position.

The Deep Blue Sea

In a previous post, Eli explored the rapid equilibrium between the three surface reservoirs for carbon dioxide, the atmosphere, the biosphere and the surface of the oceans, maybe to a depth of 1 km.  Just to remind the bunnies, here is the overview of the carbon cycle,

and here is the animated cartoon showing the rapid equilibration of the three top level reservoirs when a pulse of CO2 enters the atmosphere

That equilibration takes about 5 years.

In this episode Eli will explore a bit of the slower coupling between the surface ocean and the deep ocean.  Inquiring rabett's want him to point out that the amount of carbon in the intermediate and deep ocean is about 30 times that in the three fast reservoirs, give or take a bit, so that the overall process will be a dilution of the excess CO2 that humans have pushed into the atmosphere over a considerable period of time.

Being not an artist the owner operator has sketched out how the interchange between the surface and the deeper oceans works

The most interesting thing about this is that while the surface ocean and the deep ocean are linked through over turning at their interface, there is a one way valve moving carbon from the upper to the lower ocean, the biological pump.

Simply put, this represents the settling of organic carbon from dead critters. But it is not simple.  It fills Eli with awe and reminds him of Einstein's remark that God is subtle, but not malicious.  Also very clever.

It turns out that there are two biological pumps, and the interplay between them controls the interchange with the deep ocean and the atmosphere.  As shown in this figure from Rost and Riebesell

The organic carbon pump moves carbon in the form of organic material (here represented by CH2O, but really meaning any dead animal or plant) down into the deep sea.  The second mechanism, the carbonate counter pump is a consequence of the formation of calcium carbonate shells from the reaction of two hydrogen carbonate ions (HCO3^-) with a calcium ion Ca²⁺.  This also  increases the amount of dissolved CO2  which, in turn is partially pushed into the atmosphere, increasing the concentration in the atmosphere.  The CaCO3 to organic carbon ratio, called the rain ratio, is a measure of which pump is strongest.

However, and this being Rabett Run, you did know there was going to be one of those we are confronted with the problem of how neutrally buoyant organic critters sink to the bottom of the sea. For that Eli looked at Particulate organic carbon fluxes to the ocean interior and factors controlling the biological pump: A synthesisof global sediment trap programs since 1983 Susumu Honjo, Steven J. Manganini, Richard A. Krishfield and Roger Francois.  Turns out that the organic carbon forms aggregates with the shells, other forms of CaCO3, opal and the other crap (literally) that is floating in the seas including sand.  The biological pump is indeed a dirty business.  The biological pump which is the driver of interchange from the surface to the deep ocean.  Honjo, et al find that the carbonate driven biological pump dominates in the in the open seas except in the far north.

While the formation of shells 

Ca²⁺ + 2HCO3^- --> CaCO3 + H2O + CO2 

is neutral by itself in moving inorganic carbon from the surface to the deep ocean, with one molecule of calcium carbonate balanced by a molecule of carbon dioxide, the calcuim carbonate provides significant ballast for the settling of organic carbon into the deep ocean.  To an extent other ballasting material (opal, fecal matter, sand) take over in areas where shells made of calcium carbonate are missing.

So the next question is what will increasing sea surface temperatures and decreasing pH do to the biological pump.

Steve Koonin: One of America's Worst Humans

Credit xkcd

Eli's attention in the comments has been drawn to a rather superficial analysis of the situation the world finds itself in by Steve Koonin whom the bunnies have met before. Koonin appears not to have taken Andy Lacis' advice to spend time to understanding the physics of climate change better and that small changes in the wrong place are what brings prosperity to undertakers. As Lacis said about Koonin's belittling the effect of small changes in global temperature

. . it is also well known that a seemingly small change (up or down) in absolute body temperature by only 1% (3.1 K, or 5.6 F) would make one sicker than a dog, and, that a 2% change in body temperature (up or down by 6.2 K, or 11.2 F) will virtually guarantee a dead body. From this, it should be sufficiently clear that, when viewed in absolute energy terms, the viable margin between life and death in the Earth’s biosphere is remarkably narrow – so much so that a seemingly insignificant 1% to 2% change in the total energy of the global environment will invariably result in serious disruption of the established infrastructure of life in the biosphere.

However, give the lad credit, Koonin is only worried about the next 80 or so years, by which time he is certain to be not worried. As Eli pointed out long ago we lost time to those clowns when they opposed the Montreal Protocols, we lost time to those clowns when they opposed actions on climate change, and we are about to lose more time when they try and tell us that nothing can be done so sit back and enjoy the ride, which is, of course, what Koonin has now graduated to. 

These scientific and societal realities compound to make stabilization of the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, let alone its reduction, a distant prospect. As a result, even as the world struggles to reduce emissions, human influences on the climate will not be decreasing for many decades. Thus, adaptation measures such as raising the height of sea walls or shifting to drought-resistant crops become very important. Fortunately, adaptation is on the table in Paris to complement emissions reductions.

Adaptation is not the only choice. You can die. Your family can die. Your situation can deteriorate to the point it is not worth living (see Somalia, Syria, dystopia, etc.). Happens frequently to individuals during major changes. Adaptation is not a magic wand that makes everything good again, and sometimes it is not possible, certainly not for individuals, and often enough, not possible for populations.

Advocates of adaptation frequently think that it is a strategy for others and they will not have to take part.

Simply to say adapt and go not further is a response of the ethically challenged. Adapt how, at what cost, in money and lives and quality of life. Avoiding situations where dire choices have to be made is advisable, but evidently not to those who would rather not confront necessary changes to their own behavior.

Eli is not a big fan of adaptation.

Even so, being a bunny of good will, gentle reader, allow Eli to accept the idea that human influences on the climate will not be decreasing for many decades.  This of course, misses the reality that if the nations of the world accept Steve Koonin's advice, human influences on the climate will be INCREASING for many decades, which brings us to J. Willard Rabett's four laws of climate change

1. Adaptation responds to current losses.
2. Mitigation responds to future losses
3. Adaptation plus future costs is more expensive than mitigation,
4. Adaptation without mitigation drives procrastination penalties to infinity.

Steve Koonin figures he won't be around to pay the procrastination penalties, but he doesn't want to pay mitigation costs today for the damage he has done.

Climate denialism harms speculative science

I want to follow up on Eli's comment below that "There is a place between blogs, arXiv and Science for really speculative papers, but the authors need to strongly defend themselves." Yes, and Hansen's paper is properly occupying that place, assuming it can stay defended.

But then, think about a speculative paper that went for the mirror-opposite side of the spectrum, saying "what if we've been wrong about everything about climate change and here's a negative feedback mechanism previously undiscovered that will safely limit things." Let's further assume this turns out not to be a Galileus paper but a Bozo paper, as seems likely. The normal consequences of publishing something that's wrong is bent, by denialism.

Normally, the bad consequences of publishing a paper in a scientific journal that turned out wrong are minimal - you only wasted some space that could've publicized a useful scientific result (possible exception for applied science like medical journals, but even there a single wrong study is unlikely to immediately change medical practices). With that minimal downside, why not publish something that questions everything on the chance in ten thousand that it turns out to be right?

Climate denialism, OTOH, means publishing a wrong paper that questions whether we have a problem will cause damage to the real world, because denialists will use their considerable power to magnify it beyond its importance. Just as a lie can fly while truth limps, a wrong paper will fly just as fast when used by liars and the self-deceived.

Papers like Hansen's aren't too harmed, except for being published more hastily because denialists have used up the last 30 years that could have bought us more time to think. It's speculative work in the other direction that's harmed by the misuse from denialists.

Where that leaves journal editors is less clear - what if it really is the Galileus paper they're considering? We'd really want it published. I guess where it leaves the editors is that they should invest a little extra effort in trying to figure out where the paper falls on the Galileus-Bozo spectrum.

Making Waves

A day or so ago, an amazing picture of a Kelvin-Helmholtz instability backlit by the sun has appeared in many places.  The one shown below is from the bleealuna's imgur site

These patterns are formed when there is a velocity difference at the interface between fluids introducing a shearing force.

Now this is all over the net, but a Eli's Feedly feed had another picture which is eerily similar (it is the day after Halloween) but on a vastly different scale.  The Impact Manufacturing lab at Ohio State has been developing new methods of impact welding where two sheets of metal are forced into each other by creating an electrical or laser ablated plasm below them

Did somebunny say Kelvin Helmholtz Waves?

The figure is about 1 mm across.  The picture of the Kelvin-Helmhotz waves in the atmosphere at least a few km.  What is a difference of 10⁶ for a good model.

For more information there are videos at Ohio State.