Don't mess with the bunny....

UFO Breakfast Recipients notes that

Not many people know this, but Farmer MacGregor was a global warming denialist. He got his, however, at the paws of a fierce, badass rabbit.

For some time now the pensive Rabett has pointed out that neither adaptation nor mitigation alone can meet the existential threat of climate change. While not of the sort that thinks life will vanish from the Earth, he sees a threat to our societies, and recognizes that when the burrow caves in a lot of bunnies go into the cooking pot. It is, as they say, a time of great unpleasantness.

Farmer MacGregor was swimming in cash from Exxon/Mobil, fat and unwary. His suffering was terrible, or so one might think from the amount of noise he made.

Among other things you can find information on squirrel venom and other consumables over there. The commenters are another issue, with one of them calling King Eli a queen and the other recommending bunny burger. Bunny burgers?

In April 1992 Spy magazine published an article in which they described an amusing hoax. They opened a Bunny Burger store where customers would choose a live bunny from a cage and then it would be taken in back to be ground into a custom burger. (This was a few years before the popular press picked up on the rat restaurants in China which really do this, but with rats.)

Eli understands that several franchises were purchased in Colorado, showing admirable anticipation and poor investment planning, but alas, Bunny Burgers is no longer in business, nor is Farmer MacGregor. Don't mess with the Bunny

To a non-lagomorph, the whole thing is hilarious go read. We at Bunnies End are cleaning out the Elmer Fudd trophy case.

Hmm. . . That's Suspicious

Eli being a glutton for punishments and carrot was easily led astray by the likes of Barry Bickmore describing a usual Moncktonian perambulation (aka a trip around the mulberry bush). Seeking amusement Eli  was going thru the comments at Willard Tony when this appeared in the LCD from Roy Spencer

"The quoted statement is incorrect as it stands. PRTs are used to measure the temperature of the onboard (warm-point) calibration targets. The cosmic background (cold point) is assumed to be 2.7 K (or something close to that..it doesn’t really matter). PRTs are laboratory standard and highly stable, each one being carefully calibrated before launch. 

Those two calibration points are used to calibrate the Earth-viewing data.and the AMSR-E calibration is a special case of poor design…the warm target was made of a material with low thermal conductivity. The instrument was designed in Japan by engineers just coming up to speed on the technology, and it should never have been approved by NASA in the first place. But, the instrument was “free” to NASA, so there was less scrutiny. I say all this as the AMSR-E U.S. Science Team leader."

Dr. Roy was explaining to the assembled WattKnots how the (A)MSU system works by interpolating the signal between deep space (2.8K) and a hot target.  The hot target has a number of platinum resistance thermometers buried in it and a pseudo black body surface (black is the most difficult color).  The targets are technically complex.  They are not anywhere as laboratory standard nor highly stable as platinum resistance thermometers. Eli's comment which they let through

If the warm target is made of a material with low thermal conductivity the implication is that it could slowly age, e.g. it’s thermal conductivity could change and thus the temperature distribution across the warm target could slowly change. With eight prt’s this should be observable.  If there is a temperature distribution across the warm target, the detector could be looking at a varying emissivity. Just sayin.

Now as the regulars recognize the Bunny has been playing with the idea that there is some sort of long term drift in the microwave sounding units or the analysis of data from these units, so this was a new item in play.

It turns out that there are many opportunities for changes, including changes in emissivity of the target coatings.  One of the secret sauces in analysis of AMSU returns is figuring out on station the non-linear gain of the antenna from the two calibration points.  Scott Church made a long study of the AMSU system which describes the mess best described as TL:DR, but the bottom line has a name, Instrumental Body Effect.  There is certainly enough room for all sorts of mischief.

Tell Eli about the gold standard.

Marohasy Mess Up

Among the things that bother Eli, and there are myriad, is not understanding that because proxy reconstructions are calibrated by using instrumental records they by necessity ASSUME Mike's trick, extending the proxy by use of instrumental data.  In fact, the instrumental data is more accurate in the period where they overlap, because the proxys are scaled to it.  Thus, the instrumental record used for the calibration should always be shown.  Moreover, IEHO, the usable instrumental records (properly homogenized of course) in the area where the proxy is sampled should be the ones used to scale each proxy individually.  Something that either does not appear to be much done or at least not much noted.  No matter.

Anyhow, Jeniffer Marohasy and accomplice John Abbot have published a paper in a soon to be former Journal, GeoResJ, of which it could be said that it is Elsevier and it is history

GeoResJ will be discontinued from January 2018 and is closed to new submissions. We would like to express our sincere thanks to the authors, referees, editors and editorial board members who have contributed to the journal over the past few years.

As to Jen and John, well Eli guesses that they have observed the profit that Judy Curry and Peter Webster are making, well they have set up their own long range weather forcasting service, one that Eli assumes will compete with the Farmer's Almanac and Piers Corbyn for James Annan's betting attention.  They even have their own journal.  Isn't the Internet wonderful.  Frankly Eli is of the opinion that Curry and Webster are ahead in that game even tho the Bunny's opinion of the later two, is, well, limited.

ATTP has published a comment on the Abbott Marohasy paper.  Go there for details, but Eli wants to pick up on the Twitting.  One of the fits from the AM paper were featured on Breitbart (friends don't link friends to Breitbart :(.  It turns out that that was from Moberg 05 and various claims were undressed by the usual skeptics.

Zeke was the first to notice, and he twitted the

This new tree ring proxy reconstruction that Breitbart is claiming shows "global warming almost entirely natural" is missing something... pic.twitter.com/7FRYZEldA0

— Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) August 22, 2017

which he later ammended to

Here is what it would look like with 10-year average NH land/ocean temperatures appended to their Moberg record: pic.twitter.com/HdPaaTw4Ix

— Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) August 22, 2017

Now Eli went and looked at Moberg 05 to find

To calibrate the reconstruction, its mean value and variance were adjusted to agree with the instrumental record of Northern Hemisphere annual mean temperatures [19] in the overlapping period AD 1856–1979 (Fig. 2b).

Ref 19 is Hemispheric and Large-Scale Surface Air Temperature Variations: An Extensive Revision and an Update to 2001 by P. D. Jones and A. Moberg the first two sentences of which are

This study is an extensive revision of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) land station temperature database that is used to produce a gridbox dataset of 5° latitude × 5° longitude temperature anomalies.

but also included a land+ocean data merge and it looks like that is the one Moberg used.  Gavin got an ear in pointing out that Abbott and Marohasy's time axis was off by ~ 35 years.  That meant that their 20th century was really 1845-1965. As all know there has been a steep rise in global temperature since then. 

and fetched J. Marohasy out of the brian patch

reject your false claims, and is inappropriate that u graft instrumental thermometer HadCRUT record onto proxy record

— Jennifer Marohasy (@JennMarohasy) August 23, 2017

which is amusing in light of Fig. 2B from Moberg 05

Madame Rabett knows all (readings $5)....

Some time ago, Eli got into it with denialist riff-raff, and in the course of the debate, modestly pointed out that he had posted on everything they were saying before they said it. The Rabett mostly keeps his political political comments off this blog as opposed to his climate political comments and his political climate comments, but to show you why you should never, ever mess with the bunny, right after the US election Eli started to point out in various places that

Re: C-Span Washington Journal on Monday (none / 0)

A minor suggestion you might offer. Since the Republicans left the budget approval to the next Congress, the Democrats should strip out EVERY set aside and send the thing forward post haste. True some D set asides will go away, but think of the message.

by Eli Rabett on Sat Nov 25, 2006 at 08:21:10 PM EST

and what do we get today....

Democrats tidying up a cluster of unfinished spending bills dumped on them by departing Republican leaders in Congress will start by removing billions of dollars in lawmakers’ pet projects next month.
The move, orchestrated by the incoming chairman of the Appropriations committees of the House of Representatives and the Senate, could prove politically savvy even as it proves unpopular with other members of Congress. As a group, they will lose thousands of so-called earmarks, personal projects inserted in legislation during the process of preparing it for passage.

"There will be no congressional earmarks," Rep. David Obey and Sen. Robert Byrd, both Democrats, said Monday in a statement announcing their plans. The idea was quickly endorsed by incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Ms. Rabett demurrs and tells Madame Rabett to put the fishbowl back on the mantel.

The Betts Test

Having engaged himself in a worthy round of hole digging while trying to explain why he never used what he himself acknowledged as the excellent Skeptical Science’s explanations about climate issues, Richard Betts fell back on defending Ethon’s favorite, Roger Pielke Jr., against the Skepticals listing said Roger as a climate misinformer.

This too did not go so well until Richard came up with the Betts test, that there were nowhere to be found on said list those who were really out of their mind worried about the dangers of climate change (the name of Peter Wadhams came up in this regard and indeed Dana Nucetelli has a few words on this)

However Eli finds the Betts test a good one and would point to an interesting example previously discussed here on Rabett Run, specifically Roger Jr.’s Convenient Truthiness. Now at the time, Roger’s Prometheus had not yet been pecked to death by Ethon, and Rabett Run was but a small vanity blog, but Eli had asked over there why Roger reserved all his fire for Mike Mann, Al Gore and the IPCC. The answer came

Question: Why don’t I write about glaciers, solar variability, Fred Singer, or Pat Michaels?  

Answer: I don’t know anything special about glaciers, solar variability, or the issues which are often discussed by Fred Singer or Pat Michaels. By contrast, I do know something about disasters and climate change. In fact, I know a lot, perhaps as much as only a few dozen people.

Eli was not particularly impressed

Other than the fact that the Google turns up a mess of Singer / Michaels pronuncimientos about climate change and disasters, we here at the Rabettorium were under the impression that the good Prof. Pielke runs a SCIENCE POLICY INSTITUTE and is always telling us that he loves science policy and we don't.

S. Fred and Pat have been playing in the science policy patch like forever, and maybe before. I am morally certain that RPJr has never, ever read a single word of that stuff. On the other hand, I am a bunny, and you know about the morals of hares. In the words of Dorothy Parker about a particularly childish children's book, Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.
UPDATE: Well, it looks like Roger knows S. Fred well enough to invite him to lecture his classes. FWIW, Trenberth, Sawitz et al also came. Roger also knows Pat Michaels work well enough to cite it in his publications on hurricane damage and elsewhere, as well as the fact that his father and Michaels are co-authors and long term collaborators. In short, the deniability here is not even plausible.

You want the links bunnies, well go to the original

Then, not a single comment from the audience now, well, ATTP has gathered a few but he always does a better job of that than Eli, but none at the time.

As to Roger, the Betts test is a wonderful razor to tear apart the envelop of his latest and Richard might consider taking a Betts test hisself.  Eli will be back with the results.

Hard problems, fear and solutions: Pick two

 Just the other day Eli was innocently pushing the search engine, coming across this article in the Washington Post from 2017. BTW, there are two published papers on the subjects that the diligent might care to read, "Immunizing against prejudice: Effects of disease protection on outgroup attitudes" Julie Y. Huang  Alexandra Sedlovskaya, Joshua M. Ackerman and John Bargh and  "Superheroes for change: Physical safety promotes socially (but not economically) progressive attitudes among conservatives", Jaime L. Napier , Julie Huang, Andrew J. Vonasch and John A. Bargh again.  Both are open, so never fear.

Now the Bunny is not so innocent in the wiles of psych papers that every word is to be believed, but the direction the article and the papers take is a useful one to ponder. Bargh writes about the roots of political orientation.

For example, over a decade now of research in political psychology consistently shows that how physically threatened or fearful a person feels is a key factor — although clearly not the only one — in whether he or she holds conservative or liberal attitudes.

 At this point a bit more reading and Eli became cautious about assigning political parties to conservative and liberal, but rather thinking of these as states of mind which are loosely correlated (a lesson taught by observing relatives). Bargh goes on 

Conservatives, it turns out, react more strongly to physical threat than liberals do. In fact, their greater concern with physical safety seems to be determined early in life: In one University of California study, the more fear a 4-year-old showed in a laboratory situation, the more conservative his or her political attitudes were found to be 20 years later. Brain imaging studies have even shown that the fear center of the brain, the amygdala, is actually larger in conservatives than in liberals. And many other laboratory studies have found that when adult liberals experienced physical threat, their political and social attitudes became more conservative (temporarily, of course). 

But, of course, politicians, at least the ones who succeed, are at a deep level aware of this, may have even read these papers, and certainly find it in life's lessons

This is why it makes sense that liberal politicians intuitively portray danger as manageable

and why  the other side is

instead likely to emphasize the dangers of terrorism and immigration, relying on fear as a motivator to gain votes.

There is something missing here, perhaps the description of one of the experiments will help

In fact, anti-immigration attitudes are also linked directly to the underlying basic drive for physical safety. For centuries, arch-conservative leaders have often referred to scapegoated minority groups as “germs” or “bacteria” that seek to invade and destroy their country from within. . . .

“Immigrants are like viruses” is a powerful metaphor, because in comparing immigrants entering a country to germs entering a human body, it speaks directly to our powerful innate motivation to avoid contamination and disease. Until very recently in human history, not only did we not have antibiotics, we did not even know how infections occurred or diseases transmitted, and cuts and open wounds were quite dangerous. . .

Therefore, we reasoned, making people feel safer about a dangerous flu virus should serve to calm their fears about immigrants — and making them feel more threatened by the flu virus should cause them to be more against immigration than they were before. In a 2011 study, my colleagues and I showed just that. First, we reminded our nationwide sample of liberals and conservatives about the threat of the flu virus (during the H1N1 epidemic), and then measured their attitudes toward immigration. Afterward we simply asked them if they’d already gotten their flu shot or not. It turned out that those who had not gotten a flu shot (feeling threatened) expressed more negative attitudes toward immigration, while those who had received the vaccination (feeling safe) had more positive attitudes about immigration.

In the context of today's mess, about COVID, climate change and more, this says that the way to conservatives' agreement is to emphasize solutions. The opposition will take the other track and seek to vilify outgoups. Denial of solutions is a tactic to increase fear, if there are no solutions, then fear is unavoidable.

Sound familiar?

So with the anti-vaxxers, the climate change deniers and yes the no-hopers, emphasize progress and solutions.

Eli Grabs Another Envelope

Bunnies are not really into complex calculations where the meaning is hidden in the math.  For one thing there is great opportunity to fool yourself, for another, it is pretty simple to mislead others.  To Eli math is something you grab after you have figured out what is happening, and then you grab it in shells, with the easy parts first.  That way if you mess up, you always can look at the inner shell to figure out where you went wrong.  EO Wilson had some recent thoughts about the role of mathematics

Fortunately, exceptional mathematical fluency is required in only a few disciplines, such as particle physics, astrophysics and information theory. Far more important throughout the rest of science is the ability to form concepts, during which the researcher conjures images and processes by intuition.

and simple models help with forming those concepts.  In a recent previous life the Bunny Collective discussed the relative probabilities for emission by a single vibrationally excited  CO₂ molecule that has been vibrationally excited by absorbing a photon.  There are two fates for the little guy, emission of an IR photon.

[1]  CO₂^* -->  CO₂ + hν          Rate constant = k_R

and collisional de-excitation by another, say nitrogren or oxygen molecule

[2]  CO₂^* + M -->  CO₂ + M   Rate constant = k_M

Plugging in the numbers, at atmospheric pressure the Rabett showed that only one in a hundred thousand excited molecules would emit an IR photon.  As several pointed out, high up in the stratosphere this decreases in proportion to the pressure, but, for example, at ~17 km it is one in ten thousand, and at ~ 25 km one in a thousand.

On the other hand, thermal excitation of CO₂, the reverse of reaction [2] is just

[3]  CO₂ + M -->  CO₂^* + M   Rate constant = k_-M

so now, in addition to absorbing an IR photon CO₂^* can be excited by collisions, converting thermal translational energy into vibrational energy. 

How fast a reaction happens is called the reaction rate, and is proportional to the concentration of each reactant and a number called the rate constant which hides all the dynamics, e.g. the quantum chemistry, the probability of a collision having enough energy to actually cause molecular changes, etc.  If the rate of the forward reaction, equals the rate of the reverse reaction,  an equilibrium requires that as many molecules react in the forward direction as in the reverse




[4]  (k_M [M] + k_R )  = k_-M  [CO₂^*][M]

If  k_R < < k_M[M] it can be neglected and then [2] and [3] form a simple equilibrium

[5]  CO₂^* + M = CO₂ + M

which can be rearranged to yield

[6]    [CO₂^*]/[CO₂] = k_-M /k_M = K_eq

The next step is to show how thermodynamics allows a simple estimation of K_eq and [CO₂^*].  The emission rate in photons per second per unit volume will then simply be

[7]   k_R [CO₂^*]

Plus ca change (NASA US Election Edition)

Before the US election the dour bunny was of the opinion that at a minimum Columbia University was about to receive a gift of GISS. Whether it would be silly enough to accept the donation was another story. Goddard, Langley, JPL, Ames and Glenn were in deep trouble too, as was the entire agency. In one scenario aeronautics would go to the FAA leaving a rump Confederate Space Exploration Agency centered around Johnson, Kennedy, Marshall and Stennis. Kennedy would be renamed Strom Thurmond Space Center.

The recent election has shuffled the deck. California (Ames and JPL) has Nancy Pelosi and Boxer and Feinstein who are not about to let anyone mess with their Centers, GISS is in New York with two rather powerful senators, but the big winner is Goddard. The main center is in Steny Hoyer's district (new majority leader in the House of Representatives) and Barbara Mikulski in the Senate. She will be the new chair of the subcommittee responsible for NASA appropriations. Outlying labs such as GISS and IV&V (Robert Byrd, Jay Rockerfeller and Allan Mollohan in the House) look to be in good shape. The other Centers (including Johnson, with Bush in the White House and Sheila Jackson Lee in the House, there is an odd couple) appear ok too. NASA may survive. Of course, given the talent displayed by the incumbent we have our questions about the owner operators.

NASA Watch has some other details

Rabett stylin

A while ago Eli went to the mattress with Atmoz over blankets. It was pointed out that there are styles in science and the bunny's is to do illustrative experiments. If they carry Darwin credit, so much the better. It's not for nothing that chemistry is called stinks and bangs and physics shocks and explosions. If we wanted to play safe we would have taken up financial futures. Which, come to think of it, is what the theoreticians did in case you have any questions about why the world is in an economic mess.

Eli will rewrite this for the G&T response, and there are some refinements that have to be made (for one thing we have to measure the temperature of the upper and lower surfaces of the glass) and it has to be done in vacuum, just as gravityloss pointed out, also take a look at the blanket wars posts) but he thought some would be interested.

The lab bunnies started with a heating plate, fed at ~40 VAC through a Variac. Eli placed a couple of thin glass tubes on this and a large glass plate about the some size as the heating plate on top of that. You have to look carefully to see the plate, but you can find the greenish tinged edge. This heated up to ~166 C at equilibrium. Couple of caveats. The temperature varied ~2 C over 5-10 minutes, the thermocouple used to measure temperature is the blue wire to the left, the plate is a 2" diffusion pump heater, the glass tubes Pasteur pippets and the glass plate a large cheap lens from lord knows where. You use what you got.

Eli then grabbed the glass plate with his hands (One of the skills you pick up after forty years in the lab is a certain ability to touch hottish things. Comes in handy in restaurants) and removed it. The temperature rapidly decreased to 151 C in a minute. BTW, Eli is insensitive, but he can't pick up anything much over 70 C without illegal asbestos glass blowers gloves.











And here come the sun. . .

The Beatles - Here Comes The Sun.mp3 -


Here is the beginning of my post. And here is the rest of it.

The Five Fold Path

What to do about climate change is framed as a choice between adaptation and mitigation, code words for either accepting the inevitable while struggling on or maybe actually doing something.  This is a false dichotomy.

Eli has never been a shy bunny, for example, Eli Rabett's Simple Plan to Save the World.   In this tradition, the Rabett wishes to tell the annonymice once again what the real choices are to deal with the mess we are in and the worse mess that is coming.

The world needs a five pronged strategy

• Adaptation dealing with the damage already done that cannot be undone
• Amelioration, eliminating harmful effects of our actions
• Conservation with needed and desired but not wasteful usage
• Substitution of green systems for destructive ones
• Mitigation reversing our thoughtless abuse

Conservation includes energy efficiency, amelioration covers such things as CO2 capture and storage so we don't do more damage, substitution increased nuclear, solar, and wind energy replacing fossil fuels, mitigation is reserved for things that actually decrease the concentrations of greenhouse gases and reverse damaging land use changes.  Adaptation is a last choice, the bitter pill to be swallowed when nothing else is to be done.

A richer vocabulary.

Eli Rabett's Five Fold Way to Deal with Climate Change

(with a few changes)
Adaptation, Amelioration, Conservation, Substitution, Mitigation

Eli has never been a shy bunny, for example, Eli Rabett's Simple Plan to Save the World, with a codicil for India and China. In this tradition, the Rabett wishes to tell the annonomice how to deal with the mess we are in because of the denialists and the delayers.

The world needs a four pronged strategy

• Adaptation to deal with the damage already done
• Amelioration, eliminating harmful effects of our actions
  
• Conservation with needed and desired but not wasteful usage
• Substitution of green systems for destructive ones
  
• Mitigation reversing our thoughtless abuse
  

Conservation includes energy efficiency, amelioration covers such things as CO2 capture and storage, substitution increased nuclear, solar, and wind energy replacing fossil fuels, mitigation is reserved for things that actually decrease the concentrations of greenhouse gases and reverse damaging land use changes.

Encourage the others. Eli will know his own.

If You Thought Eli Was a Strange Bunny

By way of Ms. Rabett's favorite Japanese blog, Tofugu who warns us not to mess with Junichi the Rough.