US Universities Might As Well Close Now

American universities have had a good run since 1945 powered by state and federal government support as well as donations from alumni, foundations and nice folk.  In rankings US research universities occupy the first four places and 13 of the first 25.  The decrease in state funding is already hammering state schools such as the University of Wisconsin, etc.

The US Congress has applied the killer blow.  By proposing to tax tuition remission, the House of Representatives has essentially made attending graduate school a Darwin test.  Eli's friend Andy Dessler has an op ed in the San Antonia Express-News which looks at what would happen if this bill passed.

This would be a terrible policy because it would hurt one of America’s most prized and valuable possessions: excellence in advanced university research. Graduate students form the backbone of research done at universities in the U.S. When professors proudly talk about the amazing work their lab is performing, the odds are that the critical contributions were made by an army of smart, hardworking grad students.

Andy points out the many benefits to the nation of this research, and why passing this tax would be a disaster. 

Our research universities are the envy of the world. Because U.S. research is so good, students come to us from all over the world. And the U.S. benefits from this because the smartest of these people often stay here after they graduate, adding to our professional research workforce.

Sadly, that horse is already out of the barn. Even if the tuition tax is not in the final bill, international students are already forgetting US universities as places to apply to because completing their degrees with Republicans in power, and even if they are defeated is a chancy game to play with your life.

Companies that provide a tuition benefit to their employees, can rip that sucker up since the benefit might come with a tax liability.  US student contemplating graduate school or taking a job now have a simple answer, take the job, who knows if they will be able to complete the degree. 

But it gets worse, STE grad students mostly have research assistantships.  Humanities, social science and math grad students have teaching assistantships which also have tuition remission.  Who is going to take a chance on starting a degree program with the tuition tax lurking?  And without them who is going to teach the myriad sections of English and Math as well as the Chem and Physics Labs.  Undergrad instruction is going to go full sage on the stage MOOCish.

Still, there is something interesting in the proposals from the Goth-Republican caucus, a tax on university endowments for the Harvard Yales.  Now this is really a dumb idea, but it does set the stage for a wealth tax when reality set in (usual if ever clause inserted here)

Biodiversity versus evangelical anti-environmentalism

Given that yesterday's holiday in the US was a spiritual time for many, I'm returning to Creation Care among the Christian right.

We'll need some serious ideological ferment to get to realism on climate change among evangelicals beyond the minority who currently acknowledge the science.* Not impossible - we see how evangelicals and many conservatives broke out of the "tough on crime" position that they were locked into 20 years ago, but still very difficult.

Dominion theology, with its argument that God placed the earth under the "dominion" of humanity as a justification to exploit the earth, is a clear setback. A good example of this nonsense is the Cornwall Alliance, shouting "dominion" at every opportunity as a reason to exploit natural resources. While there might be some sincerity by some few at Cornwall, there's no reason to trust them or their dark money funders.

And yet even these people can't completely deny environmental reality. I think I think the best shot on environmental issues with evangelicals isn't climate change, it's with biodiversity and species extinction. Even Cornwall has to say, after making up a bunch of nonsense about the slow pace of extinctions, that "None of this means that there are not particular species that are, in fact, endangered and that can benefit from careful conservation efforts." Among evangelicals that are less financially motivated for disingenuity than Cornwall, I think the argument could translate into real environmental protections.


One of the strangest places to see environmental issues handled in a nuanced way is the Creationist site, Answers In Genesis. They easily dismiss the idea that dominion is a blank check to destroy. They quote Psalm 24:1, "The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein" together with the standard verse on dominion at Genesis 1:28, "have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth." Dominion is stewardship with responsibilities over something that belongs to God, not authorization to destroy it. Evangelicals who believe this might have trouble with permanently destroying biodiversity.

If I were a rich environmentalist, this is an area where I'd spend some money developing the activists and message, in addition to the very active environmental movement among religious groups outside of the evangelical community.



*Important to acknowledge not all evangelicals are conservatives, and the climate science believers among evangelicals could just be the non-conservatives. This goes to the question of whether religious belief really drives opinion or if it's all just political tribalism. I think religious belief does have an effect, but it's complicated.

The Vanity Press

Retraction Watch has a bombshell, an injunction against OMICS for deceptive business practices.  Now what pray tell are those.

In her decision granting the injunction Judge Gloria Navarro wrote

The evidence produced by the FTC demonstrates that Defendants engaged in probable misrepresentations regarding journal publishing. On the OMICS website, for example, OMICS makes numerous representations indicating that it follows standard peer-review practices. (See PX12 Att. L at 657, 773, 748, Ex. 12 to Mot. for Prelim Inj., ECF No. 9-12). 1 Under standard industry practice, the peer review process often takes several weeks or even months and involves multiple rounds of substantive feedback from experts in the related field. (See PX13 ¶¶ 9–10). In contrast, the FTC has provided evidence that Defendants’ peer review practices, in numerous instances, took a matter of days and contained no comments or substantive feedback

The Court found that the FTC would likely succeed in proving the merits of its claims. 

This inadequacy is further demonstrated by statements from purported “editors,” which indicate that they never received manuscripts to review or else even agreed to be listed as an editor. (See, e.g., PX03 ¶¶ 3–4; PX11 ¶ 7). In some instances, individuals listed as “editors” without permission requested removal from the website without success. (See, e.g., PX02 ¶ 4; PX08¶¶ 4–7; PX06 ¶ 11).

and the injunction is a doozy.  OMICS is enjoined from (among other things

making any representation, or assisting others in making any representation, expressly or by implication, that any journal or other publication is peer-reviewed unless any work product submitted to that journal or publication is reviewed by peers who are subject matter experts, who are not journal employees, and who evaluate the quality and credibility of the work product, and the representation is otherwise non-misleading;

Now whom does Eli know who publishes with OMICS?

Ned Nikolov, and amusingly what points does Ned make about his OMICS publication:

Read the paper and see the evidence for yourself. Publisher's name is irrelevant! Our study went through an extensive peer review anyway ...

— Ned Nikolov, Ph.D. (@NikolovScience) July 28, 2017

Ned also gives talks at OMICS conferences about which the judge had a few choice words.

For more on Nikolov see Eli and ATTP

Russian money connections paying for Trump's legal defense against illegal activities with Russians

Yes, I think it's a problem:

According to filings with the Federal Election Commission, the Republican National Committee has paid more than $400,000 in personal legal fees for Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. in connection with the investigations into the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia in the 2016 election. At least $12,000 of those funds came from a Ukrainian-born billionaire with ties to Vladimir Putin.

It's a problem that any political party money provides direct financial benefits to electeds - that creates a pathway for anyone who's rich to put money in the pocket of the president.* Money with shadowy connections to a hostile government is even more disastrous. I'll concede that $12,000 isn't a lot, but that's just what we know about now.

Maybe this one money connection to Russia will be cut off - CNN says Trump is planning to stop taking RNC money for his own legal defense and may funnel his own money to his staff's defense. Of course when it comes to promises to spend his own money, what Trump says he'll do and what he actually does are different worlds. If it does come true though, it seems to be a sign of fear.



*I might reluctantly have a different opinion if a non-rich person is ever again elected president, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.

Tom's Trick Works and Things Are Worse Than They Seem

Some time ago Eli referred to the US Climate Reference Network as Tom Karl's Trick in that it offered an elegant way of evaluating the data and homogenization of the US Historical Climate Network and by extension the global networks of climate stations

 Its primary goal is to provide future long-term homogeneous observations of temperature and precipitation that can be coupled to long-term historical observations for the detection and attribution of present and future climate change. Data from the USCRN will be used in operational climate monitoring activities and for placing current climate anomalies into an historical perspective. The USCRN will also provide the United States with a reference network that meets the requirements of the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS).

The Bunny's take on this was here is a sensible way of checking the accuracy of older climate networks in the past and calibrating them in the future.  But there was a point that was missed, perhaps even by the designers.  They sensible paired USCRN stations with USHCN ones for evaluation.  Because of this it was implicit in the design that significantly less than the generic 30 climate data evaluation period would be needed to draw conclusions, and that those conclusions would extend back over the entire USHCN period.

Zeke Hausfather, Kevin Cowtan, Matthew J. Menne, and Claude N. Williams, Jr published a short paper on this, Evaluating the impact of U.S. Historical ClimatologyNetwork homogenization using the U.S. Climate Reference Network (open version) where they showed that the USHCN, the historical network, slightly UNDERESTIMATES the warming trend as measured by the USCRN, the optimal network, especially for maximum daily temperatures

Their conclusion was understated, as one would expect

During the period of overlap between the USHCN and USCRN networks, we can confidently conclude that the adjustments to the USHCN station records made them more similar to proximate homogenous USCRN station records, both in terms of trends and anomalies. There are no systematic trend biases introduced by adjustments during this period; if anything adjusted USHCN stations still underestimate maximum (and mean) temperature trends relative to USCRN stations. This residual maximum temperature bias warrants additional research to determine the exact cause.

 The paper also shows that homogenization narrows the distribution of raw data from USHCN stations while leaving the means unchanged which pretty much kills the loud claims of fake data from the peanuts' gallery, but the systematic difference between the USCRN and USHCN warrants further study and a bit more worry.

Manufactured Russia scandal is a nothing burger

My distinguished colleagues on this site, Eli Rabbet and Brian, are convinced that the ruling-class media (NY Times, Washington Post, MSNBC) is hot on the trail of a major scandal. According to the mainstream media, the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to smear Hillary Clinton’s campaign and allow Trump to win.

I respectfully dissent.

Allegation: A server holding a large collection of emails by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was hacked by the Russians, which then leaked the emails to the US media, to the great embarrassment of the DNC and Hilary’s campaign.

Rebuttal: A group of retired spooks, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) has performed forensic investigations of the metadata. The VIPS determined the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceed an internet capacity for a remote hack. Forensics also shows that the copying was performed on the East coast of the US.

I readily admit that I have no expertise in this area. But the VIPS do have such expertise. I have not seen any coverage by the MSNBC, the NYTimes, or the Washington Post that addresses the claims made by the VIPS. Instead, the Establishment aims to drown out the opposition by dint of constant repetition. The summary of the VIPS study, entitled

Was the Russian Hack an Inside Job?

can be found at www.counterpunch.org/2017/07/25/was-the-russian-hack-an-inside-job

Allegation: Russia colluded with the Trump campaign to subvert the democratic election.

Rebuttal: A recent book on the 2016 election, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign by journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. In the book’s final pages, the authors describe the utter shock experienced by the top campaigners, who never dreamed that Hillary could lose the election. At the same time, the top campaigners were staggered by the unflattering revelations of the leaked DNC emails. Allen and Barnes describe how Hillary successfully changed the subject: Instead of inquiring into the content of the emails, Hillary staffers asked, WHO hacked the DNC server. The answer of the Hillary campaign? Russians hacked the emails.

See link at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shattered:_Inside_Hillary_Clinton%27s_Doomed_Campaign

Gary Leupp, history professor at Tufts University, does not agree with the official line that

“Russia had rigged the election by providing stolen DNC emails to Wikileaks, using them to discredit Hillary. (It’s rarely mentioned how, precisely, they had done that, by showing that the DNC under Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had rigged the primaries against Bernie Sanders.)”

See link at www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/20/manafort-news-a-blockbuster-or-nothingburger

Journalist Chris Floyd scoff at the anti-Russian hysteria.

Floyd has actually looked at some of the online advertisements that the Russian government (supposedly) bought.

“What did we see? Hillary Clinton in a devil costume boxing with Jesus. A Clinton-backing Satan arm-wrestling with Jesus. Pro-gun memes. Anti-immigrant memes. Memes about military-hating Democrats. Basically, the same sort of things your cranky uncle or Foxicated cousin has been sending around on email for the past 20 years. The idea that someone could be dissuaded from voting for Hillary Clinton because of something like this is absurd.” See link at www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/20/manafort-news-a-blockbuster-or-nothingburger

Consider the careful work by the journalist Robert Parry, cited by Norman Solomon.

Stripping the 25-page DNI (Director of National Intelligence) report down to its essence, Parry pointed out that it “contained no direct evidence that Russia delivered hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta to WikiLeaks.” Parry added: “The DNI report amounted to a compendium of reasons to suspect that Russia was the source of the information — built largely on the argument that Russia had a motive for doing so because of its disdain for Democratic nominee Clinton and the potential for friendlier relations with Republican nominee Trump. But the case, as presented, is one-sided and lacks any actual proof.”

Solomon concludes that Democrats are playing with fire.

See link at www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/10/democrats-are-playing-with-fire-on-russia

Aaron Mate writes in the Oct 6, 2017 issue of The Nation magazine that

Russiagate is More Fiction than Fact

From accusations of Trump campaign collusion to Russian Facebook ad buys, the media has substituted hype for evidence, Mate writes.

“Since Election Day, the controversy over alleged Russian meddling and Trump campaign collusion has consumed Washington and the national media. Yet nearly one year later there is still no concrete evidence of its central allegations.”

See link at www.thenation.com/article/russiagate-is-more-fiction-than-fact

Journalist Max Blumenthal addresses a headline in The Washington Post on Sunday Nov 5, 2017. The scare headline reads

At least nine people in Trump’s orbit had contact with Russians during campaign and transition

Wow! Pretty scary! Until Max Blumenthal puts it in perspective.

“Many of these forbidden contacts consisted of meetings with Russian diplomats.”

The Wa Po story authored by Rosalind S. Heiderman, Tom Hamburger and Carol D. Leonnig

Blumenthal goes on to comment sarcastically “Diplomacy must cede to brinksmanship if not all out war.”

Green Plate Challenge

Izen has turned the Green Plate Effect and his animation into a video just in time for the bunnies to show it to their uncles at Thanksgiving or Christmas.  Copy this onto your smart phone for future use

and Science of Doom has issued a challenge to the back radiation deniers.

The Lysistrata Solution - Do not cite, do not quote, do not review

The latest is that Mark Jacobson has filed a lawsuit against the National Academy of Sciences, the Proceedings of same and Christopher Clack for badmouthing, mopery and no takebacks.  There are important issues at play, for example, can renewable energy get to 100% of what is needed (Jacobson) or only 80% (Clack) without nuclear, and a lot of talmudic stuff about how to interpret what was written by the various parties to justify their positions and whether the other parties interpreted what the parties of the first wrote correctly or cherry picked with malice and aforethought.

These are policy driving questions but both sides advocate strong and immediate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions starting twenty years ago and certainly now.

What is also clear is that Jacobson in filing this suit has pushed the norms out the Overton window in a way that could quickly lead to no good things and that many are concerned.

Eli, in his usual way has a simple solution.  Those who are troubled, indeed angered by this suit have a simple way of making their concern clear.

Publicly tell Mark Jacobson that they will no longer cite, quote or review his papers and grant proposals until the suit is withdrawn.

Beyond this it may be necessary to ask editors and program managers not to send their work to Jacobson for evaluation and review.

Oh yes, one other tell in this whole mess is the addendum to the initial order summoning the parties attached by the Chief Judge Robert Morin of the DC Court which makes the suit subject to the DC Medical Malpractice Proceedings Act

After an action is filed in the court against a healthcare provider alleging medical malpractice, the court shall require the parties to enter into mediation without discovery or, if all parties agree with only limited discovery which shall not interfere with the completion of mediation within 30 days of the Initial Scheduling and Settlement Conference (ISSC) prior to any further litigation in an effort to reach a settlement agreement.

A report has to be filed ten days after the mediation session.  Eli is holding tryouts for the mediator position.

Eli Takes a Bow

While Eli is not the world's most accurate news source, allow the Bunny to take a bow.  Back in July 2016 the observant readers read

Just Because You're Paranoid Doesn't Mean Somebunny Isn't Out To Get You

. . . . . .

These questions include why the US Congress is not mounting a full bore investigation into why the Russians are "helping" Mr. Trump out.  There is a good argument that without Russian money Trump is flat broke and two of the advisors closest to him, Paul Manafort and Carter Page, are mobbed up with Putin.  Eli uses the term mobbed up with intent.  Russia is not an autocracy, it is a kleptocracy.

Ms Rabett, who has some experience in such matters on the compliance side of the fence, points out that money laundering violations define the expensive real estate market in places like NY and SF, as brokers have accept money from peculiar sources.  It is certain that the Trump Organization has accepted the money.  What is not certain until law enforcement serves papers, is whether they did their due diligence and reporting.  Eli suspects not, and if systematically done, which Eli suspects so, that is a RICO violation.

Eli must also ask whether Wikileaks is a front for Russian intelligence. Julian Assange more or less admitted that with the usual, you can't prove it That puts a different twist on a whole bunch of things they have done in the last five years.  Or perhaps they are just stooges for the Russians, sort of like the dead end Bernie Bros.

This story is moving fast and the reaction of the Benghazi crazed Republicans in the US Congress will provide some interesting tales.  For example, Trump has conceded that his Russian "friends" were behind the hack.

Dear Lord.
. . . . . . .

Rabett Run where you read it before it happens

Electric Buses Charging Ahead

Nice article by David Roberts on electric buses. A similar range of opinion that we see on passenger EVs - they're coming, and someday they'll take over, but medium terms predictions are all over the map.

Roberts is on the bullish end, saying electric will dominate by 2030. I agree with the fact that in the US, federal support for capital costs shifts the incentives strongly to cheap O&M for local governments, and that's where electric shines. Why should they buy non-electric?

I can give one reason - when I was on the board of a water district, I pushed for an internal EV mandate. Our O&M staff pushed back, saying our service bay already was too small and they couldn't service two types of vehicles (I think they've since added them). So inertia is a problem.

Roberts is putting a lot of his optimistic eggs in a single basket, the Proterra electric bus maker. Let's hope they and their competitors succeed in a revolution, but it's still early days.

My guess is that Roberts is likely right. Financial incentives and pollution incentives are strong. I think Roberts also underplayed the convenience factor. EV buses have more torque, so you can redesign and accelerate your routes and get your passengers to destinations faster, especially hilly routes or ones with lots of stops - but only if all the buses on the route are electric. Cities will be incentivized to switch to all-EV buses.

An early test of these predictions is whether bus manufacturers slow down on the R&D for ICE buses. We should see that in less than 10 years if EV buses really are going to be predominant-to-exclusive by 2030.


On a personal note, my wife and I are very slowly getting more used to buses. Going down to one car between us is a good incentive. The train is great, but I still tend to put my bike on the train or use GoBike rather than find a bus at the end of the train route. Despite that, there's a great bus route to San Francisco Airport that's far more convenient and cheaper than parking a car there, and another along the main drag here in San Mateo County that's also pretty good for shorter trips. Maybe faster EV buses would get us onboard more.
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Here ya go Brian.  Already in service in Krakow Poland Solaris Urbino 8.9.  100 km range, 4 hour charge time - Eli

Why the Green Plate Effect Has Had an Effect

The Green Plate Effect (GPE) post is a gedanken experiment posed by your friendly bunny, which uses simplifications to think through the consequences of a proposition.  The proposition is that as several  have claimed, that the Greenhouse Effect (GHE) violates the second law of thermodynamics.

Discussion of the GPE has occupied more that a few places, including Rabett Run, Roy Spencer's bodega, and the Dragons Lair (be sure to wear protection when going there or better yet do not), but contrary to the Weasel, there does seem to have been an effect.  (BTW he has been tossed out of his condo and retreated to the original hovel)

The GPE post drove home two ideas:

1.  The GHE is not a statement about two bodies, a hot and a cold one, e.g. the surface and the atmosphere, but a statement about three bodies, a heat source, the absorber of energy from the heat source and the thermal shield, In the GPE these are the illumination source, the blue plate and the green plate. 

This idealization can be extended to the sun, surface atmosphere system at the cost of mathematical complication involving things such as geometry, viewing angles, emissivity, thermal conductivity, diurnal cycles, etc.

Were bunnies to go acaveating it might be mentioned that the blue plate would cool more quickly in the absence of the green plate when the light was turned off.  This, happens in real life.  Night time temperatures fall much more quickly in the desert than in Mississippi and yes, Betty, water vapor does absorb IR emissions from the surface and yes, something is needed to heat the surface first.

2.  Simple analysis shows that in the GPE the presence of the green plate makes the blue plate hotter.

The myriad attempts, some here, some there, involve changing the problem to something else or they break down into first or second law contradictions or they tie themselves up into algebraic knots.  Mathocists are invited to look at the comments at RR, Dr. Roys, or Postma's Pablum Palace.

The New Merry Minuet

In Eli's dotage the need to crouch under a young bunny's desk waiting for the nuclear end has returned.  While this never was much more than a hope, waking up every morning wondering whether one has indeed done so is not much fun.

Their was a song which captured this back in the day


But it needs updating, a task that Eli has taken on

They're rioting in Charlottsville
They're starving in San Juan
There's hurricanes in Florida
And Houston has floods

The whole world is festering with unhappy souls
Bannon hates McConnell, Burmese hate Rohingyas
Suni hate the Shia, Brexiters hate the Dutch
And I don't like anybody very much!!

But we can be tranquil and thankful and proud
For Trump's been endowed with a mushroom-shaped cloud
And we know for certain that some lovely day
The asshole will set the spark off
And we will all be blown away!!

They're rioting in Charlottsville
There's strife in Iraq
What nature doesn't so to us
Will be done by the Republicans

New York Times misleads on Germany's "huge" investments in renewable energy

The NY Times ran a piece on Saturday Oct 7 by reporter Stanley Reed, headlined

Germany’s Shift to Green Power Stalls, Despite Huge Investments

The reporter is puzzled about the failure of Germany to reduce carbon dioxide emissions below the levels that obtained in 2009.

In the last decade or so, Germany has subsidized solar panels and wind turbines. The total bill since 2000 is 189 billion euros or $222 billion. At first glance, it looks like a huge investment. but to put that amount in perspective, realize that Germany has a population of 82 million. The annual per capita cost is…

(cue the sound effects as I reach for my calculator) $222 billion/(82 million X 17 years a mere $159 per person per year. Mathematically, the average German citizen pays $159 per year, or $13.25 a month or 44 cents a day. That doesn’t sound like “huge” investments.

Another calculation is to consider the German GDP which is $3.5 trillion. Divide by 82 million people to get the per capita GDP of $3.5 trillion/82 million = $43 thousand.

The annual per capita renewable subsidy as a fraction of the GDP is $159/$43,000 = 0.004, so the allegedly “huge” investments are 0.4% of the GDP.

Either way, the investments are not huge.

Reed quotes one 27-year old student who voted for the far-right “Alternative for Germany” party, who says that his family pays an additional 800 Euros ($936) every year for subsidies for the energy policy. (This number is in agreement with the calculation above if the student’s family has 6 members because 936/159 = 5.9). We don’t know the size of the student’s family, or whether or not that individual is typical.

In addition, not everybody pays taxes at the same rate. Germany has a lot of wealthy people with a strong aversion to paying taxes, who often succeed in shoving off the tax burden onto everybody else. Back in the USA, the hotel billionaire Leona Helmsley famously proclaimed that “only little people pay taxes” and she was accurate. Warren Buffett has remarked that his secretary pays taxes at a higher rate than he does.
 
To return to the NYT article….

It’s no great mystery why the carbon dioxide emissions have not decreased, Reed has answered the question in his article. Germany’s energy plan is not to phase out coal, but to phase out nuclear power by 2022. Nuclear power plants have very low carbon dioxide emissions, so closing nuclear power plants has meant that Germany has become “more reliant on its sizable fleet of coal-fired power stations, which account for the bulk of emissions from electricity generation.” (as Reed states)
 
In short, the decision to phase out nuclear power by itself would have caused carbon dioxide emissions to increase. Germany’s investments in wind turbines and solar panels have prevented the total carbon dioxide emissions from rising, but they have not been enough to cause emissions to decrease.

While the costs of the subsidies to wind power and solar panels do not seem “huge”, they may have run up against up a limit of political tolerance, given the lopsided distribution of income in Germany and the opposition of wealthy Germans to paying their fair share of taxes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/07/business/energy-environment/german-renewable-energy.html

The Killer Rabett of Caerbannog Has a Chew on Steve (Tony Heller) Goddard

Eli's friend, the Killer Rabett of Caerbannog noticed Eli's comment on Steve Tony Goddard's sense of misdirection, and had a few words on the Twitter.  There were more that a few clues to Steve Tony's methods and materials which, both of us agree, are worthy of gathering in one place for future use with a few expansions of Twitterisms and such.  Rabett of caerbannog T-shirts available at Shirtoid

In response to the usual cherry, pick with a topping of political agenda, Caerbannog. . . well let Eli go to the Twitter
---------------------------------------------


Here, says Caerbannog pointing to Eli, is proof that Goddard aka Heller is a tinfoil-hat-wearing nutter

What else can be said about someone who works a construction project into a grand global conspiracy to manipulate temperatures? He's *nuts*.

As for the content of the message? I've addressed data adjustment issues many times here, but you fail to understand.

• I have shown many times that adjustments are required to correct for the effects of station moves (i.e. 100s from city centers to airports). 
• I have pointed you to information about data adjustmnts, including links to NOAA's adjustment package that includes all code
• *and* full instructions on how to build/run it. The NOAA package includes a complete test-suite to make it easier for others to verify....

Bottom line -- when I post substance, you completely ignore it and blow it off.

Recap for others here: Heller focuses on USHCN instead of GHCN because USHCN covers only about 1.5% of the Earth's surface area. As a result, short term temp swings (aka "noise") are  highly correlated over temp stations. When averaged together, this results in less "noise cancellation".

That means a lower "warming" SNR. The US-only temperature trend is just emerging. A small local trend means adjustments can change slight cooling to slight warming. Also, there is more likely to be a temperature bias for localized regions, where many temperature stations may have had similar changes in equipment and procedures.

It turns out that for USHCN as well as GHCN, many stations were moved from city centers to airports. Many airport stations have data from before 1900.

When you see airport stations with data going back before there were airplanes, what does that tell you about those stations? Think hard.

Also warming has not been uniform over the continental USA. The West has warmed more than the South. That means area weighting is important.

Overall station density a bit less in the West than in other regions. So without area-weighting, the area with the most warming is underrepresented.

The problem can be worsened if you select a subset of stations. You must ensure reasonably uniform geographic weighting in your averaging. This is especially true if the warming is fairly weak relative to the year-to-year variation. This will often be true for small regions.

USHCN, because it covers only 1.5% of Earth area with annual temp variations large relative to warming, gives Heller opportunities to mislead. If Heller were to look at GHCN, where coverage is global and the warming trend is much larger than global year-to-year variations he wouldn't have any "wiggle room" to spin results and make accusations. The global temperature trend is huge relative to the noise and huge relative to adjustments.

That's why Heller won't touch GHCN. The warming signal to noise ratio for the entire Earth is much stronger than the warming signal to noise ratio for just the USA.

There's no way that Heller could "cherry pick" the GHCN warming trend away. The warming signal too strong. So Heller will never touch GHCN.

So Heller will never touch GHCN. That is, Heller will *never* show adjusted vs. unadjusted *global* temp averages from GHCN data. The results would destroy his message.

The Green Plate Effect

An evergreen of denial is that a colder object can never make a warmer object hotter.  That's the Second Law of Thermodynamics, so according to the Agendaists, the Greenhouse Effect, with greenhouse gases playing the role of the colder object, is rubbish.  They neglect the fact that heating and cooling are dynamic processes and thermodynamics is not.

Eli, of course, is a dynamic bunny and knows how to add and subtract. Divide is also possible.  What is happening is that one does not have just a hot body and a cold body, but a really hot body, the sun, constantly heating a colder (much), but still warm body the Earth, which then radiates the same amount of energy to space.

In elevator speak, Tyndall put it

[T]he atmosphere admits of the entrance of the solar heat, but checks its exit; and the result is a tendency to accumulate heat at the surface of the planet.

Eli had a different but not as elegant elevator tweet

Today on twitter, Eli stepped through the simple math and he thought it would be a good thing to put the thread on this blog for future reference.  We start with a simple case, imagine the Earth is just a plate in space with sunlight shining on it.   Maybe 400 W/m^2

The sun warms the plate, but as the plate warms it radiates until the radiated heat matches the heat being absorbed from the sun

Using the Stefan Boltzman Law you can calculate the temperature of the plate when it reaches equilibrium (400 W/m²) = 2 σ Teq⁴   where  σ is the Stefan Boltzmann constant 5.67 x 10^-8 W/(m² K⁴), factor of 2 for a two sided plate per m². Run the numbers Teq=244 K.

Now lets add another plate. We'll color this plate green for greenhouse. It is heated by the first at a rate of 200 W/m²

But after a while, it too has to heat up and reach an equilibrium temperature. . . so as a first guess something like

That's wrong though because there are 400 W/m^2 going into the two plate system and 300 coming out.  At equilibrium an equal amount of energy has to be going in as coming out  So what happens??

The entire system has to heat up to reach the equilibrium condition.  T1 and T2 are the equilibrium temps of the plates.

Looking at the two plate system, the energy going in is 400  W/m² and the energy going out is  σT1⁴ +  σT2⁴    Since these will be equal at equilibrium

400  W/m²  = σ T1⁴ +  σ T2⁴ 

And there also has to be an equilibrium for the energy going in and out of the green plate

σ T1⁴ =  2 σ T2⁴

The bunnies can rearrange the second equation to get

σ T2⁴ =  1/2 σ T1⁴

and substitute for σ T2⁴  back into the first equation 

400  W/m²  = σ T1⁴ +  1/2 σ T1⁴

or

400  W/m²  = 3/2 σ T1⁴ 

Solving for T1 the answer is T1 = 262 K.

Without the greenhouse plate it was 244 K.  

Introduction of the second plate raised the equilibrium temperature of the first by 18 K. 

The Green Plate Effect

Show this to the next fool with an agenda who thinks that the Green Plate Effect violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Steve Goddard Needs to Visit Suburban Washington

The unwary amongst the bunnies might, given provocation, search Beltsville Laurel USHCN.  Were a bunny so foolish the bunny would quickly run into some spit flecked harumphing from Steve Goddard, aka Tony Heller, or visa versa.  Unlike Eli Steve Tony can't keep his selfs strait, but no, never mind.  The title of the piece is Extreme UHI fraud at NOAA and, like most of Willard Tony's dastardly discoveries, the answer is nu?. (By the way, Surface Stations could use a spring cleaning).

Eli became aware of this via some of the usual agendaists** who pointed to it as evidence of perfidy but since the Rabett lives only a few miles away from the locale of extreme UHI fraud, he though he would actually take a bit of a closer look

Steve Tony's claim has two parts.  First that NOAA closed a perfectly good long running station in Laurel Maryland.  Laurel is roughly half way between Baltimore and DC, about 20 miles from each. As an older suburban area, it is pretty well developed.

NOAA has 16 USHCN stations in Maryland, but they have stopped collecting data from all but four of them. One of the disappearing stations is at Laurel, which has been collecting since 1895 – but no data reported since August 2015. 

The really interesting thing about this is that down in the comments, Mark Albright pointed out that

The Laurel USHCN station was closed in August 2015. According to the Historical Observing Metadata Repository (HOMR) the reason for closing Laurel 3 W was due to construction at the site:

“INACTIVATE STATION DUE TO LACK OF SUITABLE SITE TO MOVE EQUIPMENT TO DUE TO ONGOING CONSTRUCTION AT CURRENT LOCATION. “

However, no agendaist** took notice of this.  The construction was a large shopping center to the north and work in the highway interchange surrounding the site.  Blowing the picture up shows a bunch of serious power lines going through the top end and pictures from Google Maps in 2012 show serious earth movers pushing stuff around in the interchange

The USHCN station was over to the left (west) side of the D interchange.

So what about Greenbelt.  Well what does Steve Tony have to say about that

Beltsville (at I-95 and The Beltway) is five miles closer to Washington DC and shows two degrees warming during that period as the city has expanded. Beltsville is one of the four stations still reporting.

and he shows a map

with a red dot right on I-95 where Beltsville is.  However, as anybunny who lives in the DC area knows, that is not I-95, but US 1.  And, again, as DC folk know, Beltsville is where the USDA has its experimental farms.  The Beltsville station has moved about.  There have been nine locations on the various farms, starting to the east of US 1 in 1931 and now sitting to the west (nearer to 95, but not nearly as close as the Laurel site was right in an interchange.

The dot shows the current location.  The metadata shows that the station has always been located on farmland.

So much for Steve Tony.

 ** New Rabett Run name for those who deny global warming to advance a political agenda.

Noted for the Record

By way of Marc Morano

this buffer zone has also magically appeared around Australia recently. I will update our landfalls paper thru 2016 ;-)

— Ryan Maue (@RyanMaue) January 5, 2017

On a more serious note the discussion about sea level rise making it necessary to abandon Pacific Islands may have been less pressing than one about continued settlement on islands exposed to tropical cyclones.  Barbuda has been abandoned at least temporarily.  Other islands in the Leewards are, well not so well off, and the US and British Virgin Islands have been hit as hard as Puerto Rico. At what point does it become necessary to abandon smaller Caribbean islands like Barbuda, at what time to abandon Puerto Rico?

Would another hurricane season such as this in the next 10 years make rebuilding impossible.  What level of rebuilding would be necessary to shelter the island population from continued tropical cyclone threats.

PBS has a list of places to donate to for Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.  Eli would be happy to post other suggestions for other island hit by the storms

Another tidbit

Dr. Gray & I said in Nov. 2005 that unlikely to see major hurricane landfalls like 04-05 in 06-07. Didn't realize it would be this quiet tho pic.twitter.com/JBYQkhk8zl

— Philip Klotzbach (@philklotzbach) August 15, 2017

In memorium Andy Skuce July 22, 1954 - September 14, 2017

Andy Skuce is dead. 

An important and appreciated member of the Skeptical Science team.  A gentleman none would speak ill of ever.  Honored by even those who he argued against.  Born in England Andy was Canadian, in his words, "a recovering oilman".  Andy was always here to help.

Skeptical Science has posted a memorial at their web site.

Economics says time to shut down some coal plants (even ignoring externalities)

From Think Progress (originally from paywalled Moodys):

Sadly the graph isn't global, it's for the 15 US states with the best wind resources. But for those states it's saying that the cost of just operating and fueling coal plants exceeds the cost for wind power of constructing, operating, and (heh) fueling.

Imagine a utility that recently commissioned a coal plant and sold long term bonds to finance it. The utility would need to charge $39/MWhr plus the cost of paying off the bonds, let's say another $6/MWhr (for this exercise, the bond payment amount doesn't matter). That utility could shut down the coal plant, build wind instead, pay off the stranded cost bond for constructing the coal plant and still charge much less than it would cost to keep operating coal.

Moodys predicts early retirement of coal plants as a result. Looking to see it happen soon.

Horseshoes and Hurricanes

Several folk - half the world to be precise- have been going too and fro about the role that climate change has played in the latest weather catastrophes.  Eli had a say yesterday, and some of the Friends of the Bunny chimed in.  Perhaps Izen had the best tweet comment about cause and effect

To stretch the metaphor, many things can light a fire, but the size depends on how big the pile of fuel it can burn.

and Bernard J pointed out that the nature of the beast of chance is that when the statistics become strong enough so a single event can be unequivocally attributed to the changes we are making in the atmosphere, oceans and soil, then it is already too late and a considerable amount of pain has already been absorbed with more and worse to follow.  It may not be a good idea to be living on such a planet.

This, of course, raises the question of the skill in hurricane track forecasting  A difference of 70 km or so yesterday saved Miami and by an even smaller margin Tampa.  Others may debate to the value and duration of such a reprieve.  There are lots of folk who know more about this than Eli, and one of them pointed him to those who really care, the US National Hurricane Center page on Forecast Verification.  

Turns out there are multiple models from many places and a scorecard is for sure needed. NOAA provides one for the models it uses  Forecasts are done on a three hour cycle with the forecast due three hours after the start of the cycle.  Models are divided into early or late, depending on when in the cycle (or afterwards) they are available.  Early models which start to run at the beginning of the cycle and are available before the end are called early.  Those which take longer are called late.  The output of the late model is adjusted so that it feeds into the start of the next occurring cycle becoming a psuedo very early forecast for that cycle. 

Models can be statistical, depending on historical data, these tend to be early, or dynamical, at some (varied) level doing physics based climate modeling.  The most complex of these are pretty obviously late models.  Models can be dropped from the ensemble when they don't perform well or something better comes along.

That being said, how are the models doing.  Data goes back to the 1970s.

Things are improving, perhaps also because tracking is improving.  At early times the ensemble was heavily weighted to statistical models, dynamical models rose to the fore in the 1990s

There are multiple models and combining them into a single forecast has a bit of magic about it where the forecasters weigh the combination of various models.  This can be seen in the 48 hour forecasts from the "early" models and the official NHC (dark line) forecast,  The dotted line is a combination of two statistical forecasts (see links for details)

Anyhow the Florida peninsula is about 150 miles at the widest down to about 100 just north of Orlando.  You can get lucky at horseshoes.