Gone with the floe

The Russians have a program for placing observing stations on stable ice floes, but the number of stable ones is tending to zero and preparations are being made for evacuation much earlier in the melt season than anticipated.  This is a direct consequence of the thinning of the ice

“A collapse of the station’s ice floe poses a threat to its continued work, the lives of the crew, the environment close to the Canadian Economic Zone and to equipment and supplies”, a note from the minister reads. . .

With ice levels in the Arctic reaching record lows, finding a suitable floe for the station proved to be a difficult task last autumn. The icebreaker carrying the station’s crew had to sail all around the North Pole before finding an ice floe solid enough to hold the station. None of the three floes that had been pre-evaluated from land as possible objects were considered safe enough.

Also the previous shift of Russian scientists experienced problems with the ice situation in the Arctic. In late April the members of North Pole-39 had to move the whole research station to another ice floe because the first one was breaking up.

The dialects of brainfuck

nononono, Eli is not forgetting the filth commandment, brainfuck is a compiler,

Hell it's in the Wikipedia

The brainfuck programming language is an esoteric programming language noted for its extreme minimalism. It is a Turing tarpit, designed to challenge and amuse programmers, and was not made to be suitable for practical use.^[1] It was created in 1993 by Urban Müller.

The entire syntax is composed of eight commands  >< +-.[], brainfuck ignores anything else. Eli was splendidly unaware of this until sucked in by the kind of marvelous indirection that blogs can deliver, first a reference in passing to "a comma based operating system" at Popehat which produced a pointer to the wikipedia in the comments.

There are dialects

Anyone Eli Knows?

On another topic, but just as telling

Don’t assume people are nutballs just because they question the current conventional wisdom

We don’t. We assume they’re nutballs because science has spent far more time than it really should patiently addressing all of their concerns, and discovered that they’re basically horseshit, and yet they still won’t shut up.

Live blogging Jim Hansen et al.

I'm trying this out as an experiment, will expand as he and others talk. We're at the WEST 2013 Sustainable Silicon Valley Summit. I'll occasionally throw in parenthetical comments.

Their big new thing is a Consensus Statement on Science, seeking endorsers here.

2 degrees C rise = 6 meter (feet? didn't catch it) sea level rise in the long term

Renewables just a small sliver of energy use relative to fossil fuels, can't do it on its own.

Fee and dividend - put cost at mines or point of entry

Start at $10/ton, increase $10 year


Arrgh, he's done already. Okay, on to Anthony Barnosky to discuss impacts

Incredible extinction crisis, this is the sixth. The current extinction rate is faster than anything since the dinosaurs.

90% of big fish are gone. From one to three centuries from now, we'll lose 75% of species will be gone.

40% of land surface is already transformed, and we're going to add another 2.5 billion people to population. Sometime this century the percentage will be 50% plus.

Standard Beijing air pollution reference.

More work days lost to enviro pollution than malarai AIDS and tuberculosis.

(Seems like he's talking about non-climate impacts we're having on environment)

Technology isn't obstacle to solutions. In 50 years we've built enough roads in the US to go around earth twice.

Cooperation from local to global (yes!)

(More below the jump, including Gov. Jerry Brown who's sitting in the audience right now listening to scientists)

Wish-Washing

Organizing for America (nee Obama for America) is engaging in a wish-washing (TM -RR) exercise, barrel shooting Republican rejectionists, while ignoring the in the room approval of the Keystone pipline.  Greg Laden posted about a local meeting in Minneapolis where OfA gathered together local activists to discuss climate change activism, and trying to avoid talking about Keystone

There are two things that I now know for certain. The first, which I learned tonight, is that Obama for America will not have an effective climate change component if Obama does not come out in opposition to Keystone. Every single one of those activists is involved in a half dozen different projects, some focused on one issue, other on many, that they devote considerable time to, and that they regard, quite rightly, as very important. Many of the individuals in the room are heavily involved already in climate change activism and are already working with existing political groups, churches, or other organizations on climate change (our local 350.org guy was there for example). These climate change activists don’t need the OFA, though the OFA needs them. . . .  Right now, Obama has not moved forward enough for us to find any space behind him so that he can actually lead us.

The consensus at tonight’s meeting was this: The local Minneapolis OFA has to take a message back to Obama and OFA headquarters: Yes, of course we’ll help. But first you need to get your head out of the sand. In particular, the Alberta tar sands. And then we will do more than help. We’ll carry you.

Eli, in the comments were a bit blunter

The problem, of course, is that being from MN you were too polite. You should have told the guy, “look, this is our key issue. Either Obama kills the pipeline or he kills all support from environmental and climate change activists. Take that message back to Chicago.”

Eli might have added something about the hippy punching first term not having exactly built a level of trust.

Then you leave.

and

There is a saying that the Republicans fear their base and the Democrats despise theirs. It really is time to demand results, and to start putting up candidates in primaries even if that means loosing a few elections.

OFA is a pressure point because they need the spirited.

Now Eli does not do huffs, but Ms. Rabett has a policy that when someone gets difficult with her of sending in Eli with the admonition, Eli, you know how you are. Be that way.

Unfortunately some are falling for OfA's wish-washing (TM-RR) campaign, or at least giving it legs.  In the words of Mr. Dooley, trust everybunny, but cut the cards.

Why MOOCs fail

Thoreau at High Clearing has been going on for some time about MOOCs and why he thinks they are a failing fad. He proposes a new buzzword, Hight-Touch Engagements, e.g. small classes,

Online tools won’t go anywhere* (despite my bitching, I use a few of them to supplement my evil in-person class, I just don’t go around preaching that I’m saving the world with some new religion), but in a few years the fad will switch from sending everybody to college on their sofa with an LCD to some sort of opposite extreme.  I predict, on the basis of zero evidence**, that the fad will be something like “High-Touch Engagement.”  We’ll be told that traditional education has been predicated on a factory model, with faculty focusing on lectures and avoiding one-on-one mentoring and interaction, and we need to change this.

At this point some of you are saying “That’s not true!  A lot of faculty want a model of small classes, mentored research projects, etc.  In fact, isn’t that what a lot of STEM pipeline programs are about?  Isn’t that what small liberal arts colleges are about?”  And my answer is:  Shhhh!  I’m trying to start a new fad to counter the push to move college to the couch with an LCD.

Eli doesn't exactly disagree.  To the Bunny, the danger of the MOOCs is that in a disengaged class it is too easy for students to find a simple entry to some Rabett Hole that leads them nowhere, e.g. there is no experienced person to say, whoa, you got that bass ackwards Bunny.  But there is also another reason why universities will not prosper by MOOCs alone and it is encapsulated in the Urban Dictionary definition of Rabbi

By metaphor from the Jewish religious role, an older, more powerful or higher-ranking person in the corporation where one works (but usually not in the chain of command) who can give good advice about office politics, and may be able to pull strings, remove heads, or otherwise provide protection from hostile forces.

You don't get that in a 10,000 student MOOC.  IEHO, the real opportunity is for colleges and community colleges to run MOOC recitations for small groups of 10-15 students for money, of course.

--------------------------------
Poster from Michael Branson Smith

The Tornados of Tomorrow

    The news from Oklahoma is heart-wrenching. Houses totally destroyed. Devastation. The dead and wounded, and the glassy-eyed survivors. Global climate change will cause more storms and stronger storms in the future, including tornadoes.

    Meanwhile, most Americans think that global warming and clean energy should be priorities for Congress and the President, according to a recent poll by Yale and George Mason University. Most Americans support reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, support taxing carbon, support giving tax rebates to people who purchase energy-efficient vehicles or solar panels, and funding renewable-energy research. So the problem is not with popular opinion.

    The problem is with an important policy current within the ruling class. Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe has been lubricated by more money from oil companies than any other Senator, raking in $662,000 between 2000 and 2008. Not coincidentally, Inhofe has been a vehement opponent of climate science, claiming it's all a liberal hoax. In Washington, the facts are always negotiable.

    Both of Oklahoma's Senators (Tom Coburn and James Inhofe) are against any disaster aid, unless the Federal budget is cut by an equal amount somewhere else. If there are any grassroots citizen action organization in Oklahoma, they should publicize this among their fellow Oklahomans. "Your Senator is against Federal disaster relief to you!"

A Rabett Exclusive

Ethon came flying in the window with a missive from John Cook.  Based on the cross-tabs from the prequel survey, the bunny wondered what the distribution of No Position ratings from the abstracts would be in Cook et al based on the responses of  the authors who responded to the Email survey.

Among papers whose abstracts were rated "no position", according to self-ratings (which is a proxy for the endorsement level of the full paper):

 

228 endorsed AGW

213 had no position

11 rejected AGW

In other words, most of the climate papers with "no position" abstracts go on to endorse AGW in the full paper. We explicitly mention this in the paper. So whenever the deniers are saying "66% of climate papers have no position on AGW", they're simply wrong and either haven't read the paper or are misrepresenting the paper.

the self ratings being the ratings by the authors.  As Eli remarked before, the No Position abstracts, themselves are attached to very few papers that reject AGW.

Those interested in shark jumping can hi thee over to Lucias.  Eli will not post the link the level of parsing over there is growing dangerous but then again . . . sport:)

The "doing something that's short of everything is nothing" fallacy

Above is the best name I've got for the fallacy I keep seeing in many contexts. Somebody else should come up with a better name.

There are some good arguments against expanding nuclear power as a solution to climate change (economics economics economics), but saying we shouldn't do it because by itself it won't solve the entire problem isn't a good argument. I've also seen it locally when some people argued that funding to remove barriers to fish passage is useless when it removes 90% of the barriers on a stream but not 100% of the barriers.

There's some inability to see one effort as part of a broader effort instead of being the magic solution. Maybe the name is "You're Not the One, So Go Away Fallacy"? "Magic Solution or Bust Fallacy"?

The latest manifestation of this is Dan Kahan, who should know better, and his unhappiness over/despite the spate of publicity for the Cook et al. survey of climate abstracts (see Kloor for the same but there's little hope for him). Eli's been blogging about our prequel survey - I would've pushed harder if I had realized how much coverage it could have received.

In essence, Kahan visually demonstrates all the media this study's achieved in a short time period and then says it hasn't solved denial of climate change, so what's the point? To be fair, he isn't claiming ownership of the Magic Solution himself and just poses questions.

Maybe my best response to Kahan's question are a few of my own. Let's forget the rejectionists right now and focus on the fence-sitters and those who generally accept climate change. Do all of those people understand just how strong the scientific consensus is? They're not the ones predisposed to reject these facts.

I'm just a lazy blogger and won't dig it out, but my guess is the Pew and Stanford polling would show that a large fraction of them don't know the strength of the consensus, and those are people that should be receptive to this information. Getting people to move from wishy-washiness and tribal loyalties to increased personal understanding and commitment to the issue is a significant part of the battle.

As for the Magic Solution, you got me. I think we do have to beat the drums for the truth, and having a consistent story that 97% of the abstracts and 97% of the relevant climatologists and over 95% certainty in the IPCC all say the same thing, is really helpful. We have a complete story that satisfies the need for closure while rejectionists have coincidences and conspiracies. The 97% agreement among abstracts reinforces the story.


UPDATE:  and this:

Republicans’ aggressive campaigning against Obama’s clean-energy agenda was “an overreaction,” Feehery said. “It made us seem like enemies of the environment. The idea that government has absolutely no role, that the climate is absolutely not changing—it’s not smart,” he said. “It’s also not smart if you’re talking about all the farmers in red states that make money off windmills. A lot of the base is there.”

The Magic Solution might be to quintuple wind production in Texas.

Cross Tabs

As Eli mentioned previously, the cross tabs have some of the most interesting information from the Prequel

The most interesting cross tabs in the prequel, now in the recovery room, were those that were put into the middle, the ones where at least one of the two bunnies that looked at an abstract though that the abstract fell into one of the five middle categories, discusses AGW (D), discusses methods (M), paleoclimate (P), unrelated to AGW (UR) or undecided (UD.  The crosstabs below are for the two ratings when one of them was in the middle categories.  EE and IE are explicitly endorses and IE is implicitly endorses.  Similarly IR and ER are implicitly rejects and explicitly rejects.  Two votes for a particular rating (e.g. D/D) were counted as two votes for that position

These are ONLY the cross-tabs for ratings that INCLUDED one of the middle categories.  These are NOT cross-tabs for cases where both raters agreed that the ABSTRACT either supported or rejected AGW.

Those are further below 

	D	EE	IE	M	P	UR	UD	IR	ER
D/EE	34	34
D/IE	75		75
D/D	110
D/IR	5							5
D/ER	2								2
D/M	17			17
D/P	6				6
M/M				24
M/EE			6	6
M/IE			17	17
M/IR				1				1
P/P					86
P/IE			6		6
P/M				7	7
P/IR					3			3
UR/UR						28
UR/EE		7				7
UR/IE			23			23
UR/D	8					8
UR/IR						1		1
UD/UD						2
UD/IE			3				3
UD/D	4						4
UD/IR							2	2
UD/M				1			1
	261	41	130	73	108	69	10	7	2

 

The telling thing about these cross-tabs is how few split votes there were for the rejectionist position, and on inspection of the actual abstracts, the number appears to be inflated. 

As to the affirm vs. reject side of the ratings, well, it ain't a contest

	D	EE	IE	M	P	UR	UD	IR	ER
EE/EE		102
EE/IE		125	125
IE/IE			128
IR/IR								4
IR/ER								3	3
ER/ER									4
		227	253					7	7

The generic 97%