A lizard riding a horse

Faithful Reader may recollect from an Earlier Post how TOF mused upon the collective result of a cycle riding on the back of a trend.

Something is not right.

h/t Matt Briggs

Odd Coincidence

A weather map: the Polar Vortex

Wisconsin Glaciation

The edges of the Laurentide glacier are a pretty good fit to the path of the jet stream when deflected by a blocking high. 

In the old novel The Sixth Winter, this was ascribed by the scientists of the time, processed through John Gribbin, to a cooling atmosphere.

The Sixth Winter

Cool!

Recently and for amusement, TOF has been rereading a potboiling SF adventure from the 80s entitled The Sixth Winter by Douglas Orgill and John Gribbin. It was written during the Global Cooling scare and involved the sudden onset of a new ice age. TOF found interesting the following, supposedly an excerpt from a report:

FIVE:  In warm decades, such as those prior to 1950, this jet [stream] follows an almost perfect circle around the globe. At the same time, it pushes with it a succession of weather systems: rain, followed by a dry spell, more rain, and so on. But when the atmosphere cools, the jet stream becomes more erratic, swinging in zigzags, first north then south, and becoming very weak and susceptible to disturbances caused by sea temperature and by snow and ice on land and sea.

SIX: Recent severe weather conditions in North America and elsewhere are a result of this weaker, more erratic pattern of windflow. High pressure building over the southwestern United States seaboard, aided by ocean temperature conditions, zigzags the jest stream so that it is too weak to push the "blocking high" system away. A dominant flow from northwest to southeast is established across the whole of the United States east of the Rockies, encouraging the southward flow of the jet stream and cooling a great area of ocean south of Newfoundland. The severe United States winters of 1977 and 1978 marked the return of this pattern as a common feature after more than 100 years of relatively equable weather.

Anyone who has seen the hoo-hoo about the "polar vortex" on the weather reports during the recent cold spell immediately recognizes the pattern described by Gribbin, although it is today blamed on global warming, rather than global cooling -- or at least (tautologically) on "climate change." Elsewhere in The Sixth Winter, characters ascribe to the cooling climate of those days the more variable and extreme weather that is today ascribed to a warming climate.

Ah, sure, and it's the wonderful modern age we live in.  "Men are always powerfully affected by the immediate past," Belloc wrote. "One might say that they are blinded by it."  So in the 1970s they wrote of global cooling, ironically at about the time temperatures turned around and began to warm again. After another thirty years or so, interest in warming reached a pitch -- just in time for temperatures to flatten out and begin to drop again, as the had done after the peak in the 1940s.

Political Book Reviews

ON OF THOSE THINGS that TOF finds ever perplexing is the tendency of some politically committed readers to commit politics on books they read.  TOF knew such folks in the 60s.  They would wool over pop songs, examining their lyrics closely for heterodox opinions, whether of satanic influences or of less-than-leftward sentiments.  The story is that at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Pete Seeger almost took an axe to the cable when Dylan came on, not because of the electronic backup, but because Dylan was no longer doing political songs. 

Well, it's a New Age, Faithful Reader.  While browsing through customer reviews of On the Razor's Edge on Amazon.com TOF discovered the following nugget by Gregory N. Hullender:

Twinkle, Twinkle

It seems that the rate of supernova occurrence (black line) is pretty much a dead match for biodiversity -- the normalized marine invertebrate genera count (blue line).  The gray is the error band around the biodiversity count. 

When Sagan said we were made of star-stuff, he had only half the picture.  Apparently, the stars really do affect life on earth.  The Permian extinction falls right in:

Svensmark notes that the Late Permian saw the largest fall in the local supernova rate seen in the past 500 million years. This was when the Solar System had left the hyperactive Norma Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy behind it and entered the quiet space beyond.

Through a variety of mechanisms, too few supernovae resulted in warmer air, reduced circulation, poor nutrient mixing, ending with a shortage of oxygen in the atmosphere.  Nearly all life on earth went extinct.
But once upon a time an abundance of nearby supernovae chilled the earth so badly it kicked into Snowball Earth.   So, Goldilocks, human life arose in a period of "just right" insofar as supernovae are concerned. 

The Wonderful World of Statistics - Part II

Back in August 2012, we presented the Allegory of the Fluoropolymers and promised a Part II "soon."  Well, nine months seems long enough to give birth, so...

Have You Seen This Theory?

Hi!  My Name is Global Warming

Have You Seen Me? 

Rochester MN, 1 May 2013

This young theory has been missing for a decade, now,
and her parents are very worried

Anyone who thinks they have seen this theory should call 555-WARM immediately

The Odd Ends of Odds and Ends

Yes, it's that time again.  Clearing out bunch of ends and odds.

• The Little Ironies of Life
• Life Used to be So Much Simpler
• The Music of a Generation
• Hot Enough For Ya? 
• Return of the Quanta

For Peat's Sake

A number of years ago...  In fact, a great number of years ago...  I participated in the writing of a fun novel titled Fallen Angels.  The 'guffin of the book was that all the greenhouse gasses had been cleaned out of the atmosphere, shutting down global warming and thus triggering an ice age.  Nyuck, nyuck.

Now this is a common enough literary trope -- reversal of expectations -- but the matter was already becoming politicized and so reaction to the book was largely political, even though a closer inspection of the premise reveals that it accepts the fact that carbon dioxide does tend to warm the earth.  It simply supposes that Other Stuff is going on at the same time; viz., another ice age is starting and global warming is staving it off.  Remember, this was just at the tail end of the Global Cooling hoo-hah, a phase of history now falling into George Orwell's "memory hole."

The Wonderful World of Statistics - Part I

Yes, it's that time once again.  So sit yourself down, kick your feet up, and pop a couple of brewskies, and ready yourself for:

The Allegory of the Fluoropolymers

Once upon a time, when the world was younger and TOF still had to work for a living, TOF came to the Land of the Fluoropolymers somewhere in the wilds of central New Jersey.  Among the many sterling qualities of these fluoropolymers - indeed of all polymers and many other substances beside - is the viscosity of the material.  Viscosity may be thought of as the flow of that which is thick.  High viscosity is "thick" and low is "thin."  It is measured (usually) in centipoise (cps) although TOF has been in situations measured in poise and (once, memorably) in which it was measured in kilopoise.  (The latter involved not liquids dripped through a Zahn cup, but solid plastic pellets pushed through an orifice.  TOF will leave you with that thought.)  The science fiction masterpieces of Flynn have sometimes been called not "hard SF" but "high viscosity SF," much like the wit of TOF, which is also said to be thick. 

Make an Ash of Yourself

Ash Wednesday
Today is the most subversive day on the revolutionary calendar.  It is the day when we become fleetingly aware that maybe Nietzsche was not right and the will need not be triumphant.  Recall that ol' Crazy Fred told us in Will to Power

Through Christianity, the individual was made so important, so absolute, that he could no longer be sacrificed. ... All 'souls' became equal before God: but this is precisely the most dangerous of all possible evaluations.

Crazy Fred

Hence, the fierce determination of the Late Modern to deny the very existence of soul.  In Latin, this is anima, and is the same as "life."  So what follows from soul-denying is necessarily life-denying.  We also see the root of the Late Modern determination to subordinate the individual to the group, replacing individual human natural rights with state-granted group-entitlements.  And in that rejection of all souls being equal, we wound up with some lives being less equal than others, the lebensunwertes Leben, or "life unworthy of life," a pig which we sometimes tart up with the lipstick of "quality of life."  And those who fall too far down the "quality" scale may be denied life by their betters. 

Fred also wrote:

Interpreting the News

Hey, boys and girls, can you spot the logic in the following headline? 


"Report: Health Insurance Profits Rise Despite Health Care Reform"
--headline, NationalJournal.com, Jan. 5

Yes, that's right, sports fans.  Since the point of Health Care Reform™ is to require everyone to by health insurance, insurance companies will then be selling more policies, more cash will flow in, and their profits will rise.  Not "despite," but "because."

Note that another purpose was to require policy coverage be given to people with pre-existing conditions.  This vastly changes the actuarial risk to the insurance pool and in fact changes it from insurance to entitlement.  A greater actuarial risk means a higher premium to cover it, and this too means a rise in profits. 
+ + +

Gandersauce Alert

• "It is disturbing that President Bush has exhibited a grandiose vision of executive power that leaves little room for public debate, the concerns of the minority party or the supervisory powers of the courts. But it is just plain baffling to watch him take the same regal attitude toward a Congress in which his party holds solid majorities in both houses. Seizing the opportunity presented by the Congressional holiday break, Mr. Bush announced 17 recess appointments--a constitutional gimmick. . . . Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton made scores of recess appointments. But both of them faced a Congress controlled by the opposition party, while the Senate has been under Republican control for Mr. Bush's entire five years in office."--editorial, New York Times, Jan. 9, 2006
• "Nearly six months after it opened its doors, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finally has a director, after President Obama's recess appointment of Richard Cordray. . . . Mr. Obama also appointed three new and qualified members to the National Labor Relations Board. . . . Announcing the appointments, Mr. Obama also asserted a welcome new credo: 'When Congress refuses to act, and as a result, hurts our economy and puts our people at risk, then I have an obligation as president to do what I can without them.' Hear. Hear."--editorial, New York Times, Jan. 5, 2012

And this is just plain funny, from the WSJ Best of the Web

"A poorly chosen baby name can lead to a lifetime of neglect, reduced relationship opportunities, lower self-esteem, a higher likelihood of smoking and diminished education prospects, according to a new study of nearly 12,000 people," Canada's National Post reports:

The research, which appears in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science [sic], is thought to offer the firmest conclusions to date that "unfortunate" first names evoke negative reactions from strangers, which in turn influence life outcomes for the worse.

The story's headline adds even more ill effects: "Bad Baby Name Could Leave Your Child Sadder, Dumber: Study."

Hmm. We have a president named Barack Hussein, and as of a month ago the two leading contenders to challenge him were Willard Mitt and Newton Leroy. That ought to clear things up for anyone having difficulty fathoming the rise of Richard John Santorum.

Global Warming

is there anything it can't explain?

What Hath Global Warming Wrought?

Snow near my brother's house by Philadelphia

It is snowing here in the Lehigh Valley.  Forecasts are for 4-8 inches.  It is not yet Hallow E'en.

Now, the IPCC models were always in agreement that most of the warming would take place in Northern Hemisphere winter nights (which actually doesn't sound so bad), so the trend toward colder over these past ten years or so is whiffing a lot like Popper.  But never fear: weather is not climate!  (Except when it is: cf. Katrina, Irene, Texas drought, etc.)  And it ain't global warming no more; it's climate change!  So any time the climate seems to change, it is due to climate change.  And never mind the dizzy spell from circular reasoning.  I suppose the orbits of the planets can now be explained by location change, too. 

Odds and Ends

Only in Pennsylvania

In New York City, when someone wants to sell you a bridge, it's a fraud.  In Pennsylvania, they actually go out and get a bridge - and it's theft. 

Does This Bother Anyone?

Should it? 
a) Lead Author on definitive paper
b) is president of a consulting firm
c) That makes its money on the fruits of such papers.

Caesar omni suspicione maiores debent esse uxorem. 

Fossil Genes, OWS, Precognition, and Intrepid Pathfinders below the cut

Who Ya Gonna Call When the Sun Goes Out?

The solar magnetic field strength experienced a shift in 2007, and ol' Sol just ain't had the mojo since. 

Some Places Are Hard to Mow

Odds and Ends

Congressman Weiner Strikes Again!
"Four Restaurant Customers Burned by Flaming Bananas"

--headline, Northwest Florida Daily News (Fort Walton Beach), June 13

Imagine if He Were Not "Friendship Man"
"Friendship Man Kills Himself and Injures Wife in Process"

--headline, Dyersburg (Tenn.) State Gazette, June 14

Unfortunate Headline of the Week
"Boehner Jokes About Weiner's Name in Ohio Speech"

--headline, Associated Press, June 12

BTW, aren't we all just a little bit happier that Congressman Weiner's given name is not Richard?

Infantile Regression

Here is an illustration of the limitations of linear thinking alluded to in a previous statistical post: When is an Average Not an Average?  Both charts involve everyone's favorite topic: Global Warming/Climate Change/Climate Disruption. 

The first is a time series of the satellite data compiled by RSS [Remote Sensing Systems].  The series, plotted by Bob Tisdale, was for the purpose of comparing the recent revision of the data algorithm -- certain satellite feeds have been added, others discounted or weighted differently -- to the previous revision.  (Overall effect is that v.3.3 produces slightly cooler temps than v.3.2)  But our purpose here is to observer the linear regression thrown through the data series, for everyone needs a good laugh now and then.

Global Warming Drives Up Food Prices

You can't argue with the facts. Observe the UN FAO Food Price Index:

Now, it turns out that wheat held steady and rice declines slightly, so the increase is due mainly to maize (corn). The biggest exporter of maize is the US, and this past year, 40% of the US maize crop went to ethanol rather than into food. That's 40%. So, yes, food crops have decreased due to global warming; viz., the hysteria over it has diverted food away from the mouths of the poor into the gas tanks of the well-to-do in order that they may feel really good about their moral superiority.

Sorry for the intemperate remarks, but I'm one of those "feed the hungry" nuts.