Dinosaurs From Titan

A recent science news article proved more thought provoking than a cursory glance would suggest. An announcement from a research team poring over Cassini/Huygens (Saturn space probe) data confirmed that Saturnian moon Titan has hydrocarbons raining from the sky. In fact, there’s literally oceans of oil, because oil is what makes up Titan’s oceans. There’s enough hydrocarbons on Titan to power mankind for thousands of years.

Ummm…. wait just a minute. Did I just say oceans of oil?

I was told oil was compressed dinosaurs.

Hmmm.

Skeptics Part 3 — Surface Data

It’s getting warmer, right? That’s what the news says. Temp records being set, and so on. 2007 was the 3rd warmest year ever recorded. Global warming must be real. As noted previously a cottage industry popped into existence after the hockey stick fiasco, this one being made up of independent investigators. They’ve been reporting interesting stuff.

But still… it’s getting warmer, right? Not so fast. Enter Chico CA weatherman on TV, Anthony Watts. He runs surfacestations.org, a site where volunteers are creating the nation’s first citizen owned photographic record of the weather reporting stations that NASA/GISS uses to tell us that 2007 was the 3rd warmest year. (GISS = Goddard Institute of Space Studies.) The photorecord at his site is AMAZING. Turns out that there’s decrepit equipment, sensors that have known problems, sites located in parking lots, and so on. You can’t have a weather site in a parking lot; concrete retains and radiates heat. Everyone who’s ever walked outside on the cool grass and stepped on a sidewalk on a sunny day knows this. This site is now getting a LOT of notice, even by pro climatologists who now seem to think this bears scrutiny.

Moreover, GISS does some really funky stuff to the temperature data, claiming that they’re correcting for siting problems and the like. But in looking at homogenized vs raw data even on an archtypical site, you see that years prior to the last 20 or so are lowered in temperature, and later years are adjusted UP. Hmmm. That’s not right. The whole thing is really screwy. What this says is that 2007 may *not* be the 3rd warmest year ever.

But wait! They don’t use this, they have satellites that measure temperatures. You know, new tech. Get with the program, old timer. Repeat after me: SATELLITES.

Ummm… so how do you think NASA calibrates them?

Creating Science Skeptics — Treemometers

By now we’re all familiar with Al Gore’s hockey stick graphic, showing that the temps are going up uncontrollably and we’re all going to drown and so on. Do you know how it came to be? I’ll tell you — it’s trees.

Specifically, it’s a high desert species, the Bristlecone Pine (BCP). Many are found on the CA border with Nevada in the high Sierras. Some were teenagers when the Romans were busy creating empires on the other side of the world. They’re very old. In fact, they’re one of the oldest living things. Trees create a new ring every year. In the case of the BCP, this ring width is claimed to be roughly analagous to the temp that year. As you know, there weren’t a lot of thermometers available way back when, so these tree rings were used as a “proxy” (a stand in) for temperature data. In short, Treemometers.

It was a study done in the 90’s on a small grouping of BCP’s (about 60 or so?) that drove most of the data. Now, the problem is that this data has been scrutinized and found lacking. Some of the suspicion is directed at the practice of dendochronology where the claim that ring with = temp per year is not entirely accurate. Critics point out that it could well be that there are other reasons why a ring can be thicker, such as a wet year, which doesn’t always correlate to the temperature. They may not be very good proxies. This is an area of scientific infighting, complete with flying pocket protectors. Other proxy measurements show a different picture, one that says the 1200’s were warmer than today. And a new BCP study (2007) came out that didn’t agree with the earlier treemometer study. The claim was that the earlier study used strip bark technique vs extracting a core. So here you have a little bit of scientific wrangling, a little bit of healthy skepticism, all of which is common enough. As a sidenote, the original BCP investigation was done by two scientists named Idso and Graybill. Idso now runs co2science.org and is a scientific skeptic of the global warming hypothesis.

But there’s a bit more to the story. There’s skepticism, and then there’s outrage. Where the outraged skeptics were created was that the graph creator, a fellow named Mann, refused to show his work, release his raw data, refused to show what math techniques were applied to the data to create the graph, and so on. There were some nitpicks with the math used, as expected, but the the refusal to release the data and show the work was what set everyone off.

Science, you see, is a method. You gather data, form a hypothesis, and you make a prediction. Then you see if your prediction is right. More importantly, though, is that you do this in a way that lets anyone anywhere reproduce your work. If Josef Abuttov in Moscow wants to repeat your experiment, he can, and if Josef gets the same results you get, then you’re probably onto something.

So the critics rightfully accused Mann of being unprofessional, causing a big spat, which then spilled over to the public arena in a way big enough that people like me are aware of enough of the goings on. Congress even got involved, irking the hell out of Sen Inhofe, who has since then been dubious. The refusal to do the science thing created a cottage industry overnight intent on poring over every bit of data, questioning everything. This probably wouldn’t have happened had it not been for Al Gore’s proclamation that the “science is settled” and using Dr. Mann’s graph to prove it. Science is NEVER settled. Some of what this cottage industry is discovering is very interesting. (More on that later.) And of course there’s a lot more people looking at treemometers than ever.

Creating Skeptics

A new technology is on the horizon, one that can create fuel from CO2. Big news in the environmental circles that consider global warming as the mother of all problems. So the NYT journalist* reporting this solemly asks “Is having more fuel without more greenhouse gases an advance, or the road to yet more sprawl and gridlock?” and — WHUMP — another skeptic is born. Read the reporter’s line carefully. I’ll translate: greenhouse gases are a very bad problem that needs to be solved, so by solving this problem, we can use this as a way to impose things that the green “progressives” have wanted all along. That’s convenient.

So, if you buy argument #1 (greenhouse gases are a problem needing to be solved) then you get two extra complete headaches for free. It’s a trojan horse. It’s the 3 for 1 special. The only way out of the headaches is to propose that that argument #1 is not correct. Instant Skeptic.

The new Skeptic is now listening to otherwise silly radio commentators like Rush Limbaugh or reading online political pundits who claim the environmental problem to be a hoax and the political enemy wants to take away your way of life and ruin the US economy in the process. They would be half correct — the alleged problem may or may not be a hoax, but because the whole thing is politicised as per above, the political enemy DOES want to use this to impose his will. Of this there is little doubt. (Why did I say “enemy”? Anyone who threatens to change things in your life for the worse and offering nothing is certainly not your friend.)

I’ll bet that fully 75% of skeptics are “Political Skeptics” in that they’re not by definition skeptical that there may indeed be an actual environmental problem that needs to be solved, but they are certainly and justifiably skeptical of the intentions of those who champion solutions. What else will they “solve?” We’re your friends, they say. And you say “As in you’re from the government and you’re here to ‘help’ me, is that about it?” Right thinking people know that’s the time to run for the hills.

I’ll further bet that most people don’t have critical reading skills. Younger ones and those indoctrinated in eco-think look at the journalist’s writing and assume all is well. Older readers may look at this and feel uneasy, not because they translated as I did above, but there’s something about that reporting that seems… well, wrong somehow. They end up being skeptical of things they’re not even sure about, and the alternative to skepticism is to agree to a raft of stuff they don’t (and won’t) believe to be proper.

In short, idiotic reporting and ham handed political agendas CREATE skeptics. It’s not about the science, despite the environmental blogosphere’s contention that people are too dumb or uneducated to get science. It’s about the politics.

*this is a real life quote, not something made up.

Anthropogenic CO2

While reading I came across an interesting claim. Seems that what’s taken as a given in the climate science community is the idea that we know how much CO2 in the atmosphere came from fossil fuels. This is supposed to be due to the ratio of two isotopes c12/c13. If the ratio swings one way, is natural; if the other, it’s the signature for way old CO2 (fossil fuel.) Must be something about the half life like C-14 dating?

The interesting thing however isn’t that part of it, which to me looks like science. Instead, it seems that the crowd doing this work isn’t talking to the atmospheric or oceanic specialists. The atmosphere people seem to think that CO2 lives in the atmosphere for a while and then it’s absorbed by the oceans. The oceanic specialists know this and then say that oceans emit CO2 as they warm. This is not really in any dispute. Good science being done.

The interesting bit is that for an oceanic sink to work, it’s emitting first what came in last. (In software we call this Last In First Out.) Think about that. When the oceans warm, they emit the CO2 collected during the victorian era, from P-51 Mustangs in the 40’s, and so on, which is added to the atmosphere. Somehow I doubt the oceans have magical ways to emit only the natural isotope ratio CO2. That means earlier emissions are being absorbed and then re-emitted. Fossil fuel ratio or otherwise.

I’m thinking that what CO2 specialists are measuring re ratios isn’t merely current emissions, but rather the sum total of the contributions of mankind via fossil fuels. OK, so maybe not the total, but certainly a mixture of current and past emissions, enough to make it impossible to determine which is which.

I’ve posited this on a number of climate specialty sites and still no answer. It could be that this is a stupid question, and it could be that this isn’t a comfortable one. I’m guessing that since usually the climate sites are usually pretty good about answering stuff, this observation is probably one that nobody’s considered.