Yet another geek blog

8 December 2008

Hot Air and Global Warming

When NASA sends probes to other planets they are never asked to justify how such places can be real if they are unimaginably far away. They are never criticised for wanting to study the atmosphere of Neptune rather than relying on common sense. Nor do they have to deal with the idea that the very fact that they are trying to find out proves that 'science does not know everything' and is therefore a waste of time.

This, of course, is because nobody has ever been upset by anything they ever heard about Neptune. When people hear about global warming on Earth, they hear lots of things that they do not like. And too often their reaction is to just drown out the bad news.

An excellent example is the blog of Roger Helmer a Member of the European Parliament. I have picked this blog because it is a better summary of the position than rambling rants on the subject.

He makes the following points that I will look at one at a time:

• We have good records about the past environment.
• The temperature rise over the last 150 years is consistent with the cycle for the last 10,000 years.
• We see warmer and cooler periods every 1200 years or so.
• The world is cooler now than it was during the Holocene Optima (sic), the Roman Optimum or the Mediaeval Warm period.
• CO₂ levels have been much higher in the past and there was no 'tipping point'.

We have good records about the past environment

We do indeed. But it is important to remember that there is no one single source of information. They come from scattered locations and become less accurate the further back in time you go. Nevertheless, the boundaries of error are quite well understood and you cannot pick and choose when to heed it.

The temperature rise over the last 150 years is consistent with the cycle for the last 10,000 years

There are places in Antarctica where it snows every year but never thaws. The snow turns into layers of ice that preserve information (including temperature) about the time that the show fell. Here are some data from two such places:

The x-axis is 'thousands of years ago' so the present day is on the left.

This graph does indeed show the last 10 thousand years has show a steep increase in temperature from -6C to 1C. Case closed.

That graph looks awfully empty; what does the rest of it look like?

The 10 thousand year window has been chosen very carefully to include the ending of the last ice age. Take a look at the whole graph 1:

As you can now see, ice ages are regular events. It is also sobering to notice that they last far longer than periods between them.

But the cycle covers hundreds of thousands of years. There is nothing here that would be noticeable within the blink of a human lifetime. So the one degree temperature rise in the last century is not 'consistent' with the seven degree rise in the last 10 thousand years, it is huge acceleration.

Another thing that you can see from looking at the whole graph is where we are in the cycle. We are at a point of level-ish temperature, far closer to the beginning of the next ice age than the end of the last one. So any increase in temperature at this point is a break in the pattern.

We see warmer and cooler periods every 1200 years or so
and
The world is cooler now than it was during the Holocene Optima (sic), the Roman Optimum or the Mediaeval Warm period

You can indeed see from the full graph above that the temperature line is a jagged one, not a smooth one. But think again about the timescales. Glaciers advance and retreat, forests come and go.

Here is a closer look at the las 12 thousand years, the flat-ish bit we are in now2.

This graph looks a lot messier because it shows data from more places. This is actually better because it means that the average temperature (the bold line) is much more reliable.

 

What support is here for the claim that the Holocene(Climatic) Optimum was warmer than today? You can raise the average by selectively ignoring colder data but that proves nothing because you can also do the opposite. You could also argue that because the data do not catch any changes of less than three centuries then the temperature might have been higher. By the same argument, they might have been lower.

Notice also, that the change from zero thousand years ago and 2004 is too steep to show at this scale, hence the inset.

Can we zoom in any further? Indeed we can2:

Here, the x-axis shows years AD so the present day is on the right. At last we are on a comfortable timescale.

There have certainly been changes. In the 9C there were vineyards in northern Britain and in the 17C public fairs were held on the frozen river Thames.

Again, there is nothing that suggests that the average global temperature approached today's level. If anybody has any data to the contrary then they must present it.

CO₂ levels have been much higher in the past and there was no 'tipping point'.

When? Antarctic ice has also recorded levels of carbon dioxide for the past 400 thousand years3:

None of the recorded levels are anything like the levels of today.

What is not Said

But the real problem with lists like the above it not what is said, but what is inferred.  And the main inferences are that:

If you can pick holes in the Greenhouse explanation then global warming is not happening

Facts generate explanations but they are not generated by them. If you fall from a cliff you cannot avoid the ground by writing a witty critique of Newton's law of universal gravitation.

If global warming is happening it is natural and therefore alright

This is something we all need to be clear about. There are six billion people on our planet. We need to breath and eat. We are utterly dependant on the ecosystem to provide these things for us and we are appallingly vulnerable.

Says Who?

Sources

1. Petit J.R., Jouzel J., Raynaud D., Barkov N.I., Barnola J.M., Basile I., Bender M., Chappellaz J., Davis J., Delaygue G., Delmotte M., Kotlyakov V.M., Legrand M., Lipenkov V., Lorius C., Pépin L., Ritz C., Saltzman E., Stievenard M. (1999) Climate and Atmospheric History of the Past 420,000 years from the Vostok Ice Core, Antarctica, Nature, 399, 429-436
2. Climate Reconstructions. See also The climate of the Holocene
3. Vostok Ice Core Data

Wikipedea

The graphs I have used were contributed to wikipedia by Dragons filght.

• Global Warming
• Temperature Record
• Carbon Dioxide Variations
• More Dragons flight graphs

Denialism

• 2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved
• Greenhouse gases could have caused an ice-age claim scientists (but see also Bad Science)
• CO2 Sceptics

Labels: science, society

5 November 2007

Who's Afraid of Political Correctness?

If there is one piece of journalistic laziness that continuously astounds me it is 'Political Correctness gone mad' stories. I am not annoyed by the fact that they invariably turn out to be nonsense- I expect papers to contain stories like that. No, what annoys me is that otherwise rational people seem to accept them without question.

The basic premise is as follows. Somewhere in the world, there exists a vast left-wing 'political correctness' lobby who exert a sinister control over free speech. This is resisted by a few Lone-Voices-of-Reason who dare to speak out. I call them Lone-Voices because they all talk about themselves. Even as they cut and paste each others stories.

Lets have a look at some examples.

Young Children now have to sing 'Baa Baa Rainbow sheep' because 'Black Sheep' is Racist

Sometime around 1986 a number of charity-run nursery schools in Oxfordshire started increase children's vocabularies with the following exercise. Children sang the same songs over and over with different variations of words. In this song for example, the words 'boy' and 'girl' were alternated, and the sheep became happy, sad, bouncing, hopping, pink, blue, white and (yes) black.

Nobody quite knows how many nurseries used this exercise. But it may have been as many as two. And yet, a quick google will get you 3,040 Lone-Voices-of-Reason protesting against this example of 'political correctness gone mad'.

(Nursery Rhymes, by the way, have never had a standard traditional form passed down from the dawn of time. They have always been fluid and deliberately re-written by various people. Most of the ones we know today were heavily sanitised by the Victorians.)

Christmas is being banned because it offends non-Christians

There are so many versions of this that I cannot go into them all. So I will cover best known example: Winterval.

in 1998, the department of Birmingham City Council responsible for helping local businesses created some advertising material for a new marketing concept called 'Winterval'. This was a umbrella term for various celebrations that run from Hallowe'en in October to the New Year events in January. Using the umbrella term was much cheaper that making separate material for thing like Hallowe'en and Guy Fawkes night that occur very close together. The main aim of the exercise, of course, was to bring as many people in to the city centre as possible at the time when they were doing their Christmas shopping.

The media went into a frenzy, and all of the local papers reported the same story- Birmingham Council was banning Christmas. The implication was that this was done to avoid offence to non-Christians. Letters pages, radio chat shows and blogs often went far further and took it for granted that the Council has 'caved in' to Muslims.

All this despite the fact that:

• The Winterval material pushed Christmas as its biggest event
• The money spent on Christmas through Winterval was in addition to the normal Christmas money
• The Council's Christmas celebrations went on as normal

One result was hostility for the council from local businesses. Why, they demanded to know, is the Council wasting our tax money banning Christmas? Don't they know how important Christmas shopping is to the economy?

The term 'Brainstorm' is offensive to Epileptics so we should use 'Thought Shower' Instead

This one is my very favourite because the very source is a 'political correctness gone mad' story.

In 2003, Liz Lightfoot of the Telegraph newspaper published this article which denies that the term 'Brainstorming' is offensive to epileptics. She even goes as far as to contact the National Society for Epileptics to confirm that they have never heard of such a thing.

What is wrong with that? Surely she is working hard to de-bunk a myth. Unfortunately, this is the myth. The word 'Brainstorm' had never before been used to describe an epileptic fit. No guidance existed telling people not to use the term.

Nevertheless, the story continues to gain momentum. According to Wikipedia, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment and the Welsh Development Agency both ask their staff to use 'Thought Shower' instead. And I would not be at all surprised to hear epileptic fits called brainstorms.

Schools now have to say 'Whiteboards/Chalkboards' because 'Blackboards' is Racist

Britons call them blackboards because they are boards that are (usually) black. Americans call them chalkboards because they are boards for chalk. The general rise of the use of Americanisms in Britain has caused a rise in the use of 'chalkboard'. At the same time, modern classrooms are now being fitted with the whiteboards (so called because they are white) that you get in offices.

This example clearly shows how a little genuine confusion is enough to trigger the template.

The Template

This is the template :

1. Somebody decides to use a different word for something.
2. Therefore, they are being forced to change by Powerful-Them because of potential offence to Whinging-Them. (Sometimes, they are the same Them).
3. Therefore I (Lone-Voice-of-Reason) am being coerced by Powerful-Them too.
4. There for I will recite the magic spell "It's Political Correctness Gone Mad" and Whinging-Them will be confounded.

Notice that neither Powerful-Them or Whinging-Them have any input and do not need to even exist. Notice also that no matter how many thousands of Lone-Voices-of-Reason scream the same thing in unison they cannot concieve of themselves as anything other than a dissenting mionority.

The Process

So, somebody hears 'whiteboard' where they expect 'blackboard'. Somebody must have decided to stop schools saying 'blackboard'. That somebody could only be the Government. But why? Clearly because black people would be upset to hear the word black.

Interesting

A couple of very interesting things are happening here.

First of all, our Lone-Voice-of-Reason is standing up for the right to say what they like. But they are doing so by complaining about the fact that somebody else has chosen to say what they like. So, in their heads, what everybody should be saying is the same thing.

Secondly, only a racist would believe that black people would be offended by the word 'black'. The thought would never occur to anybody who had no problem with the fact that some people are black.

What Happens Next?

The crazy thing is that these stories often go on to have an effect. Put simply, there is no 'Politically Correct' lobby who decide changes in language. It fact, there is nobody at all who can decide or enforce this. Of course, there are lots of people who try- but they can only succeed by genuinely convincing a majority of people.

Instead, the language changes all the time because some people change the use of a word and other people like it enough to adopt the chage.

And who has the most influence? Not the 'Politically Correct lobby' because they do not actually exist. Not bloggers (even I do not read my blog.) No, lazy journalists read my millions of people have all the clout.

Imagine you are a blackboard manufacturer. You read that some people are offended by the use of 'blackboard'. This is not an academic issue: you could be losing money because of this. So, what do you do? Do you campaign to redeem the word? Of course not because you do not actually care. You just start calling them chalkboards. Not because Powerful-Them forced you, but because Lone-Voice told you about it. The same Lone-Voices who see chalkboards for sale and say "See! I told you so!"

But Why?

Two common factors in these stories are:

• That the the author is prevented from doing A because They are doing B ("A teacher calls it a chalkboard, there I am not allowed to call it a blackboard").
• That some minority group is the ultimate reason for all this ("Why can't Muslims understand that they are living in a Christian country?")

These account for the general tone of angry defensiveness of the stories. I think that there is a simple explanation. The authors want it to be true. To be more specific, the want the world to work in this way.

They want it to be true that if somebody says or does something then other people are some how forced to do the same. They want it so that by bravely speaking out they they too can wield this mysterious power.

They want it to be true that authorities are forced to act due to complaints from minority groups. They want it because they have so many complaints that need to be acted on.

They do not want to live in a world where people listen to opinions, observe examples and then decide for themselves what to do.

But, what are they frightened of?

Bonfire Night

I leave you with a traditional British rhyme to celebrate this time of year. If I walk down the street singing it I would probably be arrested. A clear case of 'Political Correctness gone Mad'.

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason Why Gunpowder Treason Should ever be forgot.

A penny loaf to feed the Pope
A farthing o' cheese to choke him.
A pint of beer to rinse it down.
A faggot of sticks to burn him.
Burn him in a tub of tar.
Burn him like a blazing star.
Burn his body from his head.
Then we'll say ol' Pope is dead.
Hip hip hoorah!
Hip hip hoorah hoorah!

Labels: society

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