Gareth – Page 164

You never give me your money

Bill English’s first budget has disappointed many by ditching promised tax cuts, but pleased a few by reinstating a Green home insulation initiative. The Science Media Centre has a handy summary here. There’s $321 million of new money for R&D through a “Primary Growth Partnership” (details due on June 2), which goes some way to offset the loss of Labour’s “Fast Forward” fund, but no money for the promised climate change research centre (it was going to be a “virtual” centre, now it’s actually gone). Reaction in the science community was mixed, as the Science Media Centre documents. Professor Philippa Howden-Chapman, director of the He Kainga Oranga/Housing and Health Research Programme at the University of Otago, Wellington commented:

“I’m very pleased to see that there has been multi-partisan agreement about the importance of retrofitting insulation and install sustainable heating and that significant investment has been included in this Budget. There is going to be a ramp up over four years and by the end of that time it is estimated that over a quarter of uninsulated houses in New Zealand will be insulated.

“I think it’s important that the Government is requiring people to insulate their houses before they can access the subsidies for sustainable heaters. This makes physical and energy efficiency sense and is based on sound public health science. There has also been further attempts to increase the incentives for landlords to upgrade their properties, which is important for the 40% of householders that rent in the private sector.

Meanwhile, Prof Paul Callaghan at Victoria University was “disappointed” with the budget:

â€œIf New Zealand is to turbocharge its way out of this recession, we have to develop new export businesses based on knowledge and innovation. What we need are significant new investments to build our innovation system. The 2009/10 budget has not addressed that issue.â€

However, in a fairly clear signal that the Emissions Trading Scheme is going to survive its select committee review, Nick Smith announced increased funding of $6.9 million for developing the Emissions Trading Scheme, “including international linkages”.

[Beatles (rare long version)]

This year’s model

[youtube]5tRiZG-yR24[/youtube]

Take MIT’s global ocean model, assimilate data from NASA’s fleet of satellites, and run the whole thing through two of the world’s most powerful supercomputers on a much more detailed grid than used before, and you get this stunning animation of ocean currents from 1994 to 2002. It makes fascinating viewing: look for the complex whorls of currents to the southwest of NZ, or the loops of the Gulf Stream (red/white is fastest moving water).

This sort of detailed ocean modelling is important for capturing the interactions between atmosphere and ocean: useful for improving weather forecasting on short and medium term timescales, as well as improving climate projections on regional scales. NASA JPL press release here.

How many times can you shoot yourself in the foot and still walk to work?

I do enjoy Wishart’s attempts at ripostes to my debunking of his nonsense. Last time, you may recall, he got confused between volcanoes beneath the ocean and the ones you can see — like Ruapehu. This afternoon he shoots from the hip in response to my post, and confuses himself yet again…

And in case Truffle doesn’t explain it properly, Wouters et al’s paper is helpfully entitled “GRACE observes small-scale mass loss in Greenland” [my emphasis on small scale]. The paper was not called “Panic Stations: All Hands To The Pumps!”.

He claims to have read the paper, but hasn’t noticed that in this context, small-scale means regional — that is, differentiating between mass loss in the various bits of Greenland. It’s all there in the abstract…

…we examine changes in Greenlandâ€™s mass distribution on a regional scale.

Remember, this is a man who claims to have investigated the whole field, and determined that “anthropogenic global warming theory is nothing more than a propaganda stunt” (p227). And “behind all the scare stories on a number of fronts — from the need to give up the war on drug trafficking to the need to tax you thousands of dollars more per year because of your “carbon footprint” — lies a left-wing billionaire (one of several in his group) with an agenda and the means to pull it off.” (p242).

Schoolboy howlers and conspiracy theories. A heady mix for some, a laughing stock to others.

Chortle!

[PS: The former NZ champion trufflehound has fully working teeth.]

Savaged by a dead sheep #2

In a meeting last week a late arrival strode in and announced (with a big grin) “You’ve finally made it, Gareth, you’ve been attacked by Ian Wishart.” It appears that my review of Air Con rattled Wishart sufficiently to prompt him to pen an attack on me in his conspiracy magazine Investigate. Over the weekend he helpfully posted what he calls the “salient” bits at his blog under the title More idiocy from the team at Hot Topic. Saves me from having to buy a copy…

Wishart’s main claim is that the evidence I submitted to the ETS Review committee was out of date before it was given, and to prove his point he quotes extensively from his own book. That was a major tactical error on his part, because it gives me an opportunity to demonstrate (once again) that Air Con is full of misrepresentations and inaccuracies.

Continue reading “Savaged by a dead sheep #2”

Bear necessities

Scientific papers are often dull, worthy screeds, difficult to read and hard to understand without considerable effort, but sometimes they are an absolute pleasure. I can heartily recommend Amstrup et al. Rebuttal of “Polar Bear Population Forecasts: A Public-Policy Forecasting Audit”, Interfaces (2009) pp. 1-17 [PDF, Woods Hole press release] as a fine example of clarity and concision — and a classic slap down of “researchers” who haven’t taken the trouble to understand what they’re writing about. The rebuttal is of a paper by Armstrong, Green and Soon (AGS) (Armstrong et al. Polar Bear Population Forecasts: A Public-Policy Forecasting Audit, Interfaces (2008) pp. 382-405 [PDF]) in the same journal last year. AGS was highly critical of two US Geological Survey papers that were instrumental in persuading the authorities to list polar bears as an endangered species. The AGS “audit” paper is extensively quoted in Ian Wishart’s Air Con, in the chapter where he explains why the bears aren’t in trouble, so by way of correction (because you won’t be getting one from him), here’s what Amstrup et al have to say…

Continue reading “Bear necessities”