Betting on the hockey stick

The recent questions raised about the notorious "hockey stick" graph (by scientist Michael Mann) are gaining just a little bit more public traction than have other questions raised about global warming over the past few years. Dr. Mann's graph purports to clearly show global warming, and one can imply from the timing of the "warming" that the impact of human activity is at fault. But first amateurs (reminds me of the blogs!) and then mainstream scientists have started to raise questions about Dr. Mann's methodology. The usual response to these sorts of questions in the world of science is to make your methods available for peer review — something that Dr. Mann is apparently refusing to do. Of course, this raises all the more question, as there is no legitimate reason to withhold this information.

In an opinion piece on Friday, the Wall Street Journal briefly tells the story of Dr. Mann's graph, including the extraordinary impact his graph — because of its "clarity" — has had on the impetus behind responding to global warming. They summarize:

But the important point is this: The world is being lobbied to place a huge economic bet — as much as $150 billion a year — on the notion that man-made global warming is real. Businesses are gearing up, at considerable cost, to deal with a new regulatory environment; complex carbon-trading schemes are in the making. Shouldn't everyone look very carefully, and honestly, at the science before we jump off this particular cliff?

Well, that's a valid point all right — $150 billion a year is not chump change by any measure. Of course we should be sure of the science before we place this particular bet (or any like it).

But perhaps a more interesting issue is this: how do we avoid having this sort of tempest-in-a-teacup in the first place? Why is global warming being treated as though it were proven fact, instead of what it really is: an intriguing theory?

I am not a scientist, and I don't even have an opinion about whether global warming is in fact occurring. But it seems to me fairly obvious that the scientists who are investigating global warming have a clear vested interest in the world having great concerns about it. It is this great concern, after all, that causes governments and philanthropic organizations to cough up vast amounts of cold, hard cash for targeted research. Surely it's true that before the scary bogeyman of "global warming", scientists studying climatology didn't have nearly so effective a grant-generating tool. And equally surely, not every scientist (or their manager) is unaffected by this fact. Does anyone doubt that the climatologist whose work spectacularly supports global warming (like Dr. Mann) finds it easier to get grants than the climatologist whose work casts doubt on it? This is a classic setup for producing biased results — a system of incentives for those who produce one outcome, and disincentives for those who produce the other.

And it's exacty what we — the country and the world — don't need: biased information (whether it is flawed or not) to base vital policy-making on. Surely there must be a better way...

Ten inches!

Looked at my rain gauge a moment ago, and we've just crossed ten inches for the year. Yahoo!

Self-portraits from Mars

Spirit and Opportunity have been roving on Mars for over a year now, doing lots of great science. Both of them are long past their design lifetime, and are off on extraordinary unplanned exploration. Spirit is climbing some low mountains, hoping for both informative geology and a good view. Opportunity just finished thoroughly exploring a small crater, and after that found it's own heat shield and studied that. It's now off on a long trek across the mostly featureless plains its on, in the hope of making it to another crater.

Spirit is in pretty good shape, but is suffering from a few problems of old age. For example, it has a "sticky" wheel that sometimes drags a bit. And it has an intermittently shorted wire that is so far not causing any problems, but could. Spirit also has a coating of dust on its solar cells that reduces the amount of power they provide. This dusting of the solar cells was expected, and in fact was something that the mission planners thought was likely to be what finally killed off the rover — but so far, the coating is much less than expected and is not causing major problems. Occasionally the operations planners include relatively quiet days to let Spirit's batteries charge up, but that's about the only impact of the dust.

Opportunity, on the other hand, is surprising everybody. Not only is it still in tip-top shape, but it also inexplicably has far less dust than even Spirit! Also, photo observations have shown that the dust has been somewhat mysteriously cleaned off a few times during Opportunity's travels. Explanations proffered have included kindly Martians, dust devils, vibrations while travelling on steep hillsides, and (probably most likely) convenient gusts of wind. Whatever the causes, Opportunity is doing great — and there's good reason to hope that it can trek a few miles across the plains to visit another crater.

The two self-portraits at right (Spirit on top, Opportunity on bottom) were made by using the panoramic camera that each rover has. If you click on them, you'll get truly enormous high-resolution versions that are suitable for printing or making Windows desktop backdrops from. These panoramic cameras are mounted on a mast sticking straight up out of the middle of each rover. The mast was mostly intended to give this camera a little extra visual range. But that same mast allows pointing the camera straight down and taking a whole series of pictures (each covering a small piece of the rover) that can be laid side-to-side to make up a complete self-portait, like a mosaic. Software that's readily available even to amateur photographers (called "stitching" software) allows putting all these images together to make seamless composite images, and that's what the JPL folks did to make these. That's also why the images have such a strange shape — the rovers only took the small pictures where the rover would actually be in the picture.

In my opinion, the twin rover missions to Mars are great examples of federal government money well spent — as opposed to the enormously expensive and relatively unproductive manned space missions. The Mars mission is one that I cannot imagine attracting commercial interest sufficient to fund it, though the commercial world would certainly be interested in providing the vehicles, support systems, and services involved in such a mission (and of course to some extent private enterprise is involved). But the Mars missions have hard-core science as their objective, and they are abundantly delivering on that. To the extent we believe government should be funding pure science, such missions are excellent candidates. The manned missions, by comparison, are pathetic. There's little justification for them in terms of the science delivered, and even less justification when their stupendous cost is factored in. There may — may — be more plausible justification from a commerical angle. But if that is truly so, then private enterprise would do a much better job of funding and executing it. For all these reasons, I am very much opposed to a government-funded manned space program...

Of Moonbats and Leftist Loonies

Trying to figure this out led me on quite a googling expedition — there are hundreds of thousands of hits on the word "moonbat", nearly all of them from recent political blog postings. I kept getting distracted by intriguing phrases, like "AutoRantic Moonbat" and "barking moonbat", and "moonbat central". The challenge was to find anything that wasn't part of the blogosphere. I didn't find much:

    "Moonbat" is the name of a painting.

    A U.S. military plane (a night bomber) was once nicknamed "Moonbat".

    Lots of people have named their cats "Moonbat".

For me, the term made instant sense the first time I read it. "Moon" conjures up the crazies that come out in the full moon, and "bat" conjures up "batty" and all its related terms and phrases. Fits very nicely to those the term is applied to! It strikes me as one of the least contrived of the new words I've run into recently...

Several sites led me to either Little Green Footballs or Libertarian Samizdata (both are great blogs) as the originators. Wikipedia gives the nod to the latter, and just over two years ago:

Moonbat is a pejorative political slogan coined in 2002 by Perry de Havilland of "The Libertarian Samizdata," a libertarian weblog. The term enjoys great currency in the libertarian blogosphere, where it is used to disparage modern liberals, peace protestors, and other ideological opponents. SEE ALSO: Feminazi, Idiotarian.

Definitions

1. "Someone on the extreme edge of whatever their -ism happens to be." (de Havilland )

2. "someone who sacrifices sanity for the sake of consistency" (Adriana Cronin)

3. "... human whose cerebral cortex has turned to silly putty causing him or her to mentally slide down the evolutionary ladder to the level of a winged rat who is influenced by the moon and wants to suck your blood. Also not-so-affectionately known as a "Democrat"." (www.barking-moonbat.com F.A.Q)

4. Not liberals, but leftists. Whereas liberals are patriotic, leftists seek to undermine their national strength. Anti-war protestors, likely to call the US military "nazis," apt to blame the 9-11 attacks on a US government and Zionist conspiracy, are moonbats. Liberals who oppose the war, are not.

5. A poster at the liberal/progressive website Democratic Underground.

Whatever the actual origins of the word, it's a winner in my book...