… by the Beatles is playing outside of my window right now. Never mind that’s one of the worst Beatle’s songs ever, what the hell is a copy of it doing in Yemen? I’m constantly amazed…
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… go to this site. They are attempting to document the measuring sites used by NASA and other organizations to make sure that they are adhering to the guidelines set up for accurate temperature readings to be made. This is an important aspect of the science of climate change and global warming in general. By documenting the sites, researchers can tell which sites are more reliable than others and possibly be able to figure out corrections for sites that are being affected by their position. This site has already brought to light some really awful measuring areas (on an asphalt parking lot next to air conditioners for example) and with any luck they will be excluded/corrected in any sort of survey. This is good stuff and you can get directly involved with Global warming and climate science!
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Had a visit from the embassy yesterday
Some folks from the American embassy came over yesterday to talk to the American students. Most of it was about keeping in touch with them. The security guy talked about things that they have done at the embassy Most of the time was spent discussing passport and visa issues. I was told that getting more pages in my passport was really simple and could be done in a day, whew! I’ll go down there on Sat. and get that taken care of. He also mentioned an interesting thing that I was not aware of, if a company sponsors your residency visa, you have to get permission from them to leave the country. That’s something to think about… I have not heard of any problems with the language schools, after all, none of them want to get a reputation for giving native English speakers a hard time. I think I’ll go down and talk to some of them next week and ask about possible jobs…
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A great site on global warming
It’s over at U of Colorado I think. It’s a very science minded place, lots of discussion about statistical methods and the quality of observation sites. I particularly like their “Main conclusions.”
The Climate Science Weblog has clearly documented the following
conclusions since July 2005:
conclusions since July 2005:
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The needed focus for the study of climate change and variability is on the regional and local scales. Global and zonally-averaged climate metrics would only be important to the extent that they provide useful information on these space scales.
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Global and zonally-averaged surface temperature trend assessments, besides having major difficulties in terms of how this metric is diagnosed and analyzed, do not provide significant information on climate change and variability on the regional and local scales.
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Global warming is not equivalent to climate change. Significant, societally important climate change, due to both natural- and human- climate forcings, can occur without any global warming or cooling.
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The spatial pattern of ocean heat content change is the appropriate metric to assess climate system heat changes including global warming.
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In terms of climate change and variability on the regional and local scale, the IPCC Reports, the CCSP Report on surface and tropospheric temperature trends, and the U.S. National Assessment have overstated the role of the radiative effect of the anthropogenic increase of CO2 relative to the role of the diversity of other human climate climate forcing on global warming, and more generally, on climate variability and change.
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Global and regional climate models have not demonstrated skill at predicting regional and local climate change and variability on multi-decadal time scales.
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Attempts to significantly influence regional and local-scale climate based on controlling CO2 emissions alone is an inadequate policy for this purpose.
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A vulnerability paradigm, focused on regional and local societal and environmental resources of importance, is a more inclusive, useful, and scientifically robust framework to interact with policymakers, than is the focus on global multi-decadal climate predictions which are downscaled to the regional and local scales. The vulnerability paradigm permits the evaluation of the entire spectrum of risks associated with different social and environmental threats, including climate variability and change.
Humans are significantly altering the global climate, but in a variety of diverse ways beyond the radiative effect of carbon dioxide. The IPCC assessments have been too conservative in recognizing the importance of these human climate forcings as they alter regional and global climate. These assessments have also not communicated the inability of the models to accurately forecast the spread of possibilities of future climate. The forecasts, therefore, do not provide any skill in quantifying the impact of different mitigation strategies on the actual climate response
that would occur.
I particularly like the idea of calling into question what an average global temperature actually means and the very important distinction between global warming and climate change. It’s a great site, you can find it
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More about dogs here
I mentioned that I used to walk with my dog in the woods when I was little. My teacher asked me if that was to protect me from dangerous animals. He was rather surprised to find that there really isn’t anything dangerous in the Virginia woods (outside of a rabid raccoon or something). I then went on to explain the common English phrase “Man’s best friend.” He flatly rejected that, citing some personal experience of a dog biting a man he knew. I admitted that dogs can be dangerous, but that most of them are not. He then told me that if a dog licks his clothes, he has to wash them 7 times, once with sand, before he will be allowed to pray in them again. That’s the level of disgust people have for dogs here…
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State vs. the market
Karl and I were talking the night before he left to go home. In several of our conversations I noticed that he had a fairly common bias when trying to figure out how to get things accomplished. “If the government doesn’t do it, it won’t happen,” is a really common attitude. Almost without exception, the people that ardently believe in this are afraid of what people will do if left to their own devices. They see no hope of charity, care, or understanding from people. It’s really a cynical viewpoint if you think about it. The alternative to allowing people to do what they want is to force people to do what the government, or in a best case scenario, what the majority of people want to do. They of course do this by forcibly taking money from us and forcing us to follow whatever program they come up with.
As you may guess, I feel that things should be left to people to decide for themselves first before any government involvement kicks in. This is rarely allowed to happen, there is usually some sort of regulations in effect for just about everything out there. Usually, it is the government interference that allows “market failures” to happen. For me, what defines a market failure is that everyone can do whatever they like and nobody is happy with the outcome. I had been a believer in the idea that market failures didn’t really exist without govt. meddling. Living in Yemen has made me rethink some of those ideas.
Two examples of actual market failures that I have seen here are the unbelievable amounts of litter and the horrendous (and dangerous) traffic. I have no idea what’s going on with the litter, seemingly everyone complains about it, but is unwilling to do anything about it. I once had someone lament how dirty Yemen is while he threw a wrapper on the ground! My only guess is that there is some sort of cultural bias towards littering or away from preventing it… The traffic example is a little easier to explain I think. There is relatively little enforcement of traffic laws here, so people drive however they choose, with disastrous results. There are constant traffic jams (usually caused by terrible parking in busy areas), intersections are both risky and harrowing, and the flow of traffic in general is incredibly slow. The noise of horns is deafening, and it leads to you tuning them out for the most part. My idea behind why the “market” for traffic running smoothly doesn’t work so well is one of transaction costs. In any market, actors in it must be free to negotiate between themselves for the outcomes that they both want, for the ones they are willing to “trade” for. If the cost of doing the transaction is too high, it doesn’t happen. Imagine trying to import a plow from England to colonial Virginia. It was far too costly in terms of time to bother with getting it from England, they just went down to the local blacksmith and got one instead. In the same way, traffic moves too quickly for there to be too many “negotiations” to occur. What results is the traffic that we have here. The government (through rules and enforcement) sets up the negotiations beforehand (right of way, traffic lights, etc.) so that no time is needed to figure out who should go where. Traffic tends to be much more efficient (more cars through a given area in a given time) and I believe safer with these negotiations taken care of in advance. So yes, we give up some freedom, but because there isn’t a way for us to make transactions in the market otherwise, the government solution works fairly well.
Here’s where my ideas get a little more difficult to think about. I do believe that people should be allowed to try interact among themselves first before relying on the government to “fix” things. The trouble is, as in the case of traffic here in Yemen, if you allow the market to do its own thing, I’m not sure you can “fix” it later on. I have no idea how the government could step in now and correct the big problems with traffic here. So maybe things like high transactions costs could be predictors in advance whether or not the govt. should be involved. There may be some other factors as well, but the possibility that people may be stupid or evil are not (IMO) good reasons to mandate government control over something. Let people interact with each other freely and usually good things will come about…
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Sad state of affairs
My teacher told me about one of his neighbors today. Apparently, the guy suffered some sort of sudden onset of a mental illness and his family is in a mess. It’s a bad scene, he can’t work, he needs medicine daily, his wife is illiterate, and he has 4 kids (the youngest being 2 weeks old). It was a thinly disguised appeal for money. He didn’t really ask, but he made it clear that he was collecting money to help this guy. I didn’t offer to help. Charity here is tough, there are so many people that need help and you can’t help them all. In the US, I don’t feel too bad about not giving to people on the street, they usually just drink whatever money they get. Here, people are mostly just poor and out of options. To add to the problem, westerners are universally better off than the locals and so they all see us as ready sources of money. My general strategy is to give to the lame and blind, not to give to people that use their (healthy) kids as pity magnets, and to never give to anyone begging between cars in the street. Even with these limits, there are way too many people that need help for me to give all the time. I feel bad, but what can I do?
I have no doubt that my teacher has a lower opinion of me now, but to be fair, he’s talking about a guy I’ve never met and I’ve only known my teacher for a week. I’m pretty sure that Adel is telling the truth, but I’ve been burned a few too many times by Yemenis looking for cash. Things would probably be different if I knew the guy… One of the things that happens when you live in an area as poor as this is that it hardens you to suffering a bit. It’s never easy to see, but it gets easier to not feel guilty. I hope the family can get along somehow…
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Good news that you probably won’t see
NASA has revised their temperature database used in climate science downwards due to over-adjusted readings caused by a software bug. The result? Now 4 of the hottest years of this century are in the 1930’s! See Warren’s report here.This has huge implications for how people view warming trends amid the whole global warming scare. Things are not as bad as we’ve been told. Despite this, this good news will not be mentioned in any of the news outlets. In fact, I will make the bold prediction that most people will somehow see this as bad news. This is good, things are not as hot. With any luck, this will cause some reevaluations among the global warming community.
One thing that this case highlights is that most of this data is not available to public or peer review. Once again, a professional statistician has had to force an agency to admit that it’s numbers are all screwed up. he found this not by looking at their algorithms (which are not released) but by backward engineering them. This is the same guy who demolished the so called Mann’s hockey stick. There is an incredible lack of transparency with climatology and why it is tolerated I have no idea. There isn’t any other branch of scientific inquiry that tolerates the hiding of methods that seem to be standard practice in the global warming machine. I have never thought of it this way, but I am now seriously wondering if all of the money being funneled into hyping global warming is causing people to be really loose with their methods. That argument usually goes the other way with people claiming that oil companies bribe people into denying the global warming orthodoxy, but surely the side with the most money is the one to be suspected, no? It is estimated that the anti global warming (or more accurately the anti man made global warming) crowd is outspent by a factor of 50 by the proponents of the man made catastrophe theory. I’m starting to think that all that money is making people do some questionable things…
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Fun with Europeans
The last full, nonairport day I was in the states was a sunday. While looking through the ads, one caught my eye. It was from Bass Pro Shops and strangely enough there wasn’t any tackle or boats being advertised. Nope they were gearing up for the fall deer season and the things that were most prominently advertised were guns. I had never seen so many in an ad before, I had seen the occasional shotgun or .22 advertised, but never a handgun or larger caliber rifles. They had everything from the bolt action .22 up to 30-06 rifles and handguns ranging from .22 to the .357 and .44 magnums in addition to all sorts of 12 and 10 gauge shotguns and ammo. The entire thing was about 8 pages.
Like I said, I was a bit surprised, but not shocked. The first thing I thought of was my European housemates. I have yet to meet a European that can appreciate, let alone not get freaked out by Americans and their love of guns. To be fair, a lot of Americans don’t like it either but I have come around a bit on hunting. When I was growing up, I always associated hunters with the redneck crowd. Let’s face it, that’s probably mostly true, but what they do is more important than what they are. The Spanish women last night were predictably appalled by guns and the hunting culture until I pointed out that we still have quite a bit of wildlife in the States. I get the impression that that is not the case in most of Europe. Not only do we have a lot of deer in particular, but we don’t really have any predators to keep the population under control. Deer in rural areas would simply starve in the winter if left to their own devices. Deer in more populated areas have the same problem, but they also cause problems when they interact with people. This wouldn’t be too much of a problem if all they did was eat the lawns and shrubs, but when they “interact” with cars, they are deadly. I think that a couple of women last night actually understood why hunters (and their guns) are needed in the US. That doesn’t explain the handguns in the ad of course, but they didn’t notice that and I didn’t bring it up:-)
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Had fun last night
Karl had a bit of a going away get together in his room last night. 6 people showed up plus Henry, Karl and I. There were munchies, vodka, and mixers to be had and everyone seemed to have a good time. I was in charge of bringing the music. I set up my computer and let people pick whatever they wanted. The girls hovered over it most of the night and I was amazed at what these 20 something Spanish women were picking… Lots of Sam Cooke, Beatles, Police, Gordon Lightfoot(?), ABBA, and a handful of other oldies. There were a few NOFX and Penneywise songs thrown in there for good measure, but I really didn’t expect them to pick what they piked. People left gradually, the three (really beautiful) spanish women stayed later, but two of them had class the next morning at 8:00, so they left a little after 12:30. On of them stuck around until 4 or so, I hit the sack around 2. I found it funny that the four of us were trying to figure out how to ditch the bottles, the youngest among us was 26 and there we were acting like 17 year olds, LOL. Anyway, it was fun and a great send off for Karl.