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The New York solar map just debuted at the fifth annual Solar Summit. Solvecimate News reports: “The map is an important part of this effort,” said Tria Case, who heads the New York City solar map project as director of sustainability for the university. “It’s a tool that building and homeowners, installers, city officials and Con Ed can use.” The map is exact. During night flights over New Yok in May 2010, a twin-engine plane equipped with lasers captured the architecture of the city. From these images, CUNY’s Center for Advanced Research of Spatial Information created a 3-D model of the city. “It’s as if we shrink-wrapped the entire city in paper lined with a one-meter grid and got the exact elevation and horizontal location of each square meter,” Sean Ahearn, the geographer who directs the center, told SolveClimate News. Ahearn said the site incorporates so many bytes of information that it took a supercomputer with 10 processors some 50 hours to generate the map interface. The website can calculate how much solar radiation hits every square meter of the city — every hour, every day for an entire year. For building owners it means they can size up of the solar energy potential of their rooftops within minutes.

Scientific skepticism requires we consider the full body of evidence before coming to conclusions. The antithesis of genuine skepticism is ignoring all the evidence that contradicts a desired conclusion.

he article seems to overlook the relative importance of solar radiation and wind as being the two main drivers of evaporation, translating as the skin temperature of the evaporating surface rather than ambient temperature, and the airflow over it, which in the case of solar radiation would make water vapour more of a forcing than a feedback. This paper details the calculations and the various inputs that are involved BUREAU OF METEOROLOGY REFERENCE EVAPOTRANSPIRATION CALCULATIONS

This doesn't seem like a particularly relevant or useful start to the discussion of this topic. John's done some nice work looking at humidity trends wrt the water vapor feedback, and it would be a shame to divert the discussion right from the start into a lot of wrangling over minutia.

The commenter starts with some ad hominems, asserting that my post is biased and emotional. They provide no evidence or argument to support this assertion. And of course they don’t even attempt to counter any of the arguments I laid out. They then follow up with an argument from authority – he can link to a PhD creationist – so there.

The article that the commenter links to is by Henry M. Morris, founder for the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) – a young-earth creationist organization. Morris was (he died in 2006 following a stroke) a PhD – in civil engineering. This point is irrelevant to his actual arguments. I bring it up only to put the commenter’s argument from authority into perspective. No disrespect to engineers – but they are not biologists. They have no expertise relevant to the question of evolution – no more than my MD. So let’s stick to the arguments themselves.

The article by Morris is an overview of so-called Creation Science, of which Morris was a major architect. The arguments he presents are all old creationist canards, long deconstructed by scientists. In fact I address many of them in my original refutation. Creationists generally are not very original – they recycle old arguments endlessly, regardless of how many times they have been destroyed.

Since the shale gas revolution and resulting confirmation of enormous domestic gas reserves, there has been a relatively small group of analysts and geologists who have doubted the future of shale gas.  Their doubts have become very convenient to the environmental activists I mentioned earlier. This particular NYT reporter has apparently sought out a few of the doubters to fashion together a negative view of the U.S. natural gas industry. We also believe certain media outlets, especially the once venerable NYT, are being manipulated by those whose environmental or economic interests are being threatened by abundant natural gas supplies. We have seen for example today an email from a leader of a group called the Environmental Working Group who claimed today’s articles as this NYT reporter’s "second great story" (the first one declaring that produced water disposal from shale gas wells was unsafe) and that “we've been working with him for over 8 months. Much more to come. . .”

this reporter’s claim of impending scarcity of natural gas supply contradicts the facts and the scientific extrapolation of those facts by the most sophisticated reservoir engineers and geoscientists in the world. Not just at Chesapeake, but by experts at many of the world’s leading energy companies that have made multi-billion-dollar, long-term investments in U.S. shale gas plays, with us and many other companies. Notable examples of these companies, besides the leading independents such as Chesapeake, Devon, Anadarko, EOG, EnCana, Talisman and others, include these leading global energy giants:  Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron, Conoco, Statoil, BHP, Total, CNOOC, Marathon, BG, KNOC, Reliance, PetroChina, Mitsui, Mitsubishi and ENI, among others.  Is it really possible that all of these companies, with a combined market cap of almost $2 trillion, know less about shale gas than a NYT reporter, a few environmental activists and a handful of shale gas doubters?

Since it doesn't have a lot of commercial appeal, most of the people working in the area, and the vast majority of those publishing the scientific literature, work in academic departments or at government agencies. Penn State, home of noted climatologists Richard Alley and Michael Mann, has a strong geosciences department and, conveniently, makes the department's salary information available. It's easy to check, and find that the average tenured professor earned about $120,000 last year, and a new hire a bit less than $70,000.

That's a pretty healthy salary by many standards, but it's hardly a racket. Penn State appears to be on the low end of similar institutions, and is outdone by two other institutions in its own state (based on this report). But, more significantly for the question at hand, we can see that Earth Sciences faculty aren't paid especially well. Sure, they do much better than the Arts faculty, but they're somewhere in the middle of the pack, and get stomped on by professors in the Business and IT departments.

This is all, of course, ignoring what someone who can do the sort of data analysis or modeling of complex systems that climatologists perform might make if they went to Wall Street.

freedom of information documents suggest that Soon corresponded in 2003 with other prominent climate sceptics to try to weaken a major assessment of global warming being conducted by the UN's leading climate science body, the Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.Soon, who had previously disclosed corporate funding he received in the 1990s, was today reportely unapologetic, telling Reuters that he agreed that he had received money from all of the groups and companies named in the report but denied that any group would have influenced his studies.

"I have never been motivated by financial reward in any of my scientific research," he said. "I would have accepted money from Greenpeace if they had offered it to do my research."

Charles G Koch Foundation, a leading provider of funds for climate sceptic groups, gave Soon two grants totalling $175,000 (then roughly £102,000) in 2005/6 and again in 2010. In addition the American Petroleum insitute (API), which represents the US petroleum and natural gas industries, gave him multiple grants between 2001 and 2007 totalling $274,000, oil company Exxon Mobil provided $335,000 between 2005 and 2010, and Soon received other grants from coal and oil industry sources including the Mobil Foundation, the Texaco Foundation and the Electric Power Research Institute.

Everyone is a skeptic nowadays, or so it seems. From climate change to evolution to vaccination, large proportions of the population claim to be skeptical about many of the claims of mainstream science. So why are we, member of the skeptical community, not rejoicing?

A skeptic, in popular discourse, is simply someone who denies a particular claim. But true skepticism, as espoused by philosophers and scientists for millenia, is more an intellectual attitude than a position on a specific issue. A skeptic is someone who always demands sufficient evidence or reasons before accepting a claim. This skeptical attitude – its opposite is credulity – leads skeptics to reject as unfounded any claim that cannot withstand the rigours of the scientific method, which includes controlled experimental testing. The more extraordinary the claim, the more rigourously it must be tested before a skeptic will be willing to accept

skepticism does not always lead to denial. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but sometimes that extraordinary evidence can be provided. Einstein’s theory of relativity, which holds that matter can change the very shape of space and time, is an extraordinary claim, yet it has stood up to the most demanding of scientific testing.

By Carlin Romano Standing up for science excites some intellectuals the way beautiful actresses arouse Warren Beatty, or career liberals boil the blood of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. It's visceral.

A brave champion of beleaguered science in the modern age of pseudoscience, this Ayn Rand protagonist sarcastically derides the benighted irrationalists and glows with a self-anointed superiority. Who wouldn't want to feel that sense of power and rightness?

You hear the voice regularly—along with far more sensible stuff—in the latest of a now common genre of science patriotism, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science From Bunk (University of Chicago Press), by Massimo Pigliucci, a philosophy professor at the City University of New York.

Cleantech companies just can’t seem to get it right. At least, that’s the notion Peter Thiel — a co-founder of PayPal and president of Clarium Capital — subscribes to when he looks at cleantech companies as potential investing opportunities. He made the comments at a Commonwealth Club event in San Francisco Wednesday.

That’s not because he doesn’t believe in the technology — he just doesn’t like the way the companies are run, he said. “Most of the people who run cleantech companies are sales people, not engineers,” Thiel said. “Something seems to have gone quite wrong with cleantech.”

most cleantech companies that try to develop alternative energy forms are building power sources that are more expensive. Solar panels, for example, are still not a cost-efficient way to generate power because companies have made the assumption that people will pay more for more environmentally friendly ways of producing energy, Thiel said. “We need something cheaper, not more expensive,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if the energy is cleaner, it doesn’t work if it’s more expensive.”

Christopher Monckton, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, had given a rousing speech to a crowd at Bethel University in Minnesota, near where I live.His speech was on global warming and his style was convincing and irreverent. Anyone listening to him was given the impression that global warming was not happening, or that if it did happen it wouldn't be so bad, and scientists who warned about it were part of a vast conspiracy.

Monckton cited scientist after scientist whose work "disproved" global warming.He contended that polar bears are not really at risk (in fact they do better as weather warms); projections of sea level rise are a mere 6cm; Arctic ice has not declined in a decade; Greenland is not melting; sea levels are not rising; ocean temperatures are not increasing; medieval times were warmer than today; ocean acidification is not occurring; and global temperatures are not increasing.

I actually tracked down the articles and authors that Monckton cited. What I discovered was incredible, even to a scientist who follows the politics of climate change. I found that he had misrepresented the science.

I have put together a quick spreadsheet to allow me to do a bit of sensitivity analysis of what it would take for the US to get to 80% "clean energy" in its electricity supply by 2035, as proposed by President Obama in his State of the Union Speech

1. I started with the projections from the EIA to 2035 available here in XLS. 2. I then calculated the share of clean energy in 2011, assuming that natural gas gets a 50% credit for being clean.  That share is just under 44% (Nukes 21%, Renewable 13%, Gas 10%). 3. I then calculated how that share could be increased to 80% by 2035.

Here is what I found: 1. Coal pretty much has to go away.  Specifically, about 90% or more of coal energy would have to be replaced. 2. I first looked at replacing all the coal with gas, all else equal.  That gets the share of clean energy up to about 68%, a ways off of the target. 3. I then fiddled with the numbers to arrive at 80%.  One way to get there would be to increase the share of nukes to 43%, gas to 31% and renewables to 22% (Note that the EIA reference scenario -- BAU -- to 2035 has these shares at 17%, 21% and 17% respectively, for a share of 45% just about like today.)

have you noticed how the capacity of the media to explain in lay terms such matters as quantum physics, or cosmology, is contracting faster than the universe is expanding? The more mind warping the discoveries the less opportunity there is to fit them into 30 seconds in a news cast, or 300 words in print.

There has been a long running conspiracy of convenience between science reporters and the science being reported to leave out inconvenient time and space consuming explanations, and go for the punch line that best suits the use of the media to lobby for more project funding.

Almost every space story I have written over 50 years has been about projects claiming to ‘discover the origins of the solar system/life on earth/life on Mars/discover the origins of the universe, or recover parts of things like comets because they are as old as the sun, except that we have discovered they aren’t ancient at all.’ None of them were ever designed to achieved those goals. They were brilliant projects, brilliantly misrepresented by the scientists and the reporters because an accurate story would have been incomprehensible to 99.9% of readers or viewers.

you need to understand whether recent weather trends are extreme by historical standards. The Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project is the latest attempt to find out, using super-computers to generate a dataset of global atmospheric circulation from 1871 to the present. As it happens, the project's initial findings, published last month, show no evidence of an intensifying weather trend. "In the climate models, the extremes get more extreme as we move into a doubled CO2 world in 100 years," atmospheric scientist Gilbert Compo, one of the researchers on the project, tells me from his office at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "So we were surprised that none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased circulation going back to 1871."

researchers have yet to find evidence of more-extreme weather patterns over the period, contrary to what the models predict. "There's no data-driven answer yet to the question of how human activity has affected extreme weather," adds Roger Pielke Jr., another University of Colorado climate researcher.

We do know that carbon dioxide and other gases trap and re-radiate heat. We also know that humans have emitted ever-more of these gases since the Industrial Revolution. What we don't know is exactly how sensitive the climate is to increases in these gases versus other possible factors—solar variability, oceanic currents, Pacific heating and cooling cycles, planets' gravitational and magnetic oscillations, and so on. Given the unknowns, it's possible that even if we spend trillions of dollars, and forgo trillions more in future economic growth, to cut carbon emissions to pre-industrial levels, the climate will continue to change—as it always has.

one of the big arguments that environmentalists have used about the need to stop climate change is that those who will suffer most are the little brown poor people in far-off lands who will, for instance, experience increased incidence of malaria and exposure to floods and other disasters. (Of course the fact that they are already burdened by such things in huge disproportion to the privileged minority doesn’t seem to enter into the argument).

But I raise this point because when it comes to climate survivalism, the little brown folks are nowhere to be seen, and apparently it’s every relatively affluent white guy (and his nuclear family, of course) for himself.

Dan Sarewitz takes the Washington Post to task for publishing a bizarre commentary on the coming climate apocalypse: Check out the article by a climate survivalist from the February 27, 2011 Washington Post. (I’m going to go out on a limb and treat the article as if it’s not a satire or hoax, but maybe the joke’s on me.) The author describes how he’s buying solar panels and generators and laying in food and supplies and putting extra locks on his doors and windows in anticipation of the coming climate apocalypse, much in the way that in the 1960s certain nuts were digging shelters in their backyard to provide protection against hydrogen bombs, and in the ‘80s (and probably to this day) right-wing crazies were building up small arsenals to protect themselves against the time when the government tried to take away their right to be bigots.

Scientists these days tend to keep up a polite fiction that all science is equal. Except for the work of the misguided opponent whose arguments we happen to be refuting at the time, we speak as though every scientist's field and methods of study are as good as every other scientist's and perhaps a little better. This keeps us all cordial when it comes to recommending each other for government grants.

Why should there be such rapid advances in some fields and not in others? I think the usual explanations that we tend to think of - such as the tractability of the subject, or the quality or education of the men drawn into it, or the size of research contracts - are important but inadequate. I have begun to believe that the primary factor in scientific advance is an intellectual one. These rapidly moving fields are fields where a particular method of doing scientific research is systematically used and taught, an accumulative method of inductive inference that is so effective that I think it should be given the name of "strong inference." I believe it is important to examine this method, its use and history and rationale, and to see whether other groups and individuals might learn to adopt it profitably in their own scientific and intellectual work. In its separate elements, strong inference is just the simple and old-fashioned method of inductive inference that goes back to Francis Bacon. The steps are familiar to every college student and are practiced, off and on, by every scientist. The difference comes in their systematic application. Strong inference consists of applying the following steps to every problem in science, formally and explicitly and regularly: Devising alternative hypotheses; Devising a crucial experiment (or several of them), with alternative possible outcomes, each of which will, as nearly is possible, exclude one or more of the hypotheses; Carrying out the experiment so as to get a clean result; Recycling the procedure, making subhypotheses or sequential hypotheses to refine the possibilities that remain, and so on.

On any new problem, of course, inductive inference is not as simple and certain as deduction, because it involves reaching out into the unknown. Steps 1 and 2 require intellectual inventions, which must be cleverly chosen so that hypothesis, experiment, outcome, and exclusion will be related in a rigorous syllogism; and the question of how to generate such inventions is one which has been extensively discussed elsewhere (2, 3). What the formal schema reminds us to do is to try to make these inventions, to take the next step, to proceed to the next fork, without dawdling or getting tied up in irrelevancies.

It is both misguided and dangerous to push unobserved risks further into the statistical tails of the probability distribution of outcomes and allow these high-impact, low-probability "tail risks" to disappear from policymakers' fields of observation.

Such environments eventually experience massive blowups, catching everyone off-guard and undoing years of stability or, in some cases, ending up far worse than they were in their initial volatile state. Indeed, the longer it takes for the blowup to occur, the worse the resulting harm in both economic and political systems.

Seeking to restrict variability seems to be good policy (who does not prefer stability to chaos?), so it is with very good intentions that policymakers unwittingly increase the risk of major blowups. And it is the same misperception of the properties of natural systems that led to both the economic crisis of 2007-8 and the current turmoil in the Arab world. The policy implications are identical: to make systems robust, all risks must be visible and out in the open -- fluctuat nec mergitur (it fluctuates but does not sink) goes the Latin saying.