I hope to resurrect this site, so I’m testing the settings of my offline editor.  Below should be a photo:

This is the Pond du Guard, a Roman aqueduct near Avignon in France.

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UPDATE:  I’m not entirely happy with how Windows Live Writer handles photo uploads, but it will do for now given my previous solutions for offline weblog editing are no longer supported by their creators/authors.

With inadvertent but very apropos timing, The New Scientist published an article on research showing how the weather in Europe is affected by solar activity:

Quiet sun puts Europe on ice

14 April 2010 by Stuart Clark
Magazine issue 2756.

BRACE yourself for more winters like the last one, northern Europe. Freezing conditions could become more likely: winter temperatures may even plummet to depths last seen at the end of the 17th century, a time known as the Little Ice Age. That’s the message from a new study that identifies a compelling link between solar activity and winter temperatures in northern Europe.

The research finds that low solar activity promotes the formation of giant kinks in the jet stream. These kinks can block warm westerly winds from reaching Europe, while allowing in winds from Arctic Siberia. When this happens in winter, northern Europe freezes, even though other, comparable regions of the globe may be experiencing unusually mild conditions.

Weather is a result of a huge number of factors, which is why up until comparatively recently weather forecasting wasn’t accurate beyond 48 hours or so. With more powerful computers and more sophisticated models that account for more of the factors that affect weather along with more types of data (such as from Doppler radar) the forecasts have gotten better.

As noted in the article in The New Scientist, energy input from the sun significantly affects weather, which is why the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland may affect weather for months, as reported on MSNBC.com:

Volcano could mean cooling, acid rain

‘Not like Pinatubo’ so far, but potential is there

msnbc.com staff and news service reports
updated 10:03 a.m. CT, Thurs., April 15, 2010

If Iceland’s active volcano gets even more active, Icelanders and air travelers won’t be the only ones impacted. Gases from past large volcanoes have actually lowered Earth’s temperatures, triggered lung ailments, caused acid rain and thinned our protective ozone layer.

The Eyjafjallajokull volcano isn’t there yet. “This is not like Pinatubo. So far the scale is not big enough to have a global effect,” Hans Olav Hygen, a climate researcher at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, said in reference to the 1991 eruption in the Philippines.

But the potential is there. The new eruption is 10 times more powerful than another nearby last month, threw up a cloud of ash nearly seven miles high and closed down air traffic across northern Europe.

As far as I know, climate change skeptics do not dispute that gases from volcanic eruptions affect the weather. What I find amazing is that many climate change skeptics deny that the significant increase in carbon dioxide, ozone, and sulfur-based emissions due to human activity over the last 200 years has any effect. Instead, often, one sees “look, there’s a massive snowstorm in the northeast, so much for global warming,” conflating weather with climate.

Sadly, climate change research has a serious public image problem. Climate change was initially presented as “global warming” because the results from the models indicate that the average temperature of the planet will be increasing. The phrase “climate change” is more appropriate because some areas will become cooler rather than warmer. For example, the British Isles, and Europe as a whole, are warmer on average than one would expect because of effects from the Gulf Stream. Suppose as a result of climate change, the path of the Gulf Stream changes? Europe would get cooler, even though the average global temperature rose. Just because it was called “global warming” does not mean that every region on the planet would get warmer, but that complexity gets lost in the noise machine.

It’s far easier to be snarky and point to the chaotic weather to deny that the climate might change. Remember, “climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.” Ironically, climate change will result in more chaotic weather, and that may give the skeptics what they think is more ammunition to shoot down the concept that human activity could change the global climate.

Weather and climate are the result of a very complex system with many inputs and many interactions. We have direct evidence from volcanic eruptions that introducing new gases into the atmosphere does change weather on a wide scale. I have difficulty understanding how anyone can claim that human activity, which has introduced large quantities of gases into the atmosphere, would not have an effect. One might argue how large that effect might be, and possibly even what direction that effect would take, but in the end, there would be an effect. Is it really wise for humanity to continue to change the composition of our atmosphere without understanding the ultimate outcome of that change?

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice . Comments can be made at Random Fate , but please note they are not posted until after review.

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Although other issues have become the focus of the manufactured tempests of both new and old media, that does not mean that there is no fallout from previous hyperbolic storms. The Dot Earth Blog at NYTimes.com has a post on the report from a committee of experts recommended by the Royal Society inquiring into the climate change research at the University of East Anglia, where emails and other files were released five months ago giving climate change skeptics what they thought was smoking gun proof of a conspiracy to manufacture data showing climate change is real and caused by human activity.

What won’t get the attention from the skeptics is that the researchers have now twice been exonerated of any willful misleading or scientific malpractice.

That is to be expected, sadly enough, especially nowadays in the hothouse of new, unedited media and pundits being regarded as more credible than real experts.

What is interesting to the more thoughtful is revisiting the origins of the controversy. It is fully worth reading some of the comments from the report summary (pdf of the report found here):

- It is regrettable that so few professional statisticians have been involved in this work because it is fundamentally statistical. Under such circumstances there must be an obligation on researchers to document the judgmental decisions they have made so that the work can in principle be replicated by others.

- After reading publications and interviewing the senior staff of CRU [Climatic Research Unit] in depth, we are satisfied that the CRU tree-ring work has been carried out with integrity, and that allegations of deliberate misrepresentation and unjustified selection of data are not valid.

- We believe that CRU did a public service of great value by carrying out much time-consuming meticulous work on temperature records at a time when it was unfashionable and attracted the interest of a rather small section of the scientific community. CRU has been among the leaders in international efforts to determining the overall uncertainty in the derived temperature records and where work is best focused to improve them.

- We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it. Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganized researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention. As with many small research groups their internal procedures were rather informal.

As referenced in the title of this post, there is an old truism that was popularized by Mark Twain. The full quote is:

Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”

- Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography: The Chapters from the North American Review

Like words, statistics can be twisted to appear to show something that they do not show. In other words, often one should say the equivalent of “I don’t think that word means what you think it means” after yet another exclamation of “Inconceivable!” when statistics are presented, especially graphically. It’s amazing how the thousand word pictures can distort meanings even further.

In the end, though, it comes down to this, statistics is a branch of Mathematics, and Mathematics is a language that can be understood and mistreated just as any other language.

Bear with me here, and let me show you how math is really a language.

Newton’s Second Law is one of the first equations taught in any Physics class, and it is one of the simplest equations other than the Einstein equation that resulted in the atomic bomb. Newton’s Second Law is written mathematically as:

F=ma

Where F is force, m is mass, and a is the acceleration of that mass. What does this equation mean in words, though?

Well, it means that if you push on something (that’s the force), that thing with go faster in the direction you push (going faster is the acceleration), and how much faster it goes depends on how heavy it is (in other words, the mass). The heavier the thing is the harder it will be to make go faster.

That equation with four symbols expresses a relationship that to be described in English uses many more words than four, but the equation does completely describe the relationship in the physical law. Mathematics is a language, and a concise and powerful one at that.

Statistics is a specialized branch of Mathematics, and I think a good analogy is that it is a dialect of math just as there are dialects of spoken and written languages that may not be easily understood by those who speak a different dialect of what is nominally the same language. For example, Chinese has two main dialects, Mandarin and Cantonese (or Yue), and they are not necessarily mutually intelligible in all cases.

How does this relate to the East Anglia climate change research controversy? Refer to the bullet points above:

- It is regrettable that so few professional statisticians have been involved in this work because it is fundamentally statistical. Under such circumstances there must be an obligation on researchers to document the judgmental decisions they have made so that the work can in principle be replicated by others.

Many scientists believe they understand statistics better than they really do, just as many non-scientists believe they can interpret statistics and other data types better than they really can. So while there was no deliberate scientific malpractice nor a conspiracy to fabricate results, there was not quite the rigor that one would prefer for this type of data. This does not invalidate the results, it just means they need to be examined more closely, and future work needs to have more participation by experts in statistical analysis.

So, the climate change skeptics, while overly hyperbolic, had a small kernel of a point in their manufactured tempest, but those concerned by the possibility of climate change were and are justified in their worries.

As I used to often say, in the end you have to do ALL of the math.

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Cross-posted to The Moderate Voice and Random Fate. Comments can be made at Random Fate, but please note the comments are moderated.

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I haven’t written for this weblog in a month. I’ve been lost, and I’m only just now finding my way out.

As is frequently the case, music expresses things better than a thousand words, and better than even a picture sometimes:

I don’t see the way out, but I haven’t given up yet…

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There are TWO of them! AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
-H. L. Mencken

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
-Richard Feynman

The thought of sucide is a great consolation; by means of it one gets through many a bad night.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.
-George Bernard Shaw

Part of being sane, is being a little bit crazy.
-Janet Long

For the skeptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as superhuman law it is administered with subhuman inefficiency.
-Eric Ambler

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
-Flannery O’Connor

The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.
-Edith Sitwell

Patriotism is often used as a shelter for the thoughtless, arrogant, and greedy.
-Otis Beck

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From Darth Mojo:

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In light of the not so recent end of the George W. Bush administration, it is worth evaluating the value of a high IQ versus the ability to make rational, fact-based decisions. I found this article very enlightening:

Clever fools: Why a high IQ doesn’t mean you’re smart

It is something worth thinking about.

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.
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