Posts Tagged global warming
Tasty tidbits gleaned by a news-starved junky for stats trivia
Posted by mark in Uncategorized, history on June 10th, 2010
The June 10th “Views” section of the International Herald Tribune (the global edition of New York Times) offered a few choice bits for me to savor after nearly two weeks traveling abroad without an American newspaper.
- A pie chart reporting on a June 1-7 telephone survey by Stanford University of 1000 American adults asking their opinion on belief in global warming. A pie chart illustrated that about 75% do believe in global warming, 20% do not, and 5% “don’t believe in pie charts”. I suspect that the author of this editorial, Jon A. Krosnick – a professor of communications at Stanford, meant this last bit of the chart to represent those who are undecided, but the graphic designers (Fogleson-Lubliner) figured they’d have some fun.
- Olivia Judson’s comments on “Galton’s legacy” note that this preeminent British statistician once published a comment in Nature (June 25, 1885 “Measure of Fidget”) that correlated boredom by how the audience squirmed during particularly wearisome presentations. I wish I would’ve thought of this “amusing way of passing an otherwise dull” lecture before attending two statistical conferences over the last several weeks. Based on this 2005 assessment of “Nodding and napping in medical lectures”, the more things change the more they stay the same, at least so far as presentations are concerned. The only difference is cost. For example, the authors figure that at a typical 1 hour talk to 100 high-powered professionals, say master statisticians, perhaps as much as $20,000 goes up in snores.
“Nodding was common, but whether in agreement with the speaker or in reverie remains undetermined.”
– Kenneth Rockwood (Dalhousie University), Christopher J. Patterson, McMaster University, David B. Hogan (University of Calgary)
Atlantic claws coming to town this Christmas
I came across this unusually bold crab a few weeks ago while beach-walking in Florida.
Perhaps the size of this creature is explained by findings of marine geologist Justin Ries of the University of North Carolina, who reports that rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide may lead to larger crabs, shrimp and lobsters.
See a summary of Ries’s research and a picture of a monster lobster in this post by NPR. Wow, these exoskeletoned creatures really like carbon!
PS. All this talk of large lobsters reminds me of an illustration of evolutionary operation (EVOP) by Box and Draper.* Their process improvement method calls an ongoing series of two-level factorial designs that illuminate a path to more desirable manufacturing conditions. I will talk more about this in a future blog.
*Box, G. E. P. and N. R. Draper, Evolutionary Operation, Wiley New York, 1969. (Wiley Classics Library, paperback edition, 1998.)
Statisticians do not see global cooling trend
This story by Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer, is sure to create a lot of heat from those who dispute global warming. Without revealing what the numbers represented, his news organization gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends. They found no evidence of any decline – only a long-term increase over the last 130 years, thus taking away fuel for the fire that the world is now cooling.
I like the idea of this being a blind analysis, although I wonder if these four statisticians might’ve seen through this. Also, what is a good sample size for statisticians? Four seems meager. Do you pick statisticians at random, or what?
Anyways, I am more concerned about my Minnesota Gophers going to a new outdoor stadium in what will turn out to be one of the coldest Octobers ever in this region. They play Saturday night, which is Halloween – scary enough on a college campus –but it might be wickedly cold as well. Fortunately I have a good collection of Gopher shirts, sweats and jackets to put on layer-by-layer. I noticed something funny about being outdoors after so many years of under the Metrodome: People clapping with mittens on just doesn’t work as well for cheering purposes.
Quest against greenhouse gases takes on religious fervor
(For the record, I do not drive an SUV, my furnace is a high-efficiency gas burner, my windows are double-insulated and the attic was recently blown with ultra high r-value fill. In other words, please do not question my dedication to reduce fossil fuel use by any reasonable means. Furthermore, I enjoy hiking, biking, canoeing, ice and roller skating — any outdoor activity that does not involve an engine. In other words, I am in favor of environmental protection.)
Tuesday night, at my brother-in-law’s invitation, I listened to a lecture by a professional from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) who added fuel to the fire for reducing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The venue was the men’s club for a local Methodist church. The talk was introduced with an appeal for environmental stewardship as a Christian mission. It began with an explanation of the science behind greenhouse gases. To be fair, the speaker suggested that without any carbon dioxide, we would likely be a bit chilled — perhaps by 60 degrees Fahrenheit! Next we saw the usual graphics on global warming over the the past century and back to the Middle Ages (for example, see this site by Woods Hole Research Center (protecting the integrity of the global evironment). Several people then pitched in with comments about how Al Gore dramatized this in the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” by climbing up a ladder to the peak of temperature. (I am suspicious of politicians and Hollywood actors preaching science, so this film remains unscreened.) One fellow, a retired PhD scientist, had the temerity to speak up that the connection of carbon dioxide to global warming is not yet proven and that other causes, not manmade, could have far greater impact on temperature increases or decreases. Seeing others in the audience squirm uncomfortably and even make faces to indicate how crazy this was, I knew that the earth’s fate was sealed — we are soon to be cooked in an atmospheric stew of our own making. The speakers then broke the church members into small groups to select from a handout of action items some things they would pledge to do (see the MPCA’s “What Can We Do”). I am thinking about buying a bunch of cloth bags to bring my groceries home (one of the items). I’ve already done most everything else on the list.
What worries me more than global warming itself is the intermingling of politics and religion with climatology, for example the demands of a group led by Reverend Rich Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals and Nobel laureate Eric Chivian of Harvard to make changes in values, lifestyles and public policy to avert global warming. Cizik told a news conference that “…Evangelicals have a responsibility to be even more vigilant than others. We will not allow the Creation to be … destroyed by human folly.” An opposing view is offered by Massachusetts Institute of Technology atmospheric scientist Richard Lindzen — a critic of California’s proposed legislation against global warming: “It’s kind of pathetic because we have almost no understanding of major changes in climate over hundreds of thousands and millions of years…we’re forecasting climate when our success in explaining it is about zero.” (Source: CBS Broadcasting .)
Seeing the recent California freeze play havoc with citrus must give that state’s citizens pause in their rush to join the global-warming evangelists.
Longer-term perspective on global warming (and other catastrophes)
On March 16th I blogged about the sharp upturn in global temperatures that some liken to the blade of a hockey stick. The blog provides a link to a graph reproduced by the BBC which goes back 1000 years. Aside from questions about how data are fitted, simple changes to scales and other attributes of the graphs themselves can paint very different perspectives on seemingly straightforward scientific questions such as whether we ought to be worried about global warming. Andy Sleeper shows this in part 7 of his white paper titled HOW TO LIE WITH STATISTICAL GRAPHICS. The color-coded graph generated by the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration is very alarming. However, it only provides 122 years of history and the y-axis scale is restricted to about 2 degrees C. A few figures later in Sleeper’s paper one sees another graph based on 400,000 years of temperatures estimated from core samples of Antarctic ice. It reveals cyclic temperature swings of 12 degrees C! In this context, should a less than 1 degree increase in global temperature be considered abnormal, that is, due to a special cause such as man-made carbon dioxide?
PS. Here’s something to really worry about. The November issue of Sky and Telescope features a heads-up on “The Most Dangerous Asteroid Ever Found” — a 1000-foot pile of rock called Apophis. It will just miss the Earth on April 13, 2029. If Apophis hits a narrow zone — called the keyhole, it will be dragged enough by our gravity to put it on a course that collides with Earth seven years later. One can only hope that NASA’s proposed gravity tractor will pull the asteroid off target and save the planet.