Courtesy of Watts Up With That, I came across a blog post by Kate Marvel, a climate scientist who says she is "so bored with the hiatus". The WUWT article makes some good criticisms, though in fairness to Marvel, it appears to take her post's title a bit too literally--she isn't bored with the fact of the hiatus, but with all the media attention it gets, which is not quite the same thing. But here I want to focus on another aspect of Marvel's post: it's another good illustration of something I've blogged about before, namely, why the public finds it hard to trust what scientists say.

First, I want to quote a particular paragraph from Marvel's post in full, so that when I start to parody its style, as I am about to do, it will be clear that I am not exaggerating:

Look, sometimes the ocean takes up more heat, and sometimes the atmosphere does. This is because the climate system is complex--so complex that people literally do nothing all day but study how the air and water on Earth slosh around and interact with each other. These pitiable people are called scientists, and despite their questionable life choices they are really pretty sharp. While they no doubt appreciate being reminded of the hiatus by you, WSJ writer/internet commenter/angry uncle, you may rest assured that they are aware of it, perhaps even more so than you! The question they are interested in is not, "how come surface temperatures are rising so slowly?" but rather, "why is the ocean doing so much of the work right now, and how long will this last"?

Wow, that sounds really cool! So what you're saying is, there are these really awesome people who are studying the climate, and they came up with this graph that shows how the ocean is absorbing a whole lot of heat. And, from what I can tell, the question they are asking is why the ocean is absorbing more heat now that it used to, right? That's what "doing so much of the work right now" means, yes?

The problem is, you see, that if I look at this graph you gave, that's not what I get from it. First of all, it's hard to tell what it's saying, because you didn't actually give any data to back it up. So I can't check any real numbers; all I can do is eyeball this graph to try and pick out trends. For example, I can try to figure out how much heat the ocean absorbed from, say, 2000 to 2008 (which appears to be the end of the graph), and compare that with how much it absorbed in previous time periods of the same length.

And when I do that, I come up with something like this: about 70 units of heat absorbed from 2000-2008 (the units are 10²¹ J, according to the graph); about 20 units absorbed from 1992-2000; about 60 units from 1984-1992; about 50 units from 1976-1984; and about 30 units from 1968-1976. Now, if I were asking questions about this, the question I would be interested in is not "why is the ocean doing so much of the work right now?", because it doesn't look like it's doing significantly more work now than it did in the 1970s or 1980s. The question I would be interested in is "why did the ocean do so little work in the 1990s?", because that is the time period that seems to be so different from the ones before and after it. But from what you say, these "sharp" climate scientists, of which you yourself are one, are not even asking that question at all.

(If I were really sharp, I might ask about the 1960s and early 1970s too, and I might even hypothesize that there was some sort of natural cycle in the way the oceans absorb heat, and that this might affect the climate. I might also ask, though, how reliable this ocean heat data is back that far in the first place, since we didn't even start trying to cover the ocean systematically with temperature measurements until the ARGO buoy project started in 2003, and that didn't give us reasonably complete coverage until about 2010. But maybe that's too much for a single post.)

In other words, your graph does not tell me that the ocean is masking warming now by absorbing more heat than usual. It tells me that, during the 1990s, the ocean caused warming by absorbing less heat than usual. So the story you are trying to tell me with this graph is not the story that the graph itself tells me. That does not inspire my confidence, and it probably does not inspire the confidence of other members of the public either (to say nothing of media outlets like the Wall Street Journal).

We do appear to agree on one thing, though:

my biggest problem with the hiatus is that it's really so tedious.

The only difference is that what I find tedious is not the "hiatus" or the general reporting about it, but the fact that scientists like you trot out data and graphs and so forth and claim they say one thing, when they really say something else.

Peter Thiel, in a recent article, says that (as the article's subhead puts it)

If you want to create and capture lasting value, look to build a monopoly

Of course this works out well for the monopolist; but how about the rest of us?

Read more...

The latest round of the Netflix-Verizon tiff that I recently blogged about has now appeared in a post by Verizon and a response from Level 3.

Read more...

In an entirely predictable development, at least if you've been keeping up with my previous posts on net neutrality, Netflix is now having a tiff with Verizon over slow delivery of Netflix content to customers.

Read more...

If you've read my previous post and are still wondering, even after the Postscript, whether I was really being fair, you may be interested in this from Level 3, another major Internet transit provider like Cogent, which I mentioned in my last post. It should come as no surprise that they are also having problems with major broadband providers.

Read more...

In the wake of the Federal Court ruling in January that struck down key portions of the FCC's Net Neutrality regulations, it looks like the agency is now considering allowing ISPs to have a "fast lane" for preferred traffic, which means traffic that content providers are willing to pay the ISP extra for carrying. Needless to say, the content providers, such as Netflix, are not in favor of this. And also needless to say, ISPs like Comcast are hastening to assure us that these aren't the droids we're looking for. (Notice that the Netflix article is full of technical details, while the Comcast post is just corporate doublespeak--not to mention that the boilerplate disclaimers are more than twice the length of the actual post.)

Read more...

Some time back I made a proposal for campaign finance reform. Now I find that Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a constitutional amendment that is identical to my proposal. I don't know if Sanders reads this blog, but however he got the idea, I'm for it.

A while back, I advised climate change alarmists to get off the soapbox. Now it appears that I have to extend that advice to scientists more generally.

Read more...

This news is several years old now, but I just came across the article today and I can't resist a brief comment.

The good news: videos of Richard Feynman giving his famous lectures on physics at Caltech in 1964 are available online, thanks to Bill Gates.

The bad news: if you think this means that a wonderful resource for learning about science is now open and accessible to everyone, think again. From the article:

Note you will need to download Microsoft's Silverlight to get around the site.

You can take the boy out of Microsoft, but you can't take Microsoft out of the boy.

A recent article (via Reuters, via Hacker News) says that the US Congress should spend more time working and less time vacationing. I could go on and on about what Congress actually does when it is working, but that would go in the rants section of this blog. Here I just want to comment on one particular thing that struck me about the article.

Read more...