Clarifying the Science Behind Global Cooling

“It is easy to lie with statistics; it is easier to lie without them.” – Frederick Mosteller

Global Cooling Trend Close-Up of Last Decade

Yesterday I posted this image of what climatologists are claiming is evidence of warming in the last decade, and explained how it actually shows a cooling trend; however, it has come to my attention that the methodology I used, while completely legitimate in a completely fallacious sense, did violate the scientific principle of Occam’s Razor, which states that the simplest explanation is the most likely.

The problem with this graph is that there are way too many dots on it, making it too complex. A much simpler graph, with fewer dots, would clear things up and show how the world has actually cooled in the last decade.

Global Cooling Trend Simplified Close-Up of Last Decade Simplified

See? Isn’t that cleaner? Easier to understand? Occam’s Razor baby. That’s right. This is what those Global Warming cooks don’t want you to see. How about we apply this principle to the whole last century of temperature data?

Global Cooling Trend over the Last Century

Warming Versus Cooling

Where’s your warming now Al Gore? Huh? As we can see from this graph, most of this century has been on a cooling trend. Take all those shaded parts that I’ve so helpfully shaded and all the non-shaded parts that I’ve so helpfully not shaded and put them on a statistical bar graph thing like you see in power point, and look what you get. You get this pic over here to the right, with the red cooling bar being much much bigger, like three times much much bigger than the warming bar.

How can anyone look at this concrete visual data and not see Global Warming’s a crock?

Here’s more on Dr. Marohasy’s global cooling assertions.

More Global Cooling Evidence Embarrasses the IPCC Orthodoxy

A recent article that appeared in The Australian, Climate facts to warm to, has the transcript of an important interview with Dr. Jennifer Marohasy a biologist, free market advocate, and Global Warming skeptic.

When asked “Is the Earth still warming?” Dr. Marohasy replied:

No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years.

Surprising right? Why haven’t all those Global Warming Climatologists been talking about this? Especially, as Dr. Marohasy points out, they don’t deny it:

The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognizes that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued…

We can clearly see this plateau here:

Global Cooling Trend

Global Cooling Trend Close-Up

In case you can’t see it, here’s a zoom in of the last ten years to the right. You can see the obvious cooling trend. Notice the way the red median line looks like it sorta wants to curve just a little bit there? If you use your imagination, you can clearly visualize this red line actually pointing in the opposite direction.

Go ahead. Just imagine that. Imagine this picture upside down. That’s what Dr. Marohasy is talking about. Why are Climatologists at the IPCC ignoring this important fact being imagined in the brains of climate skeptics? Why? Why is the IPCC and MSM refusing to cover this important visualization research?

And what about the NASA Aqua satellite, which has been collecting data since 2002 on Earth’s atmospheric temperatures, water cycles, and sea-ice levels? Dr. Marohasy brings up the satellite’s research several times, but NASA only publishes the data that supports their preconceived notions of global warming, like melting Arctic Ice and global temperatures. There’s a lot of data supporting this cooling trend that Dr. Marohasy has so much faith-based evidence for, and the fact that NASA doesn’t have it on their website, just further proves how real it is. NASA is trying our faith.

And what about the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri’s blatant acknowledgement about the recent temperature stall? Here’s some damning highlights from the article:

Last year was among the six warmest years since records began in the 1850s and the British Met Office said last week that 2008 will be the coolest year since 2000, partly because of a La Nina event that cuts water temperatures in the Pacific.

“We are in a minor La Nina period which shows a little cooling in the Pacific Ocean,” Delju told Reuters. “The decade from 1998 to 2007 is the warmest on record and the whole trend is still continuing.”

The record year for world temperatures was 1998, ahead of 2005, according to WMO data. Among recent signs of the effects of warming, Arctic sea ice shrank last year to a record low. (emphasis mine)

“2008 will be the coolest year since 2000,” got that? Let me italicize, underline, and follow it with some exclamation marks just in case you missed it: “2008 will be the coolest year since 2000!!!”

God Bless the FreeRepublic for notifying their fanatically conservative base of this important development, who then flooded the blogosphere with this news the MSM was so blatantly ignoring, even getting the story on the front page of Digg by fanatically clicking on that “Digg It” button over and over and over again. Thanks to their activism, all those thoughtless sheep who believe the empirical evidence of Global Warming might get a clue.

I also appreciated the way these same activists got an offensive political cartoon posted to Digg under “General Sciences:”

Science is way too liberal in the way it doesn’t push conservative talking points. This cartoon will go a long way towards demonstrating what conservatives can contribute to collegiate scientific discourse.

Also featured on the radio show hosting Dr. Marohasy, was someone arguing that low fat diets cause diabetes and heart disease. I always knew all those servings of fruit and vegetables was just a liberal ploy to effeminate American men.

Programming Adventures: Revision History Humor

I had a good chuckle while working on a Database Procedure today, when I spotted the following entry in the Revision History notes:

Revision History Humor

Super Science Ninja Squad: Alan Turing

Sadly, after his chemical castration, Turing committed suicide by eating a cyanide-laced apple.

Sun Spot Cycle Prompts Fears of Global Cooling

Yet again my religious faith in Anthropogenic Global Warming has been shaken to its core by the power of Conservative Science. Witness the headline appearing on the Drudge Report last week:

“Sun’s ‘disturbingly quiet’ cycle prompts fear of global COOLING…“

The article in question points out that there is nothing to show CO₂ variations have any effect on climate:

R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada’s Carleton University, says that “CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales.”

I simply cannot dispute this statement. In fact, the following graph based on the New Antarctic Ice Core Data starkly illustrates this complete and utter lack of correlation:

400,000 year CO2-Temperature Correlation

As anyone can plainly see, the line representing the Atmosphere’s CO₂ is bright red, while the line representing the Earth’s Temperature is a vivid blue. The difference is plain as black and white… or red and blue, obvious to anyone. Well… obvious to anyone who isn’t colorblind or otherwise blind, like maybe ideologically blind like all those silly tree-hugging hippies who can’t even read a graph they’re so busy hugging trees and stuff. I bet they even wanna marry a tree, they love them so much (That’s why they support gay marriage, it’s a gateway to vegisexuality).

All of this irrational focus on demonizing CO₂ has blinded the world to the real threat, sun spots:

Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.

Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.

This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.

Unlike the imaginary correlation between CO₂ levels and the global mean temperature, there is a real-life actual honest-Abe indisputable correlation between sun-spot proclivities and temperature:

Temperature, CO2, and Sunspots

Sure the sunspot line is gold and temperature red, but notice how cool those two lines look. The sunspot and temperature lines have squiggly lines over them that make them dynamic, exciting, attention-grabbing. These are two lines that have a lot in common with each other, and bear no resemblance to that drab blue CO₂ line. Hmph. Nobody but silly, uneducated liberals could find meaning in a boringly gradated line like that.

And if that doesn’t convince you then check out these peer-reviewed journal articles (or just their summaries) on sunspots and temperature correlations here, here, and here. Makes all those tree-sex-having people seem pretty silly huh? I mean, even sillier than the vegetable sex makes them seem.

---

PS – Exxon, can I get my check now?

ideonexus is a 100% All-American Blog

Sam Shepard, Apollo 14

dorancha has correctly pointed out, without implying that I personally was a communist, that the Smurfs are pretty much commies living in a Marxist Utopia. Some bloggers have accused me of socialism in my Tragedy of the Commons Explained with Smurfs article.

You know who the real commies are in the blogowebs? My critics, who give their content away for free!!! (Gasp! Scandal Alert!)

That’s right. I get paid to blog. Okay? If I was a socialist, I would be blogging for free, like all those faux free-market bloggers.

You think they really believe in the free market? Then why aren’t they getting paid to write about it? Because they’re closet Marxists, snuggling up with the Communist Manifesto before bed every night! Reading their blogs is like having cybersex with someone claiming to be a BBW asian girl who’s actually a hairy trucker wearing panty-hose!!!

So remember. Every time you use a Commie-based, Web 2.0 resource like Wikipedia, a blog that isn’t ideonexus, or the webbernets in general, you are taking money away from honest, hard-working American capitalists, like myself. That’s what I think everyone needs to know and understand here.

I am a 100% All-American Heterosexual Capitalist Blogger.

Tragedy of the Commons Explained with Smurfs

Has been posted at the Science Creative Quarterly.

99 Smurfs on the Wall

Science Etcetera Moonday, 20080204

Shuttle Discovery Approaching ISS

Angela Gunn has the 60-second analysis of the 2009 NASA Budget, there’s good and bad news there.

It is a dark day for the cool kids club, as Iran joins the space race. Booooo!!!

While the bad news is that the 2009 Bush budget is a disaster for HIV/AIDS research, the good news is that all the Presidential hopefuls (with a snowball’s chance in hell of getting elected) strongly support science, although this might just be a case of lowered expectations.

National Geographic has a photoset chronicling the dramatic Drying of the West.

Behold! The World’s Largest Wind Turbine.

Hubba. Hubba. Stillettos boost a woman’s sex life, by strengthening the muscles involved in orgasm.

OzOnatORRRRRRR!!!

Blogging has introduced me lots of wonderfully intelligent, thoughtful people with whom I both agree and disagree. Blogging has also opened me up to the apparent ravings of lunatics as well. Behold, a sample of what ended up in my inbox last month:

First the quakes from global warming, then my “unusually” correct quake predictions providing warning, and then the words of those guilty of these crimes against nature and humanity. I predict unimpeachable earthquakes from global warming because those extremist Republicans and Christian substitute “slide whistles” for “thermometers” and they set about plagiarizing each other for votes, money, organ harvesting, and mass murders. Overlapping with the week of 12/30/07 – 1/5/08, only the predicted choke point of Central America has moved far north to the US/Canada/Pacific region with potential for a major volcanic eruption. (These 3 choke points also correspond to the lobes of tectonics on Mars.) Proving global warming denial is just not an extremist river in Egypt, I present the Prophet Moses and a “red” Nile leaching hidden evil from the Pharaoh to modern Evil Inhofe, Cardinal Pell, and Dr. Dobson exporting evil to Greece

This is maybe 1/10^th of the full e-mail, and it doesn’t get anymore coherent anywhere else. I found fourteen more e-mails just like this in my spam folder a month later, all from Robert J Rhodes, aka. “The Ozonator.”

OzOnatORRRRRRR!!!

My first suspicion was that this was spam-mail language, randomly generated content designed to get around a spam filter; however, not only is this odd-john filling my spam folder with this bizarre, stream-of-consciousness stuff, but he’s blasting it in comments sections all over the web, like here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Strangest of all, there doesn’t seem to be any purpose to it. Everyone in the comments threads ignores it, and all the e-mails after the first automatically went to my spam-folder. “The Ozonator” is putting a fantastic amount of time and energy into composing nonsense and putting it online.

But then I suppose the same could be said of me. : )

OzOnatORRRRRRR!!!

Harnessing the Incredible Brainpower of Sports Fans

Flash Gordon Quarterback, NY Jets

One day I decided I was going to become an American Football fan. I went to a sportswear shop in the mall and picked out a Raiders cap. The Raiders were going to be my team. That afternoon, I arrived at my dishwashing job at the college cafeteria, proudly sporting my new interest.

“Oh hey!” Tim, a coworker who was bussed in from the local mental institution pointed at my forehead. “You like the Raiders!”

“Yep,” I nodded proudly. “That’s why I wear the hat.”

Tim was ecstatic, “You guys have Rocket Ishmael! He passed for suchandsuch many field downs… and kicked X many touch goals… and ran for Y many first yards… and intercepted N many tackles!” Tim was rattling off copious amounts of sports facts at me in a barrage of information overload.

“Wow. I did not know that. Really?” I struggled to process this sudden deluge of data, “That’s cool. Uh-huh. Interesting. You don’t say.”

Tim stopped suddenly, frowning curiously at me, “You don’t really know anything about football, do you?”

“Ummm…” I thought for a moment. “Those Raiders have really cool helmets, huh?”

“I’ll give you a dollar for your hat.”

Sold, and thus my American Football interest was quickly extinguished.

It blows my mind to sit in a bar and listen to the obscure mountains of data sports fans can so casually toss about to one another. These are people who know all major players for numerous teams going back 30 years or more and can expound on statistical analyses of those players’ capabilities that leave my head spinning.

Two football fans arguing over who was the better quarterback, John Amway or Flash Gordon, sound suspiciously like two nerds arguing which was cooler, Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. Football fans geek out just like anybody else, it’s just their brand of geekery is more socially acceptable.

Why is that? Why do some athletes make more than 50 times the annual salary of the United States President? Why the urge to watch people run, jump, throw, and grapple in teams/tribes with “totemic” names like Bears, Eagles, Colts, Panthers, and the like? In his essay, Monday-Night Hunters, Carl Sagan argues that it’s simply in our genes as hunter-gatherers, and it’s easy to understand why a species such as ours, which only began gave up the hunt a few thousand years ago for an agrarian lifestyle would still have brains wired to this vicarious thrill.

But the operative word here is vicarious. This sound and fury signifying nothing constitutes an incredible expenditure of time and resources. Imagine if Sports fans devoted their energies to Science the way they devote themselves to their NFL Team:

Lou: I’m tellin’ yah Benny, Feynman was a better Physicist than Oppenheimer.

Benny: You kiddin’ me Lou? Your thinkin’ that clown was a better Physicist than Robert “father of the atomic bomb” Oppenheimer? Now I know your loosing it.

Lou: That Commie Oppenheimer couldn’t hold a candle to Feynman–

Benny: ’scuse me, but dat’s an ad hominem logical fallacy their Lou.

Lou: Feynman made major contribution to Quantum electrodynamics, the physics of superfluidity, and his Feynman diagrams were fundamental to String T’eory!

Benny: Ah bumpkiss to yah String T’eory. You just wait till that new super-collider comes online and blows apart all that String T’eory nonsense.

I’m telling you, if we can find some way to get the world’s legion sports fans to refocus their incredible powers of concentration and data-crunching cognitive prowess, we could solve world hunger, cure cancer, and be driving hybrids to the #@$%ing Moon in less than 10 years.

Still, I plan to watch the Superbowl Sunday Night for my Vicarious-Hunter-Fix.

Go Raiders!

Flying Spaghetti Monster on My Desk (Shhhh… Let’s see if they notice.)

A friend gave me this ultra-nifty handy-dandy spifferific crocheted FSM for the Winter Solstice Holiday Season, and since FSM is my co-pilot, I’ve placed it on my desk for all to appreciate.

FSM is My Co-Pilot

Here’s the thing. I work for the Federal Government on a Coast Guard Base. We are prohibited from religious displays, so I’m officially breaking the rules. The people I work with are not allowed to hang up crosses, stars of davidzes, etc on their desks. This has come up before, and management asserts that it is a Federally-mandated no-no.

But here’s the other thing. Nobody knows what the heckskies FSM is, so they don’t know it’s religious. Dig?

But here’s another other thing! Even if they did know what it is, by asking me to take it down, they’d be acknowleding Pastafarianism as an actual religion! Thus derriding their own religion!!!

And here’s another other other thing!!! Pastafarianism isn’t really a religion, it’s a mockery of religion; therefore, the FSM on my desk is actually a symbol of secularism!!!

Bwa-Ha-Ha!!! Somebody call the Supreme Court in to figure this one out. I’m not afraid to face SCOTUS!!! First thing I’d do is kick Justice Scalia in the balls!!!

I have absolutely no idea if I’m breaking the Federal rules or not, and I’m chasing logical loopdeeloos around in my head trying to figure it out, and now I… I… I’m feeling kinda dizzy and seasick…

Okay… bye now.

Clan Apis

Clan Apis

Clan Apis chronicles the life and times of a single worker honey bee, Nyuki, who’s delightfully wise-ass and wholly enchanted with her life in a hive where her personal experiences are no different from those of the her thousands of neighbors.

Dr. Jay Hosler’s understanding of entomology, evolution, and natural science allows him to fill Nyuki’s life with all the minutiae of the honey bee’s world. From the details of her life as a larvae, joining the swarm to establish another hive, and defending that hive from other bees and animals. We even learn the physiological effects of the bee ageing process, what happens when bees get old and how they die.

Dr. Hosler’s literary knowledge gives the story another layer. The irony of a dung beetle named Sisyphus, forever rolling his boulder of poop along. The bee characters all have names like Nyuki, Dvorah, Hachi, Zambur, Abeja, and Melissa, which mean “bee” in Swahili, Hebrew, Japanese, Farsi, Spanish, and Greek respectively.

While the his decision not to anthropomorphize his bees’ physiology ensures Disney will never have anything to do with the story (that and its realism, Hosler’s worker bees are female), Dr. Hosler’s choice does not make it difficult to distinguish characters from one another and keeps them entirely bee-like, instead just of being dumb humans with bee-features.

Dr. Hosler’s combination of literary, artistic, and scientific talents create some wonderfully witty moments that stick with the reader long after. My favorite of these is his recounting of the evolution of life in the sea, as things get more complex and more crowded, a lone amphibian, struggling to find some breathing room, struggles to find its way onto land, the first human ancestor to do so:

Although Nyuki’s life is wholly ordinary and unexceptional for a honey bee, her attitude, her perpetual ionian enchantment with her world makes her exceptional and unique.

You can purchase Clan Apis online through Amazon.

---

Jay Hosler also has some great comic strips online.

Somma’s Stochastic Revised

My friend BMF photoshopped up the following version of my Somma’s Stochastic Eponym following a comment thread about what symbol best represents science, since the atom caused some confusion:

Somma’s Stochastic Revised

Bet you wish you had added me to your Facebook friends list now Ira Flatow?!?!

Scientists everywhere are going to see this and shake their heads disapprovingly. : )

Adventures in Dating 2.0

The Internet hosts a wide variety of novel match making services. Personals applications, Social Networking sites, Chat Rooms, and the like all provide the socially inept, like myself, dating opportunities previously unavailable before the Information Age. I can’t imagine how socially-awkward Baby-Boomers found true love without the World Wide Web to aid them. I’m guessing they didn’t, and tried to fill the void by spending up the National Debt.

So I hopped onto one of these sites one day, match.com, and quickly set about building an attractive profile. 34 SWM – Enjoys Rubik’s Cubes, oddball science news, and Star Trek marathons. I was a little miffed that the “How many children?” question wouldn’t let me enter “2.5,” but took it as an encouraging sign that the site administrators lacked my cleverness. I added the catchy one-liner, “Let’s Do Some Peer-to-Peer Saliva Swapping,” to my profile and hit the “Save” button.

Match pulled up a list of potential mates based on numerous compatibility factors such as eating habits, political leanings, and leisure activities. With my electronic bait out in cyberspace and so many potentials, all I had to do was sit back and wait for the ladies to start throwing themselves at me. Right?

Wrong. A whole week passed without a single response. I quickly concluded my profile exuded such brilliance it was probably intimidating members of the opposite sex. I’m such a brainiac that it can frighten women away at times.

So I set about taking the initiative. After intensively researching a dozen or so local single women’s profiles for common political and intellectual interests, I went with the one who had the cutest picture. A career-driven 28 SWF into healthy eating and books on evolutionary biology. She wanted kids too! Cha-Ching!

So I messaged her, suggesting that, with so many personal interests in common, we might be successful at cohabitation and, eventually, through regular, vigorous copulation sessions, successfully recombinate our DNA to produce viable offspring, whom we could live vicariously through.

She never replied. Probably a bot, a computer program set up to lure desperate men into surrendering their e-mail addresses to some company that resells them to spam marketers. That’s the only possible explanation for why she–or rather, it wouldn’t respond to my Don Juan-esque advances.

So maybe my success lay in a different medium, something face to face, yet non-traditional. So I signed up for a Speed Dating event, twelve dates in an hour, five minutes each, short and to the point. I’d never dated before, so this seemed like a good way to get some practice.

I arrived early to scope it out. After peeking through the windows to make sure the coast was clear, I casually slid up to the bar and looked around nonchalantly.

“Are you here for the Speed Dating thing too?” a remarkably attractive blonde woman asked me. It was like she appeared out of nowhere, smiling dazzlingly at me.

“Wh-Who me?” I stuttered, doing my best impression of a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming Mack truck. “I have no idea what you’re talking about! Excuse me I have to to go now!”

I sprinted out of the place as casually as possible, but did manage to sneak back a little while later and spy on the event through the bar window. It looked like fun, but also intimidating, what with all that confusing eye contact and baffling social-subtext to decipher, especially that odd blonde girl. There was definitely something very suspicious about her.

It’s like Groucho Marx once said, “I would never join any club that would have me as a member.”