What is HADCRUT3?

Hide the Decline

I've been hearing this phrase a lot (it now comes with its own music video), but a picture is worth a thousand words:

This particular picture comes from a discussion of the whole "decline" issue at ClimateAudit.com. The black line is the measured width of tree rings. The red line is the reported global temperature. The "decline" begins around 1960. As you can see, it shows a big difference between what the tree rings say and the weather experts report.

I can't explain WHY there is such a difference... but it sure reduces my confidence in ancient temperature reconstructions. If we can't match global temperatures to tree rings in the last fifty years (when we were actually able to check the correlations), why should we believe anything anybody says about temperatures hundreds of years ago?

Climategate's Commenters

Scanning the mainstream media articles on the East Anglia emails, I've been surprised at the makeup of the comments. They are OVERWHELMINGLY skeptical (of anthropogenic global warming), no matter how left-leaning the publication may be. Why should this be so?

My guess is that those who believe in man-made global warming have precious little to say about the Climate Research Unit (CRU) files, so they aren't even trying to defend them. The skeptics have been scorned and shunned for a LONG time, so they've got a LOT to say. The comments section of major papers has no way to "balance" a situation like this, so you wind up with a journalist reporting on a story, followed by a ton of people piling on.

It adds up to an interesting corrective to the way media works. It looks like a dissenting minority no longer needs to think in terms of "taking back" the media to get their voice heard, even when the sociological structures are overwhelmingly in favor of one position.

Humans and Science

The Volokh Conspiracy is one of the best law blogs around, and this post does a beautiful job of bringing what we know about changing human behavior to bear on the global warming problem. You can talk all day long about the science of global warming, but unless you know something about the science of human action, you're never going to get result. Here's the gist:

I’m not asking about climate science here, I’m asking about collective action problems in international law and policy. How is this exercise different from previous failures? Even if new states are persuaded to say yes on paper, on what grounds does anyone think that these commitments will be fulfilled this time, particularly given the record of Kyoto? The article linked here from the AP talks about “momentum building” and “legally binding agreements.” What does that mean and how? Legally binding to prevent defection down the road, how? This is not an attempt to get snarky, but complete puzzlement on my part. How is this different from earlier attempts?

I've been vocal about pursuing supply-side fixes to the global warming question. I don't think humans have the political tools we would need to keep developing nations from using fossil fuels if that is the cheapest available source of energy. That leaves us with the option of building better mousetraps with a lower carbon footprint.

Nothing beats nuclear power for a free-market means of cutting the carbon footprint. I'm all for nukes, whether global warming is a man-made crisis, a politically-driven fraud, a statistical blip, or a solar cycle. We've got the technology to provide cheap, clean, safe electricity anywhere on earth. Let's do it!

The Intelligence of the Blogosphere

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit linked to this Harvard blogger who included Instapundit in his research on the interconnectedness of blogs, as shown in this chart:

The new science of artificial "neural networks" suggests that one can model the blogosphere (or any human community) as a neural network. Each blogger has a set of regular inputs (like the dendrites on a neuron) and a single output (like the axon). "Learning" occurs as synapses form and/or break between dendrites and neurons (and/or strengthen and weaken), with the "intelligence" of the system emerging as a result of interconnected nodes.

There's no real question whether the blogosphere (and other networks of communicators, such as the traditional media) is a neural network--the more interesting question is "how intelligent is it?"

That turns out to be a remarkably easy question to explore. Politics divides the blogosphere neatly into left and right sides, and both sides of the blogosphere are constantly making predictions. Those predictions get tested every election cycle. That means researchers should be able to:

1. map out the general structure of the neural network on both sides,


2. collect pre-election predictions,


3. compare those to public opinion polls (as a "baseline"), and


4. compare the "spread" between predictions and polls to the actual results.

A neural network built around the axis of the DailyKos/DemocraticUnderground/FireDogLake blogs might prove to be more "intelligent" than the competing net that includes Drudge/Instapundit/RedState, or it might not. As a matter of pure science, I'd love to know which is better.

And, as a political junkie, I'd love to add all the "intelligence" I can find to my own side!

A Single Human Ancestor

Every blue-eyed human is descended from a single ancestor who lived 6,000-10,000 years ago, says the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Copenhagen. (Nobody knows blue eyes like those Scandinavians!)

This finding might be consistent with the Ryan-Pitman Black Sea Flood theory. The time frame is about the same (Ryan and Pitman claim that Mediterranean waters broke through the Bosporus and flooded the Black Sea around 5500 BC.) That's 7,500 years ago--easily within the blue-eyed time frame. A sudden diaspora of blue-eyed Black Sea farmers would explain why blue eyes are so prevalent in Europe without resorting to a "survival of the fittest" model that says that a blue-eyed babe is really that much more attractive than a brown-eyed girl.

If there were blue-eyed farmers around the Black Sea in 5500 BC, one should be able to track where they went from there, using a combination of mitochondrial DNA and the unique gene for blue eyes. Ryan and Pitman use clues like agriculture and Indo-European vocabulary to support their thesis, but these genetic markers might help to confirm or disprove their theory.

It's about time!

Which environmental agency handles this one?