A weird week

Between people denying that there is a correlation between CO2 and temperature and several other items, last week was just plain weird for me.  A few pieces of, I hope, some more general interest.

One is, of course, the reminder that CO2 is indeed correlated with temperature.  And, of course, since that original article is pushing 6 years old, I should make an update.  (Clue: The conclusions won't change much -- 6 years isn't large compared to the 50+ already used.)  But also the reminder that I really should write that note I've had in mind about just what correlation is.

Then there was the (different) anonymous also on twitter who seemed to think it was terrible that a comment was made equating people on 'the other side' were as bad or worse than the worst mass murderers.  I don't hold with such comments, and the blog in question was for a group that I'm a member of (National Center for Science Education.  But, by the time I saw the tweet from the anonymous the next morning the comment had been deleted.  I agree with the deletion -- if we are talking science, there's no need or point to equating others to mass murderers.  The anonymous was continuing to complain even after the comment was deleted, though.  Don't get that, nor the fact that a different (and higher profile) blog published a main article equating people in climate science to terrorists and mass murders, yet it (the anonymous) has no objection to that.  Nor, to be pragmatic, why it sent me the tweet rather than the owner of the blog.  I may wield awesome power, but that's mostly in my own mind -- not in every organization that I happen to be a member of.

In the midst of those, there was an idiot congressman (Grijalva, D-AZ) deciding to launch a fishing expedition on people, whose testimony he didn't like, got their funding from.  I'm all in favor of disclosure of all funding by people who testify to congress.  But not such selective application of the principle.As it stands, only government funding need be disclosed.  That strikes me as a problem  If you're happy with oil company funding not being disclosed, though, how happy are you that Greenpeace/Earth First!/... funding also doesn't need to be disclosed?  And vice versa if you're not fine with business disclosure.  For the same reasons, I also opposed the fishing expeditions of Joe Barton (R-TX) against Mann, Bradley, and Hughes (2005). 

I suppose there's a certain theatrical interest in what will follow now.  Republicans have officially decried (James Inhofe, R-OK, chair, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee) such fishing expeditions.  But Republican Lamar Smith (R-TX), chair of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, is pursuing his own fishing expedition against the National Science Foundation for funding proposals on, for instance, internet security and fraud detection.  Myself, I'm in favor of internet security and fraud detection. 

And then there's been the recent fishing expedition announced by Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) against NASA for its temperature record analysis.  The analysis that agrees extremely well with results from NOAA, the Japanese Meteorological Agency, the Berkeley effort at re-analyzing all data from ground zero and re-inventing all wheels, .... 

Oh well.  Then there were the llamas, and much to-do about someone's dress?  A weird week.

Next post will be about a couple more substantive, and constructive, aspects to the week.

Question place 2015

Time to hang out the shingle again for questions.  What would you like to know about?

In the mean time -- See Dr. Kate Marvel's distressingly accurate description of the peer review process.  Fortunately it isn't always like that.  Unfortunately, it sometimes is, or at least is close.  While you're at it, add her to your regular reading.  See her also at @DrKateMarvel on twitter.

Also, If you need your fellow scientists to be dry & stern & aloof in order to take their work seriously, you are a terrible scientist. @AstroKatie  Scientists are usually passionate about their science.  How that gets expressed, varies.  Some like the dry+stern+aloof approach.  Some like the yippee! approach.  As she also said, versus the dull and inaccurate 'scientists mystified by X' headlines: All headlines about unexplained phenomena should read "Scientists Super Excited to Find New Juicy Juicy Mystery to Gleefully Obsess Over"

Forecast Evaluation

Boy, blow one historic blizzard forecast and people get all cranky*.  Except, as H. Michael Mogil discusses, it was an almost perfect forecast.  For the specifics of that storm and its forecast, I refer you to Mogil's article.

I'm going to take up the more narrow topic of forecast evaluation.  (Disclosure: I do work for NOAA/NWS, but, as always, this blog presents my thoughts alone.  Not least here, because I agree more with Mogil than the head of the NWS, Louis Uccellinni, about this forecast.)  One school of forecast (or model) evaluation looks at computing large scale statistics.  The most famous one for global atmospheric models is the 5 day, 500 millibar (halfway up the atmosphere), wave number 1-20 (large scale patterns), anomaly correlation.  When people refer to the ECMWF model (or 'Euro') being better than the NWS's model (GFS), this is usually the number that is being compared.  But I don't live halfway up the atmosphere, nor do most of you.  We're somewhere near the bottom of the atmosphere.  And there is much more of interest than just average temperature through a layer of the atmosphere.  So there are many other scores (dozens of them) -- See http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/gmb/STATS_vsdb/ for some examples and discussion of what the scores mean.

Most of those scores, though, don't get to my personal -- weather forecast consumer -- interest.  Namely, I'm trying to make a decision of some kind.  NYC, which heard a forecast of 24" (60 cm) but got 9" (22 cm), presumably made decisions that they wouldn't have if they'd heard the perfect forecast that hindsight now provides.  It's here, I think, that we get to the meat of forecast evaluation.  Had this same error been made over the ocean, rather than over the most populated city in the US, with the rest being as it happened, the NWS would be getting praised for their great forecast.  The important part was not difference between reality and forecast, but number of people who made the wrong (in hindsight) decisions.

So let's explore evaluating forecasts by way of our decisions.  I don't make decisions for major metropolitan areas, and not about street plowing and so forth, so will leave that aside.  One realm of weather-affected decisions is in my running.  Let's ignore summer decisions (I'd as soon avoid thinking about what summers are like here) and go with the path as temperatures drop.  Normal gear -- in pleasant weather conditions, is t-shirt and shorts.  Once it cools below 60 F (16 C), I pull on a pair of gloves for my run.

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Chandler and the Chandler Wobble

The fact that the earth wobbles was expected/predicted long before it was observed, which makes for a couple stories about the nature of science and the people who do it.  The story of the Chandler wobble starts up almost a century before Chandler was born.  In 1765, the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, whose name appears throughout mathematics and physics, was examining the mathematics for conservation of angular momentum on a rotating spheroid -- i.e., something like the earth.  It turned out that such a body could have a wobble on top of its regular rotation.  Given what was known about the shape of the earth then, Euler predicted a period for his wobble of about 305 days.  (Modern information doesn't change this number much.)

The magnitude of such a wobble could also be estimated from the law of conservation of angular momentum, and was somewhere around 0.1 seconds of arc.  That made for a difficult observation in 1765, and it wasn't until 1841 that astronomers started trying to observe this 10 month (305 day) wobble.  Given data analysis methods of the day -- pencil and paper -- analyses were done looking to see if there was a signal with a 10 month period.  No such signal was found, even though several people looked.  Side note being that one of the astronomers who looked in to this was Friedrich Bessel, who was the first person to measure the parallax (thence distance) to a star.  Quality of observing skill was not an issue in his failure to detect the wobble. 

Enter, then, in the late 1880s the next start of our story, and some options of how to tell it.  I could tell the story about a 'lone genius, toiling in obscurity until his great moment'.  It would be doing some fair amount of violence to reality, but that hasn't stopped all story tellers.  Chandler was indeed not being paid to do science.  He made his living as a merchant.  But keep in mind, though, that in the 1800s, 'scientist' even as a label was fairly new, and very few people who were scientists, or rather, who were doing science, did it full time.  Many were men of independent means who used their free time to try to understand the world.

Chandler was one such, but his roots in astronomy extended far back -- to high school.

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New blog -- Philosophically Purple

Very different topics than here, very different writing style, but one similarity -- a love of the universe.  Secondary similarity is that the author is my sister. 

Philosophically Purple

From the close of her first note:

You will have to forgive what I can assure you will be phrasing and punctuating that lives outside the happy boundaries of the Chicago Manual of Style. I am aware of punctuation, I just reserve the right to use it — and word choice — as I see fit. Yep, control issues all over the place here.

My ponderings tend to run along the themes of living life well, kids, being a lifelong student, and friendship. If that has value to you, then come on over to this blog as often as you like. I’ll have a plate of metaphorical cookies at the ready.

Welcome.