Tag: science

Using today’s most advanced climate models Indian meteorologists were still unable to correctly predict this year’s monsoon rainfall.

9:39 am

The uncertainty of science: Using today’s most advanced climate computer models and data, Indian meteorologists were still unable to correctly predict this year’s monsoon rainfall.

The rains during the four-month-long monsoon season (June to September) – accounting for more than 80% of India’s annual rainfall – is crucial for the agricultural economy. In April, the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) had predicted that the monsoon season would see normal or above-average rainfall. On 2 August, however, it confessed that more than half of India has received “deficient or scanty” rains, and that the monsoon rainfall for the entire country is likely to be 19.7 % less than normal.

Because they were trying to predict a long term weather pattern, the overall rainfall produced by the yearly monsoon, this prediction was not unlike most of the climate temperature predictions produced by the IPCC’s global warming climate scientists. Moreover, this monsoon prediction likely used similar algorithms and the same data as the IPCC models.

Thus, this failed prediction of monsoon rainfall gives us another peek into the accuracy of those global warming climate models. And that peek is not encouraging. It suggests once again that we should not yet put much faith in the predictive accuracy of the IPCC’s models. The science is simply not advanced enough yet.

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The Sun continues to fizzle

9:56 am

Yesterday NOAA posted its monthly update of the ongoing sunspot cycle of the Sun. You can see this latest graph, covering the month of July, below the fold.

As we have seen now for almost four years, the Sun continues to under-perform the predictions of solar scientists when it comes to the number of sunspots it is producing. In fact, that the sunspot number did not rise in July is surprising, as July had appeared to be a very active month for sunspots, with some of the strongest solar flares and coronal mass ejections seen in years. Instead, the number declined ever so slightly.
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Archeologists are disputing the age of a jawbone found in a cave in England.

12:37 pm

The uncertainty of science: Archeologists are disputing the age of a jawbone found in a cave in England.

Both sides of the debate agree that there is a lot riding on the outcome. “What is at stake is the entire [prehistory] of Neandertals and early modern humans in Europe,” Pettitt says. Apart from the Kents Cavern fossil and some 43,000- to 45,000-year-old teeth from Italy whose status as modern human or Neandertal is currently also debated, the oldest undisputed human fossils in Europe are about only 40,000 years old and come from a site in Romania. If modern humans really made it all the way to northwest Europe by 41,500 years ago or even earlier, it would mean that they entered Europe much earlier than once thought and also spread across the continent very rapidly. It would also increase the overlap between modern humans and the Neandertals, who already lived in Europe, and who went extinct sometime between 40,000 and 35,000 years ago. What’s more, such an overlap could make it more likely that Neandertals, who made sophisticated ornaments and tools in their last years, copied these techniques from modern humans rather than inventing them on their own.

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A scientific analysis of a database of over a million songs produced since 1955 has found that modern popular music is louder and has less variety or range than the popular music of the past.

9:06 am

A scientific analysis of a database of over a million songs produced since 1955 has found that modern popular music is louder and has less variety or range than the popular music of the past. Key quote:

Lastly, the researchers detected a trend of homogenization of the timbral palette. Timbre is what makes a particular musical sound different from another, even when they have the same pitch and loudness. It is essentially the difference between different instruments playing the same note at the same loudness. They found that, after peaking in the mid 60s, timbral variety has continued to narrow.

This confirms a suspicion of many fans of modern popular music, that it is less interesting and shows far less creativity than the popular music of the 1960s. This result might also explain why 1960s music remains so popular.

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A journalist takes objective look at global warming

10:13 am

For the past week there has been a new spat of articles written about human caused global warming, instigated by an op-ed (subscription required) written by scientist Richard Muller in the New York Times, where he wrote:

Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

Not surprisingly, the mainstream press has jumped on this op-ed and the public release of new data by Muller’s team as further proof that the debate over global warming is settled and we should all bow to our governmental overlords and agree to any regulations they propose to save the planet.

Not so fast.
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Water Ice in Shackleton Crater?

9:58 am

Ice in Shackleton?

New results from the radar instrument on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has found evidence of water-ice on the slopes of Shackleton Crater, located at the Moon’s south pole. The paper, published on Saturday in Geophysical Research Letters – Planets, suggested that about 5 to 10 percent of the weight of the material on the slopes of the crater is comprised of water ice, to depths of 6 to 10 feet.

The box on the upper left in the image to the right shows the data from a radar sweep of the crater taken on April 18, 2010, and compares that to five computer models. As you can see, the data here most closely matches the 5% ice model. Two other sweeps showed similar results.

The water-ice, if there, is not in slabs of ice, as sometimes portrayed in the press, but would be mixed into the Moon’s regolith, or “topsoil”, and would have to be processed out like ore to be useful. Or to quote the paper’s conclusion:

The fundamental conclusions made with high resolution, ground based radar of Shackleton remain unaltered — that no large-scale, meters thick ice deposits are evident within the crater. Rather, Mini-RF data are consistent with roughness effects or with a small percentage of water-ice deposits admixed into the uppermost 1-2 meters of silicate regolith within Shackleton, possibly accounting for the observations made by the Clementine bistatic experiment.

Several points:
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most of the weather stations in the US are so poorly sited that their temperature data is unreliable.

7:28 pm

“Most of the weather stations in the US are so poorly sited that their temperature data is unreliable.”

The article describes a new paper which analyzed the reliability of the weather stations in the U.S. and found that NOAA not only favored the data from the more untrustworthy stations — which also happened to have a warming bias — they then adjusted the overall data upward even more.

In other words, any temperature data from the last few decades cannot be trusted.

The full details can be found at Watts Up With That, but I haven’t given that as the main link because the page takes so long to load due to the many comments. You can also go here for additional information.

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