Peak Oil?

A leetle rant about those who insist that PO is here! In NZ! I told yer so!

Variations on 'I told you so' are a good substitute for thinking?

NZ is nowhere near PO: the CSG prospecting undertaken by L&M, the Southland lignite fields, and the highly prospective offshore oiliferous zones are all local mitigators. The undoubted impact in a wider sense is of the toxic combination of locally selective PO (e.g. Europe), and BHO's latest excursion into the international version of Chicago Machine Politics which won't end well.

What is needed is a cool, realistic view of how best to use our certain and extensive resources well: so as to make a transition which:

- preserves living standards for working people at or somewhere near current levels. (The rich always have multiple options, ignore them, and it might be as well to state out loud what Won't be possible, in terms of aforesaid living standards' contents). And condemning folk to live in the late 17th century won't cut it, either.

- does not involve more than a reasonable extension of current technological trends. F'rinstance, positing mass use of personal EV's is perfectly OK. Proposing maglev rail everywhere isn't. No unicorn milk and pixie dust, please.

- takes into account the dark view exemplified by fiction such as Danny Suarez' 'Daemon', informed though such as John Robb's Global Guerillas (much mischief for very little input because of systempunkts spread liberally through our infrastuctures), and the genetic fact that we're highly evolved monkeys with an immense capacity for self-delusion and mayhem.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Maybe.

Could be termed 'sustainability' but that phrase is soooo devalued.

Accounting for Temperatures

I’ve had a good deal of experience with accounting systems, and it has just struck me that the whole global temperature database should be constructed in a transactional fashion.

To wit:

Each station in the record has an ‘account’ – a GUID if you will, and all temperature values and adjustments for a given station are recorded as transactions for that account, assigned to a date (and even time), and classified as some Type of transaction.

Types of transactions (trx) could usefully be globally codified: as it’s clear that a potent source of confusion is just what value adjustment happened to what data, when. The analogy here is to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) which rules the accounting world. Sorely needed in the world's temperature records....

Accounting systems which use the ’single-table’ approach and are in essence just a big bucket of transactions thereby, could in fact be adapted for this sort of recording. I've worked with SunSystems, Coda and Kypera - all are of this type. There are probably many others.

Trx types would obviously include:

- RAW measurement
- UHI adjustment
- EQP equipment change/calibration etc
- LOC location change adjustment

and so on.

Then, every Step in any process which causes value adjustments to be made to any data point (account/station, day) could be traced, and most importantly, added as a new trx, thus leaving the raw data strictly alone.

Auditors love this sort of approach, and the SQL database engines which store and handle the data, make short work of the heavy lifting in terms of summing trx, adding trx, and consolidating data. Of course the database itself is typically chock full of compliance features (thanks to SarbOx).

As a final aid to traceability, each trx can be stamped with the process name that put it there, and even a description. And who…..

And the beauty of this is that the existing data-generation routines can still operate, but instead of altering arrays of values, they would be adding trx per single data point.

As the start of a Global Temperature Dataset, a transactional accounting-style structure would begin to address the ‘amateur hour’ data storage and versioning techniques we see in so much of the CRU dataset, thanks to Harry.

Harry Read Me - ClimateGate

An entertaining read. Harry has grave qualms about the data, the methods, and his own abilities, all written up in the ReadMe text file in unflinching fashion.

A lovely quote:

So, once again I don't understand statistics. Quel surprise, given that I haven't had any training in stats in my entire life, unless you count A-level maths.

An honest man in a den of vipers - I've just finished Wolf Hall, and the similarity between the climate crew and the post-Luther Catholic church is striking.

Climate crew:
- suspect data,
- data munges up the wazoo,
- academic echo chamber,
- currently facing funding cuts and fraud scrutiny,
- lashing out at critics (how Dare they - they aren't even Peer-Reviewed!).

Catholic Church:
- failing belief in the basic propositions by population,
- emergence of fanatical fringes of existing belief system,
- closed system of ecclesiastical courts (a state within a state)
- facing funding cuts as Henry VIII realises that if he can be Head of the Church and thus secure a ruling on his first 'marriage', he can also obtain the keys to the church's extensive coffers,
- burns critics at the stake after trials conducted by....priests!

I know analogies by example aren't scientific, but hey, it worked for carbon dioxide and AGW, d'innit?

Climategate - a few links

The 'Hardly Screwed' epithet which envious types used to throw at the University of east Anglia's Climate Research Unit is spookily accurate, possums....

Chiefio - who has discovered the 'snowbird' tendency of global thermometering - is my favourite link, because he took the time to actually build a test Linux box, work through the GisTemp code and station data, and think about the results. An engineer after me own heart. The results, for those lazy sods who don't click links is threefold:

1 - fewer thermometers in the world over time
2 - survivors tend to be at the coast or at low altitude
3 - history data, being from high altitudes as well, plus inland, is inherently different and colder, so the 'snowbird' thermometers (coastal or low altitude) with which this history is being compared show Warming! Quelle surprise....

Iowahawk has given us a short lesson on the climatologist ecology. Read it and laugh. Or have a replacement keyboard handy if you are consuming liquid refreshment.

Smoking gun or AGW Mushroom Cloud? I favour the latter, but the deaths will take years, and will be by radiation poisoning - the slow cutting off of grants funding....

AGW as Mass Delusion

Heh. Couldn't have put this better meself. There are two mass delusion abroad IMHO: AGW being one (natch) and the notion that financial Ponzi schemes will not cause pain, the other. Sigh. As Dylan sings (Things have Changed):

People are crazy and times are strange
I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range
I used to care, but things have changed

Another climactic known is revealed to be unknown

This leetle bombshell affects, oh, around half the marine organisms in the world. In essence, by omitting the 'assumed in the current paradigm' step of releasing oxygen while consuming carbon dioxide, these organisms have never done a darn thing in the carbon cycle.

That sound you may hear if you listen closely is a whole bunch of Gerbil Worming gravy train riders saying 'bugger' and re-calibrating their GCM's to show that We're All Freaking Doomed, still. Gotta keep them grant shekels flowing.

The shekel quote:

Wolf Frommer, director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Plant Biology, agrees about the discovery's ground-breaking importance. "If we thought we have understood photosynthesis, this study proves that there is much to be learned about these basic physiological processes."

The Key to All Mythologies

This article (ht: Gods of the Copybook Headings) sums up my own attitude to The Gerbil Worming debate. A teaser quote:

"it speaks in the doom-laden accents of pure certitude of what will happen in 50 or 75 or a hundred years from now - and, with the same ferocious certitude, demands decisions of immense consequence be made now to forestall its bleak and definitive projections."

Right on, bro'.