Open Thread

For discussion of topics not related to other posts.

And here’s an interesting post I found.

Chaos

Math without physics, is not physics.

There’s yet another mathturbation post at WUWT. This one, by Andy Edmonds, argues that because weather is chaotic (in the mathematical sense), it’s impossible to model climate. In fact that’s the whole argument — a lot of words, but it boils down to nothing more.

Regime Change

Last week, a headline in the Bangor Daily News read: “Heat grips much of US, so get used to it.” It was for a story from AP about the unusual early-June heat wave which afflicted much of the U.S., and includes the report that “A new study from Stanford University says global climate change will lead permanently to unusually hot summers in the coming years.”

Must-Watch Video

Courtesy plomedia, highlighted by Climate Denial Crock of the Week.

Scary.

Frankly, Not

We recently pointed to another example of mathturbation brought to you by Anthony Watts, courtesy of Pat Frank (author of this travesty in E&E). A reader asked, “could someone post a paragraph or two about the specific flaws in the WUWT presentation.”

OK.

Circle Jerk

You’ve heard of mathturbation. It has now been taken to the extreme.

Who else but WUWT to make it a group effort? Ick.

Methane Update

As we have noted previously, the second most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas (after carbon dioxide, or CO₂), is methane (CH₄), and although its concentration (only about 1.8 ppm) is far less than that of CO₂ (at 390 ppm), it’s a stronger greenhouse gas on a per-molecule basis, and it ends up transformed into CO₂ by atmospheric chemistry processes anyway. Also, more than half the atmospheric CH₄ load is due to changes wrought by mankind. Atmospheric methane concentration had stabilized from about 1999 to 2007, but recently began rising again, as reported in Rigby et al (2008).

Markov 2

In the last post we showed how Harold Brooks has applied a 1st-order Markov Chain model to the phenomenon of a significant tornado day (“STD”), in particular to explain the frequency of occurrence of long runs of consecutive STDs. An STD is defined as any day with at least one (possibly many more) tornados of strength F2 or greater (on the Fujita scale).

Math Fun: the Markov Tornado

While looking around for tornado data, I found a fascinating page by Harold Brooks in which he builds a model of the likelihood of a “significant tornado day,” which I’ll call an “STD” (yeah, it’s a funny choice). This is defined as a day with at least one tornado of Fujita scale F2 or stronger.

Year of the Twister

Shortly after it became clear that April 2011 broke the U.S. record for the most April tornados, the Washington Post reported that it was not a “legitimate” record … yet. That’s because earlier years’ counts are adjusted upward in an attempt to compensate for our increasing ability to detect tornados in the U.S. However, it didn’t take long for April to shatter, not only the actual record of observed number of tornados, but the adjusted record as well.