It’s all hot air

Letters to todays Times: Councillor Jenny Jones of the Green Party Group on the London Assembly writes “In London alone, homes produce enough CO2 every year to fill almost seven million hot air balloons.”
Why hot air balloons? you don’t use CO2 in hot air balloons because CO2 is heavier than air. Might it be to give a suggestion of unbearable heat? Why not enough CO2 to create an iceberg of incredibly cold frozen dry ice with a surface temperature of -78.5 degrees centigrade?

 

A year in the life…

One can almost feel sorry for the average scaremongering global-warming thinktank when it’s accurately calculated headline-grabbing meaningless generalisation falls into the hands of the British media – in this case Sarah-Kate Templeton, Health Correspondent of the Sunday Times.

The Optimum Population Trust calculated the carbon emissions of an additional British baby as being the equivalent to 620 return flights to New York. I estimate that they did this by dividing total UK emissions per year: 566m tonnes CO2 by the UK population: c60 million and multiplying by a lifespan estimate of 76 years. This produces their estimate of 750 tonnes per head of population per lifetime – which comes in very similar to the 700-850 tonnes estimated to be produced by 620 average return flights to New York.

So far so good. Obviously one can quibble – were all the flights full? or ask more serious questions – have these people ever heard of economies of scale? obviously an additional head of population isn’t going to have that per capita impact – unless God help us, its Sir David Frost with his thousands of Concorde flights – but basically OK.

Not so Sarah-Kate who reports that it is the equavalent of 620 flights per year. This puts the unfortunate child at 1/750,000th of annual UK CO2 emissions: or in other words assumes a UK population of 750,000.

Crapstats rating ***

 

GLOBAL WARMING SWINDLE – PART III

Get up to speed with previous entries here

First it’s great when people know their own mind: program producer Martin Durkin emailed Dr Armand Leroi of Imperial College London and science popster Simon Singh to say: “You’re a big daft cock…hours and hours of shit programming on global warming…Never mind an irresponsible bit of film.making. Go and fuck yourself.”
Later the bi-polar controversialist commented: “Needless to say, I regret the use of intemperate language. It is so unlike me. I am very eager to have all the science properly debated…”

Don’t you just love the “Needless to say.” Anyway read the story here.

Meanwhile the empire strikes back: the Independent has run a story on “The Real Global Warming Swindle“: and I quote

One of the principal supports for his thesis came in the form of a graph labelled “World Temp – 120 years”, which claimed to show rises and falls in average global temperatures between 1880 and 2000….

The programme-makers labelled the source of the world temperature data as “Nasa” but when we inquired about where we could find this information, we received an email through Wag TV’s PR consultant saying that the graph was drawn from a 1998 diagram published in an obscure journal called Medical Sentinel. The authors of the paper are well-known climate sceptics who were funded by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and the George C Marshall Institute, a right-wing Washington think-tank.

However, there are no diagrams in the paper that accurately compare with the C4 graph. The nearest comparison is a diagram of “terrestrial northern hemisphere” temperatures – which refers only to data gathered by weather stations in the top one third of the globe.

However, further inquiries revealed that the C4 graph was based on a diagram in another paper produced as part of a “petition project” by the same group of climate sceptics. This diagram was itself based on long out-of-date information on terrestrial temperatures compiled by Nasa scientists.

Strange – I saw the program, noted the graph as important and have just googled ‘World Temp 120 years’ and found it on http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_07/ – yes thats the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies - dedicated to research into climate change.

Here it is updated and below it is the last similar graph I found:


As they are both showing the same thing (and if you don’t know that mean and average are the same thing you shouldn’t be reading this blog), its interesting to compare them.
The second one is scarier because its narrower, so all the lines are steeper and seem to be happening more suddenly. It also has a 5 year mimium of -6 in about 1910 which the first one doesn’t have and it has a sharp fall from 1940 to 1950 followed by a gradual upwards slope to 1980, whereas the first one has a plateau from 1950 to 1980 with an actual minimum around 1963.
Human beings are very strongly visual animals (when dogs take over as top species, data presentations will feature smells much more strongly than at present) and we pick up on these cues. Please see support page (yet to be written) “The Iniquities of Bubble Charts”. Which one is correct? who knows.

Anyway here’s a bit of good news: increasingly this blog reads that the temperature fall in the middle of last century was caused by the release of industrial sulphate particles and this masked global warming – and on either chart basis, it was pretty effective. We’ve stopped these because the Scandiwegians were whingeing about their forests, buts isn’t it comforting to think we can always bring them back.

 

IT’S HUGE – NO IT ISN’T – IT’S BIGGER THAN THAT

More examples of how the special interest groups cannot resist piling Pelion on Ossa. As increasingly civilians agree with some of the most doom laden predictions, the professionals have to up the stakes.
A good example here: David Cameron in a speech on 12th March said that 15,590 species were threatened with extinction because of man’s activities. No said the WWF (in the paper edition only) “in reality the real figure would be much higher because IUCN (the World Conservation Union) ignored many of the predicted threats, including changing weather and temperature patterns”. Journalists: Anthony Browne and Sam Coates.

And from the Independent on 11th March (Geoffrey Lean and Rachel Beebe):
“Liz Hurley’s long-haul wedding has produced a carbon footprint so large that it would take the average British couple more than 10 years to contribute as much to heating up the planet as she and Arun Nayar have done in little over a week. It would take a typical Indian couple a massive 123 years.

A special study, by an Oxford-based footprinting consultancy, suggests the celebrations will release around 200,000kg of carbon into the atmosphere.

The consultancy, Best Foot Forward, reckons this is an underestimate.”

But they did the estimate…

Actually there’s an interesting angle on the Liz Hurley stats: her wedding cost $1.95m (half the top estimate) and produced 200,000kg of carbon. That’s 100gm per $.
The average Indian couple have an annual income of about $1500, but produce the same amount of carbon in 113 years: that’s 1180gm per $.
So in terms of ecomonic activity, Liz Hurley’s wedding is about 10 times less polluting than the average Indian couple!
Let’s hope that none of the money the wedding cost in India ended up in the hands of that couple.

 

GLOBAL WARMING – MASS DEBATE BEGINS

See post below for introduction to this subject.

What has this blog found out so far? Well first of all, global warming is hot hot hot. A huge amount of today’s Times was about climate change. There was a pretty typical article, in this case by Mary Ann Sieghart: “it no longer seems tenable to dismiss the existence of global warming or to deny the contribution that humans have made to it.” What’s changed? the amount of coverage perhaps.

There was also an important letter from Terry Evans on climate change: “Sir, Your leading article (“Green Grind”, March 10 ) demonstrates the problem facing the layman in the debate over the cause of climate change”. He’s right of course, and that’s why this blog is trying to advance from the status of layman to keen amateur. We’ll be returning to Tel’s arguments in the future.

Meanwhile this is what this blog has found so far:

1) For the last 25 years, the earth’s measured temperature has been increasing pretty steadily and over the last century has been rising for most but not all of the time.

2) The theory that mankind has caused this – at least in part – is mainly because of a correlation between CO2 and global temperatures over the last 400,000 years (as proved by antarctic ice-cores). This is the famous Al Gore moment.

3) The current argument promoted by ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle‘ is that this correlation is coincidence rather than causation – because the rise in CO2 comes after the rise in temperature whereas the empirical man might expect cause to precede effect. In general, the consensus defence to this is not that the measurements of antarctic ice-cores are subject to error (and so this blog must assume that they are not), but that the flow of cause and effect is complicated in this case by feedback loops, threshholds, other gases and other possibilities.
As Terry Evans says “The discovery that deep ice cores showed that, in the past, carbon dioxide followed the movement of temperature means that serious positive feedback processes come into play which will increase carbon dioxide concentrations as air temperatures rise — ie, possible runaway warming. Most of these feedback processes are well understood.” This means that initial warming is caused by solar activity or suchlike, but is then sustained and possibly increased by rising CO2 levels (probably from warmer oceans retaining less dissolved gas).

4) Sceptics on the other hand believe that as global temperatures increase, so CO2 levels increase (probably from warmer oceans retaining less dissolved gas) but that the change in CO2 levels in no serious way explains previous or current changes in temperature. Changes in temperature are to do with the sun alone or its position relative to the earth – or possibly to the increase in methane emissions by the elephants who support this diskworld.

5) This blog was disappointed to learn (probably erroneously as it was from Wikipedia) that greenhouse gases do not warm the earth in the same way as a greenhouse warms. It had assumed that all controversy could be sorted out by getting a greenhouse, putting a small model of the earth inside it and chucking some dry ice into the bucket on the floor.

6) Hang on in there – we’re about to get to the point.

7) What is clear to this blog is that the relationship between CO2 levels and temperature is much more complicated than the layman is normally allowed to imagine. Catch a look at this graph:

Look at that sharp verticle red line right on the right of the graph – thats the CO2 level in the atmosphere – everyone agrees that this increase (150 years out of 400,000) is due to human activity (let’s be specific – its due to your gas-guzzling SUV, Mr America – now bow your head in shame). The question is – why aren’t we frying tonight?
CO2 levels now stand at 0.0365%, but in the past, the peak levels of around 0.028% occurred when the average global temperature was about 1.5C higher than the latest 5 year average.

Look, however much it wants to, this blog is unwilling to call this a load of old horseshit until it understands more about the feedback argument. But in its younger days, this blog used to make a living in the area of econometric modelling – things like the relationship between price and sales – in that case, whether cause or effect follow each other is much less important: a decrease in price could coincide with a competitive product launch and not cause an immediate increase in sales but over time and on average, the lower price increases the desirability of the product. In the CO2/temparature relationship, this blog doesn’t yet understand why that relationship shouldn’t be immediate – and waits for your comments.

9) When it was still involved in the black arts of modelling, this blog would have said that the relationship between CO2 and temparature had recently broken down, or fundamentally changed in ways that cannot currently be predicted (and cut its fees accordingly).
Because the website that I took the last graph from: Daviesand.com also had this graph: to show the latest cause and effect

but if that is the current relationship, then the 400000 year plot – highly simplified – would look something like this:

which is not quite the same sort of Al Gore moment.

Dear me, tomorrow we’ll go back to something interesting like the number of potato sellers on the M4.

 

IS THIS THE CRAPPEST OF THEM ALL?

It is with considerable trepidation that this blog steps into the Global Warming Arena. This blog has always been somewhat sceptical about climate change because it can remember when the new Ice Age was about to come upon us (and don’t forget that the 1970s saw 7 bad winters). It also dislikes on principle the shrill puritanism that afflicts so many climate change campaigners. The glee with which they tell our young children that the world, far from being the fun place is appears, is in fact a hell built especially for the next generation disgusts this blog.

Nevertheless its a brave crapsniffer who argues with 2500 scientists in the IPCC, particularly since some of them probably know a lot about statistics. Also the consequences of being wrong are very serious: although as ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ pointed out, the consequences of believing in the orthodoxy are also serious.

To sum up then, although this post was inspired by ‘TGGWS‘, this blog is actually trying to work out for itself what the likely truth may be. JOIN IT ON AN EPIC JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY OVER THE NEXT FEW POSTS.

Todays temperature (London) 15C. Average for March: 10C. Record for March: 21C

 

SMALL ERROR – NOT MANY DEAD

The Times – 24th Feb 2007
Ben Webster – Transport Correspondent.

“More than 180 people were killed by uninsured drivers last year.”
Information box same article:
“2m uninsured drivers” Source: Motor Insurer’s Bureau/Association of British Insurers.

But in 2003, 3508 people were killed on British Roads. If that figure is the same for last year then only 5% of deaths are caused by uninsured British drivers, and if they cause deaths at the standard rate that would mean the total number of drivers in UK is 40 million.

OH MY GOD, THATS WHAT IT IS! MAYBE HE’S RIGHT.

Ah but total number of drivers is probably people with driving licenses. So this is probably crap but I can’t prove it.

 

THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN….

the baby beats the nurse and quite athwart goes all decorum.
On the whole, this blog expects misinformation from all sources but was a bit shocked to find that even Google had joined the countless throng of bollocks-providers. This blog was casually googling itself and got the following:

This is the first page returned on a search of “crapstats” (No I do NOT mean carpstats). I’m pleased that I’m above sadtosser – and surprised because he’s got links of links. But whats the point in being right up there if the casual punter searching for my deathless prose then gets directed to www.petsdb.info: and specifically a page about the Tennessee Treeing Walker Coonhound.

Like most bloggers, I’m hoping that someone will turn my blog into a film starring Billie Piper’s snatch, but for that to happen I need the traffic. This sort of thing isn’t going to help.

 

HUGE MOTHERLODE OF DRIVEL UNCOVERED – WILL SUPPLY HUMAN NEEDS FOR 20 BILLION YEARS

In an exciting new development, on Feb 7th, a major source of tripe was discovered in the Times. An ‘information’ box contained 10 claims about how we spend our time. The source was given as “Times Database”.
Was every one of these claims crap?
Let’s have a look:

“In an average lifetime of 75 years, 25 of them will be spent sleeping.” In other words, everyone sleeps an average of 8 hours a night – or if not some people will hardly ever be conscious.

“If you watch two hours of television a day, you will spend 2,281 hours (or three months) in front of the box.” Well 2281 hours is close to 3 months, but as 2 hours is 1/12 of a day, this implies a total lifespan of 4 years (3 months times 12)

“If you walk your dog two miles a day, you will cover 9344 miles during the average pet’s 12.8 year life.” I won’t deal with the question of lifespan by breedsize vs requirements for exercise – what’s the point of accuracy? I’ll just point out that if you multiply 12.8 by 365 and then by 2 you do indeed get 9344 – so they forgot about leap years.

“The average British woman spends two years of her life gazing in the mirror” I suppose this one is hard to disprove. Lets cut out babyhood and assume a constant daily rate of gazing, that gives about 41 minutes a day (no I havent included leap days). This might be true, but for instance my mother hardly ever looked in the mirror during the last 10 years of her life – understandably, and my daughter averages about 5 minutes a day. My wife claims about 8 minutes a day. OK, so you wouldnt come round to my house to look at the totty, but every million people like this starts to make the results for the balancing heavy gazers unfeasable. Some day I’ll put up a serious page about things that have normal distribution (like height) and things that don’t (like gazing in the mirror) – and how to tell the difference.

“Average shoppers will spend six months of their lives at the suypermarket. A typical consumer makes two half hour trips to the supermarket every week.” At that rate, they will only notch up 6 months after 84 years of shopping. But who manages a half hour trip to a supermarket?

>”The average woman dedicates 603 days of her life to applying mascara, blusher, lipstick and eyeshadow – and a further 170 days removing the various layers”. Well if all women plastered themselves in makeup for 70 years of their lives that would only average 44 minutes a day (slightly longer than the 41 days she spends gazing in the mirror. The same arguments apply.

“Stressed British workers lose seven years of sleep over their lifetimes because of work worries.” Presumably this must be in addition to the 25 years they spend sleeping – and what about loosing sleep through other worries, illness, straight insomnia and the odd late night? Hello! – is anyone up? I don’t think so.

“Britons spend more than four years on the telephone in their working lives – with women chatting for a whole year more than men.” If the average person works for 7 hours a day for 5 days a week for 40 years – (and they don’t): then they work for 72800 hours. 4 years on the other hand is 35040 hours. So the average worker would be on the telephone for half their working life – and for every bus conductor, squaddie, shopworker, merchant seamen. miner, schoolteacher who spends no time on the telephone, someone else is on the phone for the whole of their working day?
I nearly mentioned lorry drivers as non telephone users, but scarily, they tend to be the ones who are on the phone all day!

“The average computer user will spend 4.7 years surfing the internet during their lifetime.” How can they tell? most people have had access to the internet for less than 10 years – and how can we know how long the internet will exist in its current form? or the life expectancy of the average internet computer user? (their pasty expressions and RSI show plainly the state of moral turpitude into which these unfortunates have fallen).

“The average smoker spends nearly a month on breaks while at work. This equates to 7426 hours during the average smoker’s working lifetime, or nearly a whole year spent smoking rather than working”
Either: we’re dealing in work months so lets give them the benefit of the doubt and reckon that’s 52 weeks times 35 hours (some work more – others less) * 1/12 (= a man month) (no holidays, no illness, no leapyears). So thats 152 hours a year, which gives a working lifetime of 48 years, which is just too high. Or its a 24hr a day month (as used so often in these statistics) which gives a working lifetime of about 12 years.

For the first time ever, this blog feels able to award the “Times Database” the coveted ***** crapstats rating for exceptional services to misinformation.
Congratuations to the named journalist on the page ‘ Simon de Bruxelles’ and to the sub who consulted this database, probably with one hand.

 

Business as usual

After Christmas there was a period of calm on the statistics front, the newspaper were mainly covering how awful the government is and they don’t any numerical proof for that But suddenly in the last few weeks its back to business as usual.

Evening Standard Febraury 6th: in a preview of the Nigeria Ghana friendly at Griffin Park claimed that there were 1 million Nigerians and 400000 Ghanaians living in London.
Where can this rubbish have come from? I crawled the web trying to find some estimate of the truth when I found this which claims that there are one million Nigerians in Britain. All is explained: the Evening Standard has taken the first number it could find related to the whole country and then claimed in for London.

The truth? who knows – but out of 850000 London schoolchildren, 10400 could speak Yoruba and 1900 Igbo. Obviously imigrants tend to be more common amingst children but this might gross up to about 50-70000 of all ages.

Crapstats rating ***

In the same issue of the Evening Standard came the remarkable headline “One in 10 doctors can’t speak English”. The justification for this was that whereas doctos from outside the EU have to take a language test before practicing, those from other EU countries, didnt and that was 23085 out of 240000 doctors currrently working in this country.
The Evening Standard has immediately understood that as foriegners, they simply can’t speak English – however much you shout at them.

Crapstats rating ***