Tuesday, May 21, 2019

solar variability

The stupendous loss in the depth and richness of human nature is a noticeable part of the price we have to pay in transforming economics from a moral science of man creating wealth to the cold logic of choice in resource allocation. No longer a study of man as he is, modern economics has lost its anchor and drifted away from economic reality. As a result, economists are hard pressed to say much that is coherent and insightful, although their counsel is badly needed in this time of crisis and uncertainty.--Ronald Coase and Ning Wang

Happy Birthday Brandon!

Today's blog is my 3,000th. You'd think I'd be better at it.
Went to PT yesterday for my back. Full employment is beginning to show.
President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency to protect US computer networks from "foreign adversaries".The president signed an executive order which effectively bars US companies from using foreign telecoms believed to pose a security risk to the country. Trump does not name any company specifically in the order.However, analysts suggest it is mainly directed at Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei.

The College Board’s "adversity score" will give students a boost for coming from a high-crime, high-poverty school and neighborhood, according to the Wall Street Journal. Being raised by a single parent will also be a plus factor. Such a scheme penalizes those values that make for individual and community success. We are rewarding the known factors for failure.
Does this mean we will have to give adversity scores to college exams, homework and quizzes as well? How about life?

California is mulling a new state measure that would require cities and counties to allow permits for duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes on much of the residential land currently zoned exclusively for single-family housing, according to the Los Angeles Times. The war against quality continues.
Rutgers University is being investigated by the Office for Civil Rights for its six single-gender, girl-only (no boys allowed) series of programs titled “The Academy at Rutgers for Girls in Engineering and Technology (TARGET).” Specifically, TARGET is a summer program at Rutgers designed for middle school and high school girls [only] to increase awareness and familiarize them with career opportunities within engineering.”

The distinction, emphasized by Friedrich Hayek, between prehistoric life in small bands and modern life in large-scale society: Small bands achieve cooperation at small scale by enforcing social norms personally, in the context of repeated interactions and ongoing face-to-face relationships. But modern economic well-being requires human cooperation on a massive scale, in a market where we depend on millions of strangers

A summary of Trump's Tariff Plan: Trade wars are good — and easy to win — because they hurt U.S. farmers (lost exports), U.S. businesses (higher prices for imports of raw and intermediate materials), U.S. consumers (higher finished goods prices), and the U.S. government (support payments for farmers).


On this day in 1927, American pilot Charles A. Lindbergh landed at Le Bourget Field in Paris, successfully completing the first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight and the first ever nonstop flight between New York to Paris. His single-engine monoplane, The Spirit of St. Louis, had lifted off from Roosevelt Field in New York 33 1/2 hours before.

               This is an abstract of a Harvard paper from 2015.



Debate over what influence (if any) solar variability has had on surface air temperature trends since the 19th century has been controversial. In this paper, we consider two factors which may have contributed to this controversy: 1. Several different solar variability datasets exist. While each of these datasets is constructed on plausible grounds, they often imply contradictory estimates for the trends in solar activity since the 19th century. 2. Although attempts have been made to account for non-climatic biases in previous estimates of surface air temperature trends, recent research by two of the authors has shown that current estimates are likely still affected by non-climatic biases, particularly urbanization bias.


With these points in mind, we first review the debate over solar variability. We summarize the points of general agreement between most groups and the aspects which still remain controversial. We discuss possible future research which may help resolve the controversy of these aspects. Then, in order to account for the problem of urbanization bias, we compile a new estimate of Northern Hemisphere surface air temperature trends since 1881, using records from predominantly rural stations in the monthly Global Historical Climatology Network dataset. Like previous weather station-based estimates, our new estimate suggests that surface air temperatures warmed during the 1880s-1940s and 1980s-2000s. However, this new estimate suggests these two warming periods were separated by a pronounced cooling period during the 1950s-1970s and that the relative warmth of the mid-20th century warm period was comparable to the recent warm period. 


We then compare our weather station-based temperature trend estimate to several other independent estimates. This new record is found to be consistent with estimates of Northern Hemisphere Sea Surface Temperature (SST) trends, as well as temperature proxy-based estimates derived from glacier length records and from tree ring widths. However, the multi-model means of the recent Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) climate model hindcasts were unable to adequately reproduce the new estimate – although the modelling of certain volcanic eruptions did seem to be reasonably well reproduced.


Finally, we compare our new composite to one of the solar variability datasets not considered by the CMIP5 climate models, i.e., Scafetta & Willson, 2014’s update to the Hoyt & Schatten, 1993 dataset. A strong correlation is found between these two datasets, implying that solar variability has been the dominant influence on Northern Hemisphere temperature trends since at least 1881. We discuss the significance of this apparent correlation, and its implications for previous studies which have instead suggested that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide has been the dominant influence.


You don't hear much of this. Maybe because there are no bolds or bullet points or underlines.

No comments: