60 Minutes ran a piece on the amount of money spent in the last 2 months of life. It's rationing that's irrational, according to the doctor interviewed. Great journalism, great example of what should be a bipartisan issue that has become a partisan one.
Dec 08 2009
The East Anglia Emails show scientists doing their work---nothing more
As the climate conference in Copenhagen opens today, the democratization of expertise reaches new heights of danger. Scientifically illiterate people, shown a glimpse of how real science works, understanding nothing about it, pull random quotes that are supposed to be scary. They shouldn't be, and they aren't to me.
I am not a climate scientist, but I do read the major journals, and I know what words scientists use when communicating with one-another (but not with the public). Apropos, we come to the first supposedly controversial email
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim's got a diagram here we'll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith's to hide the decline. Mike's series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Hey, look at that, a "trick"...but he says it's a "Nature trick". What the hell does that mean? It means that it's a 'trick' that was PUBLISHED IN THE MOST PROMINENT SCIENCE JOURNAL, which is called Nature. What he means is that there is a good method for inserting real measured temperatures as substitutes for another data set, which is a completely legitimate way of presenting the data and drawing inferences. If you don't like it, you too can come up with another way of analyzing the data. Guess what? Either way, global warming is not in doubt. The care that's going into this graph is to help understand the scope of global warming, the rate, mechanisms, feedback loops, and other things.
But what of "hiding the decline"? Isn't that damning. No. Hiding the decline refers to the fact that tree ring data doesn't seem to agree with actual measured temperatures, which indicates that there is some uncertainty about when tree ring temperature data is valid. We use the best data available...measured temperatures! What would you do? Now, I wouldn't publish a document using the word "hide", but it's nothing nefarious.
The other paper by MM is just garbage - as you knew. De Freitas again. Pielke is also
losing all credibility as well by replying to the mad Finn as well - frequently as I see
it.
I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep
them
out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !
Cheers
This isn't mere squabbling among peers. Jones thinks that the paper is bullshit, written by a hack. Trust me, science has hacks. If you go to the APS March Meeting (which is humongous) you can find the hack sessions. Entire sessions of people whose work is accepted to have no scholarly merit. But APS turns no man away, so they at least have the good taste to group the hacks together. And man, do you know it when you get caught in one. I have seen talks denying tenets of quantum mechanics, proposing the fabrication of materials which are nonsense, denying the existence of black holes, and worse. Jones sees shit and wants it out of the most important conference on climate change. Good! I hope somebody out there is fighting against denialism when it really matters.
The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a
travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on
2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our
observing system is inadequate.
This is only a little bit messier. The problem he seems to be addressing is political, and not scientific. Over the past ten years, if you draw a line, you don't get a net temperature increase, based on the raw data. The reason that no cogent explanation for this has come forth is that climate science is really hard! That is, it's hard to make short-term predictions or say much of anything about recent times. As the time scale gets larger, the data are much easier to explain, as effects like El Nino become averaged out and the real phenomena emerge. Keep this in mind: global warming declarations by scientists are always couched as urgent when applied to LONG TIMES. Don't give me 10 years of data and try to draw an inference, let alone one year of data (if I hear one more asshole say that he doesn't see global warming because today is so damned cold...)
Science is hard. Scientists do a pretty good job keeping the public's well-deserved trust by being careful about presentation. Otherwise, those without training can be easily swayed by people with ulterior motives by putting a quote out of context. We don't show every data set that didn't work out because somebody forgot to turn on the preamp, or the water-cooling broke that day, or whatever. We make judgments and we go with what we believe. If the idiots win this fight because they got a peek behind the curtain, we will pay an awfully high price.
Nov 16 2009
AVS Conference notes (unedited): Day 4
11:20am Nanostructured interfaces for drug delivery. Mucosal delivery is the most important (mouth, etc.). Have to overcome mucous layer. Oral delivery is very hard because of high pressure and flow. Want to go into intestines and stay there for awhile while drug is delivered. Normal drugs only deliver 2-3% of their dose, the rest just goes through. First they used a nanofab to make a large planar device that sticks for a long time and delivers drugs from some gel sitting in some patterned buckets. Delivery very good. Then they made Si-nanowire-covered spheres. The nanowires are about the size of microvilli. They attach to the epithelial layer very well! Permanently, pretty much, which is ok since the epithelial layer sloughs off every 24 hours. They can attach chemicals to the end of the nanowires, which are 20-60nm in diameter, 4 um long. Put cells on a porous film and inserted into the eye, cells migrated into place on the optic nerve and the film biodegrades. Awesome. She also talks about viral capture a little bit. WOW! That's the fucking way to do it! Design a nanoparticle with a bunch of nanowires that have functional groups that will grab onto viruses and inject them into the body. Common cold is cured!
Nothing of note for the rest of the day. This conference is pretty ghetto. No wifi? Shit, even the dinky little CNID conference had Wifi. Need to go work on my 2nd talk a bit.
Oh, good. The hotel wifi is still down. Because it's easy to conduct business in the 21st century without the internet. Thanks a lot, Wyndham.
Nov 16 2009
AVS Conference notes (unedited): Day 3
10:40am Ballistic electron emission microscopy (BEEM) study of hot electrons in Cu film. Lots of questions, mostly because this paper is kind of full of crap and nobody knows what he's talking about. He can't answer the questions, and is trying to intimidate. Lots of people filing in at the end.
11:00am XPS of fuel cell membrane. 30 um x-ray spot (1.2 mil), not bad. Map out the composition. People came for this? All he seems to say is that Pt doesn't diffuse into the nafion.
11:20am Study of materials on steel. Shallow interfaces so that xps can go thru. Valence band XPS. Have to compare w/ band structure calculations. Blah.
11:40am XPS data analysis software. Real-time analysis of XPS. This speaker is terrible. The program is ridiculous. It would never work in a reliable way; xps interpretation isn't that easy. He gave me a good idea about my XPS signal to noise program, though. I should be integrating in Labview instead of taking the peak height. Some computational overhead, but probably worth it.
Oh god, Bartels is talking later. Eh, I can't take this today. I'm bailing.
Nov 11 2009
AVS Conference notes (unedited): Day 2
8:40am My talk. Nobody came.
9:00am Fe3O4 termination. STM below the Velway temperature. This is another talk about residual water vapor effects on samples in a UHV chamber. Is this very interesting? Clean the damn sample. Regular termination is tetrahedral Fe, metal insulator transition. People filed at the end of my talk to see THIS?
9:20am STM of VO2, metal insulator transition. Promising gas sensor. Right. Surface MIT can happen for V2O5. They desorb the carbon at 100C??? How?! 2D band gap maps, turns into something partly metallic at 80C. No correlation with copography.
9:40am Adsorption of alcohol on alpha-Al2O3. Ultra high field NMR. Al tetrahedral and Al octahedral seen on NMR, and some other signal (maybe penta). Al+3 which is just at the surface. This is like the damn surface science meeting. I'm snoozing. Diebold: "Very nice." Whatever.
2:00pm E-beam induced deposition (EBID) and purification of gold. This is so cool! You put down a precursor like CVD and use a focused electron beam to dissociate the molecule and leave gold behind. They made a map of the earth 400nm wide in gold. This guy uses O and H to clean it up, since the precursor leaves behind contaminants when it's dissociated. Atomic H and O work pretty good. All of this is at room temp. Good for 'rapid' prototyping; takes 30 hrs for a cleaned structure.
2:20pm Cryogenic EBID. Low-T improves sticking probability. Dose with e-gun off, then pattern. Uses an SEMFIB, cools to 120K. Morphology changes w/ time somewhat. Can be used for photomask repair. He made some cool pictures and structures similar to dual damacene stuff.
2:40pm Low-energy e-beam on graphene. Thickness with auger. Auger electron diffraction. Lots of stuff here. ESD broad beam study of graphene (1st time). Lots of H+ on it for some reason, probably at step edges. ESD shows many organic fragments. Desorption threshold at 20eV. Knotek Fiebelmann mechanism. (New J. Phys 10 (2008) 093026. Graphene oxide? Hammer's method. Forms graphene oxide by low energy electron irradiation.
4:00pm Nucleation of EBIDs. 4.5nm dots possible, even as low as 0.7nm dot pattern. Needs 300keV e-beam. Leaves behind 1.6nm of amorphous carbon. I have no idea what he's talking about. Where's the nucleation?
4:20pm People keep trying to dim the lights. They are fluorescents, they don't dim. Christ. Direct local deposition w/ EBID & ALD. Oh. You just make a seed layer with EBID and then use ALD to grow more (with high purity). Seed layer of 0.5nm is enough. Limited to low aspect ratios because of ALD non-directionality.
4:40pm People are piling in. This one must be highly anticipated. Trying to break a specific bond with low-energy electrons. Dissociative electron attachment. This is boring chemistry. Eventually needed a buffer layer on thiols at low temp to break only the methyl terminations. This talk could have been 20 mins, was 40.