Dean's World

In my recent post on Gore getting smeared (again) for his global warming advocacy, I made some statements that were incorrect in the comment thread and would like to acknowleddge them (and thank Jody and Casey Chris Moore in particular).

First, I claimed that the output of a star drops off with the fourth power of distance. This is, as Casey Chris Moore points out, incorrect - as a simple review of basic geometry would suggest, if you define the surface area of increasing radius spheres, and postulate that the energy over that surface is to remains a constant, then it must be a inverse-squared law.

My error was in confusing from my flawed memory the luminance relation with distance, with the luminance relation with temperature. In fact the output of a star varies with the fourth power to its blackbody temperature:

l ~ σT⁴

where for a perfect black body, σ = 5.67 × 10^-8 W m^-2 K^-4 (the so-called Stefan-Boltzmann constant).

Also, Jody provided a link to information I had not seen before that indicates that the power output of the sun is indeed variable. From that article:

"Historical records of solar activity indicate that solar radiation has been increasing since the late 19th century. If a trend, comparable to the one found in this study, persisted throughout the 20th century, it would have provided a significant component of the global warming the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports to have occurred over the past 100 years," he said.

It is important to note the very big "If" in the quote above, for the purposes of trying to relate solar output to global warming. Again, given the absolute neccessity of keeping all these factors in proper account, and also making sure predictions fit to past observations, there is no substitute for computer modeling, despite what the skeptic Mr Gray claims.

BTW, RealClimate had a piece discussing the warming "trend" observed on Mars that I think is fair and rigorous. The RC folks also discuss the relevance of solar output in the following posts:

Did the Sun hit record highs over the last few decades?

The lure of solar forcing

A critique on Veizer’s Celestial Climate Driver

Read them and draw your own conclusions.

FWIW, Casey also takes me to task for my incredulity at dismissing computer models, and asks why models can't take 1950's data and predict 1975 weather. The answer however is that climate and weather are not the same thing.The sheer idiocy of Gray's skepticism for computer models is indeed a credibility-shredding position. On this point, you need to learn more about what climate models are for. Predicting weather is decidedly NOT the point.

And finally, I am sorry for the poor state of political wrangling in the HIV-AIDS debate, but rejecting the validity of peer review and the basic mechanism of how science works in this country as a result is an extreme cynic's perspective which I don't share. If HIV-AIDS is one anecdote, then my own field (medical physics) is the opposite and equal one. So I am still not even remotely sympathetic to cries of government bias and funding problems claimed by the skeptics. That's a cop-out - when you lose the debate on the facts, cry conspiracy.

Thanks, guys, for keeping me honest.

UPDATE: sorry Chris. Got you mixed up with Casey on the comment thread.

In this video segment, Sterling Burnett smears Al Gore by comparing him to the Nazis.

transcript:

Burnett: That's the problem. If I thought Al Gore's movie was as you like to say, fair and balanced, I'd say, everyone should go see it, but why go see propaganda? You don't go see Joseph Goebbels’' films to see the truth about Nazi Germany. You don't go see Al Gore’' films to see the truth about global warming...

watch the video for more - including how the host cuts off a rebuttal to Burnett pointing out that he's a paid lobbyist working for Exxon Mobil.

via Crooks and Liars.

All signs point to a hurricane season just as bad, if not worse, as last year. To add insult to injury, looks like there might well be a new category introduced: Category 6.

there have already been hurricanes strong enough to qualify as Category 6s. They'd define those as having sustained winds over 175 or 180 mph. A couple told me they'd measured close to 200 mph on a few occasions.

The Saffir-Simpson hurricane category scale is based on wind speed: A Category 1 hurricane has sustained winds from 74 to 95 mph, Category 2 has sustained winds from 96 to 110 mph, Category 3 has sustained winds from 111 to 130 mph, Category 4 has sustained winds from 131 to 155, and a Category 5 storm has sustained winds greater than 155 mph.

The categories run in roughly 20 mph increments, so a Cat 6 would be greater than 175 or 180 mph.

"Remember, for each 10 mph increase of wind speed," says atmosphere scientist Greg Holland, "there's about 10 times more damage, and 20 times more financial loss."

In other words, the increase is not "linear" but "exponential."

The article points out that there is alink between gloal warming and hurricane strength, but overstates it slightly. As the RealClimate folks pointed out, it's impossible to ascribe cause for any single event (ie, Katrina) to global warming. However, there definitely is a relationship - in a nutshell,

while we cannot draw firm conclusions about one single hurricane, we can draw some conclusions about hurricanes more generally. In particular, the available scientific evidence indicates that it is likely that global warming will make - and possibly already is making - those hurricanes that form more destructive than they otherwise would have been.

The key connection is that between sea surface temperatures (we abbreviate this as SST) and the power of hurricanes. Without going into technical details about the dynamics and thermodynamics involved in tropical storms and hurricanes (an excellent discussion of this can be found here), the basic connection between the two is actually fairly simple: warm water, and the instability in the lower atmosphere that is created by it, is the energy source of hurricanes.

The RealClimate folks also point out that Al Gore's global warming movie An Inconvenient Truth treated the topic of hurricanes and global warming with the proper restraint.

Living in Houston as I do, I evacuated last year for Rita. I blogged the entire ordeal (scroll to the bottom and then go upwards). I'll be doing the same this year should the need unfortunately arise.

My son Jake, when he was just a baby (he's going on 9 now, and an Honors Student 3rd grader) developed a bad case of diarrhea. He was pooping like crazy, which scared the crap (ha, ha) out of my lovely wife and me. His fontanelle was sunken, and he looked horribly thin and was not reacting normally to things. But we worked with our family physician and got him the fluids he needed, and he was okay.

Now here's the thing: even though we're basically working class people, we had good access to doctors and decent health care here in wealthy America. He got real bad at one point but we were able to take him to a first-class American Emergency Room, with consultation with a good family physician, and we got him through it. He's fine now.

But as it happens, in the third world, babies die every single day of this simple malady: Diarrhea. Thousands, tens of thousands, die of it. Every single day, babies die of this. It's no damned joke.

So imagine my reaction when I read this:

A tiny biosciences company is developing a promising drug to fight diarrhea, a scourge among babies in the developing world, but it has made an astonishing number of powerful enemies because it grows the experimental drug in rice genetically engineered with a human gene. ADVERTISEMENT

Environmental groups, corporate food interests and thousands of farmers across the country have succeeded in chasing Ventria Bioscience's rice farms out of two states. And critics continue to complain that Ventria is recklessly plowing ahead with a mostly untested technology that threatens the safety of conventional crops grown for food.

"We just want them to go away," said Bob Papanos of the U.S. Rice Producers Association. "This little company could cause major problems."

Ventria, with 16 employees, practices "biopharming," the most contentious segment of agricultural biotechnology because its adherents essentially operate open-air drug factories by splicing human genes into crops to produce proteins that can be turned into medicines.

Ventria's rice produces two human proteins found in mother's milk, saliva and tears, which help people hydrate and lessen the severity and duration of diarrhea attacks, a top killer of children in developing countries.

But farmers, environmentalists and others fear that such medicinal crops will mix with conventional crops, making them unsafe to eat.

The company says the chance of its genetically engineered rice ending up in the food supply is remote because the company grinds the rice and extracts the protein before shipping. What's more, rice is "self-pollinating," and it's virtually impossible for genetically engineered rice to accidentally cross breed with conventional crops.

I am completely on Ventria's side. I hate those who say "don't experiment with human genes" this way. This isn't "frankenfood," this is life-saving stuff.

(Thanks Harvey for bringing it to my attention.)

Our friend Harvey has an interesting piece on the drug ibogaine up at Llew Rockwell's site.

Wikipedia's got some pretty good supplemental info on the drug.

Update: And here's an even lengthier writeup. More on Harvey here.

Quoted from The American Journal of Psychiatry Vol. 134, No. 10. October 1977:

A 49-year-old married woman presented on an urgent basis for psychiatric evalution because of delusions of being a wolf and "feeling like an animal with claws." She suffered from extreme apprehension and felt that she was no longer in control of her own fate: she said, "A voice was coming out of me." Throughout her 20-year marriage she experienced compulsive urges towards bestiality, lesbianism, and adultery.

The patient chronically ruminated and dreamed about wolves. One week before her admission, she acted on these ruminations for the first time...

And:

During the first 3 weeks, she suffered relapses when she said such things as "I am a wolf of the night; I am a wolf woman of the day...I have claws, teeth, fangs, hair... and anguish is my prey at night...the gnashing and snarling of teeth...powerless is my cause, I am what I am and will always roam the earth long after death...I will continue to search for perfection and salvation."

More right here.

Interesting to be the psychiatrist who got to write up that casty study, eh?

An old internet friend of mine, Dr. Loren Cordain, has published a dietary cure for Acne.

Loren is no slouch. He's a respected professor of physiology who has published in a wide variety of peer reviewed publications. This isn't herbalism or any of that--when Loren says something, he's got very solid research behind him.

According to a somewhat surprising new study:

White, middle-aged Americans — even those who are rich — are far less healthy than their peers in England, according to stunning new research that erases misconceptions and has experts scratching their heads.

Americans had higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, strokes, lung disease and cancer — findings that held true no matter what income or education level.

"I knew we were less healthy, but I didn't know the magnitude of the disparities," said Gerard Anderson, an expert in chronic disease and international health at Johns Hopkins University who had no role in the research.

Let's get this out of the way first: despite some intimations to the contrary early in the article, the difference has nothing to with Britain's socialized medicine.

However, Britain's universal health-care system shouldn't get credit for better health, Marmot and Blendon agreed.

Both said it might explain better health for low-income citizens, but can't account for better health of Britain's more affluent residents.

Marmot cautioned against looking for explanations in the two countries' health-care systems.

"It's not just how we treat people when they get ill, but why they get ill in the first place," Marmot said.

In fact, logically it really has nothing to do with the medical system's efficiency at all. Health care doesn't keep you from getting sick, it treats you after you get sick.

So why do Americans get sick more often? The study says exercise and obesity can't explain it, so I'll offer another possible explanation:

Tea.

Britons obviously consume much more tea than we do (it's their national tradition), as do the Japanese. Both have similarly lower rates of chronic disease than we do. There are mountains of empirical evidence showing tea reduces the risk of many chronic illnesses like heart disease and some types of cancer, particularly over the long term. Even the mechanisms are now fairly well-understood.

While the FDA still isn't on board, at least in regards to breast/prostate cancer, the overall evidence is strong enough that anyone who has concern for their long-term health should probably be drinking tea, taking a green tea supplement, or both.