Y2K rears its head again...

[kickaha]

http://www.dailytech.com/Blogger+finds+Y2K+bug+in+NASA+Climate+Data/article8383.htm

Summary: The NASA study that had 1998 as the warmest year on record, and a sharp upturn in US temps in '99/'00? Bad software doing the analysis. At fault? A Y2K bug. Ouch.

Authors of study have conceded the bug, and released new results.

Warmest year was actually 1934, and 5 of the 10 warmest years are now *before WWII*.

I would hope that this would get the same sort of mainstream coverage as the original study, since it's a valid correction by the original authors, but my bet is that those sites that *do* cover it are screamed into submission as oil industry apologists. Fox News is going to be all over this like white on rice, of course, which isn't going to help any sort of rational discourse.

Regardless of one's position in the climate change sectarian violence of words, bad data is bad data is bad data. Trend is still upwards, but I'll be shocked to see if "1998 warmest year on record" stops getting used in the mainstream press as gospel. No one wants to admit they were wrong - kudos to the study authors on fessing up and modifying their results. That's good science in action. Too bad the general public gestalt can't work a bit more like that. :P

Comments

[georgmi.livejournal.com]

The general public gestalt thinks scientific knowledge is either Gospel truth (because it's Science, duh!) or a bunch of lies concocted by the Godless liberal conspiracy (because they have their own Gospel truth, duh!).

Peer review, experimental design, reexamination of evidence in light of new discoveries, these things don't even enter into the worldview.

Huh, with data dating back to 1880, 5 of the ten warmest years show up in the first sixty years, 5 show up in the 66 years since then? Sounds about right. Wonder what that does to the projections--is the average trend less steeply upward than they thought?

It also calls out the gotchas in calling the phenomenon "global warming" instead of referring to global climate change, which is what's really happening, and what's really important--the redistribution around the calendar and around the globe of rainfall and dangerous storm activity, and the resulting effects on our ability to produce enough food to feed us all.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Ayup.

Sad when people's own insecurities about being Right or Wrong are projected onto what is an ongoing process of discovery.

The spike in the last few years is quite a bit lessened, but the trend *is* still upwards. As it was in '28-'44, and '50-'58, so it's not exactly a smoking gun. The effect of the reanalysis on the global situation was less, it only altered it by a couple of percentage points down, which is interesting - is something else taking up the slack, is the global data reliable, or do we simply haven't a solid clue how to work with this data yet?

Given the *stunningly* bad data gathering in some areas of even this country, (when a weather station is moved from a grassy plain to the middle of a parking lot, do you *really* think the sudden upturn in temperature is from global, or local effects?) I am highly skeptical of even the base data. We're just all over the map.

[georgmi.livejournal.com]

I've said from the beginning (as in, the early '90s) that arguing about whether human activities are the (or even *a*) primary causal factor is disingenuous at best and deliberately destructive at worst.

Yes, if it turns out that things we are doing (the significant imbalance between carbon release into and capture from the environment, deforestation, marine pollution, ozone-depleting emissions) are contributing to the trend, then yeah, we should see what we can do to reduce the impact. But first arguing that climate change isn't happening, and then that people aren't causing it, and using those arguments to block significant other work on the question, has stolen decades now from our ability to plan on how we're going to react to it. Those decades of arguing are going to turn out to have killed people, maybe a lot of people.

There are many other measures of climate change--the growth of the Sahara, the shrinking of the polar ice caps, the upward trend in frequency and strength of tropical storms. But to a certain extent, even all that doesn't matter. What's important is that there are millions of people (and other species) living on the margins of potentially-affected areas, and billions of people dependent on food production that is susceptible to even fairly minor changes in temperature and (more importantly) rainfall distribution. We have to figure out how to move people out of threatened areas, and how to buffer our food production against disaster.

[ssandv.livejournal.com]

Much as I'd like to jump on this bandwagon, there are still something like 30 different indicators that show fairly rapid change in the global climate profile over the past 30 years. Making this the basis for a counterargument would be like a creationist saying "but C-14 isn't consistent!" True statement in the correct context, but massively misleading.

My primary concern with the way the global warming thing is playing out is that we're not going to get people out of poverty without industrializing them, and we're not going to industrialize them without polluting. People with life expectancies less than 40 can't really wait until 2050 for us to get the pollution thing figured out so that we can let them start actually producing things on an industrial scale. All the shrill screaming and lack of genuine discourse on both sides of this issue may have economic effects here, but it has life-threatening effects other places.

I'm kind of a fan of realclimate.org on this subject--they're good about dotting i's and crossing t's when it comes to explaining what various refutation attempts do well, do poorly, and just flat out fail to understand. If this has legs, I would expect them to address it within the next couple days (though they haven't updated much lately, dang it.)

As far as the "producing enough food to feed us all" meme, that hasn't been a problem in a *very* *long* *time*. There's fairly strong evidence that pretty much every famine in the past 500 years has predominantly political causes. The problem is in distributing food, not producing it. Distributing food is very, very hard compared to producing it.

[georgmi.livejournal.com]

Just because food production hasn't been a problem in the (relatively) recent past, doesn't mean it can't become a problem in the future.

Demand for food is pretty inelastic; supply tends to be very elastic. What that means is that you don't need a very big disruption in production in order to get significant effects on prices, which will push even more people below the poverty line and into the risk of starvation.

[ssandv.livejournal.com]

I'll assume the Econ 101 wasn't supposed to sound that condescending.

I submit that you're grossly incorrect about the elasticity of food demand. Maybe *you've* never chosen whether to eat or pay bills, but lots of people have, and the vast majority of people in the 1st world eat about twice their subsistence level, which at the very least demonstrates a lot of potential for elasticity--there's just never been a *reason* for the first world to ramp back food consumption, since this is where it's easy to distribute. (When the Soviet Union imported grain from the US in the 1970s and 1980s it was exclusively an infrastructure problem. They have enough arable land in Russia to feed pretty much the whole world.)

Beyond that, do you have any actual evidence that there will be a significant net loss of arability due to global climate change? There's a lot of fairly fertile soil that's trapped in permafrost right now, as opposed to the farmland that's been subjected to "modern methods" for 100 years or so, which tend to leave it relatively unsuitable and require lots of extra fertilization, because the government penalizes you for rotating crops.

[georgmi.livejournal.com]

Most people I talk economics with don't know what elasticity means, and it's more conducive to the understanding of my points to preemptively provide sufficient context than to answer questions afterward. If it came off as condescending, it wasn't meant to, and I apologize. I will in return assume that your suggestion that I don't know what it's like to go hungry was also not intended to come off that way, and we'll call it a draw, okay?

Having seen butter prices double over a couple of weeks a couple of years ago with a relatively small decrease in the supply of butterfat, and having seen the effects of a late, hard frost in California on produce prices this spring, I don't think I *am* particularly incorrect about the elasticity of food demand. I will grant that the experience in America is likely different than that in the third world, but I am primarily concerned with the reaction in the States to the climate change problem, for a couple of reasons. First, because I live here and I selfishly don't want to have to pay significantly more for my dinner. Second, because the third world doesn't really have the resources to *do* anything about the problem right now, and the US does. That makes us morally responsible, in my opinion, to be developing solutions. And yes, I am aware of the stupidity of expecting anything like moral responsibility out of our government.

Also, it's not the average person in the States who will be particularly affected by significant price increases--it's the folks on the cusp of poverty, the ones who didn't used to have to choose between food and rent, but might have to in the event.

The problem of production is not exclusively one of the raw acreage of arable land--one also needs the people and equipment in place to farm it, and as you point out, the infrastructure to extract and distribute the produce. Land in permafrost doesn't have any of those things today, and given the way politics work in the world today, I don't see any reason to think that the transition period between the emergence of the need and the development of the infrastructure (and then the relocation of the people) will be swift.

[ssandv.livejournal.com]

Most of which I think makes my original point, regardless of who's correct about demand elasticity--the only way to get those people out of that position is to improve their standard of living, and if we concentrate on avoiding pollution at the expense of industrializing the developing world, they're going to be stuck in poverty long enough that it'll be at best their children's children who start to see the benefits of industrialization.

For what it's worth, I don't think you can measure demand elasticity very well for overall food consumption in the US by store prices because there are so many artificial price supports and crap going on, but it may be the best of a set of lousy metrics. Which, I suppose, is what the original post was about in the first place :)

[georgmi.livejournal.com]

That also plays well into my point that instead of arguing about the existence and cause of climate change, we should be figuring out how to deal with it.

Yeah, quoting butter prices was only half an argument. It didn't seem like butter was moving off the shelves any slower, but that's an impression, not evidence. Could just as easily be explained by lower inventories rather than sustained demand. Hell, could even be explained by my shopping patterns over that period.

It's always struck me as kind of funny that so many people in this country are so dead-set against government "interference" in their businesses, when their businesses only exist because they're in large part propped up by the government in the first place. OK, maybe "funny" isn't the word I'm looking for.

[georgmi.livejournal.com]

Oh, hey--I found this report done for the DEFRA, the UK's Dept for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs:

http://www.defra.gov.uk/foodrin/milk/pdf/agraceasreport.pdf

It lists demand elasticities for dairy products in various countries, broken down by income range. I know dairy isn't anything like the whole picture, but it calls out an interesting data point: The US is by a huge margin an outlier, with a price elasticity of demand for dairy products of -0.095, where most high-income countries range from about -0.25 to -0.45. The poorer countries top out at around -0.75.

[ssandv.livejournal.com]

Cool. There's an obvious problem, of course, that the elasticity of overall food demand would be different than just dairy, because I can choose dairy vs say, soy milk (well, if I could stand the stuff) while still choosing food. Also dairy is one of the worst for price supports in this country. Still interesting stuff.

[georgmi.livejournal.com]

Blech. No, I can't say I'd consider soy more than a partial substitute for dairy. :) I drink it in my mochas because I'm lactose-intolerant, but noplace else do the rest of the ingredients adequately mask the taste.

But adequate substitutes would make the demand elasticity of dairy greater than that of food overall, not less. Which means that -0.095 has to be the result of significant market manipulation, as you point out.

Yeah, I plan to spend some more time poking around the DEFRA site--it's crazy what my brain decides is shiny at any particular moment.