Inhofe's Law

--by Horatio Algeranon

To Moore's great Law
We toast with beers:

Transistors double
Every two years.

To Inhofe's Law
We can only cringe:
Stupidity doubles
On an endless binge.

Econolyin'

-- by Horatio Algeranon

Econo-reality,
It's plain to see
Is certainly not
What it's claimed to be.

The cost of crude
And price of food

Are "managed" by
The Wall Street Dude

The economy adjusts
With booms and busts
To exploitation
By the Trusts.

Econo-reliance
Is not a science,
But, in reality,

Pure defiance.


How much longer can we afford econolyin' ?

Maybe Nancy Griffith knows. (She wrote a song about it: Listen here) 

Following is from “Speculation And The Frenzy in Food Markets
The fight over financial regulation affects global food prices” (February 16, 2011) (The Real News)

    PAUL JAY SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN : “One of the things that’s said is that there has been, in fact, a collapse of the Russian wheat market, that demand has gone way up in China and to some extent India for maize, and the role of biofuels and corn. So does this explain it?”

    JAYATI GHOSH, PROF. ECONOMICS, JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY:
    “we are getting very, very dramatic increases in price that are simply not explained by fundamentals. If you take the price of wheat, for example, it went up between June and December, it doubled in price, whereas the global wheat supply fell by maybe 3 percent and global demand for wheat has barely changed. So we really are not getting changes in price that are justified by the actual changes in the demand-supply balance.”

    “A lot of the big increase in wheat in the last six months was because of the Russian grain failure and then the Russian ban on exports, which didn’t actually affect aggregate global supply, because other countries actually supplied more wheat, but it created this perception that there was going to be a shortfall, and so there was a massive increase in speculation in wheat. So what speculation is doing is massively magnifying an existing volatility.”

de Nier's Last Theorem

 -- by Horatio Algeranon

I have discovered
A marvelous proof
Global warming is bunk,
A mammoth goof!

But alas, this blog
Is simply too small
To contain the proof

So... that is all.

— Pierre de Nier

de Nier's Last Theorem (prose form):

"On account of the Second Law of Thermometer-dynamics, it is impossible for a cooler object to make a warmer one hotter than it would be in the absence of the cooler object (the basis of the supposed Atmospheric Greenhouse Effect). I have discovered a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition that this blog --and the minds of climate scientists -- are too narrow to contain."   

        — Pierre de Nier

Not to be confused with Fermat's Last Theorem:

"It is impossible for a cube to be the sum of two cubes, a fourth power to be the sum of two fourth powers, or in general for any number that is a power greater than the second to be the sum of two like powers. I have discovered a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition that this margin is too narrow to contain." 

        — Pierre de Fermat

I have a theorem and it is mine

Engineers help us

-- by Horatio Algeranon

Engineers help us;

We're in the hands of God physicists.

"God help us; we're in the hands of engineers" -- Dr. Ian Malcolm, in the movie "Jurassic Park"

For more on  the hubris of physicists, read Unknown Knowns.

NuUnclear Speculation

 -- by Horatio Algeranon

Oh, what a fool impression we create
When first we practice to speculate.

There's lots of speculatin' goin' on about the nuclear crisis in Japan, but information is still very limited and as Yogi Berra said, "It ain't over till it's over"...

 ...and it ain't over yet.

For another ditty on speculation (albeit with a different focus), read The Speculator on Speculations.

It's not our fault

--by Horatio Algeranon

"It's not our fault"
The journalists say
"That John Doe
Thinks it's A-OK"

"To go on burning
Gas and oil
And coal and tar sands
From the soil."

"It's not our fault
He doesn't agree
With scientists
In the IPCC."

 "The fault lies
With the latter group
Whose media skills
Are puppy poop."

"They couldn't convince
A hungry girl,
To eat a scrumptious,
Ice cream swirl."

"So public doubts
Of a warming earth
Are no surprise
For what it's worth."   

The Interpretation of Dreams

 -- by Horatio Algeranon

The journalist said
"It's plain to see
There is no actual reality"

"Only dreams
Of Left and Right
Appearing in the black of night."

"My job is not
'Truth' revelation,
But balanced dream interpretation."

Added March 10

The above ditty notes the tendency of some journalists to cover (at least) "two sides" of every story as if there were no underlying reality dictating "truth" -- and therefore, as if every view deserved equal weight (and equal coverage).

But in science, there are "right" answers and many many [many] "wrong" ones, so when science is covered in this way, it simply amounts to "false balance".

Professor Scott Mandia makes some interesting observations about "Journalism and the Mass Media" (and also about the organized well funded disinformation campaign meant to "confuse the public and our policy-makers about the science of climate change") in Global Warming Man or Myth? Three Major Reasons Why There is So Much Misinformation

Mandia notes the conclusions of Boykoff & Boykoff  (2004) on the climate change issue, which "supports the hypothesis that journalistic balance can often lead to a form of informational bias."

Mandia also notes the conclusions of Boykoff  (2008) [conducted before the "Climategate" email affair] that things seemed to have improved some since their 2004 paper   

"attribution of climate change to human activity has received accurate coverage recently in a number of sources, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Times (London), The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Independent and The Guardian." 

but that 

"...an overall trend of inadequate coverage by the mass media persists."

Of course, that was then (2008, before Climategate) ...and this is now.

As Real Climate's Gavin Schmidt noted in The Guardian Disappoints, even the Guardian (which is usually pretty good on science reporting) fell down on that one:

Over the last few weeks or so the UK Guardian (who occasionally reprint our posts) has published a 12-part series about the stolen CRU emails by Fred Pearce that are well below the normal Guardian standards of reporting. We delineate some of the errors and misrepresentations below. While this has to be seen on a backdrop of an almost complete collapse in reporting standards across the UK media on the issue of climate change, it can’t be excused on the basis that the Mail or the Times is just as bad.

...and sometimes what journalists don't cover is as important as what they do cover.

Scott Mandia investigated "Climategate Coverage", (which really is an acid test for good journalism in this case, in Horatio's humble opinion) and Mandia concluded that it has been largely "Unfair & Unbalanced" (Climategate Coverage: Unfair and Unbalanced)

For more on the subject (admittedly a particularly egregious example of a "journalist") , read The Interpreter of Interpretations.

..and

The Scientist and the Journalist is about what journalists should be focused on (in IHHO)

"Elephantary, My Dear Hansen"

-- by Horatio Algeranon 

Spherical elephants and Buckyball mice
Isn't climate science nice?
Complex physics ain't required
To prove the scientists should be fired.

There seems to be an entire cottage cheese industry devoted to "falsifying" the main results of climate science based on little more than "back-of-the-envelope toilet-paper" calculations with "Toy Models".

A "Toy Model" is an extremely simple model sometimes used to get "ball-park" (very rough, order of magnitude) estimates before doing more extensive modeling. The idea that one can "overturn" the results of detailed climate modeling (which takes into account the many detailed aspects of the earth's atmosphere based on extensive experimental data) with a result from an overly simple model is really just silly.

Inspired by A Toy Model including a post by "Eric" in the comments

I agree with you [Eli] that it's 'original' to approximate the earth as a truncated icosahedron, but it's pretty funny. The classic joke is about physicists oversimplifying this... 'consider a spherical cow'. But the earth already is pretty spherical. Why on earth try to improve on that?

"Spherical elephant" is how Horatio first heard the joke.

Epicycles

-- by Horatio Algeranon

Epicycles were once imposed
To track each planet where it goes
Keeping earth at the Epicenter

Where basic physics didn't enter.

But Copernicus showed it can't be beat
To make the sun the County Seat
And Ptolemy was hence dethroned
His epicycles not bemoaned.

Playing with math while ignoring physics (see Tamino's Mathturbation) to "discover" cycles where none exist is a favorite pastime of those who are desperate to find an "alternative" to the greenhouse gas theory of warming. 

And though they were a bit contorted, Ptolemy's epicycles were actually relatively simple compared to some "theories" that have been proposed to "explain" recent global warming (read I have a theory and it is mine).