[jules' pics] Hydrate or die

We lost some cpu and some vending machines over the summer but fortunately the freezers were kept on so we can still make ice at work. Best purchase of the summer was huge clear Starbucks cups. We only need fill them twice a day.

And they are particularly pretty with pycnocline drinks...

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 8/31/2011 01:55:00 PM

[jules' pics] camouflage

camouflage, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

Purple flower and a mothy thing.
The mothy thing is a シマゲロオオヨコハイ, or Black-tipped Leafhopper (Bothrogonia ferruginea).

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 8/30/2011 09:27:00 PM

No we can't!

We are off to Tohoku again shortly for more volunteering with Peaceboat. Partly because we enjoyed it last time and partly with the thought that if our jobs do end next year (which to be honest is starting to look less likely now), then I can't imagine wishing I had spent a few more weeks in the office over the summer! We were planning to travel up by train+bike and follow the volunteering with a bit of a holiday in the area, inspired in part by articles such as this, and partly by another volunteer on our previous week who did exactly the same. The volunteer campsite is far enough out of town that having a bike to get around would be really handy, especially for the two weeks we were planning to stay, for which laundry and shopping trips would be essential. I even booked a room at the hotel mentioned in that article for our trip up (having looked around and finding that many others in the area are actually shut).

We mentioned this plan to one of the organisers at the weekend at the pre-departure meeting, and were amazed to be met with a flat refusal. No, it is absolutely impossible to turn up on a bicycle. Either get the bus from Tokyo with us, she said, or don't come at all. She also told us that the previous person who did this (ie the person on our week) had caused a lot of disruption, because she had appeared *the night before* every one else on the overnight buses. The resulting attack of severe panic resulted in three heart attacks, a case of heatstroke and four pregnancies. OK, I made up the pregnancies. Well, two of them. Just imagine, she said, the confusion if everyone did that. Oh, the humanity. Um...someone help me out here, I'm having a failure of imagination. It's a campsite. That's what people usually do. We hardly need to march in in formation. We even offered to turn up on Saturday morning at the same time as the bus (which would be easy, there is an open campsite at the other end of the same field, where we could stay on the Friday night). She remained, however, completely intransigent. It was their way or no way. Incidentally, there was no residual evidence of this confusion when we all previously turned up on the bus on the Saturday morning. I suspect that the story has grown in the retelling, which also happened to us in a different context a couple of months ago. [Got a email from the admin at work, in a panic because our landlady was complaining about the damage we were causing with the plants growing up the walls of our house. The reality was that there are no plants growing up the walls of our house, and our landlady was not at all upset but did want to trim the hedge a few feet away!] With a language where so much is left unsaid, it is easy to imagine problems into existence. I've long since learnt that there is, however, no reasoning with people when they get in this sort of mood.

We did briefly ponder cancelling the volunteering completely - partly in protest at the overall stupidity, and partly because spending a significant amount of money on a holiday is probably more beneficial than doing a bit more beach cleaning at this stage in the proceedings. However, we have compromised on a single week of volunteering, followed by a week back at home and then back up for the holiday much as originally planned. It will actually be better to not have to haul around our volunteering kit (including heavy boots) on the bike. And the forecast for Thursday/Friday (when we would have been cycling up) looks grim right now with a typhoon on course for a fly-past. It means a week less of volunteering but hey, there are rules to be obeyed here, we can't let practical and useful results get in the way of that.

It's especially disappointing to see this sort of attitude in the younger generation, who one might naively have hoped to be a bit more flexible in their outlook. But I think at this stage in their lives they have only learnt the importance of obeying rules and hammering down sticking out nails, and not yet come to understand the "case-by-case basis" approach by which the more effective administrators (and yes, there are a few of them) learn to deal with reality.

I suppose I should be relieved, that such intransigent rule-mongering and panic at the thought of anything remotely out of the ordinary can still take me by surprise after 10 years here. The time to be worried would be if it felt normal! It certainly reinforces the extent to which it is better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission, but it never occurred to us that either would actually be required in this case. If we hadn't taken the trouble to make completely certain where we were staying, we would just have turned up (having made sure that our team leader knew what we were doing, of course) and everything would have been absolutely fine.

[jules' pics] New old gate

The Karamon gate at Kenchoji got refurbished. Last year it looked more like this:

[Not our photo - clicking on the image will hopefully take you to the source]

How nice that someone still has enough money to do things properly.... at least I assume it's not a plastic veneer...

And on other side of the gate? Zen central...

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 8/30/2011 02:47:00 PM

[jules' pics] More dangerous than nuclear meltdowns...

The Hornets R Back!!! You will remember that, back in 2009, Japanese hornets (which kill about 40 people a year in Japan) were plentiful in our neighbourhood, and we tracked the source down to radical Buddhism at Zuisenji, our local temple...

All seemed quiet last year and we thought perhaps the monks had gassed the sleeping hornets over the winter. Perhaps the colony just died off. But they're back and they're setting up a shiny new home.

For those who don't remember what they look like, here's a massive hornet sucking on a medium sized camellia flower:

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 8/28/2011 09:26:00 PM

Nuclear meltdown in Hokkaido

Debito is back on Fukushima again, in full-on hyperventilate mode. "It's time for the naysayers to capitulate".

By which, apparently, he means me, quoting (without attribution) part of a comment I left on his site previously, after he had posted several screeds of anonymous scaremongering.

Of course, after challenging me to admit that I am wrong, he then censors my comments on his blog. Classy.

My position hasn't really changed since this post. Of course, it goes without saying that TEPCO and the JGovt are corrupt and incompetent, and will try their best to cover up the health risks. But that doesn't change the fact that in this case, there really aren't any significant health risks, and no amount of blogorrhea will change that. That's really where the story ends for me. Statistically, I suppose some modest but as-yet-unknown number of people will suffer genuine health effects due to radiation (more will suffer from the evacuation, stress and worry), and obviously this plus the overall effects presumably make it one of the largest industrial accidents ever, but that still leaves the risk way down in the noise for people like me. If I (a) had young children and (b) lived much closer to the centre of attention and (c) expected to stay indefinitely then I might well think it worth a more detailed risk assessment. But as a middle-aged person living well south of Tokyo for a few more years, with a significantly foreign diet to boot, it just isn't worth worrying about. I've got bigger problems, like the newly expanding hornet nest in the neighbouring temple :-)

I don't really object to people who were not capable of rationally assessing the risks and who decided that they would prefer to leave. I do object to them still saying, months later when the reality of the situation is well-known, that the sky is falling and we are all going to die horribly. It may not be a perfect comparison, but it seems that bananas are an order of magnitude more radioactive than the "contaminated" beef that was in the news here recently, for example.

Stoat also has some more interesting posts. It may be worth pointing out that while hundreds of thousands have been evacuated from their homes, and many may never return, in the case of the Fukushima refugees, this is an essentially precautionary and preventative measure, ie it has happened as an alternative to any direct impacts. For those displaced by the tsunami itself, they are the survivors of a catastrophe that killed about 20,000 and destroyed hundreds of kilometres of coastline. There really is no comparison.

[jules' pics] Lotus and lily

I took the above photos with my telephoto lens at Hase Dera temple in Kamakura. With a telephoto, you stand well back and the narrow field of view enables control of the background. Most people ignore this pond as it is just to the side of the route through the temple so, when I arrived, as usual, no one was there. However, all you have to do is wave your camera in a certain direction and a few seconds later...the view was fully obscured by umbrellad photographers pointing their cameras the same way as me. :-)

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 8/28/2011 05:13:00 PM

Kan canned

The short-running "I'll resign, but only when I feel like it" saga has ended with the passage of the 3 bills that the PM was holding out for (a bond sale, a new budget, and a bill supporting renewable energy):

BBC News - Japan PM Naoto Kan announces resignation amid criticism: Japan's beleaguered Prime Minister Naoto Kan has announced his resignation, clearing the way for the country's sixth leader in five years.

It seems to me like he managed his resignation reasonably well: rather than just running away or hanging on as a lame duck, he used the carrot of his departure to force though the most important parts of his program. It's also hard to see how he can be blamed for the tsunami and its aftermath: given that the country has been an LDP-ruled one-party state for the past 50 years, it would take superman to cut through the bureaucratic bungling in the space of weeks or even months. He actually lasted longer than most leaders in recent years, a whole 14 months.

One possible outcome of the forthcoming leadership election is a "Grand Coalition" between the major parties. I suppose it would be honest to give up any pretence that the electorate has any role to play in deciding who runs the country. But I've never known any native to do anything but shrug their shoulders when politics comes up for discussion, so maybe they get the government they deserve.

Reliability of the past

We wrote a sister to the  previous papers on the assessment of climate models using present day climate data. In this latest work we look at the past, the Last Glacial Maximum, when the earth was a much icier and drier place. We all love the Last Glacial Maximum because it was the most recent time in the past when the carbon dioxide level was very different to the modern climate. Thus we hope that studying it closely will reveal new insights about climate change. For this reason, a lot of modelling and data collecting effort has focused on it. In our paper we conclude that the data from the oceans and the models are surprisingly consistent with each other. It is surprising because when you look at a global map showing the data, and another map showing any one climate model output, you would tend to think that there must be some big problems. The models and data seem quite different in some parts of the globe, and this worries everyone. The model-people worry that they are missing important processes in their models, and the data-people similarly worry that they have overlooked something in the conversion of sediment core to temperature. But just looking at a spatial plot of the data next to one from your favourite climate model doesn't give the whole picture, because there is a lot of variation between different climate models and great uncertainty in the data. When comparing the models and data it is important to take the uncertainties into account, and when you do so, you find that the model ensemble as a whole is consistent with the data. So, climate models that we previously found to be reliable for the present day,  now seem to also be reliable for the past. This can only increase our confidence that they may also be performing well for the future!

But it's not all good news. The data we compared the models to are very uncertain, and the models span quite a wide range of results. Thus the concern perhaps now ought to be not that the models and data are inconsistent, but that the data may not be accurate enough to actually add anything new to what we already know about that climate system as represented by the models. What people want to do is use the information we have about the past to reduce uncertainty about the future, but if the data from the past are just a vague smudge roughly consistent with the models then, while this makes us happy that the models are doing OK, it doesn't actually help us improve them any further.  One strategy would be to focus effort on those regions of the globe and times in the past where the whole ensemble is in robust disagreement with the data, although before doing so, it would also be wise to consider whether the causes of these disagreements may be orthogonal to the causes of anthropogenic climate change. 

The paper is Open Access, so you can find all the typos online at Climate of the Past. 

Of course there is more to be done on this topic. We only looked at the ocean surface temperatures for one snap-shot in the past, and the ways the uncertainties in the data are estimated could (I think) be improved. And of course, now that our beloved Last Glacial Maximum has hit the big time by being included in the official runs for the next proper climate ensemble project (CMIP5 - due to star in the next IPCC report) there should soon be many more models to play with, which will enable a more robust result to be obtained. 

[jules' pics] Downtown Kamakura

Even though Amanawa, the oldest* Shinto** shrine in Kamakura, is located in one of the busiest parts of town, it doesn't get many visitors. Don't know why. Because entry is free?

*8th Century, although of course none of the buildings are that age - I suppose, in UK parlance, one would say that there has probably been a shrine on this site since the 8th Century....

**It looks very Zen to me - just show what I know...

P.S. May be better viewed here on my blog, where (as pointed out by a commenter) the same picture appears to have a relaxing sepia tone rather than the bluish cast apparent on the Empty Blog. An interesting illusion - both copies are actually identical with only grey tones.
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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 8/26/2011 11:18:00 AM

[jules' pics] hooked noses

I sometimes wonder if the goal of climate science papers is for the last line of the conclusion to consist of just acronyms, a few little words, and a verb. By comparison photographers use hardly any acronyms. One is BIF which stands for Bird in flight. So here we have BOP - Birds on posts.

The ravens in the top photo are at Bryce Canyon while the crows in the lower photo are hanging out at the temporary huts on Kamakura beach. The ravens seem to like having their photos taken, but pointing a camera at the crows pisses them off and they soon flap away in a very deliberately annoyed manner. 

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 8/25/2011 09:39:00 PM

[jules' pics] The young duds

There was a request to know what the young duds are wearing. Or something. Well here you go. All these were taken at the Daibutsu in Kamakura.

Stupid T-shirts are still very popular:

A not quite so young dud:

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 8/25/2011 01:39:00 PM

Well duh

I'm not really sure how this qualifies as being newsworthy:

Science graduates 'should move abroad'

Science graduates should look for work abroad because funding cuts mean finding work in Britain is too hard, two of the country’s leading scientists have claimed.

Doesn't really take a rocket scientist - or even an astrophysicist and sheep-cloner - to work that out.

We have occasionally considered options for returning to the UK - not least because the funding situation here is a bit precarious right now (but only because of a poorly-timed tsunami and nuclear meltdown just when the grant needs renewed, not as a matter of long-term policy). But the combination of a massive pay cut plus the need to actually work for a living has so far dissuaded us :-) Last summer reminded us of what we had got away from, though we enjoyed the visit itself immensely (not just because of the punting).

Anyway, it has long been my opinion that all scientists should spend time overseas if at all possible, as a matter of policy. Even Japan has plenty of opportunities at the moment in many areas.

[jules' pics] Beach Life

Kamakura summer beach life is in full swing. There are already plenty of surfers, even at 8am on a raining Saturday.

A beach rescuer - just like Baywatch:

No one seems to need rescuing though:

And the ocean's a flat calm:

Oh - here's a wave they all missed:

But he's caught this one - surfin' a 2 inch wave!

When there are no waves, why not try all alternative sport - ocean footie - I'm not sure there's that much future in it:

Obligatory surfer babe:

In Kamakura there are two kinds of people, late-night beachsiders and in-bed-by-10pm mountainsiders. It seems the same is true of the pigeons. These beachsiders looked very much like they were experiencing the morning after the night before.

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 8/22/2011 08:11:00 PM

Roger Rabbit

He just can't stop himself, burrowing away (don't much like the idea of a Curry hole, euuuurgh.)

It's quite amusing to watch the contortions he'll go to in order to avoid admitting a mistake. Recall that this started with his novel idea that one could determine the "correctness" of a probabilistic prediction of an event, by whether the event in question actually happens. Eg the prediction "likely to rain tomorrow" is correct if and only if the rain actually falls tomorrow.

While this might sound intuitively appealing, it quickly falls apart under any careful examination (as Doswell and Brooks warn). That is, it leads to conclusions that are obviously nonsensical and/or inconsistent. For example, if we say that a roll of a fair die is likely to come up 1-5, then this statement is correct in the sense of, well, being correct, but Roger's analysis would determine it to have been false if the roll actually turned out to be 6.

Oh, but at this point, rather than admitting that his usage of "correct" made no sense, Roger decided that for some reason his method only applies in truly epistemic cases where probability is a state of belief rather than a long-run property. It's funny that while (dishonestly) accusing me of making the IPCC out to be infallible, he then tries his best to ensure that his personal "correctness" theory is unfalsifiable. But I'm sure he is blind to that irony. Of course, no explanation is forthcoming as to why his theory, if it is useful and valid, should fall flat so quickly when confronted with a simple example. I tried again with a handmade imperfect die which is initially not known to be fair, but for which I still make the same prediction and again throw a 6. In Roger-world the probabilistic prediction is incorrect. However, in this case the long-run frequency of a 6 can subsequently found by experiment, and let's assume it turns out to be 20±0.1%. Was the original probabilistic statement still Roger-incorrect? Answer came there none...

Best of all, entirely unprompted, he came up with an example based on an asteroid falling on Boulder. While he had several times insisted that a prediction at the 90% level should be considered "incorrect" if the event did not occur, he then stated that if I predict that it is 10% probable that an asteroid hits Boulder tomorrow (ie 90% probable that it does not), then my prediction is correct if the asteroid DOES hit! This, he explains, is due to the "baseline expectation" which apparently allows Roger to invert his original definition of "correctness" whenever he feels like it. It's a bit odd that he came up with this new twist completely unprompted, as it blows apart all his previous analysis, but it's not as if his theory made any sense anyway.

Naturally, the actual paper that he co-authored contains no mention of this "baseline expectation".

With his latest post on aleatory and epistemic uncertainty, one might hope that he could have at last been starting to realise that the concept of "correctness" of a probabilistic prediction cannot in general be determined from the occurrence - or otherwise - of the predicted event (the occurrence of an event assigned a probability of zero is of course an exception). But based on the comments, it seems that this insight still eludes him.

It does seem that one infallible guide to "Pielkeian correctness" has emerged, though. If Roger says it, then it is correct, no matter how many impossible or ridiculous contortions and evasions are required to avoid admitting error.

[jules' pics] One of us

While the Daibutsu looks nice with a blue sky background, in the even lighting of a cloudy mizzly day the he becomes one of the people.

A man was lying prostrate on the path in front of the Daibutsu. Some checked to see he was OK. Perhaps he was deep in worship. Then it became apparent he was worshipping - but his object was the Nikon rather than the Daibutsu.

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 8/21/2011 08:30:00 AM

[jules' pics] wingnuttery

Many barking wingnuts have Galileo complexes. They think that because Galileo wasn't believed, they are as right as Galileo.

Mine is more like a Marie Curie complex. This is a special complex only for women who work with their husbands. They believe that because people only realised quite how clever Marie Curie was after her husband was tragically run over by a cart, that they are also eclipsed geniuses. Mustn't let the lack of handfuls of Nobel Prizes get in the way of the fantasy. 

Actually I cannot imagine how she kept going at such a high standard after losing her best friend and colleague... especially since people are almost always better as either a team or a solo performer.

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 8/19/2011 04:51:00 PM

[jules' pics] Very Loud Outside

Japan seems to lack noise pollution laws, so we get annoying vans shouting all sorts of rubbish anywhere, stupid gangs who drive around on motorbikes without silencers, and when the temperature rises above a certain threshold we get these - cicada! The internet says there are 30 different types in Japan and they are clearly the real reason that people don't riot. It's too loud outside to riot.

Note for David Benson [see comment here]: This cicada was wearing this year's new wave fashion of a simple brown wing wrap, but was otherwise naked. 

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 8/18/2011 01:02:00 PM

Probabilistic Forecasting - A Primer

Roger continues to flounder away, trying to salvage something from his latest statistical train-wreck. It's all remarkably trivial for someone who claims to "fully understand verification of probabilistic forecasts". Commenter Steve Scolnik skewers him neatly with a quotation from Doswell and Brooks:

"An important property of probability forecasts is that single forecasts using probability have no clear sense of "right" and "wrong." That is, if it rains on a 10 percent PoP forecast, is that forecast right or wrong? Intuitively, one suspects that having it rain on a 90 percent PoP is in some sense "more right" than having it rain on a 10 percent forecast. However, this aspect of probability forecasting is only one aspect of the assessment of the performance of the forecasts. In fact, the use of probabilities precludes such a simple assessment of performance as the notion of "right vs. wrong" implies. This is a price we pay for the added flexibility and information content of using probability forecasts. Thus, the fact that on any given forecast day, two forecasters arrive at different subjective probabilities from the same data doesn't mean that one is right and the other wrong! It simply means that one is more certain of the event than the other. All this does is quantify the differences between the forecasters."

Of course, there isn't a cigarette-paper of difference between what I was saying, and what Doswell and Brookes are saying, because this is all well-established basic stuff.

Nevertheless, RP chooses to make up nonsense and misrepresent what I said, without even having the decency to link to my post. I nowhere say, or imply that the IPCC statements "could not be judged to be wrong because of their probabilistic nature", indeed as he well knows I have explicitly contradicted this nonsense claim of his multiple times in the past. A single probabilistic statement at the "likely" level cannot generally meaningfully be validated because no outcome is sufficiently improbable to falsify it (under the standard significance testing paradigm). Once you have a large enough ensemble of statements, such as those the IPCC make, their judgement as a whole can easily be validated because it is highly improbable that either a small or large number of the particular events should occur, if the probability was accurate.

(Even this approach suffers from the usual problems of frequentist statistics, in that it does not actually address the issue of "how likely is it that the probabilistic system is well calibrated, given these results" but rather answers "how likely are these results, if the probabilistic system is well calibrated". However, if the probability level is small enough, we can safely reject the system anyway. This digression is probably best ignored by all readers, I just put it in to head off another avenue for nit-picking.)

Even his own analogy, he fails to be consistent with himself. Having stated unequivocally that a large proportion of the findings of the IPCC are "incorrect" he admits wrt some hypothetical bet on a football game:

"It is important to understand that the judgment [A] may have been perfectly sound and defensible at the time that it was made ... Perhaps then the outcome was just bad luck, meaning that the 10% is realized 10% of the time. Actually, we can never know the answer to whether the expectation was actually sound or not"

So he's prepared to consider probabilistic judgements "perfectly sound" when it suits him, but "incorrect" whenever the IPCC make them. Uh-huh.

[jules' pics] whi O whi O whi?

...is all that is to be a heard from British people presently. (the subject is the recent riots, of course). In answer to the question, everyone just trots out their favourite thing they disapprove of about how things aint what they used to be.

As I walk past this bar in the middle of Yokohama early on a Sunday morning I have often marvelled at the neatly arranged empty sake bottles, and wondered if the British police would even allow this kind of decoration - after all, to most British people, an empty bottle is a weapon, and anything left out on the street belongs to whoever can grab it first.

There are so many differences between British and Japanese culture, and only one of the two countries had riots last week. I could point to so many things, as I stare out of the window making things up... but I suppose that the British social scientists must be pretty happy, as now they'll hopefully get lots of research grants to work out the real reasons why(owhyowhy).

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 8/16/2011 12:55:00 PM

How many of Roger's findings about probability manage to be wrong? Answer: he's more inventive than you might expect.

Roger Pielke has a new post up asserting that 28% of the IPCC's findings are incorrect. Although it's obviously a rather implausible figure, I was expecting this claim to be backed up with some sort of evidence of errors, or at least sloppiness, or something, so I had a look at his paper that he cites to justify the claim.

It turns out that 100%-28% = 72% is merely the average (lower bound) probability level associated with the statements they made. Such as "It is very likely that hot extremes, heat waves and heavy precipitation events will continue to become more frequent." Here "very likely" means greater than 90%. So, given 10 such statements, the IPCC is saying that they would expect the "very likely" outcome to occur about 9 times, and not occur about once. And similarly for "likely" (66%). Averaging over all the probabilistic statements, it should be expected that in about 28% of cases, the (probabilistically) preferred outcome will not actually happen.

And in Roger-world, this means that 28% of the statements are "incorrect". Note, however, that he does not make this silly claim in the paper itself, but only in his blog post.

To see why this interpretation is nonsensical, consider a single roll of a fair die. I state (accurately) that it is "likely" to lie in the range 1-5. If I roll a 6, then in Roger-world, my statement was incorrect. However, it was not incorrect, and Roger is simply wrong to claim so.

As you can see from the comments, I challenged Roger on this, and his response (entirely in character) is to duck and weave. In his comment #5, for example, he shamelessly misrepresents what I said, and brings up the red herring of a definitive prediction (when in fact I had clearly made a probabilistic one, and the distinction is of course absolutely fundamental to the point). The obvious elephant in the room that Roger cannot bring himself to acknowledge is that the statement is correct irrespective of the outcome of the roll. "Correctness" of a single statement simply isn't something that can be directly validated (or invalidated) by the outcome, and the accurate calibration of a probabilistic prediction system actually relies on having the appropriate number of "failures" for each level of probability.

I realise of course that having done some rather boring textual analysis that in his own words amounts to "Nothing too interesting, really", Roger is just rabble-rousing on his blog. I'm confident that any competent scientist will see straight though it, but that's hardly his target audience.

As for what the 72%/28% average actually does mean, it doesn't actually tell us anything except that the IPCC makes a lot of statements about things that it is only (by its own admission) moderately confident about. It might in principle be interesting to see how the confidence level changes over time, but only if the set of statements were to be held fixed from one assessment to the next. People have looked at climate sensitivity estimates (hardly changed) and detection and attribution (increased markedly in confidence) but not a lot else AIUI. I suppose we can anticipate Roger claiming that the next report is either more correct, or less, depending on what mix of statements they happen to include :-)

Incidentally, and although it's a minor point it is perhaps telling in terms of his overall level of competence, Roger is also wrong where he claims that if the statements are not independent, then the proportion of "incorrect" will be higher than 28%. Actually, if the statements are not independent (while still being correctly calibrated), then the proportion that do not come to pass would still be 28% in expectation, just with higher variance, meaning that either a larger or smaller proportion would not be surprising. Unlike the simple misinterpretation in his blog post title, this elementary error is actually made in the paper itself.

[jules' pics] 8/09/2011 09:41:00 PM

Passed this delightful venetian canal in Shibuya on the way to a symposium about how Japan is going to rebuild after the tsunami. It didn't half stink. 

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 8/09/2011 09:41:00 PM

Research linking autism to Susan Greenfield is criticised

Controversy has erupted over comments made by the leading nonentity James Annan suggesting links between the increase in Susan Greenfield's public prominence and the rise in autism.

"I'm just sitting here staring out of my window and making something up to talk about," he said.

"It could be the case that this different environment is changing the brain in an unprecedented way. It's such an important issue and I'm just putting it before people to discuss."

"I point to the increase in autism and I point to Susan Greenfield. That's all. Establishing a causal relationship is very hard but there are trends out there that we must think about. I have not said that Susan Greenfield use causes autism and I would apologise to any family who is upset by anything I have said."

He added:

"I have never, ever said that Susan Greenfield is bad for the brain. But if the environment is changing, then the brain will change to adapt. All I have ever said is, let's talk about this. Susan Greenfield has become the central iconic feature of young people's lives and to say our brains will not be affected by that is to deny our evolutionary heritage."

[That's quite enough of that - ed]

[jules' pics] butterfly and flower

[Jomyoji, Kamakura]

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 8/06/2011 09:44:00 AM

[jules' pics] Happy cool summer

Luckily for TEPCO (our electricity provider, who is mysteriously short of watts this year) the summer has turned remarkably cool. A couple of weeks ago we had a typhoon and since then the temperature has barely touched 30C, and overnight it has been positively chilly (diving to around 23C). Here is Jomyoji temple (home of the 2nd blue dragonfly) on a cool and misty July morning.

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 8/03/2011 05:00:00 PM

[jules' pics] Another blue dragonfly

Well I was wrong. The dragon fly viewing is even better at Jomyoji "English" garden that at Kosokuji Juniso. At least it is better in the sense that the garden is much more accessible, and you can sit down and enjoy a nice cup of coffee while you are there.

In other news I joined Google+. It seems very handy and to have a very pleasing interface. Of course, whether it is ever useful depends on whether anyone else joins in! So far I have 2 friends!

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 8/02/2011 01:43:00 PM

Centennial scale warming over Japan: are the rural stations really rural?

This is the title of a paper we recently published here. It has been widely observed that Japanese met stations show abnormally large warming over the 20th century - there are about 60 stations that have 100y time series (there's an open access paper here) - but significant uncertainty about the attribution of this to the possible causes. Obviously there's been a lot of urbanisation over this period, which must have affected many of the sites. The Japan Meteorological Agency has produced a subset of 17 stations which it claims are basically rural, but the reasons for their choices don't seem to be very clearly documented, and neither is it clear that these "rural" stations actually are unaffected by urbanisation. For one thing, even these stations still show somewhat greater warming than is seen over most land areas globally (at least when we take the lowish latitude and maritime influence into account, some northern and continental areas have warmed more).

Our idea was that we could investigate this using observations of the surrounding ocean, for which there is also a long-term observational analysis. While we wouldn't expect the ocean and land to warm exactly the same, there should be quite a strong link given the physical proximity. Furthermore, this land/ocean relationship can be investigated with the IPCC AR4 models. Globally, these models give quite a wide range of land/ocean warming ratios (eg) but over a local region temperature anomalies are generally well correlated.



This pic is the main summary of the analysis. The blue dots show the results of the IPCC AR4 models, ocean (x-axis) versus land (y) warming over the 20th century, just considering the region around Japan. There's clearly a strong linear relationship with a slight amplification of 13% over land. The observed warming over the ocean is 0.8C as indicated by the vertical line, and the various coloured dots on that vertical line represent different subsets of the land stations - red is the largest cities which have warmed (and grown!) massively, and the three green dots are different attempts at selecting rural stations (including the JMA set). These all lie pretty close to the regression line, suggesting that the observed warming at those stations is not really out of line of what would be expected from the surrounding ocean warming and thus there is no evidence of substantial urbanisation in these stations. It's also clear that the real ocean has warmed more than in almost all of the models, but we didn't look into the reasons for this, and it could just be due to natural variability - the obs aren't even outside the range of the models, so there is not really any cause for concern here.