Long Droughts & Rising Seas

The message from "top international scients" remains confused. This from the Washington Post today:

Tuesday, January 27, 2009; Page A04

"Greenhouse gas levels currently expected by mid-century will produce devastating long-term droughts and a sea-level rise that will persist for 1,000 years regardless of how well the world curbs future emissions of carbon dioxide, an international team of scientists reported yesterday.

"Top climate researchers from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Switzerland and France said their analysis shows that carbon dioxide will remain near peak levels in the atmosphere far longer than other greenhouse gases, which dissipate relatively quickly.
...

"The new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, projects that if carbon dioxide concentrations peak at 600 ppm, several regions of the world -- including southwestern North America, the Mediterranean and southern Africa -- will face major droughts as bad or worse than the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Global sea levels will rise by about three feet by the year 3000, a projection that does not factor in melting glaciers and polar ice sheets that would probably result in significant additional sea level rises."

Huh?

Let's review a little history. The Kyoto conference was a failure for two reasons. 1. The US has not ratified their 7% reduction committment. China, India and Russia made no commitment to reductions. 2. It was widely admitted that even if all countries made a committment of reducing emmissions by 8%, it would not significantly reduce the CO2 content of the atmosphere. Presumably nothing short of eliminating the human race would help. So what has happened since 1998?

Very few countries made progress by 2005 toward their 2012 CO2 reduction goal. The few that have reduced emissions did so for reasons unrelated to Kyoto, for example the economic collapse of the USSR. The price of oil and other economic conditions have far more to do with CO2 emissions than political rhetoric.

And what about sea level? 30 foot rises! in 1000 years. 92 cm per century for ten centuries. Somebody is fudging the numbers again. In the 20th century, in geologically stable areas, sea level rose 20 cm at a constant rate, the prime contributor being thermal expansion. Previous estimates of the maximum possible rise had been 80 centimeters including the maximum rate at which glaciers could travel to the sea. Every "expert" has a different number. None of them seem to explain where they got it. Let's be grateful they didn't plot this new "hockey stick" on graph paper.

The predictions simply don't hold up when compared to historical records. If CO2 content is the critical factor in the temperature of the atmosphere, why have temperature and sea level risen so steadily in the past 8000 years? Why is there absolutely no correlation between CO2 content and temperature over geologic history?

As for the dust bowl threat, don't these people even read human history? 5000 years ago southern Iraq was a vast forest. The human race was not destroyed as a result of the desertification of Babylonia, no matter what caused it.

So now the big news is that nothing we can do will change anything and [therefore] we must act now! Somehow, the message is getting garbled. Apparently we can all agree that nothing we pitiful humans can do is likely to affect global temperature. So how much money will it cost to try? And how much money would it cost to move up hill 30 feet in the next 1000 years?

By the way, is anyone asking what the benefits may be of "global warming?" If they aren't asking, why not? If there are no benefits, then show that to be the case. This "thing" looks less like science than politics.

Who Writes Wikipedia?

Ever wonder who writes the entries in Wikipedia? "Conventional wisdom," coming mainly from the speeches of Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, says that about 1,400 people, aka 1,400 obsessed freaks, make over 73% of the edits.

Aaron Schwartz, who blogs Raw Thought, decided to look into those statistics. He knew that Wikipedia keeps a complete history of every change ever made to every article, as well as who made the change, and that history is available to the public. Some changes are made anonymously by people who never log in, but not the 1,400 mentioned by Jimmy Wales. Wales says that they all know one another and he knows them all. Schwartz found just the opposite.

"Curious and skeptical, I decided to investigate. I picked an article at random ("Alan Alda") to see how it was written. Today the Alan Alda page is a pretty standard Wikipedia page: it has a couple photos, several pages of facts and background, and a handful of links. But when it was first created, it was just two sentences: "Alan Alda is a male actor most famous for his role of Hawkeye Pierce in the television series MASH. Or recent work, he plays sensitive male characters in drama movies." How did it get from there to here?

"Edit by edit, I watched the page evolve. The changes I saw largely fell into three groups. A tiny handful -- probably around 5 out of nearly 400 -- were "vandalism": confused or malicious people adding things that simply didn't fit, followed by someone undoing their change. The vast majority, by far, were small changes: people fixing typos, formatting, links, categories, and so on, making the article a little nicer but not adding much in the way of substance. Finally, a much smaller amount were genuine additions: a couple sentences or even paragraphs of new information added to the page.

"Wales seems to think that the vast majority of users are just doing the first two (vandalizing or contributing small fixes) while the core group of Wikipedians writes the actual bulk of the article. But that's not at all what I found. Almost every time I saw a substantive edit, I found the user who had contributed it was not an active user of the site. They generally had made less than 50 edits (typically around 10,) usually on related pages. Most never even bothered to create an account."

What Schwartz discovered is not really surprising. It would be impossible for 1,400 people, no matter how brilliant, to write 75% of the roughly 2.5 million articles currently in Wikipedia. The truth is that over a thousand people working virtually full time are required simply to edit the articles as they increase and change. Editors, book salesmen, and the price of paper, is what made the Encyclopedia Britannica so expensive.

So what does this say about Google's competing "encyclopedia" called Knol? Knol is supposed to be written by experts who are paid from advertising revenue and only the author is allowed to make changes to their own articles. That way, Google argues, the material can be trusted and can't be vandalized. But the Knol scheme is fatally flawed, as Henry Blodgett points out in "Oops, Google's Knol Won't Be Killing Wikipedia After All." The "experts" are not exactly renowned and nobody seems to be making the easiest possible checks for plagiarism. For example, take most any complete sentence from the Schwartz quotation above and stick it into Google. You will immediately find a reference to the source of that sentence or at least a reference with a very low "Kevin Bacon number." And, as Blodgett explains, that's the least of the problems with Knol.

Hmm, a Kevin Bacon number for a link is amusing. Stephen Dolan, who appears to be a mathematician, has blogged on that concept. In his article "Six Degrees of Wikipedia," he discusses the links between articles in Wikipedia using graph theory. He looked for the "departure center" of Wikipedia, defined as the Wikipedia article from which it is possible to link to the most articles with the fewest clicks. Not all articles are referenced anywhere else, but he found that excluding articles that are just lists, years or days of the year, the "real article" closest to the centre is United Kingdom. Of the 2,301,486 articles existing on 3 March, 2008, 2,111,479 were reachable from some other article. From United Kingdom, you could reach them all in an average of 3.67 clicks. Next came Billie Jean King, oddly enough, at 3.68 clicks, followed by United States at 3.69 clicks. As an aside, he points out that it takes an average of 3.98 clicks to get from Kevin Bacon to anywhere else.

That ought to fill our trivia quota for today.