I remember it well… the original Borking, where a lying sack of dog excrement (AKA Ted Kennedy) told scandalous, blatant lies about a very qualified judge. The left has only gotten worse since then.
LOL! I had all but forgotten this.
Nice clip. I don’t remember it. Never saw it.
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I believe the woman in this case, not sure why?
Is there a right answer given in the movie?
Looking at the plot I think I’m right, but I’m not sure. What a plot!
It’s based on a 1944 novella by Colette.
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A search for “I remember it well” brought up this. http://j0ns1m0ns.blogspot.com/2016/10/i-remember-it-well.html
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In the current study, we discovered that specific brain mechanisms underlie these three distinct aspects of memory using a brain imaging technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The results of our study demonstrated that the hippocampus, a brain region widely associated with memory retrieval, responded to successfully remembering (in contrast to forgetting) an event, regardless of its quality. That is, the hippocampus indicated whether an object characteristic was remembered no matter how vague this memory was. In contrast, a region towards the back of the brain known as the angular gyrus tracked the precision of the memory that was recalled, such that activity in this region increased with how close participants were to the correct object location, orientation degree, and colour shade. Lastly, a third region, the precuneus, which has been associated with imagination and experiencing memories from a first person perspective, showed activity that was specific to the vividness with which participants experienced their memories.
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I light of that, the two parties in this controversy should undergo fMRI. Either that or waterboarding.
Presumption of innocence isn’t just a criminal court value. It’s actually a human right. It’s a civilizational value. It’s what Viscount Sankey called the golden thread in English law.
Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, a cognitive scientist and law professor who has studied memory for more than 40 years, with a particular focus on how it unfolds in the courtroom, has advanced a number of illuminating studies over the years. One gathered information on 300 people in the United States who had gone to prison for crimes they did not commit, as proved by later DNA evidence. Of those 300 (some of whom were imprisoned as long as 30 years), three-quarters of the convictions were the result of the false memories of the accuser.
Climate change, Senate hearings, whatever. It all comes down to epistemology, or feeling versus thinking if you don’t like big words.
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This one is a keeper.
“The Ideological Turing Test: How to Be Less Wrong” https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/the-ideological-turing-test-how-to-be-less-wrong-6803a8c290cf
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“There’s a strange paradox about wrongness: We go about our lives feeling like we’re right, but — in reality — we spend most of our lives being wrong.”
From the link provided by Ledite (Comment #170946): “There’s a strange paradox about wrongness: We go about our lives feeling like we’re right, but — in reality — we spend most of our lives being wrong.â€
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I do not think that describes me, at least not accurately. Most of the time we are partly right and partly wrong. And most of the time I know that. I am rarely certain that I am right, unless it is the sort of thing on which it is actually possible to be certain. I am always willing to change my opinion, given sufficient evidence and arguments. But then, I know I am weird (in many ways) and I know people who appear to be absolutely certain about everything. But then, when I argue, I usually act like I am certain, so others might think that about me.
———
From the link: “I should understand my opponents’ ideas so well that they can’t tell the difference between what I am saying and what they believe”.
That is gold. I try to be sure I understand the arguments of those with whom I disagree, but do I really? That provides a way to test it. I think I will have to find a web site frequented with idiots (not hard) and see if I convince them that I am one of them (very hard).
MIkeM,
Notice the “wrongness” in the song is over details. The both agree they knew each other, liked each other, had a pleasant dinner, she lost something and so on. I’m not sure one could tally everything and say anyone was mostly wrong or mostly right.
lucia (Comment #170950): “Notice the “wrongness†in the song is over details.”
It took me a while to figure out “what song?” until I remembered what started this thread. But I was commenting on the interesting link provided by Ledite. Very different indeed.
lucia (Comment #170950). That’s a good point; it’s an fun exchange, but not very real. Both remember the little details, but differently. In real life, one would remember a detail, a “you did x” or “you said y” and the other would say “I did? I don’t remember that at all”. The two would remember different things, not the same things differently.
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In real life I wonder how many can pass this test? “Give the name (full name), date, location of all the people you have had sex with, and for bonus points, the current contact info for those people.”
(Don’t tell me; too much info!)
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I am speculating here that the divide between R and D goes a lot deeper than arguments about abortion and free birth control.
Yes, a traumatic experience is one you are more likely to remember. But it is also one your mind is more likely to distort. Both observational and experimental studies have found that following a traumatic experience, the brain is more likely to commit a “source monitoring error,†i.e. to mix information from different sources.
For instance, if Ford had seen Kavanaugh on the news, and this reminded her of high school and thus her assault, her brain could have convinced her that Kavanaugh had been her assailant. In other words, it would have confused the “source†of Kavanaugh’s image, believing that it remembered him from the party when it actually remembered him from elsewhere. Such confusion is especially common among those suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Elizabeth Warren talking about about a 2020 Presidential run: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/29/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-2020.html
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She’s not what we need, and I don’t say this because I’m not a Dem. I don’t think we need another term of Trump in 2020 either. Trump can do some things I approve of, but I doubt he will ever be able to bring Americans together. Too many people hate him too insanely. The Resistance and the media will never get over it.
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Dems need to find a centrist who can bring our country together, IMO. More generally, Dems need to come back towards the center some. It’s time to give up on identity politics and the Church of the Sacred Victim. Come back to the center, offer unity, and return to power.
mark bofill (Comment #171066): “I don’t think we need another term of Trump in 2020 either. Trump can do some things I approve of, but I doubt he will ever be able to bring Americans together. Too many people hate him too insanely.”
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The same people hate any Republican, even RINO’s. Trump makes them especially crazy since they fear him much more than, say, Romney or Jeb!. The only way to bring the hard core “resistance” together with the “deplorables” is if the resistance succeeds in crushing us deplorables under their jackboots. So I think Trump is just what we need in 2020.
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mark bofill: “The Resistance and the media will never get over it.”
Another reason to vote for Trump in 2020.
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mark bofill: “Dems need to find a centrist who can bring our country together, IMO.”
Yep, they need someone who thinks there are no red states or blue states, just the United States. I, for one, won’t be falling for that again.
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mark bofill: “More generally, Dems need to come back towards the center some. It’s time to give up on identity politics and the Church of the Sacred Victim. Come back to the center, offer unity, and return to power.”
There is zero chance of that happening in time for the 2020 election. Outside chance for 2024.
Mike M,
“There is zero chance of that happening in time for the 2020 election. Outside chance for 2024.”
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Bernie Sanders has been a socialist his entire life. Ditto Warren and the rest. Whoever the Democrats choose in 2020, one thing is certain: the candidate will be left of Obama, and way left of the voters. They will run on nationalized health care, confiscatory taxes, and ignoring the Constitution whenever needed… like for gun confiscation.
SteveF (Comment #171074): “Whoever the Democrats choose in 2020, one thing is certain: the candidate will be left of Obama, and way left of the voters. They will run on nationalized health care, confiscatory taxes, and ignoring the Constitution whenever needed… like for gun confiscation.”
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Right. The fire needs to burn itself out and must be contained while that happens. Trump is the best (actually only) firewall we’ve got. Other Republicans have a tendency to try to contain the fire by giving it bits and pieces of fuel; that never works.
Why do you guys think that’s certain, that the Dems will continue to go left?
I think it’s certainly possible [that they will nominate very Lefty candidates]. Maybe even more likely that not. But I don’t see why it has to happen that way.
[Edit: I get that Sanders and Warren are likely possibilities and that they’re very left. But take Obama; if memory serves he wasn’t really on the radar until pretty late in the game. Of course he was left of center too, but that’s not my point. My point is centrist candidates maybe could be found, even if it isn’t obvious who they might be right now.]
mark,
Why do you guys think that’s certain, that the Dems will continue to go left?
Because the far left of the Democrats is where the money and enthusiasm is. They turn out for the primaries and the center doesn’t. Of course in the Democrat’s minds, Hillary was a centrist candidate. Obama in 2008 gave lip service to the center in his campaign.
Bredesen in TN is claiming to be a centrist who reached across party lines when he was governor. If he thinks he can do that as a Senator, he’s deluded. More likely, he knows he won’t be able to do that and is simply lying to the voters by using an example that is completely irrelevant.
DeWitt,
Because the far left of the Democrats is where the money and enthusiasm is. They turn out for the primaries and the center doesn’t.
Good answer. :/ I didn’t think of that.
Thanks.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #171081): “Because the far left of the Democrats is where the money and enthusiasm is. They turn out for the primaries and the center doesn’t.”
Yes, that is a big part of it. There is also the fact that most of the media is quite far left. Also, Pelosi and Company have gotten very good at enforcing party discipline, making it very hard (if not impossible) for a Congressional Democrat to deviate much from the leftist line. Finally, the Left has gotten very good at imposing intellectual discipline; a good example is the way they made Bernie backpedal on immigration.
In the not so good economic news category, it turns out that while households have deleveraged some since 2008, non-financial corporations have become increasingly leveraged, using their share equity value as collateral. Worse, corporations are using borrowed money to buy back shares. Sound familiar?
Everything will be fine as long as share prices keep going up, much like borrowing on one’s home equity to buy more real estate works as long as home prices keep increasing. But one of the standard adages of the stock market is that it never moves in a straight line forever. On the order of $3 trillion dollars in corporate debt will have to be refinanced in the next five years and $1.3 trillion by the end of 2020.
DeWitt,
“..non-financial corporations have become increasingly leveraged, using their share equity value as collateral.”
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Sure, but that is mostly larger corporations, not small. Small corporations have been frozen out of capital markets since 2008, and could not, even if they wanted to) assume more debt. So smaller businesses are mostly immune to this kind of problem… even if that is not by their own choosing.
SteveF,
I probably should have qualified that as public non-financial corporations…. IIRC, most small corporations aren’t publicly listed and traded.
Ford’s picture doesn’t have a caption of Leland’s wild parties as I remembered.
“And there were always parties to celebrate any occasion. Although these parties are no doubt unforgettable, they are only a memory lapse for most, since loss of consciousness is often an integral part of the party scene.â€
Ex-boyfriend of Ford has given a sworn statement to Senate that he witnessed her coaching a friend on beating a polygraph. She testified she never coached anyone.
It looks like the polygraph issue was a classic lawyer setup, they must be learning from the FBI. The televised testimony polygraph question was kind of strange “Have you ever helped anyone with a polygraph?”. They very likely had the ex-boyfriend testimony in hand already.
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Seems she has an ex-boyfriend who isn’t very interested in helping her out. He said she was “unfaithful”. Ouch. The ridiculous Game of Thrones continues. Please vote Kavanaugh in ASAP so we can go back to cat videos.
MikeN,
Looks like Dr Ford is going to face some ‘interesting’ weeks. I’ll bet Chairman Grassley is not amused.
In other news, a team of “scholars” submitted a bunch of made up papers to what they call grievance studies journals.
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“To date, their project has been successful: seven papers have passed through peer review and have been published, including a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten in the language of Intersectionality theory and published in the Gender Studies journal Affilia.”
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“The flagship feminist philosophy journal, Hypatia, accepted a paper (not yet published online) arguing that social justice advocates should be allowed to make fun of others, but no one should be permitted to make fun of them. The same journal invited resubmission of a paper arguing that “privileged students shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class at all and should just listen and learn in silence”
. https://quillette.com/2018/10/01/the-grievance-studies-scandal-five-academics-respond/
On a completely different subject, can anyone point me to an easy way to examine monthly *absolute* temperatures (not anomaly) for any widely used global temperature set? KNMI climate explorer only seems to expose anomalies for observations.
Dale S (Comment #171175): “On a completely different subject, can anyone point me to an easy way to examine monthly *absolute* temperatures (not anomaly) for any widely used global temperature set?”
I doubt they exist. It makes little or no sense to average absolute temperatures because they can vary significantly over very short distances due to geography. So the local data are converted to anomalies, then averaged. I don’t think anyone knowledgeable disagrees with that; the debated issues involve the processing of the anomalies to create the averages.
Tom Scharf (Comment #171173): “In other news, a team of “scholars†submitted a bunch of made up papers to what they call grievance studies journals”.
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🙂
Sounds like they have passed the Ideological Turing Test with flying colors. To remind you, the test is: “I should understand my opponents’ ideas so well that they can’t tell the difference between what I am saying and what they believeâ€. https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/the-ideological-turing-test-how-to-be-less-wrong-6803a8c290cf
Link provided originally by Ledite (Comment #170946).
Mike M. (Comment #171178)
I recall seeing such a thing (absolute temperatures) in ascii format at Hadcrut’s site some years ago, but can’t find it today. The only monthly download available for absolute temperatures is 1961-1990 and in netCDF format, and examining the contents does not enlighten me.
Whether having an absolute temperature for a global record makes any sense is a separate question — obviously it doesn’t have a physical meaning any more than the global temperature anomaly would. But you *can* get absolute temperatures monthly from climate model runs at KNMI explorers, and I would think comparing the size of the absolute swing as part of the seasonal cycle to observed temperatures would be an obvious thing to do. To the extent that the temperature itself can be fairly compared that would also be a reasonable thing to do.
So for example, looking at the ensemble mean for tas in ACCESS1-0, historical runs, CMIP5, I see the center of the scale move from 285K in January to 289K in July. Without regard to whether “anyone knowledgable” finds that useful, I find that fascinating. In a world where a 2C warming (or even 1.5C warming) is deemed some sort of catastrophe, the simulated “temperature of the world” varies by 4K on an annual basis. But is that swing real? Does this model “get it right”? I would think absolute temperatures from representative stations would be useful in assessing that.
The person she allegedly helped with the polygraph lives in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
Christine Ford testified in Congress that she wrote the letter while in Rehoboth Beach.
Her family lives in Maryland and has not been seen supporting her in any way.
Ford testified she nearly flunked out of college because of Kavanaugh. However, her academics were fine in high school for two years after this alleged incident.
It makes more sense to conclude that nothing happened to her, at least until the mid 80s when she was in her late teens, just as in her therapist notes.
Dale S –
“The only monthly download available for absolute temperatures is 1961-1990”
I would think that taking that dataset, and adding to it the monthly anomaly, would produce a monthly dataset in absolute terms.
If you’re solely interesting in the seasonal variation, you could compute the seasonal variation in each component and sum them.
The mob has their knives out. Harvard cancelled a class Kavanagh was going to teach (officially he cancelled it), 800 Harvard alumni signed a letter asking for it to be canceled. Nearly 50 people claimed to have filed Title IX complaints against Kavanaugh. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/2/students-file-title-ix-against-kavanaugh/
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Nope, no chance an allegation based solely on one person’s testimony is enough to ruin somebody’s life at the very place elites routinely lecture the rest of the country from about their morals. It is nice to see our best and brightest devoted to fairness and due process. This is why you have to have a Constitution, to prevent the whims of mob rule. I also can’t really understand why anyone would think Title IX could be abused for an ideological agenda. Certainly anyone who went to Yale or Harvard would ever intentionally make false or misleading accusations to accomplish a partisan task? Yet another example of people make themselves look like idiots while projecting an image of superiority.
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“Jacqueline Kellogg, the student who organized the campaign to file Title IX complaints against Kavanaugh, told the Crimson that using the Title IX process in this manner gives them “power” and legitimizes their “right to our feeling of being safe.”
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Our future leaders.
Dale S (Comment #171181): “Whether having an absolute temperature for a global record makes any sense is a separate question — obviously it doesn’t have a physical meaning any more than the global temperature anomaly would.”
I apologize for assuming that you did not know that.
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Dale S: “But you *can* get absolute temperatures monthly from climate model runs at KNMI explorers, and I would think comparing the size of the absolute swing as part of the seasonal cycle to observed temperatures would be an obvious thing to do.”
That is an excellent question that I have wondered about myself. Now that you mention that, I have seen such things. But I don’t remember where. My impression is that the comparison is not so good, but I would not bet on that impression being correct.
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Dale S: “To the extent that the temperature itself can be fairly compared that would also be a reasonable thing to do.”
I think I’ve seen that with the claim that the uncertainties in the observed absolute value are large enough to make the comparison not so useful. But I have not looked into whether than claim is valid or merely convenient.
Mike M. (Comment #171187)
Thank you, most interesting. So the swing in the lower troposphere is 2C on the annual cycle, substantially less than at the surface. One of the comments had a link to (discussion of?) monthly reanalysis temperatures and said they were about 4K. The link was dead, but climate explorer does let me get that information from reanalysis. NCEP/NCAR shows an annual cycle swing of about 3.25K, with the absolute temperature centered on 14.5C. The reanalysis only has data from 1950, so it can only be compared for part of historical runs.
HaroldW (Comment #171184)
The problem I’m having with using the data from the download is that there appear to be 70 non-header entries in each line, and monthly values from a thirty year time span should produce 360. With no way to interpret the data I can’t say what it is I’m seeing.
Dale S –
Sorry I don’t have the time to look into this, but the web page writes “Absolute temperatures for the base period 1961-90 on a 5° by 5° grid (Jones et al., 1999). Note that in this file, latitudes run from North to South.”
So I’m guessing that the netcdf file is a 72 (long) x 36 (lat) x 12 (month) array. I think it will become clear if you read in the file and examine the dimensions.
HaroldW (Comment #171190)
Thanks, I miscounted the entries in the line. wc verifies 75 entries in 432 (12×36) lines, but the first three entries are 0, [1-12], 0 for each line so ignoring those gives 72x36x12.
And of course, that means that these “absolute” temperatures are a single number for 1961-1990. So I should be able to calculate the average spread for each region (and collectively for the globe) but I won’t be able to see how much year-to-year variation is in the spread.
DaleS,
“I won’t be able to see how much year-to-year variation is in the spread.”
Yes. To determine that, you’d have to examine the anomaly files. There’s a netcdf file for gridcells, and hemispheric and global means.
“Reps at the University of Manchester voted to replace noisy appreciation with the British Sign Language (BSL) equivalent – a wave of both hands.
Union officer Sara Khan said traditional clapping can cause issues for students with autism, sensory issues or deafness”
seems “wave of both hands” by the BSL has caught on.
dougie
” “wave of both hands†by the BSL has caught on.”
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Great!..Next will be the killing of any breathing creature, to avoid poisoning the atmosphere with excess CO2…. these people are nuts.
The next logical step would be to ban handwaving, since it can cause issues for those with autism, sensory issues, or blindness.
Dale,
“Brett put his hand over my mouth..This is what terrified me the most and has had the most lasting impact on my life.”
New Yorker article about the second accuser had as a source a guy who heard about it from a guy. Well it turns out they interviewed the intermediate guy, and he said he didn’t know anything about it. The New Yorker chose to still use the source who thought he heard about it from the guy who denied knowing about it.
WSJ reports WH says no evidence found against Kavanaugh.
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The FBI investigation is a bit interesting, apparently these background investigations are done for, or at the request of, the WH to assist them in hiring people. Since the investigation actually ended early my impression is that the FBI handled this like it was nitroglycerin, which it is. Pretty much a “tell me exactly what to do boss” investigation. They didn’t interview Ford or Kavanaugh.
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Obviously this investigation won’t be nearly enough for everyone who coincidentally made their mind up about Kavanaugh months ago, because ummmm … this is a search for the truth, the truth that Kavanaugh is a sexual predator. If that truth hasn’t been found then the investigation needs to continue.
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Bret Stephens once again alienates his peers in a major way at the NYT. He basically praises Trump for mocking Ford in a roundabout way:
For Once, I’m Grateful for Trump
In the president, one big bully stands up to others. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/opinion/trump-kavanaugh-ford-allegations.html
“I’m grateful because Trump has not backed down in the face of the slipperiness, hypocrisy and dangerous standard-setting deployed by opponents of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. I’m grateful because ferocious and even crass obstinacy has its uses in life, and never more so than in the face of sly moral bullying. I’m grateful because he’s a big fat hammer fending off a razor-sharp dagger.”
Tom
Obviously this investigation won’t be nearly enough for everyone who coincidentally made their mind up about Kavanaugh months ago, because ummmm … this is a search for the truth, the truth that Kavanaugh is a sexual predator. If that truth hasn’t been found then the investigation needs to continue.
No investigation that finds nothing will be enough unless it runs out the clock and the Democrats take the Senate. In which case, since confirmation process is a political process by design of the founders, the majority in the Senate can vote down Kavanaugh for whatever reason they like.
The sad thing about this is that, of course, finding nothing is precisely what one would expect if there is nothing to be found. It’s true that you don’t conclude that finding nothing means there is nothing to be found– perhaps you could find something if you just searched longer. Or something will come up if you just wait a little longer. But if there is nothing to be found, in principle, you will find nothing if you continue forever.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it implies absence. The right took the risk of having a public hearing and an investigation and apparently made it through the wood chipper, albeit with a lot of scars. The Democrats and the media also came out with a lot of scar tissue. A fine example of everyone loses.
“I remember it well†… but it still didn’t happen.
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Someone in another blog made the case that it was a dream which was confused with reality. It’s just one theory among many (it was totally made up, it happened but it was not those people, it was a recovered memory, it was an implanted memory, a faulty memory, and so on). At this point, who cares (to quote someone infamous).
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But the dream theory is intriguing. Children have to learn that dreams are not real; they sure seem real at the time. I think when the mind and memory go bad with old age, those people also have a problem with that. The mind is dreaming while it is not in dream mode. In the ages in between, not so much, but I know it does sometime happen. And I suspect that there are some drugs which might cause this. Not to mention hypnosis.
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Believing something really strongly does not make it true.
Grassley’s moving in for the kill. He sent a letter asking for all communications between Ford and her representatives and Feinstein, Hirono, other accusers, and her named witnesses.
The FBI uncovered quite a bit in a week.
” I don’t know what other inference we should derive from your refusal but that the withheld evidence does not support Dr. Ford’s allegations in quite the way you have claimed.”
I recently read about a fascinating case of false memory that happened in the 80’s, I think. A women was watching TV at home when an intruder attacked and raped her. She confidently identified a prominent man (a psychologist, if memory serves) as her attacker. He turned out to have an unshakeable alibi: At the time of the attack he was being interviewed on live TV. The victim was watching that program when she was attacked and exchanged his face for her attacker’s.
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Even after the police figured out what happened, the victim remained convinced that she was raped by the guy on the TV screen.
Erick Erickson was a prominent NeverTrumper. With Kavanaugh, he now says he’s voting Trump in 2020.
From the land of friends who aren’t helpful:
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“A friend of Christine Blasey Ford told FBI investigators that she felt pressured by Dr. Ford’s allies to revisit her initial statement that she knew nothing about an alleged sexual assault by a teenage Brett Kavanaugh, which she later updated to say that she believed but couldn’t corroborate Dr. Ford’s account, according to people familiar with the matter.
Leland Keyser, who Dr. Ford has said was present at the gathering where she was allegedly assaulted in the 1980s, told investigators that Monica McLean, a retired Federal Bureau of Investigation agent and a friend of Dr. Ford’s, had urged her to clarify her statement, the people said.” https://www.wsj.com/articles/friend-of-dr-ford-felt-pressure-to-revisit-statement-1538715152
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McClean is the very same person who Ford was accused of coaching a polygraph for. She denied that, and she denies this as well. This is probably why the left isn’t demanding the FBI report be released, and what yesterday’s “anyone who thinks this isn’t political needs to put down their bong” statement was all about.
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Leland Keyser is probably the only person in this drama we can feel confident is actually telling the truth.
For those who may be curious, like me, about the spread in the absolute global temperature, if my calculations are correct this is the difference in the absolute temperature 1961-1990 as used by HADCRUT:
Min (Jan): 12.11C
Max (Jul): 15.86C
Curiously, this data was produced for Jones 1999, and the abstract of that has the range between 15.9C and 12.2C. I have no explanation for the discrepancy, minor as it is. I’m also haven’t found an explanation of which order the 72 5 degree longitudinal chunks are located in; I think it might be amusing to locate the chunk I personally live in.
For the little it’s worth, here’s the absolute figures month by month:
Jan 12.11
Feb 12.25
Mar 12.87
Apr 13.86
May 14.89
Jun 15.59
Jul 15.86
Aug 15.71
Sep 15.07
Oct 14.09
Nov 13.03
Dec 12.36
The values are driven by NH-temperate land-masses, with the global temperature moving by a degree per month in spring/fall.
WSJ: Auto Makers Consider Shifting More Manufacturing to North America
U.S. trade pact is prompting foreign auto makers to rethink supply chains to meet potential restrictions
“We will allocate more U.S. production for the U.S. market,†BMW AG CEO Harald Krüger told reporters at the Paris Motor Show this week. He said that the German car maker already sources many parts in the region, but the new trade pact will accelerate a shift in investment.” https://www.wsj.com/articles/auto-makers-consider-shifting-more-manufacturing-to-north-america-1538737201
MikeN (Comment #171249): “Erick Erickson was a prominent NeverTrumper. With Kavanaugh, he now says he’s voting Trump in 2020.”
Erickson: “Trump is neither an ambassador for my values nor the articulate champion of my principles I would prefer. But he is a safe harbor in a progressive storm that seeks to both destroy my values and upend our constitutional republic.”
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Amazing how a supposedly intelligent man can take two years to figure that out. Better late than never.
Dale S –
“I’m also haven’t found an explanation of which order the 72 5 degree longitudinal chunks are located in…”
I found a spreadsheet on my computer which derived from an ASCII version of the HadCRU “absolute temperature” file which seems no longer available. While it’s not a guarantee that the netcdf arrays are ordered similarly, the 36 latitude zones in the ASCII file are arranged from N to S: the first element in the array refers to 85-90N, and the final element covers 85-90S. Longitude zones are ordered west to east starting from the dateline: the first zone covers 180-175W and the final zone covers 175-180E.
HaroldW (Comment #171271)
Thank you for that information.
So out of curiosity I looked at my own 5×5 grid (including the Atlanta area) of 30-35N and 80-85W. HADCRUT’s absolute values come out like this for 61-90:
Jan +8.70
Feb +9.80
Mar +14.10
Apr +17.80
May +21.80
Jun +25.30
Jul +26.80
Aug +26.50
Sep +24.10
Oct +18.80
Nov +14.20
Dec +9.90
Yes, all the values end with zero. The file doesn’t actually use decimal points, it’s three and four digit numbers which all end in zero, which strikes me as inappropriate precision.
Then for comparison I selected a random GCM with a historical run (one of the GFDL entries) and looked at 61-90 for the same coordinates. It’s just a graph so I had to guesstimate to the nearest half degree. It looked like this:
Jan +8.5
Feb +9
Mar +11.5
Apr +14
May +17
Jun +20
Jul +23
Aug +24
Sep +20
Oct +17
Nov +14
Dec +10
This is just one region from one model and may not be at all typical of models as a class. I note it agrees fairly well with the observed averages in November-February, but runs cold in Mar-October by up to 4 degrees C. The modeled swing is also nicely symmetric, with Apr=Nov, May=Oct, and Jun=Sep — the observed numbers is not so symmetric, with November 3.6C cooler than April, October 3.0C cooler than May, and September 1.2C cooler than August. So both the shape of the seasonal cycle and the magnitude of the cycle are suspect for this model at this location.
DaleS –
My spreadsheet has a page where one can enter the lat/lon of a cell and the annual cycle for that cell is extracted. I obtained the exact values which you list above. So the file has not changed — or at least not in that grid cell — since 2012 (which is the spreadsheet date, and therefore the likely date of import from the CRU site).
Looking back at your #171251, the global-average annual cycle is also exactly as my spreadsheet calculated it.
Roy Spencer says (Highest temperatures are actually when the TOA solar insolation reaching the Earth is weakest, because it’s mostly land that’s being illuminated, which has a much lower effective heat capacity than the ocean does).
Just in case anyone queries why the earth is hotter when the sun is furthest away.
The more I learn the less I know.
angech,
Surprisingly enough, that has been widely recognized for many years. There is a bit more to it though. Yes, the insolation is highest at perigee (late January IIRC) but the velocity of the Earth’s orbit is the highest as well, so the southern summer is actually a little shorter than the northern summer, partially off-setting the difference in TOA insolation. The thermal mass of land (minimal) vs water (yuge!) is of course the dominant factor, since a large fraction of total solar energy is absorbed by water in the open ocean (which is very clear) well below the surface. If you want to learn more, read about the permanent and seasonal well mixed layers and how they vary with latitude.
I’ve checked about ten models now (for comparison to my local grid) and so far they are extremely consistent — with each other. The summer temperatures may differ from each other by as much as 2C, but so far they’re all running significantly cold outside winter, and all but one shows a uniform rise and fall in spring/fall that doesn’t exist in HADCRUT absolute. And whether it’s based on 1 run or 6 runs, the 2.5%-97.5% “percentile” range is no more than 1c, showing a surprisingly (to me) narrow range for something so different than observations. So the practically all show the same shape, they’re within shouting distance of each other on values — but it’s a really poor fit for the observations.
Aside from restricting the place and time (and displaying in celsius instead of K) I am leaving all settings at default. Is there a default setting that is somehow making this comparison apples to oranges?
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/504/transcript
"504: How I Got Into College"
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Here's an "I Remember It Well" story a guy tells about his lucky break which lifted him out of a bleak situation when he was young. A Chicago public radio station fact checked it and found his guardian angel. Except their stories did not match, not in the details.
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An excellent story in itself. We have to remember that we do not remember reality, we remember our impression of it. Not the same thing. Everyone has their own version of reality which they think is reality.
New IPCC report is out. Who could have guessed it:
"Holding global warming to a critical limit would require "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society," says a key report from the global scientific authority on climate change.
…
To limit global warming to 1.5 degree C is "possible within the laws of chemistry and physics," said Jim Skea, co-chair of IPCC Working Group III. "But doing so would require unprecedented changes."
Widespread changes would be needed in energy, industry, buildings, transportation and cities, the report says. Global net emissions of carbon dioxide would need to fall by 45% from 2010 levels by 2030 and reach "net zero" around 2050."
. https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/07/world/climate-change-new-ipcc-report-wxc/index.html
SteveF (Comment #171284) Thanks. I am still sort of surprised. Seems to build in a regulator. Sea level rise, less land, cooler, more freezing, sea level drops ,but oh well.
Seems if the CO2 goes up and the land is less then it will eventually cool!
Mark bofill,
"Global net emissions of carbon dioxide would need to fall by 45% from 2010 levels by 2030 and reach "net zero" around 2050."
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Well, since those things are not going to happen, we must all be doomed. The poor children in North Dakota will bever again see snow! One entertaining aspect of climate hysteria is to watch people who claim to be focused on reality utterly ignoring it; the fundamental changes they demand in how society operates will not happen, but they simply can't accept that reality.
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There is much less public discussion of global warming than a decade ago… so real progress has been made… and most people sensibly ignore the crazy doom mongers. Pielke Jr kept pointing out that the emissions reductions required could not happen, and rather than address the substance of his arguments, they drove him out of the public discussion by any means available. (Sounds a bit like what 'progressives' always do when they face someone who disagrees with the policies they favor.) IMO, they are not worth engaging if they are not in a position to impose their crazy policies…. and at present, they are not.
Steve,
Yes. I still like to keep track of what's being said, but I basically agree with you.
angech,
"Sea level rise, less land, cooler, more freezing, sea level drops ,but oh well.
Seems if the CO2 goes up and the land is less then it will eventually cool!"
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Ummm… no. The influence of sea level rise on the fraction of land area is minuscule and will have no measurable impact. So there is no expectation for cooling from sea level rise.
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OTOH, the influence of rising sea surface temperatures on snow cover in the northern spring and accumulation of water (as ice) in Greenland and Antarctica are the most significant "feedbacks" that I have heard of. Ice accumulation from more snowfall is expected to be at least a partial offset for ocean thermal expansion and the peripheral melting of glaciers (including Greenland and Antarctica). Projections of sea level rise in response to temperature increases are, shall we say, very 'fluid' at this point, and anyone who suggests otherwise probably doesn't know what they are talking about. But projections of a meter or more by 2100 are just nutty (and the IPCC even basically says that). See for example: https://sealevel.nasa.gov/understanding-sea-level/key-indicators/global-mean-sea-level (3.2 mm/year over 25 years)
SteveF,
Snow and ice accumulation on the Antarctic Plateau is known to be something like an order of magnitude faster during interglacial periods than during glacial periods. I have a plot somewhere of layer thickness vs time for the Vostok cores. The layers compress at deeper levels, but the relative difference is still there. It's not going to go above freezing there any time soon.
Back on the topic of memory, according to the Washington Post, those voting for Kavanaugh held to a "politically convenient, scientifically baseless theory that sexual assault so traumatized Christine Blasey Ford she mixed up her attacker".
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Did anyone actually say that, as opposed to just opining that she was, or might have been, mistaken in her identification? The quotations supplied in the article don't seem to support that statement.
Only the poor lamented Whalen actually advanced a "mistaken identity". Ironically, Whalen took the same approach as some of the quoted analysts in the post article in assuming that *both* Kavanaugh and Ford were telling the truth as they remember it. But in the post, it's assumed that Ford is 100% correct, and Kavanaugh's memory was blotted out completely by demon beer. This has the advantage over Whelan's theory of being both possible and impossible to disprove. Whelan's theory was impressive amateur detective work right up to the point where he identified the alternate attacker — sure, the person lived in a house with a floorplan and location that matched Ford's vague description (unlike the persons she actually did name), but it turns he could not have been the drunken groper of Ford *because he was actually dating her in that period*.
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Setting aside the vague niggle that those you date are precisely the *most* likely people to engage in drunken groping, Ford was able to reject this theory out of hand — she knew him, and knew him well. There is no possibility of confusing Kavanaugh with someone she knew well. But Kavanaugh was *not* someone she knew well. The boyfriend was the intersecting point, and the extent of contact according to Ford was both being present at 4-5 parties, primarily during her sophomore year. No contact after the final party is alleged, and her common link is not present at the final party. For his part, Kavanaugh says that could have met at some events, though he doesn't remember it, but was at no party with her at all in Summer '82. Going over his calendar, he doesn't even see a viable date where such a party as she described could have occurred.
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The presumption off the Post's quoted scientists is not only that Ford would not forget a "known attacker", but two other claims that I don't think are well established:
1) If attacked by Kavanaugh, he was sufficiently known by Ford that his identity could not be misremembered.
2) If attacked by someone who was *not* Kavanaugh that she did not know well or even at all, Kavanaugh was sufficiently known by Ford that in the intervening decades there is no chance that she would have attached his name to the less-known or unknown assailant.
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I was also interested in the article saying that her sure memory was the same basic thing as why you remember what you were doing when 9/11 happened or JFK was shot, and in fact it's a "basic tenet of psychology and cognitive science." But I thought I had read that those memories *weren't* actually more reliable, and a quick google search turned up evidence to support that:
https://www.livescience.com/15914-flashbulb-memory-september-11.html
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The idea that Ford's testimony, if sincere, is sufficient evidence because of the trauma involved rests upon *Kavanaugh's identity* being a traumatic detail of the assault. It's not obvious to me why that would be so, given that she did not know him well.
A couple of things I recently experienced are relevant to the topics being currently discussed.
…..
With respect to memory. I spent 6 months rehabbing a house in 2005 (paid others to do work), and I currently need the records to correctly report income on a land contract. So I went to my computer to look for old pictures I remembered of the beat up house and for, what was then, a lease option that occurred in December of 2005. I couldn't find either and I am thinking, what in the world — particularly with respect to the pictures, which I distinctly remembered as being taken. I started thinking that maybe I removed the file for the 2005 house to a backup hard drive — I knew in particular that I would always save the pictures, which document a lot.
So after an hour and 1/2, I finally found my old paper file. In it were the pictures, which were old-fashioned Polaroid type pictures. In my own mind, it never even occurred to me, that I had old-fashioned pictures. My point being if I didn't remember what happened 13 years ago, no one remembers anywhere near all of the details of something happening 36 years ago. That is something that cuts both ways with respect to Ford.
……
With respect to potential male/female differences. Myself and my 17-year-old son had a short discussion with my 13-year-old daughter about proclivities for long-discussions. (My daughter typically goes on and on with her friends.) We, in not a negative way, simply said that we didn't understand really long (2-3 hour) discussions. My daughter's response was: "Why wouldn't anyone want to talk with their friends?" It totally went over her head that there were people out there who didn't enjoy the thought of regular 2-3 hour discussions with their friends.
I remember it well… the original Borking, where a lying sack of dog excrement (AKA Ted Kennedy) told scandalous, blatant lies about a very qualified judge. The left has only gotten worse since then.
LOL! I had all but forgotten this.
Nice clip. I don’t remember it. Never saw it.
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I believe the woman in this case, not sure why?
Is there a right answer given in the movie?
Looking at the plot I think I’m right, but I’m not sure. What a plot!
It’s based on a 1944 novella by Colette.
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A search for “I remember it well” brought up this.
http://j0ns1m0ns.blogspot.com/2016/10/i-remember-it-well.html
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I light of that, the two parties in this controversy should undergo fMRI. Either that or waterboarding.
A commenter on chiefio.wordpress.com gave this link. Excellent.
http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/25/10-red-flags-sexual-assault-claims-employment-lawyer/
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A quote from Mark Steyn.
https://www.steynonline.com/8874/presumptions-and-condescension
The URL above doesn’t show completely, so you can’t tell what it is about. Here it is again.
“10 Red Flags About Sexual Assault Claims, From An Employment Lawyer”
http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/25/10-red-flags-sexual-assault-claims-employment-lawyer/
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And here is another article about false memories.
“‘False Memories’ Are More Common Than You Think ”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/cognitive-science-false-memories-more-common-than-you-think/
Climate change, Senate hearings, whatever. It all comes down to epistemology, or feeling versus thinking if you don’t like big words.
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This one is a keeper.
“The Ideological Turing Test: How to Be Less Wrong”
https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/the-ideological-turing-test-how-to-be-less-wrong-6803a8c290cf
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“There’s a strange paradox about wrongness: We go about our lives feeling like we’re right, but — in reality — we spend most of our lives being wrong.”
From the link provided by Ledite (Comment #170946): “There’s a strange paradox about wrongness: We go about our lives feeling like we’re right, but — in reality — we spend most of our lives being wrong.â€
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I do not think that describes me, at least not accurately. Most of the time we are partly right and partly wrong. And most of the time I know that. I am rarely certain that I am right, unless it is the sort of thing on which it is actually possible to be certain. I am always willing to change my opinion, given sufficient evidence and arguments. But then, I know I am weird (in many ways) and I know people who appear to be absolutely certain about everything. But then, when I argue, I usually act like I am certain, so others might think that about me.
———
From the link: “I should understand my opponents’ ideas so well that they can’t tell the difference between what I am saying and what they believe”.
That is gold. I try to be sure I understand the arguments of those with whom I disagree, but do I really? That provides a way to test it. I think I will have to find a web site frequented with idiots (not hard) and see if I convince them that I am one of them (very hard).
Here is what happens to leftist who are willing to consider the possibility that they might be wrong: http://www.unionleader.com/article/20180927/OPINION02/180929571/1004/opinion
MIkeM,
Notice the “wrongness” in the song is over details. The both agree they knew each other, liked each other, had a pleasant dinner, she lost something and so on. I’m not sure one could tally everything and say anyone was mostly wrong or mostly right.
lucia (Comment #170950): “Notice the “wrongness†in the song is over details.”
It took me a while to figure out “what song?” until I remembered what started this thread. But I was commenting on the interesting link provided by Ledite. Very different indeed.
lucia (Comment #170950). That’s a good point; it’s an fun exchange, but not very real. Both remember the little details, but differently. In real life, one would remember a detail, a “you did x” or “you said y” and the other would say “I did? I don’t remember that at all”. The two would remember different things, not the same things differently.
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In real life I wonder how many can pass this test? “Give the name (full name), date, location of all the people you have had sex with, and for bonus points, the current contact info for those people.”
(Don’t tell me; too much info!)
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I am speculating here that the divide between R and D goes a lot deeper than arguments about abortion and free birth control.
Here is a good comment on the accuracy of memories of traumatic experiences: http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/28/ford-argued-trauma-improves-memory-thats-not-science-says/
Elizabeth Warren talking about about a 2020 Presidential run:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/29/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-2020.html
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She’s not what we need, and I don’t say this because I’m not a Dem. I don’t think we need another term of Trump in 2020 either. Trump can do some things I approve of, but I doubt he will ever be able to bring Americans together. Too many people hate him too insanely. The Resistance and the media will never get over it.
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Dems need to find a centrist who can bring our country together, IMO. More generally, Dems need to come back towards the center some. It’s time to give up on identity politics and the Church of the Sacred Victim. Come back to the center, offer unity, and return to power.
mark bofill (Comment #171066): “I don’t think we need another term of Trump in 2020 either. Trump can do some things I approve of, but I doubt he will ever be able to bring Americans together. Too many people hate him too insanely.”
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The same people hate any Republican, even RINO’s. Trump makes them especially crazy since they fear him much more than, say, Romney or Jeb!. The only way to bring the hard core “resistance” together with the “deplorables” is if the resistance succeeds in crushing us deplorables under their jackboots. So I think Trump is just what we need in 2020.
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mark bofill: “The Resistance and the media will never get over it.”
Another reason to vote for Trump in 2020.
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mark bofill: “Dems need to find a centrist who can bring our country together, IMO.”
Yep, they need someone who thinks there are no red states or blue states, just the United States. I, for one, won’t be falling for that again.
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mark bofill: “More generally, Dems need to come back towards the center some. It’s time to give up on identity politics and the Church of the Sacred Victim. Come back to the center, offer unity, and return to power.”
There is zero chance of that happening in time for the 2020 election. Outside chance for 2024.
Mike M,
“There is zero chance of that happening in time for the 2020 election. Outside chance for 2024.”
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Bernie Sanders has been a socialist his entire life. Ditto Warren and the rest. Whoever the Democrats choose in 2020, one thing is certain: the candidate will be left of Obama, and way left of the voters. They will run on nationalized health care, confiscatory taxes, and ignoring the Constitution whenever needed… like for gun confiscation.
SteveF (Comment #171074): “Whoever the Democrats choose in 2020, one thing is certain: the candidate will be left of Obama, and way left of the voters. They will run on nationalized health care, confiscatory taxes, and ignoring the Constitution whenever needed… like for gun confiscation.”
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Right. The fire needs to burn itself out and must be contained while that happens. Trump is the best (actually only) firewall we’ve got. Other Republicans have a tendency to try to contain the fire by giving it bits and pieces of fuel; that never works.
Why do you guys think that’s certain, that the Dems will continue to go left?
I think it’s certainly possible [that they will nominate very Lefty candidates]. Maybe even more likely that not. But I don’t see why it has to happen that way.
[Edit: I get that Sanders and Warren are likely possibilities and that they’re very left. But take Obama; if memory serves he wasn’t really on the radar until pretty late in the game. Of course he was left of center too, but that’s not my point. My point is centrist candidates maybe could be found, even if it isn’t obvious who they might be right now.]
mark,
Because the far left of the Democrats is where the money and enthusiasm is. They turn out for the primaries and the center doesn’t. Of course in the Democrat’s minds, Hillary was a centrist candidate. Obama in 2008 gave lip service to the center in his campaign.
Bredesen in TN is claiming to be a centrist who reached across party lines when he was governor. If he thinks he can do that as a Senator, he’s deluded. More likely, he knows he won’t be able to do that and is simply lying to the voters by using an example that is completely irrelevant.
DeWitt,
Good answer. :/ I didn’t think of that.
Thanks.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #171081): “Because the far left of the Democrats is where the money and enthusiasm is. They turn out for the primaries and the center doesn’t.”
Yes, that is a big part of it. There is also the fact that most of the media is quite far left. Also, Pelosi and Company have gotten very good at enforcing party discipline, making it very hard (if not impossible) for a Congressional Democrat to deviate much from the leftist line. Finally, the Left has gotten very good at imposing intellectual discipline; a good example is the way they made Bernie backpedal on immigration.
In the not so good economic news category, it turns out that while households have deleveraged some since 2008, non-financial corporations have become increasingly leveraged, using their share equity value as collateral. Worse, corporations are using borrowed money to buy back shares. Sound familiar?
Everything will be fine as long as share prices keep going up, much like borrowing on one’s home equity to buy more real estate works as long as home prices keep increasing. But one of the standard adages of the stock market is that it never moves in a straight line forever. On the order of $3 trillion dollars in corporate debt will have to be refinanced in the next five years and $1.3 trillion by the end of 2020.
DeWitt,
“..non-financial corporations have become increasingly leveraged, using their share equity value as collateral.”
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Sure, but that is mostly larger corporations, not small. Small corporations have been frozen out of capital markets since 2008, and could not, even if they wanted to) assume more debt. So smaller businesses are mostly immune to this kind of problem… even if that is not by their own choosing.
SteveF,
I probably should have qualified that as public non-financial corporations…. IIRC, most small corporations aren’t publicly listed and traded.
Ford’s picture doesn’t have a caption of Leland’s wild parties as I remembered.
http://thewashingtonstandard.com/why-christine-blasey-fords-high-school-yearbooks-were-scrubbed-faculty-approved-racism-binge-drinking-promiscuity/
“And there were always parties to celebrate any occasion. Although these parties are no doubt unforgettable, they are only a memory lapse for most, since loss of consciousness is often an integral part of the party scene.â€
Ex-boyfriend of Ford has given a sworn statement to Senate that he witnessed her coaching a friend on beating a polygraph. She testified she never coached anyone.
It looks like the polygraph issue was a classic lawyer setup, they must be learning from the FBI. The televised testimony polygraph question was kind of strange “Have you ever helped anyone with a polygraph?”. They very likely had the ex-boyfriend testimony in hand already.
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Seems she has an ex-boyfriend who isn’t very interested in helping her out. He said she was “unfaithful”. Ouch. The ridiculous Game of Thrones continues. Please vote Kavanaugh in ASAP so we can go back to cat videos.
MikeN,
Looks like Dr Ford is going to face some ‘interesting’ weeks. I’ll bet Chairman Grassley is not amused.
In other news, a team of “scholars” submitted a bunch of made up papers to what they call grievance studies journals.
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“To date, their project has been successful: seven papers have passed through peer review and have been published, including a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten in the language of Intersectionality theory and published in the Gender Studies journal Affilia.”
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“The flagship feminist philosophy journal, Hypatia, accepted a paper (not yet published online) arguing that social justice advocates should be allowed to make fun of others, but no one should be permitted to make fun of them. The same journal invited resubmission of a paper arguing that “privileged students shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class at all and should just listen and learn in silence”
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https://quillette.com/2018/10/01/the-grievance-studies-scandal-five-academics-respond/
On a completely different subject, can anyone point me to an easy way to examine monthly *absolute* temperatures (not anomaly) for any widely used global temperature set? KNMI climate explorer only seems to expose anomalies for observations.
Dale S (Comment #171175): “On a completely different subject, can anyone point me to an easy way to examine monthly *absolute* temperatures (not anomaly) for any widely used global temperature set?”
I doubt they exist. It makes little or no sense to average absolute temperatures because they can vary significantly over very short distances due to geography. So the local data are converted to anomalies, then averaged. I don’t think anyone knowledgeable disagrees with that; the debated issues involve the processing of the anomalies to create the averages.
Tom Scharf (Comment #171173): “In other news, a team of “scholars†submitted a bunch of made up papers to what they call grievance studies journals”.
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🙂
Sounds like they have passed the Ideological Turing Test with flying colors. To remind you, the test is: “I should understand my opponents’ ideas so well that they can’t tell the difference between what I am saying and what they believeâ€. https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/the-ideological-turing-test-how-to-be-less-wrong-6803a8c290cf
Link provided originally by Ledite (Comment #170946).
Mike M. (Comment #171178)
I recall seeing such a thing (absolute temperatures) in ascii format at Hadcrut’s site some years ago, but can’t find it today. The only monthly download available for absolute temperatures is 1961-1990 and in netCDF format, and examining the contents does not enlighten me.
Whether having an absolute temperature for a global record makes any sense is a separate question — obviously it doesn’t have a physical meaning any more than the global temperature anomaly would. But you *can* get absolute temperatures monthly from climate model runs at KNMI explorers, and I would think comparing the size of the absolute swing as part of the seasonal cycle to observed temperatures would be an obvious thing to do. To the extent that the temperature itself can be fairly compared that would also be a reasonable thing to do.
So for example, looking at the ensemble mean for tas in ACCESS1-0, historical runs, CMIP5, I see the center of the scale move from 285K in January to 289K in July. Without regard to whether “anyone knowledgable” finds that useful, I find that fascinating. In a world where a 2C warming (or even 1.5C warming) is deemed some sort of catastrophe, the simulated “temperature of the world” varies by 4K on an annual basis. But is that swing real? Does this model “get it right”? I would think absolute temperatures from representative stations would be useful in assessing that.
The person she allegedly helped with the polygraph lives in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
Christine Ford testified in Congress that she wrote the letter while in Rehoboth Beach.
Her family lives in Maryland and has not been seen supporting her in any way.
Ford testified she nearly flunked out of college because of Kavanaugh. However, her academics were fine in high school for two years after this alleged incident.
It makes more sense to conclude that nothing happened to her, at least until the mid 80s when she was in her late teens, just as in her therapist notes.
Dale S –
“The only monthly download available for absolute temperatures is 1961-1990”
I would think that taking that dataset, and adding to it the monthly anomaly, would produce a monthly dataset in absolute terms.
If you’re solely interesting in the seasonal variation, you could compute the seasonal variation in each component and sum them.
The mob has their knives out. Harvard cancelled a class Kavanagh was going to teach (officially he cancelled it), 800 Harvard alumni signed a letter asking for it to be canceled. Nearly 50 people claimed to have filed Title IX complaints against Kavanaugh.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/2/students-file-title-ix-against-kavanaugh/
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Nope, no chance an allegation based solely on one person’s testimony is enough to ruin somebody’s life at the very place elites routinely lecture the rest of the country from about their morals. It is nice to see our best and brightest devoted to fairness and due process. This is why you have to have a Constitution, to prevent the whims of mob rule. I also can’t really understand why anyone would think Title IX could be abused for an ideological agenda. Certainly anyone who went to Yale or Harvard would ever intentionally make false or misleading accusations to accomplish a partisan task? Yet another example of people make themselves look like idiots while projecting an image of superiority.
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“Jacqueline Kellogg, the student who organized the campaign to file Title IX complaints against Kavanaugh, told the Crimson that using the Title IX process in this manner gives them “power” and legitimizes their “right to our feeling of being safe.”
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Our future leaders.
Dale S (Comment #171181): “Whether having an absolute temperature for a global record makes any sense is a separate question — obviously it doesn’t have a physical meaning any more than the global temperature anomaly would.”
I apologize for assuming that you did not know that.
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Dale S: “But you *can* get absolute temperatures monthly from climate model runs at KNMI explorers, and I would think comparing the size of the absolute swing as part of the seasonal cycle to observed temperatures would be an obvious thing to do.”
That is an excellent question that I have wondered about myself. Now that you mention that, I have seen such things. But I don’t remember where. My impression is that the comparison is not so good, but I would not bet on that impression being correct.
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Dale S: “To the extent that the temperature itself can be fairly compared that would also be a reasonable thing to do.”
I think I’ve seen that with the claim that the uncertainties in the observed absolute value are large enough to make the comparison not so useful. But I have not looked into whether than claim is valid or merely convenient.
Sorry I can’t help.
Dale S,
Maybe this will help:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2016/03/uah-v6-lt-global-temperatures-with-annual-cycle/
Mike M. (Comment #171187)
Thank you, most interesting. So the swing in the lower troposphere is 2C on the annual cycle, substantially less than at the surface. One of the comments had a link to (discussion of?) monthly reanalysis temperatures and said they were about 4K. The link was dead, but climate explorer does let me get that information from reanalysis. NCEP/NCAR shows an annual cycle swing of about 3.25K, with the absolute temperature centered on 14.5C. The reanalysis only has data from 1950, so it can only be compared for part of historical runs.
HaroldW (Comment #171184)
The problem I’m having with using the data from the download is that there appear to be 70 non-header entries in each line, and monthly values from a thirty year time span should produce 360. With no way to interpret the data I can’t say what it is I’m seeing.
Dale S –
Sorry I don’t have the time to look into this, but the web page writes “Absolute temperatures for the base period 1961-90 on a 5° by 5° grid (Jones et al., 1999). Note that in this file, latitudes run from North to South.”
So I’m guessing that the netcdf file is a 72 (long) x 36 (lat) x 12 (month) array. I think it will become clear if you read in the file and examine the dimensions.
HaroldW (Comment #171190)
Thanks, I miscounted the entries in the line. wc verifies 75 entries in 432 (12×36) lines, but the first three entries are 0, [1-12], 0 for each line so ignoring those gives 72x36x12.
And of course, that means that these “absolute” temperatures are a single number for 1961-1990. So I should be able to calculate the average spread for each region (and collectively for the globe) but I won’t be able to see how much year-to-year variation is in the spread.
DaleS,
“I won’t be able to see how much year-to-year variation is in the spread.”
Yes. To determine that, you’d have to examine the anomaly files. There’s a netcdf file for gridcells, and hemispheric and global means.
just a bit Lite UK news to give you a smile –
“University of Manchester Students’ Union bans clapping”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-45717841
“Reps at the University of Manchester voted to replace noisy appreciation with the British Sign Language (BSL) equivalent – a wave of both hands.
Union officer Sara Khan said traditional clapping can cause issues for students with autism, sensory issues or deafness”
seems “wave of both hands” by the BSL has caught on.
dougie
” “wave of both hands†by the BSL has caught on.”
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Great!..Next will be the killing of any breathing creature, to avoid poisoning the atmosphere with excess CO2…. these people are nuts.
The next logical step would be to ban handwaving, since it can cause issues for those with autism, sensory issues, or blindness.
Dale,
“Brett put his hand over my mouth..This is what terrified me the most and has had the most lasting impact on my life.”
New Yorker article about the second accuser had as a source a guy who heard about it from a guy. Well it turns out they interviewed the intermediate guy, and he said he didn’t know anything about it. The New Yorker chose to still use the source who thought he heard about it from the guy who denied knowing about it.
WSJ reports WH says no evidence found against Kavanaugh.
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The FBI investigation is a bit interesting, apparently these background investigations are done for, or at the request of, the WH to assist them in hiring people. Since the investigation actually ended early my impression is that the FBI handled this like it was nitroglycerin, which it is. Pretty much a “tell me exactly what to do boss” investigation. They didn’t interview Ford or Kavanaugh.
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Obviously this investigation won’t be nearly enough for everyone who coincidentally made their mind up about Kavanaugh months ago, because ummmm … this is a search for the truth, the truth that Kavanaugh is a sexual predator. If that truth hasn’t been found then the investigation needs to continue.
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Bret Stephens once again alienates his peers in a major way at the NYT. He basically praises Trump for mocking Ford in a roundabout way:
For Once, I’m Grateful for Trump
In the president, one big bully stands up to others.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/opinion/trump-kavanaugh-ford-allegations.html
“I’m grateful because Trump has not backed down in the face of the slipperiness, hypocrisy and dangerous standard-setting deployed by opponents of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. I’m grateful because ferocious and even crass obstinacy has its uses in life, and never more so than in the face of sly moral bullying. I’m grateful because he’s a big fat hammer fending off a razor-sharp dagger.”
Tom
No investigation that finds nothing will be enough unless it runs out the clock and the Democrats take the Senate. In which case, since confirmation process is a political process by design of the founders, the majority in the Senate can vote down Kavanaugh for whatever reason they like.
The sad thing about this is that, of course, finding nothing is precisely what one would expect if there is nothing to be found. It’s true that you don’t conclude that finding nothing means there is nothing to be found– perhaps you could find something if you just searched longer. Or something will come up if you just wait a little longer. But if there is nothing to be found, in principle, you will find nothing if you continue forever.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it implies absence. The right took the risk of having a public hearing and an investigation and apparently made it through the wood chipper, albeit with a lot of scars. The Democrats and the media also came out with a lot of scar tissue. A fine example of everyone loses.
“I remember it well†… but it still didn’t happen.
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Someone in another blog made the case that it was a dream which was confused with reality. It’s just one theory among many (it was totally made up, it happened but it was not those people, it was a recovered memory, it was an implanted memory, a faulty memory, and so on). At this point, who cares (to quote someone infamous).
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But the dream theory is intriguing. Children have to learn that dreams are not real; they sure seem real at the time. I think when the mind and memory go bad with old age, those people also have a problem with that. The mind is dreaming while it is not in dream mode. In the ages in between, not so much, but I know it does sometime happen. And I suspect that there are some drugs which might cause this. Not to mention hypnosis.
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Believing something really strongly does not make it true.
Grassley’s moving in for the kill. He sent a letter asking for all communications between Ford and her representatives and Feinstein, Hirono, other accusers, and her named witnesses.
The FBI uncovered quite a bit in a week.
” I don’t know what other inference we should derive from your refusal but that the withheld evidence does not support Dr. Ford’s allegations in quite the way you have claimed.”
I recently read about a fascinating case of false memory that happened in the 80’s, I think. A women was watching TV at home when an intruder attacked and raped her. She confidently identified a prominent man (a psychologist, if memory serves) as her attacker. He turned out to have an unshakeable alibi: At the time of the attack he was being interviewed on live TV. The victim was watching that program when she was attacked and exchanged his face for her attacker’s.
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Even after the police figured out what happened, the victim remained convinced that she was raped by the guy on the TV screen.
Erick Erickson was a prominent NeverTrumper. With Kavanaugh, he now says he’s voting Trump in 2020.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/10/05/trump_2020_138259.html
From the land of friends who aren’t helpful:
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“A friend of Christine Blasey Ford told FBI investigators that she felt pressured by Dr. Ford’s allies to revisit her initial statement that she knew nothing about an alleged sexual assault by a teenage Brett Kavanaugh, which she later updated to say that she believed but couldn’t corroborate Dr. Ford’s account, according to people familiar with the matter.
Leland Keyser, who Dr. Ford has said was present at the gathering where she was allegedly assaulted in the 1980s, told investigators that Monica McLean, a retired Federal Bureau of Investigation agent and a friend of Dr. Ford’s, had urged her to clarify her statement, the people said.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/friend-of-dr-ford-felt-pressure-to-revisit-statement-1538715152
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McClean is the very same person who Ford was accused of coaching a polygraph for. She denied that, and she denies this as well. This is probably why the left isn’t demanding the FBI report be released, and what yesterday’s “anyone who thinks this isn’t political needs to put down their bong” statement was all about.
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Leland Keyser is probably the only person in this drama we can feel confident is actually telling the truth.
For those who may be curious, like me, about the spread in the absolute global temperature, if my calculations are correct this is the difference in the absolute temperature 1961-1990 as used by HADCRUT:
Min (Jan): 12.11C
Max (Jul): 15.86C
Curiously, this data was produced for Jones 1999, and the abstract of that has the range between 15.9C and 12.2C. I have no explanation for the discrepancy, minor as it is. I’m also haven’t found an explanation of which order the 72 5 degree longitudinal chunks are located in; I think it might be amusing to locate the chunk I personally live in.
For the little it’s worth, here’s the absolute figures month by month:
Jan 12.11
Feb 12.25
Mar 12.87
Apr 13.86
May 14.89
Jun 15.59
Jul 15.86
Aug 15.71
Sep 15.07
Oct 14.09
Nov 13.03
Dec 12.36
The values are driven by NH-temperate land-masses, with the global temperature moving by a degree per month in spring/fall.
WSJ: Auto Makers Consider Shifting More Manufacturing to North America
U.S. trade pact is prompting foreign auto makers to rethink supply chains to meet potential restrictions
“We will allocate more U.S. production for the U.S. market,†BMW AG CEO Harald Krüger told reporters at the Paris Motor Show this week. He said that the German car maker already sources many parts in the region, but the new trade pact will accelerate a shift in investment.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/auto-makers-consider-shifting-more-manufacturing-to-north-america-1538737201
MikeN (Comment #171249): “Erick Erickson was a prominent NeverTrumper. With Kavanaugh, he now says he’s voting Trump in 2020.”
Erickson: “Trump is neither an ambassador for my values nor the articulate champion of my principles I would prefer. But he is a safe harbor in a progressive storm that seeks to both destroy my values and upend our constitutional republic.”
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Amazing how a supposedly intelligent man can take two years to figure that out. Better late than never.
Dale S –
“I’m also haven’t found an explanation of which order the 72 5 degree longitudinal chunks are located in…”
I found a spreadsheet on my computer which derived from an ASCII version of the HadCRU “absolute temperature” file which seems no longer available. While it’s not a guarantee that the netcdf arrays are ordered similarly, the 36 latitude zones in the ASCII file are arranged from N to S: the first element in the array refers to 85-90N, and the final element covers 85-90S. Longitude zones are ordered west to east starting from the dateline: the first zone covers 180-175W and the final zone covers 175-180E.
HaroldW (Comment #171271)
Thank you for that information.
So out of curiosity I looked at my own 5×5 grid (including the Atlanta area) of 30-35N and 80-85W. HADCRUT’s absolute values come out like this for 61-90:
Jan +8.70
Feb +9.80
Mar +14.10
Apr +17.80
May +21.80
Jun +25.30
Jul +26.80
Aug +26.50
Sep +24.10
Oct +18.80
Nov +14.20
Dec +9.90
Yes, all the values end with zero. The file doesn’t actually use decimal points, it’s three and four digit numbers which all end in zero, which strikes me as inappropriate precision.
Then for comparison I selected a random GCM with a historical run (one of the GFDL entries) and looked at 61-90 for the same coordinates. It’s just a graph so I had to guesstimate to the nearest half degree. It looked like this:
Jan +8.5
Feb +9
Mar +11.5
Apr +14
May +17
Jun +20
Jul +23
Aug +24
Sep +20
Oct +17
Nov +14
Dec +10
This is just one region from one model and may not be at all typical of models as a class. I note it agrees fairly well with the observed averages in November-February, but runs cold in Mar-October by up to 4 degrees C. The modeled swing is also nicely symmetric, with Apr=Nov, May=Oct, and Jun=Sep — the observed numbers is not so symmetric, with November 3.6C cooler than April, October 3.0C cooler than May, and September 1.2C cooler than August. So both the shape of the seasonal cycle and the magnitude of the cycle are suspect for this model at this location.
DaleS –
My spreadsheet has a page where one can enter the lat/lon of a cell and the annual cycle for that cell is extracted. I obtained the exact values which you list above. So the file has not changed — or at least not in that grid cell — since 2012 (which is the spreadsheet date, and therefore the likely date of import from the CRU site).
Looking back at your #171251, the global-average annual cycle is also exactly as my spreadsheet calculated it.
Wow, how’d this make it onto CNN…
President Donald Trump’s winning streak. Recognition for his accomplishments, almost praise even.
Roy Spencer says (Highest temperatures are actually when the TOA solar insolation reaching the Earth is weakest, because it’s mostly land that’s being illuminated, which has a much lower effective heat capacity than the ocean does).
Just in case anyone queries why the earth is hotter when the sun is furthest away.
The more I learn the less I know.
angech,
Surprisingly enough, that has been widely recognized for many years. There is a bit more to it though. Yes, the insolation is highest at perigee (late January IIRC) but the velocity of the Earth’s orbit is the highest as well, so the southern summer is actually a little shorter than the northern summer, partially off-setting the difference in TOA insolation. The thermal mass of land (minimal) vs water (yuge!) is of course the dominant factor, since a large fraction of total solar energy is absorbed by water in the open ocean (which is very clear) well below the surface. If you want to learn more, read about the permanent and seasonal well mixed layers and how they vary with latitude.
I’ve checked about ten models now (for comparison to my local grid) and so far they are extremely consistent — with each other. The summer temperatures may differ from each other by as much as 2C, but so far they’re all running significantly cold outside winter, and all but one shows a uniform rise and fall in spring/fall that doesn’t exist in HADCRUT absolute. And whether it’s based on 1 run or 6 runs, the 2.5%-97.5% “percentile” range is no more than 1c, showing a surprisingly (to me) narrow range for something so different than observations. So the practically all show the same shape, they’re within shouting distance of each other on values — but it’s a really poor fit for the observations.
Aside from restricting the place and time (and displaying in celsius instead of K) I am leaving all settings at default. Is there a default setting that is somehow making this comparison apples to oranges?
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/504/transcript
"504: How I Got Into College"
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Here's an "I Remember It Well" story a guy tells about his lucky break which lifted him out of a bleak situation when he was young. A Chicago public radio station fact checked it and found his guardian angel. Except their stories did not match, not in the details.
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An excellent story in itself. We have to remember that we do not remember reality, we remember our impression of it. Not the same thing. Everyone has their own version of reality which they think is reality.
New IPCC report is out. Who could have guessed it:
"Holding global warming to a critical limit would require "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society," says a key report from the global scientific authority on climate change.
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To limit global warming to 1.5 degree C is "possible within the laws of chemistry and physics," said Jim Skea, co-chair of IPCC Working Group III. "But doing so would require unprecedented changes."
Widespread changes would be needed in energy, industry, buildings, transportation and cities, the report says. Global net emissions of carbon dioxide would need to fall by 45% from 2010 levels by 2030 and reach "net zero" around 2050."
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https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/07/world/climate-change-new-ipcc-report-wxc/index.html
SteveF (Comment #171284) Thanks. I am still sort of surprised. Seems to build in a regulator. Sea level rise, less land, cooler, more freezing, sea level drops ,but oh well.
Seems if the CO2 goes up and the land is less then it will eventually cool!
Mark bofill,
"Global net emissions of carbon dioxide would need to fall by 45% from 2010 levels by 2030 and reach "net zero" around 2050."
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Well, since those things are not going to happen, we must all be doomed. The poor children in North Dakota will bever again see snow! One entertaining aspect of climate hysteria is to watch people who claim to be focused on reality utterly ignoring it; the fundamental changes they demand in how society operates will not happen, but they simply can't accept that reality.
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There is much less public discussion of global warming than a decade ago… so real progress has been made… and most people sensibly ignore the crazy doom mongers. Pielke Jr kept pointing out that the emissions reductions required could not happen, and rather than address the substance of his arguments, they drove him out of the public discussion by any means available. (Sounds a bit like what 'progressives' always do when they face someone who disagrees with the policies they favor.) IMO, they are not worth engaging if they are not in a position to impose their crazy policies…. and at present, they are not.
Steve,
Yes. I still like to keep track of what's being said, but I basically agree with you.
angech,
"Sea level rise, less land, cooler, more freezing, sea level drops ,but oh well.
Seems if the CO2 goes up and the land is less then it will eventually cool!"
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Ummm… no. The influence of sea level rise on the fraction of land area is minuscule and will have no measurable impact. So there is no expectation for cooling from sea level rise.
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OTOH, the influence of rising sea surface temperatures on snow cover in the northern spring and accumulation of water (as ice) in Greenland and Antarctica are the most significant "feedbacks" that I have heard of. Ice accumulation from more snowfall is expected to be at least a partial offset for ocean thermal expansion and the peripheral melting of glaciers (including Greenland and Antarctica). Projections of sea level rise in response to temperature increases are, shall we say, very 'fluid' at this point, and anyone who suggests otherwise probably doesn't know what they are talking about. But projections of a meter or more by 2100 are just nutty (and the IPCC even basically says that). See for example: https://sealevel.nasa.gov/understanding-sea-level/key-indicators/global-mean-sea-level (3.2 mm/year over 25 years)
SteveF,
Snow and ice accumulation on the Antarctic Plateau is known to be something like an order of magnitude faster during interglacial periods than during glacial periods. I have a plot somewhere of layer thickness vs time for the Vostok cores. The layers compress at deeper levels, but the relative difference is still there. It's not going to go above freezing there any time soon.
Back on the topic of memory, according to the Washington Post, those voting for Kavanaugh held to a "politically convenient, scientifically baseless theory that sexual assault so traumatized Christine Blasey Ford she mixed up her attacker".
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Did anyone actually say that, as opposed to just opining that she was, or might have been, mistaken in her identification? The quotations supplied in the article don't seem to support that statement.
Link in above post didn't work. Nor editing.
The WaPo article referred to is at https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2018/10/07/republicans-who-believed-ford-doubted-her-memory-relied-junk-science-researchers-say
Only the poor lamented Whalen actually advanced a "mistaken identity". Ironically, Whalen took the same approach as some of the quoted analysts in the post article in assuming that *both* Kavanaugh and Ford were telling the truth as they remember it. But in the post, it's assumed that Ford is 100% correct, and Kavanaugh's memory was blotted out completely by demon beer. This has the advantage over Whelan's theory of being both possible and impossible to disprove. Whelan's theory was impressive amateur detective work right up to the point where he identified the alternate attacker — sure, the person lived in a house with a floorplan and location that matched Ford's vague description (unlike the persons she actually did name), but it turns he could not have been the drunken groper of Ford *because he was actually dating her in that period*.
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Setting aside the vague niggle that those you date are precisely the *most* likely people to engage in drunken groping, Ford was able to reject this theory out of hand — she knew him, and knew him well. There is no possibility of confusing Kavanaugh with someone she knew well. But Kavanaugh was *not* someone she knew well. The boyfriend was the intersecting point, and the extent of contact according to Ford was both being present at 4-5 parties, primarily during her sophomore year. No contact after the final party is alleged, and her common link is not present at the final party. For his part, Kavanaugh says that could have met at some events, though he doesn't remember it, but was at no party with her at all in Summer '82. Going over his calendar, he doesn't even see a viable date where such a party as she described could have occurred.
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The presumption off the Post's quoted scientists is not only that Ford would not forget a "known attacker", but two other claims that I don't think are well established:
1) If attacked by Kavanaugh, he was sufficiently known by Ford that his identity could not be misremembered.
2) If attacked by someone who was *not* Kavanaugh that she did not know well or even at all, Kavanaugh was sufficiently known by Ford that in the intervening decades there is no chance that she would have attached his name to the less-known or unknown assailant.
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I was also interested in the article saying that her sure memory was the same basic thing as why you remember what you were doing when 9/11 happened or JFK was shot, and in fact it's a "basic tenet of psychology and cognitive science." But I thought I had read that those memories *weren't* actually more reliable, and a quick google search turned up evidence to support that:
https://www.livescience.com/15914-flashbulb-memory-september-11.html
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The idea that Ford's testimony, if sincere, is sufficient evidence because of the trauma involved rests upon *Kavanaugh's identity* being a traumatic detail of the assault. It's not obvious to me why that would be so, given that she did not know him well.
A couple of things I recently experienced are relevant to the topics being currently discussed.
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With respect to memory. I spent 6 months rehabbing a house in 2005 (paid others to do work), and I currently need the records to correctly report income on a land contract. So I went to my computer to look for old pictures I remembered of the beat up house and for, what was then, a lease option that occurred in December of 2005. I couldn't find either and I am thinking, what in the world — particularly with respect to the pictures, which I distinctly remembered as being taken. I started thinking that maybe I removed the file for the 2005 house to a backup hard drive — I knew in particular that I would always save the pictures, which document a lot.
So after an hour and 1/2, I finally found my old paper file. In it were the pictures, which were old-fashioned Polaroid type pictures. In my own mind, it never even occurred to me, that I had old-fashioned pictures. My point being if I didn't remember what happened 13 years ago, no one remembers anywhere near all of the details of something happening 36 years ago. That is something that cuts both ways with respect to Ford.
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With respect to potential male/female differences. Myself and my 17-year-old son had a short discussion with my 13-year-old daughter about proclivities for long-discussions. (My daughter typically goes on and on with her friends.) We, in not a negative way, simply said that we didn't understand really long (2-3 hour) discussions. My daughter's response was: "Why wouldn't anyone want to talk with their friends?" It totally went over her head that there were people out there who didn't enjoy the thought of regular 2-3 hour discussions with their friends.
JD