Volewica: politics

Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts

Saturday, January 26, 2019

Friday, January 4, 2019

Tamino who runs the blog Open Mind which is mostly about climate change, knows far more about statistics than I do. One of my majors at uni was Mathematical Statistics, but that was a long--a very long--time ago. In a recent post he discusses the whole issue of data analysis, and since he has simplified it down for idiots like me, even I understood it.

First he shows a chart of the daily minima and maxima for a place called Kremsmünster in Austria (You add the 'e' after the 'u' to show the umlaut when it doesn't exist in your language's alphabet):

What does that chart tell us? Well, first, there is a clear seasonal cycle. (Duh) Second, the gap between minima and maxima in summer is greater than in winter. Third, there are "spikes" when a single day is hotter or colder than surrounding days (that's called random fluctuation, and in economic analysis you reduce their influence by using extreme adjustment and/or moving averages). Fourth, you might be able to discern a modest uptrend. Maybe.

Now, to determine the trend in temperatures, what you have to do is to take the temperature for each day and compare it to the average for 30, 50 or 100 years. So if it's always hot on 4th July, what matters is whether it's getting hotter over time. This is called the temperature anomaly and also allows you to compare temperature trends from places which have different average temperatures, for example, the Arctic and Miami. The trend in the temperature anomalies of both places can be up even if their average temperatures are very different.

Tamino did this and then averaged these anomalies for each year. He then fitted a Lowess smoothing to these averages. This is what the average annual anomaly looks like:

So what can you see here? Well, in Kremsmünster, anyway, the trend of the temperature anomaly rose (according to the records) from 1880 to 1900, then was basically flat apart from small fluctuations until about 1980 and then started rising inexorably since then. In fact, it looks as if temperatures have risen on average by 2 degrees C since 1980. Note that even if the average was flattish between 1900 and 1980, there were big fluctuations from year to year. And some years the average anomaly was right outside the 95% probability bands represented by dashed lines in the chart. In my economic analysis I tend to remove those extreme observations using an algorithm which for short I call "extreme adjustment". I've written a handy little program which does that.

You might say well, big deal, what's 2 degrees? After all, as you can see from the top chart, the temperature fluctuates from -10 C in mid-winter to plus 30 C in mid-summer. 2 degrees? Pfui! But it's the extremes which move.

Here's the number of freezing days for each year from 1880 fitted with a Lowess smooth and a "piecewise linear" trend:

Back in 1880, there were something like 80 freezing days a year. Now that number is down to 40.

What about hot days(days when temperatures exceeded 30 degrees C)?

Well, from 1910 to 1980, hardly any. Just a few days each year, often none. But since 1980, a clear uptrend. And now there are 20-30 days a year when the temperature exceeds 30 degrees. So even though average temperatures are up by what seems to be only a little (2 degrees C) the number of hot days is up 20 fold.

[Read more here, all charts from that source too]

People who don't understand the statistics underlying our certainty that there is climate change get distracted by a particularly cold day in mid-winter. How can there be global warming, they ask, when I am so freaking cold? It's much easier to understand in summer, though. Someone born in the 50s and 60 and 70s will be able to say that it's much hotter now than it was in their youth. And they'd be right. In fact, it was record temperatures this past northern hemisphere summer which crystallised Europe's belief that global warming wasn't just real but also a threat.

At Paris, the world committed to trying to keep the rise in temperatures to below 2 degrees C. As you can see, in some places we are already there. We need to do more to green our economies; we need to counter the lies spread by fossil fuel companies and billionaires and by the rabid right and Republicans. Fortunately, the precipitous collapse in the cost of renewable energy and batteries has made our path easier and clearer. The only thing now stopping us from a rapid and wholesale switch to renewables is politics. And in democracies we know the solution to that, right?

[With thanks to Tamino, who is trying hard to lighten the world's ignorance about climate change, one chart at a time]

Thursday, November 23, 2017

Record number very worried about climate change

Source

From EcoWatch.

• Seven in ten Americans (71 percent) think global warming is happening, an increase of eight percentage points since March 2015. Only about one in eight Americans (13 percent) think global warming is not happening. Americans who think global warming is happening outnumber those who think it is not by more than five to one.  

• Americans are also becoming certain global warming is happening—47 percent are "extremely" or "very" sure it is happening, an increase of 10 percentage points since March 2015. By contrast, far fewer—seven percent—are "extremely" or "very sure" global warming is not happening.

• Over half of Americans (54 percent) understand that global warming is mostly human-caused. By contrast, one in three (33 percent) say it is due mostly to natural changes in the environment.

• Only about one in seven Americans (15 percent) understand that nearly all climate scientists (more than 90 percent) are convinced that human-caused global warming is happening.

• More than six in ten Americans (63 percent) say they are at least "somewhat worried" about global warming. About one in five (22 percent) are "very worried" about it—the highest levels since our surveys began, and twice the proportion that were "very worried" in March 2015.

• Two in three Americans feel "interested" in global warming (67 percent), and more than half feel "disgusted" (55 percent) or "helpless" (52 percent). Fewer than half feel "hopeful" (44 percent).

• Nearly two in three Americans (64 percent) think global warming is affecting weather in the U.S., and one in three think weather is being affected "a lot" (33 percent), an increase of eight percentage points since May 2017.

• A majority of Americans think global warming made several extreme events in 2017 worse, including the heat waves in California (55 percent) and Arizona (51 percent), hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria (54 percent), and wildfires in the western U.S. (52 percent).

• More than three in four Americans (78 percent) are interested in learning about how global warming is or is not affecting extreme weather events.

• More than four in ten Americans (44 percent) say they have personally experienced the effects of global warming, an increase of 13 percentage points since March 2015.

• Four in ten Americans (42 percent) think people in the U.S. are being harmed by global warming "right now." The proportion that believes people are being harmed "right now" has increased by 10 percentage points since March 2015.

• Half of Americans think they (50 percent) or their family (54 percent) will be harmed by global warming. Even more think global warming will harm people in the U.S. (67 percent), the world's poor or people in developing countries (both 71 percent), future generations of people (75 percent) or plant and animal species (75 percent).

• Most Americans think global warming will have future impacts, causing more melting glaciers (67 percent), severe heat waves (64 percent), droughts and water shortages (63 percent), floods (61 percent), and other impacts over the next 20 years.

• Two in three Americans (67 percent) say the issue of global warming is either "extremely" (12 percent), "very" (19 percent), or "somewhat" (37 percent) important to them personally, while one in three (33 percent) say it is either "not too" (19 percent) or "not at all" (14 percent) important personally. The proportion that say it is personally important has increased by 11 percentage points since March 2015.

• Nearly four in ten Americans (38 percent) say they discuss global warming with family and friends "often" or "occasionally," an increase of 12 percentage points since March 2015. However, more say they "rarely" or "never" discuss it (62 percent). Additionally, half of Americans (51 percent) say they hear about global warming in the media at least once a month, and one in four (25 percent) say they hear people they know talk about global warming at least once a month.

• More than half of Americans (54 percent) say they have thought "a lot" (22 percent) or "some" (32 percent) about global warming. Fewer say they have thought about global warming just "a little" (32 percent) or "not at all" (14 percent).

• Few Americans are confident that humans will reduce global warming. Nearly half (48 percent) say humans could reduce global warming, but it's unclear at this point whether we will do what is necessary, and one in four (25 percent) say we won't reduce global warming because people are unwilling to change their behavior. Only five percent say humans can and will successfully reduce global warming.

[Read more here]

What is striking is just how convinced Americans are that climate change is happening and how pessimistic they are that anything will be done about it. People have forgotten their collective power. You have the vote, people. You can write to newspapers. You can re-tweet articles about global warming. You can write to your Congressman/woman or Senator. It's up to us.

Monday, August 28, 2017

Terrorist kills 53,000!

Imagine for a moment that you saw this headline. You would be outraged and frightened You would demand that something be done. And you would be sure that something would be done (even if it didn't really help.) But what if we're not talking about terrorism, but air pollution?

Source

This is the thesis of this intriguing piece by the prolific and insightful Zachary Shahan of CleanTechnica. As he points out, 7 million a year around the world die prematurely from the effects of air pollution, 200,000 die in the USA, of which 53,000 die from air pollution caused by vehicles.

So why do we care so much about the deaths from a terrorist attack, and yet just shrug our shoulders with all these deaths from toxic air?

I think it's because we regard air pollution as something unavoidable. It's been with us ever since industrialisation began. Jane Austen mentions some of her characters living in the cleaner air of the West End of London. The prevailing wind is westerly; the smoke from the factories and chimneys would blow towards the East End, where the poor lived. If something just is, and you feel your power to change it is limited, you just put up with it. Especially if what is needed is collective action. Sometimes, then, change only happens because of an outcry because things have got intolerable. China is a good example of that. Some part of her embrace of renewables is due to her horrendous air pollution.

But everyone might also feel, that however regrettable the deaths caused by air pollution are, they are the price we pay for all the other benefits of our civilisation. We shrug. We need electricity, we need cars. Life's a bitch. Sigh. Yet you might start to feel differently once you realise you can produce electricity without pollution, you can have transport without pollution. You can have clean air. It's no longer an unattainable goal. We don't have to live with air pollution. The technologies exist to eliminate it completely. It's doable.

Let's do it.