On top of Mount Humphreys in October 2011. I'm told this bench is pretty new.

I met some friends in Flagstaff after the 2011 National Association of Science Writers meeting and we summitted Mount Humphreys. Living in Boulder gave me a certain advantage over my fit but flatlander friends, but I still had to climb from roughly 9,000 feet to 12,600 feet and scrambled over a lot of craggy rock. It took us about 3 hours to do it in perfect weather. We had a grand old time hanging out with about a dozen other folks at the windy top before descending back down into the incredible old aspen forest below.

Bob Krulwich writes:

Global warming is important, yes; controversial, certainly; complicated (OK by me); but somehow, even broaching this subject makes me feel like someone’s put heavy stones in my head. Why is that?

He attempts to answer his question by citing someone else’s answer (Ursula Goodenough’s). But her answer is actually a non-answer that hints at an answer by citing Jonathan Franzen’s recent NYT op-ed about his journey away from, and back to, environmentalism.

You can start with Bob and work backward,

go straight to Dr. Goodenough’s survey of climate change skeptics,

or wade into Jonathan Franzen’s philosophical narrative on Crackberries, birds and love.

Both Boulder and Longmont have noted a marked increase in bank robberies so far this year over 2010, a surge FBI officials say they can’t explain.

Boulder has had two bank robberies so far this year, up from none during the same period last year.

Longmont has had four bank robberies — twice as many as the city had in all of last year.

“When you only have two (bank robberies last year), that’s a huge increase,” said Longmont police Cmdr. Jeff Satur. “We’re hoping they’ll die off and slow down.”

The explanation is that it’s not a “marked increase” at all. When your average annual bank robbery numbers are in the single digits, and they’re still in the single digits a quarter of the way into the year, it’s not a big deal.

How about some context? For starters, here’s five years of Boulder crime statistics: 2009 fact sheet: five years of crime statistics at a glance

Let’s look at the “robbery” row (since bank robberies aren’t called out) and apply some basic statistics:

No year is going to be exactly like the previous one. It’s normal to see numbers like this go up and down with natural variability. If you started keeping track in 2006, when there were 29 robberies, the 27 in 2007 wouldn’t surprise you, and the 33 in 2008 would prompt you to expect about 30 or so robberies in 2009. But the 51 in 2009 would throw you. Is this the beginning of a multi-year crime wave? Well, with 29 robberies recorded in 2010, it looks like we’re back to normal.

If you could only see 2008 and 2009 data, you would think, whoah! 51 is a pretty big jump from 33. Crime is on the rise! What could be at fault? But if you can see all the data from 2006-2010, you realize that the 51 in 2009 is just a blip in a local robbery rate that hovers around 30 per year.

And one cluster of bank robberies does not mean bank robberies are on the rise in Boulder County or that they even deserve a specific explanation. It’s called natural variability. Stochasticity, if you will. One hot summer does not prove global warming, nor does one cold winter disprove it.

So the numbers aren’t backing you up if you say “robbery on the rise in Boulder.” But you can make it look that way if you present a table of 3-year moving averages:

These numbers are basically true, but they can be used to tell a lie. To get a 3-year moving average, you average each year with its two neighboring years. This is a common statistical practice to smooth out some of the year-to-year fluctuations that you typically see in real data. But it’s nearly meaningless with this tiny amount of data. Five years gives you only three points, which is nowhere near enough information to infer a trend. The last two points are both skewed by that 51, and the moving average effectively erases that little 29-robbery blip in 2010. If you wanted to use real numbers to make the point that the tough economy is driving Boulder folks to desperate measures, you’d do it this way.

We expect robberies to grow with population, too:

The population changed by less than 1% per year, so you wouldn’t expect a big effect from population growth. But wait, this table says the population didn’t change at all between 2006 and 2007. And the population after 2007 is always a round number? Ah yes, the red highlighted abbreviation means “estimate.”

Numbers like the population counts in this table should set off a quiet alarm in your head. It’s very, very unlikely for an honest census to turn up round multiples of 100 three years in a row. A one in a million chance, really.

Anyway, what does this says about bank robberies? Is it a sign of our financially strident times that Longmont had four bank robberies all piled up in the first three months of the year, when it only had two bank robberies over the twelve months of 2010? Here’s our table of all the data we have about bank robberies:

This is a pretty feeble-looking table. Any statistical inferences you can make from this table would be feeble, too. The second number doesn’t even represent a whole year of bank robberies, so we can’t average it with the first one, which does. There could be zero bank robberies for the rest of 2011, to give us a total of 4 bank robberies for the year. And you could make the alarming statement that “bank robberies are up 200%” or “100%,” however you like to mislead your public.

All we can really say from this table is: our numbers are far too small, and we have far too few of them, to make any statements about bank robbery in Boulder County other than that it seems to be quite rare.

Here’s how I got to that figure.

I’ve been to a couple of climate science talks recently here in climate science central (Boulder, CO). The big topic these days is extreme weather. Warmer global climate means more heat energy in surface water and air to fuel stronger storms. What none of the scientists seemed to be able to tell me was how much more heat energy (other than “a lot” or “on the order of nuclear weapons”).

So I flipped to the 2007 IPCC report and found a disappointing figure:

The world’s oceans warmed by 0.5 degrees Celsius between 1961 and 2003.

Oo, half a degree. Big whoop. Well, you and I know that water stores incredible amounts of heat energy, and that there’s a hell of a lot of water on the surface of the Earth. So here’s a slightly more meaningful number:

14.1 x 10^22 joules or
141,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules

Joules is a scientific unit for energy. That number is how much extra heat energy the IPCC estimates was stored by the oceans in the last half of the 20th century. If you convert that into nuclear weapons, it’s about

Little Boy is the ironically named atomic bomb that incinerated the people and city of Hiroshima back in WWII. Various estimates put its total energy at between 13,000 and 20,000 tons of TNT. I went with 15,000 tons of TNT. At 4,184,000,000 joules of energy per ton of TNT, that’s 62,760,000,000,000 joules per Little Boy explosion.

But getting back to the oceans. Global warming over the past half century has put as much extra heat energy into the oceans as if each person now alive in the United States detonated 7 Little Boy-class atomic bombs to heat up the water.

2.2 billion atomic bombs’ worth of energy in the oceans that the world’s hurricanes and tropical storms now have to drawn on. Is it any wonder that weather is getting extra hairy?

Put that figure in another context: the world’s ballooning and looming energy bill, part of the problem and cause of global warming. The world used about

1.504 x 10^13 watts or
15,040,000,000,000 joules per second of electricity in 2008

Divide that into 141,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules and you find that the extra heat energy stored in the oceans could have powered the world for 9,375,000,000 seconds, or 300 years, if we lived all those years like we did in 2008.

Hydrothermal energy, anyone?

At your first job at CNN, the head of the network, Reese Schonfeld, famously said you just didn’t possess the gravitas to be in TV news.
Which I think is Latin for “testicles” by the way. But to give this some perspective: I was 23 years old.

For the 15 years you co-hosted “Today,” no one seemed capable of writing about you without using one particular descriptor. Tell me about your current relationship with the word “perky.”
It used to bother me because I thought there was a sexist undertone to that word. It meant shallow and cute, but not somebody who had any depth. It did become a pejorative word, but listen, it’s better than “bitchy.”

-Andrew Goldman

A typical bathtub holds 40 gallons or so of water. That is 330 pounds. A cubic yard of it, filling what at first glance seems a modest volume of 3 feet by 3 feet by 3 feet, weighs nearly 1,700 pounds, as much as the Smart micro car.

And when water is moving at 30 or 40 miles an hour, like the tsunami that inundated northern Japan on Friday, the heaviness of water turns deadly. Imagine 1,700 pounds hitting you at that speed, and each cubic yard of water as another 1,700 pounds bearing down on you. The destructiveness of a tsunami is not just one runaway car, but a fleet of them.

Explanatory science writing at its best. I love, love, love coming up with these kinds of dimensional reference points so that people really get what I’m talking about (Chang, by the way, is an alumnus of the same SciCom program at UCSC that I just finished last year). One of the professors cited in the article estimates the energy of the tsunami was comparable to that of an atomic bomb. Except we’re talking about sheer mechanical destruction instead of harmful radiation. Unless you count the shaky nuclear reactors …

Maybe I shouldn’t be talking about atomic bomb equivalents hitting Japan.

The point is that water is heavy, and it packs a punch. And the idea brings to mind a director describing the filming of an iconic scene in the 1983 movie Flashdance. A huge bucket of water is dropped on Jennifer Beals’ chest while her character, a dancer, is auditioning. Skip to about 1:25 in this Irene Cara video to watch that moment:

You can see her bracing quite hard against the chair, and watch her torso recoil in slow motion at the impact. According to the director, the first time they tried it, they used a lot more water and pretty much crushed her. And it hurt. Like trying to drink from a firehose.

Except there’s also that pesky nuclear winter thing. You know, where the crops die for lack of sunlight and millions of people starve to death.  Not to mention the huge amounts of mutating radiation and radioactive isotopes that cause widespread death and suffering for many years afterward.  What’s more, all that crap in the upper atmosphere helps break down the ozone layer and let in even MORE cancer-causing radiation from the sun.

The original story from National Geographic News gets it mostly right and puts the “nuclear winter” caveat up high. Unfortunately, it has an eye-catching, idiotic headline:

Small Nuclear War Could Reverse Global Warming For Years? (National Geographic news, Feb 22)

Which spawned a ton of stupidly angled follow-ups, some from usually decent news sources:

A Small Nuclear War Would Stall Global Warming (Live Science, 2011 Feb 28)

Reuters picked up the story more than a week later, which is a sign of desperation for copy. Their version of the story doesn’t mention nuclear winter effects till near the end, which is news-speak for “that part is not important or background.” Actually, it IS important, and if you spent five minutes THINKING about the background info, you would realize that putting global warming in the lede and head is a totally cheap scrabble for readership:

NASA: Limited nuclear war could pause global warming (Reuters, 2011 Mar 03)

And it’s just a matter of time until a conservative news source like New American pitches the story as proof that government scientists are crazy:

Govt Scientists Propose Nuclear War to Curb Global Warming (New American, 2011 Mar 03)

Really, this research is about NASA flexing its computer modeling muscles. That nuclear war would be a devastatingly bad thing is decades-old news. The NEWS is that we have a much better ability to describe exactly how bad. Wired, thank goodness, got it right:

How One Nuclear Skirmish Could Wreck the Planet (Wired, 2011 Feb 25)

Yay Wired.com. Boo everyone else.

When Hormone Creams Expose Others to Risks (NYTimes, 2010 Oct 25)

Veterinarians around the country are reporting a strange phenomenon: spayed dogs and cats, even some puppies and kittens, are suddenly becoming hormonal.

In female pets, the symptoms resemble heat: swollen genitals, bloody discharge and behavioral problems. Male animals are showing up with swollen breast tissue and hair loss. Standard treatments and even repeated operations have had no effect.

Now vets have identified the culprit. The pets were all owned by women who used hormone creams on their hands, arms and legs to counter symptoms of menopause. Animals who licked or cuddled their owners, or rubbed up against their legs, were being inadvertently exposed to doses of hormone drugs.

Okay. Note to self: pets and hormone lotion don’t mix.

But not 24 hours later this story appears:

Daily Rub-On Contraceptive Skin Gel Could Replace The Pill(Popular Science, 2010 Oct 26)

Birth control I can spread on my skin like a lotion, without the side effects associated with the pill. Yay!

Wait a second …

Of all 3.8 million adults who married in 2008, 31 percent of Asians, 26 percent of Hispanic people, 16 percent of blacks and 9 percent of whites married a person whose race or ethnicity was different from their own. Those were all record highs.

Well, since Asians are the smallest ethnic group of the four, just by sheer odds we should be marrying outside our race (‘marrying out’) more often than the other groups. But how many of the interracial marriages are due to preference and how many of them are what we would expect just by the numbers?

If your choice of whom to marry were completely independent of race, the chance that you’ll marry someone from another race would be about like the chance you’ll run into someone from that race on the street. If we take the U.S. Census Bureau data from 2004 (most contemporary survey with all four of the largest races), the single (not married or separated) population over age 15 is: