Error Cascade

Judith Curry had a post on Error Cascade back in 2012.  There are tons of ways to screw up and one not so big screw up can lead to a progression of more screw ups that end in pretty spectacular failures.

There is some fairly new hysteria online about Arsenic in rice, water, apple juice and just about everything, since Arsenic is common if soils.  Some of the "Organic Gurus" primed the pump with Arsenic in poultry.  OMG!  Chicken farmers are feeding Arsenic to chickens then you eat them!!  Damn, that has to be bad, right?

I was bored and Googled a few things.  It appears the Arsenic deal started in Bangladesh in 1994.  Water wells had a higher than normal level so the WHO stepped in to set a few standards a limit Arsenic in water to about 50 ppb.  Since most places do not have as high a level, the WHO set somewhat arbitrarily a 10 ppb standard for every place else.  Once the drinking water standard was set and set pretty low, the US EPA requested research into field testing kits that were cheap and could read down to close to zero to include the 10 ppd water standard.

I haven't found out everything I want about the timing of Arsenic sample testing, but it appears that 5 ppb with any real accuracy is a pretty new development.  Consumer Reports got some on the new test kits and started testing whatever blew wind up their skirts and had a "block buster" discovery that some rice crop could have up to around 160 ppb Arsenic content.  This got the US "health food" guys going.

In the mean time, scientists with WHO recommended that Bangladeshi folks switch from deeper wells to shallow wells and surface water to reduce exposure to the killer Arsenic.  Surface water and shallow wells are not know to be great water sources in areas with poor sanitation, lots of people and lots of diseases.  So a MIT study found that the water source switch was killing more children that the Arsenic.

The FDA, concerned with the US food supply, basically took the position that there is no evidence that Arsenic in low ppb amounts is doing any harm.  The Arsenic in chicken haters pretty much forced the FDA to set limits on Arsenic in poultry even though that Arsenic was "organic" and posed a much lower health risk than Inorganic Arsenic.

All the time this was going on, "Organic Food" fans were developing pseudo-scientific remedies for Arsenic poisoning that has never been determine to really be a problem.  I stumbled on "Seattle Organic Restaurants" website and they recommended a "cleansing" using bananas and coconut milk to flush the deadly toxin from your pristine bodies.  Coconut milk and bananas can have as much or more Arsenic as some rices and both are an order of magnitude greater that the frigging chicken which has mainly organic arsenic to begin with :)

I am extremely grateful to Dr. Curry for enlightening me with error cascade because the terminology I was used to was "Cluster Fuck".

Throwing the Baby out with the Drinking Water: Unintended Consequences of Arsenic Mitigation Efforts in Bangladesh,

Update: More cascade potential fun.  Flint City has started replacing lead pipe run outs with new copper run outs to the meter.  Toronto, Canada did the same and noted that partial replacement, city to meter but no owner change out tended to make the lead situation worse.  Most northern cities do not like using PVC for run outs mainly because of union plumber concerns.  Using non-conductive PVC instead of copper would reduce at least part of the issues with partial replacement.  So catastrophe fans, things should get interesting.  Toronto's lead pipe replacement program questioned.

That Danged Mid-tropospheric Hot Spot Deal

The blogosphere is alive with talk about the troposphere.  I borrowed this chart from wattsupwiththat via Climate Etc., RSS's new paper indicates that the troposphere is warming at a rate of 0.125 C per decade!  There is a discussion on the changes at Climate Etc.titled, End of the satellite data warming pause?  Imagine that?  No sooner than I finished my Raising the lid on models post.

In my opinion, the Tropical Troposphere Hot Spot has issues because of pole ward advection not being properly simulated in the models.  It is really more a a northern hemisphere mid to low troposphere warm spot because Arctic Winter Warming and Sudden Stratospheric Warming are not all that easy to model nor is the break down in the Arctic polar vortex during high "wall energy" transfer.  A stable vortex helps retain heat and an unstable vortex releases lots of heat and that heat is what should be causing the warming of the tropical middle troposphere.

This dovetails with my concerns about how useful "average" surface temperature anomaly is when small amounts of energy can cause a large change in temperature anomaly during the extremely cold winter months at the poles.  We are stuck with the data we have but we really don't have to hype things that are spurious.

The "warming" is caused by latent "cooling" where warming or cooling really depends on your frame of reference.  If the tropical troposphere "warming" stays in the tropical troposphere then it would be real warming of the system but if it advects to the poles that "warming" is actually "cooling" since there isn't any heat uptake associated with it.  You could argue that it reduces the rate of cooling, but that is wrong because the outward flow increases, i.e. it is a heat loss from the system.  I don't expect many people to understand that since it would require changing one's frame of reference or "looking at the puzzle" differently.

However, the mid-troposphere should warm at a faster pace than the "surface" based on the models and the increase in the rate should be in the 70% faster range.  So the indicated 0.125 C/dec. should be scaled down to about 0.0875 C per decade at the "surface", in this case the lower troposphere which isn't really the same as the "surface" based on land and sea direct measurements.

Land "surface" temperature anomaly should be higher than satellite derived lower troposphere temperature because land is based on Tmax minus Tmin and lower troposphere is based on a "fixed" time of day.  The adjustments being made by RSS are adjustments to the "effective" time of day because the satellites can change speed a bit over time and there is also an internal calibration issue with the older satellite platforms.  I still think it is a pretty remarkable feat of engineering for the satellite data to be as good as it is, but there is no such thing as "prefect" data.

There could be better agreement if the "time of day" was made to be roughly the same.  The land surface temperature guys like local midnight while the satellites are closer to 7:30 AM local if I read the comments correctly.  Don't expect that to be discussed anytime soon either.  IMHO though, the less adjustment required the better.

Unfortunately, the RSS adjustment this time may have a little miscue similar to the Karl et al. miscue of leaning towards less "state of the art" data which happens to be a great reason to defund projects if the Climate Gurus are going to ignore billions of dollars worth of advanced remote sensing investment.  I love the space program but absolutely despise the way some are thumbing their nose at space based technology.  It is going to take a while for all this to get sorted out and I doubt that corrections if coming, will get much in the way of high dollar, high impact press.

This is where firing folks gets to be a requirement if you want progress, but of course "firing" is just so capitalistic and leaving no scientist behind is so progressive.  Funny, you cannot progress because of progressives :)

Raising the Lid on Climate Models

This is something that I missed that I found interesting.  I have used a pot lid rattling to describe the situation with the stratospheric Brewer-Dobson Circulation and Sudden Stratospheric Warming events that tend to impact the stability of the polar vortexes. I was pretty critical of people using "lazy" tropopause TOA reference when there is a lot of important dynamics up to an including the Turbopause at nearly 100 kilometers.

With the huge differences in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres temperature wise and roughness wise there are all sorts of interesting dynamics which somewhere along the line have to conserve angular momentum.  During my brief foray into the PETM situation and the indications that sea levels might be hundreds of meters higher than today I wondered how you would have to model potential variation in Earth's rotation velocity to see if it was worth considering.

This dissertation, The Earth’s Atmospheric Angular Momentum Budget and its Representation in Reanalysis Observation Datasets and Climate Models by Simon Driscol at the University of Reading popped up.  I haven't digested it all yet, but there is a mention of raising the lids on Hadley Center climate models to roughly 85 km from 40 km which was interesting.  Since climate models basically suck at emulating most of the common "oscillations" and some even get reversed flows for know ocean currents, it is pretty obvious that they have had some issues with what should be very basic physics.  Granted, modeling climate is a monumental task but not even coming close matching the difference between hemispheres to the point that they don't even want to discuss the differences between the hemisphere is pretty sad.

This is the second dissertation from the University of Reading that has caught my eye, the other being Andrew Barrett's recommended changes to liquid top cloud parameterization entitled, "Why can't models simulate mixed-phase clouds correctly."  Barrett's conclusion was that properly parameterizing mixed-phase clouds could reduce modeled sensitivity to about 1.6 C per doubling which is right in line with most current estimates.  I haven't followed up on how well is dissertation was received, but mixed-phase clouds was one of my pet peeves since increased relative humidity should impact the types of clouds being formed.  This peeve goes all the way back to the issues with the Kiehl and Trenberth etc. Earth Energy Budget incorrect assumptions about the atmospheric window from the "real" surface when their assumption actually was for the top of the atmospheric boundary layer "surface".

So I might just have a bit more reading ahead of me.  Both of these get into more intensive modeling that I am willing to pursue but worth a look.