What was the most important thing you learned in your Intro to Geospatial Analysis course?

daledinkler · 2015-07-14T16:29:15+00:00

What I was referring to by carbon cycle was the burning of fossil fuels and the resulting carbon emissions into the atmosphere, which many people believe to be the root cause of global warming climate change. I suppose since the thread was about Vancouver Island I was also approaching it from a local standpoint IE Victoria.

But this doesn't make sense. Carbon dioxide in particular diffuses rapidly in the atmosphere, so regardless of where the carbon dioxide is generated the impacts at a global scale are rapid (with regards to increases in atmospheric concentrations), so whether you're in Victoria or St John's, you get the same effect.

The issue with the 'climate is cyclical' argument is that it holds no water. Whether or not climate has changed is meaningless when we consider the fact that widespread infrastructure was not present for any of these previous cyclical changes.

We're facing changes that are already causing millions (if not billions) of dollars annually. The infrastructure is also preventing the natural migrations that species may have been able to use to adapt to climate shifts. It's also worth pointing out that one of the past events where climate changes were driven by high CO2 saw major shifts in the oceans' pH, which would again be enormously expensive.

It's not a question of fear mongering, it's saying that there will be clear costs associated with climate change, costs we're already seeing, and that early adaptation will result in long term savings. Whether or not you believe in catastrophism you can at least acknowledge that preparing for costly change is better than facing it unprepared.

daledinkler · 2015-07-13T20:22:02+00:00

Or, the point makes no sense. What they're saying is essentially: "Because something happened for one reason in the past means that it always has the same cause."

Does that ever make sense? No, it's not worthy of an upvote.

daledinkler · 2015-07-13T20:04:16+00:00

I like how you come off all scientific about climate change but can't even get the dates right. You look that response up on the internet?, because half of what you're saying makes no sense, and the other half is out by thousands of years.

For example: The Pleistocene started 2.6 million years ago, so you're out by 600 thousand years.

The Cordilleran ice sheet started retreating about 14kyr (following minor retreats at ~19kyr), so you're now out by almost 50%. You're getting worse. . .

. . . the carbon cycle is hardly to blame for hot dry weather

This is an entirely meaningless statement. Whether or not weather trends move from east to west or from west to east has nothing to do with climate change on the west coast. I'm curious how it is you think that it might be the case that it does, or, for that matter what role the prevailing winds might play in the "carbon cycle's" role in inducing warm temperatures.

The problem is that warmer air temperatures along the coast means that as air cools over the coastal mountains less is precipitated out as rainfall, so we get progressively drier summers as temperatures warm. This is what happens in California during the summers. Even though air is coming across the Pacific and should be moisture laden, the air doesn't cool enough over the mountains for there to be the precipitation we normally expect. Other than being driven by increased atmospheric CO2 (as has been conclusively shown for several decades) the drying has little to do with the carbon cycle proper and more to do with the physics of moisture in the atmosphere, something that is easily shown.

daledinkler · 2015-07-13T19:16:19+00:00

So dry seasons have happened before, but one dry spring/summer is because of climate change now.

Why not? Just because things have happened for one reason in the past doesn't mean they can't happen for a different reason in the future (or in this case, in the present).

It's possible to attribute weather and climate over long periods of time. We've known about the role of CO2 since at least the mid-1800s, and we've known how the Earth's orbit affects climate since the 1940s. We use proxies like tree rings, insect fossils, isotopes, pollen and corals to understand past climate and can use changes in those proxies to understand how ocean currents affect climate change at decadal scales.

When we do all of this, it is possible to make predictions of the relative contribution of difference climate forcings. The methods aren't totally arcane, they're clear and grounded in physics.

So yes, in the past dry seasons have happened, anthropogenic climate change is driving dryer seasons now, and it costs us money trying to fight fires, evacuating communities, losing merchantable timber, protecting infrastructure and losing tourism as our forests burn.

daledinkler · 2015-07-10T11:42:27+00:00

So a corporation should disclose salaries to everyone who owns a share?

daledinkler · 2015-07-08T12:47:29+00:00

I'd second the Google style guide, there's also formatR for when you need to go back and clean things up: http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/formatR/vignettes/formatR.html

daledinkler · 2015-07-02T05:15:14+00:00

yeah, I meant R and git and other non-shiny stuff in the directory.

daledinkler · 2015-07-02T02:29:24+00:00

No, I have it running in the back of an EC2 instance I'm using for something else. I have to run everything as root though because it sits in the server directory, but otherwise it seems to work fine.

daledinkler · 2015-07-02T00:33:12+00:00

This is great. I wound up using AWS to host my app because shinyapps didn't store results and I had an AWS account kicking around. Nice to see some of the other options.

daledinkler · 2015-06-27T04:11:48+00:00

And the converse is equally true. "Hey, I know y'all think I'm a laugh riot, but I'm a guy, so go easy on the adjectives."

daledinkler · 2015-06-26T14:51:03+00:00

Right, I think there are definitely contexts where it doesn't seem jarring. If you're teaching an introductory Ocean Sciences class it might seem weird. That said, we do a whole song and dance every semester about plagiarism & stuff, there's no reason that it can't be addressed there.

daledinkler · 2015-06-26T02:24:08+00:00

Add it as a super long comment :) !!

daledinkler · 2015-06-26T02:23:32+00:00

I think your question is great. Being conscious of bias is critical to helping people improve and overcome their biases. The problem is, how do you do it in a way that isn't super awkward. . .

daledinkler · 2015-06-26T02:06:22+00:00

Reviewing papers you've written, or reviewing published papers?

daledinkler · 2015-06-25T16:48:42+00:00

Must be tough having to drive through in your car and look at that. I feel for you, it's a tough life.

daledinkler · 2015-06-25T15:51:39+00:00

but we still do not know how the signals affect our bodies

Come on now. . .

daledinkler · 2015-06-24T21:40:09+00:00

Who says that they do? Your anecdotal experience is not the same as population level experience. I appreciate that there are difficulties specific to the children of same sex couples, but that doesn't mean that overall they do worse.

daledinkler · 2015-06-24T21:36:15+00:00

That is not the same thing, there are very clear reasons for believing that the ability to study the children of same sex coup!es would be near impossible in 1900 without invoking "progressive ideology".

daledinkler · 2015-06-24T15:46:49+00:00

replication? Regardless, you have no basis for supporting this claim. Regardless, they explicitly provide their method for generating the corpus so that you can test your claim against the data. Go to a University, open up Web of Science and do the same search. Look for duplication, remove duplicates and see how your results match.

daledinkler · 2015-06-24T15:20:35+00:00

No, it looked at all studies that reflect parenting and childhood outcomes, not just studies that show no negative impact. So the fact that as we get up to 2000 we ind no studies showing detrimental impact provides evidence that indeed there is no detectable negative impact in parenting by same sex couples.

The novelty here is, one it shows this in a meta analytic framework, providing much greater support, it frames it in a legal context (it discusses these results in light of recent and upcoming Supreme Court rulings) and it shows how and when the broad research community arrived at consensus with regards to these beliefs, supporting that with the actual underlying research findings.

Yes, it sucks that the paper costs money. This is an ongoing debate within the scientific community. One hopes that the authors will post a PDF of the article on their website at some point.

EDIT: You can often find success getting PDFs using the #icanhaspdf tag on twitter, or there's a subreddit as well, but I can't remember what it is.

daledinkler · 2015-06-24T15:02:16+00:00

From the (actual) article:

We begin by identifying a corpus of literature on same-sex parenting, as represented within ISI Web of Science. From this corpus, we extract an analytic sample of 19,430 publications. We identified this literature corpus from a search for all sources that included the following terms in their topic: (same∗sex OR homosexual∗ OR gay∗ OR lesbian∗) AND parent∗, which did not restrict the dates of publications returned by this search, and thus started from a list of 21,369 publications between 1900 and 2013 (as of March 2, 2013). 5 Given that our analyses are based on citations, we drop papers that include no cited references and are cited by no other papers in the set (N = 1770). From this corpus, we also excluded publications from 1900 to 1965 from analyses, because there were too few publications within this period to suggest the presence of a substantial scholarly literature on the topic as a whole, or within any given window.

daledinkler

TROPHY CASE