DYNAMICS AND UNCERTAINTY

Perhaps the most significant contribution of the intensifying climatic research is the accumulation of evidence that climate has never been static. Rather, it has been ever changing at all time scales. The changing character of climate, verified for the past or predicted for the future, has been sometimes described by the term nonstationarity. However, revisiting the notions of stationarity and nonstationarity, which are defined within stochastics, we may understand that the terms are often abused. Literally, claims of nonstationarity cannot stand unless the evolution in time of the statistical characteristics of the process is known in deterministic terms not only for the past, but also for the future in particular. This however can hardly be the case, because, as is known, deterministic predictions are difficult, especially of the future.
Change is not synonymous to nonstationarity, since even an ideal stationary white noise process involves change, which however becomes less and less distinct as the time scale of viewing the process (e.g., time scale of averaging) increases. However, the climatic and all geophysical processes demonstrate more prominent change at large scales in comparison to white noise or even to typical stochastic models such as Markovian. This does not reflect nonstationarity. Rather it warns us to change our perception of natural processes as resembling these simple idealized mathematical processes and to move towards a new type of stochastic dynamics.
The “new” description does not depart from the 60- to 70-year old pioneering works of Hurst on natural processes and of Kolmogorov on turbulence. Essentially, Hurst’s discovery in 1950 of the behaviour named after him and the model that had been proposed by Kolmogorov 10 years earlier recognize the multi-scale fluctuation of natural processes and describe it in stationary terms.
Contrasting stationary with nonstationary descriptions is not just a matter of semantics and of rigorous use of scientific terminology. Rather it has important implications in engineering and management. Because nonstationarity uses deterministic functions of time, it explains part of the variability and thus reduces future uncertainty. This is consistent with reality only if the produced deterministic functions are indeed deterministic, i.e., exact and applicable in future times. As this is hardly the case as far as future applicability is concerned, the uncertainty reduction is a delusion and results in a misleading perception and underestimation of risk.
Apparently, the stationary description with Hurst-Kolmogorov stochastic dynamics results in higher uncertainty in comparison to either nonstationary descriptions or to typical stationary stochastic processes. In particular, the uncertainty under Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics is dramatically increased at large scales, i.e., time scales comparable to those used to define climate, to lifetimes of engineering projects, and to horizons of management strategies. In addition, as far as typical statistical estimation is concerned, the Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics implies dramatically higher intervals in the estimation of location statistical parameters (e.g., mean) and highly negative bias in the estimation of dispersion parameters (e.g., standard deviation). It is important that the Hurst-Kolmogorov framework allows calculating the statistical measures of bias and uncertainty, either of statistical parameters or of future predictions, which are theoretically consistent and also consistent with empirically observed natural behaviours.
The above framework is illustrated using several examples of hydrometeorological time series, which initially show the consistency of the framework with reality and illustrate the implications for uncertainty. A final example demonstrates how this framework was implemented in the planning and strategic management of the water supply system of Athens, Greece, which comprises four reservoirs and several aquifers. After a long persistent drought (7 years) that shocked Athens in the beginning of the 1990s, the strategic water management became a crucial task, with amplified importance in the phase of preparation of the 2004 Olympics. The demonstration of the methodological framework also includes comparison with alternative nonstationarity modelling approaches, including a trend-based approach that yields absurd results, and a climate-model-based approach that substantially underestimates uncertainty and risk. http://www.itia.ntua.gr/en/docinfo/944/
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Koutsoyiannis, D., Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics and uncertainty, Workshop on Nonstationarity, Hydrologic Frequency Analysis, and Water Management, Boulder, Colorado, USA, International Center for Integrated Water Resources Management, US Army Corps of Engineers, United States Geological Survey, US Department of the Interior - Bureau of Reclamation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, US Environmental Protection Agency, Colorado State University, 2010.

MEN, WOMEN, & THE CARD UP THE SLEEVE

Ladies march on D.C.

By Jim Beers
I have given numerous talks and written several articles lately about the abuses and growing danger to the nation posed by out-of-control bureaucracies destroying rural America by closing the enormous federal landholdings to sustainable management and use of natural resources and the targeted use of the un-Constitutional power of selective Endangered Species actions from wolves to smelt, suckers, and caddis flies. These latter abuses based on the current Endangered Species Act have emerged as perhaps as great a challenge to American liberties and our way-of-life as the breathtaking expansion of federal power that has occurred in the very dark days of the first 18 months of the Obama Administration.
In the midst of the backlash to the dark days mentioned above, there has emerged a broad and growing political movement to "throw out all the rascals in Washington", repeal the onerous and thousands-of-pages-long-laws passed
recently by lawmakers that couldn't even be bothered to read them, much less
justify or explain them. It is this national environment of reformation as we approach the mid-term elections that gives some hope of reorienting this nation from its descent into tyranny that has been growing for several decades.
Because of this possibility of electing a committed new crop of politicians
I have mentioned the heretofore unlikely chance of repealing the Endangered Species Act or at least amending it. Some such needed changes are:
1. Make Endangered Species Listings contingent on only the worldwide status of a SPECIES (not national status).
2. Eliminate any Listing of Subspecies, Race, or Populations. Only SPECIES could be listed.
3. Reaffirm the 220+ year US Constitutional mandate that the government
MUST PAY JUST COMPENSATION for ANY TAKING of private property made in regards Endangered Species from dogs and irrigation water to any and all property rights as broadly construed.
Additionally, I recommended the very important need to:
1. Repeal the 17th Amendment making US Senators appointed by the
legislature of the State. This makes them true representatives of the State and not the current flaks for national and international agendas and all the national Non-Government Organizations that they work for now. Senators that do not represent their state too often remain in office due to support from national and international organizations. State legislators that appoint or allow such rogue Senators to remain in office, should be subject to the righteous wrath of justifiably irate voters within the state. This is a major factor in the dramatic loss of State's Rights in recent decades.
2. Reform the state and federal land-management and natural resource agencies to staff them with knowledgeable persons committed to the sustainable management and use, in the broadest sense, of the natural resources on government lands.
3. Reform state universities and public schools from the propaganda centers they have become to centers of truth and knowledge so important to a Constitutional Republic like ours.
None of these six recommendations are even remotely possible if the
incumbents currently warming Congressional seats return for another two
(much less six) years. Reform and restoration depend on new faces but the
old faces have stacked the deck and have a card up their sleeve. Take McCain, Feingold, and Reid (please) for instance.
Other than running for "their seat" they also share that ace-in-the-hole of many federal politicians with large and politically powerful Native American enclaves and many (something that amazes me) gamblers interested in "more" or "closer" casinos. Thus that secret exemption in the infamous "McCain/Feingold" election law that prohibits you and me and "our" organizations from "giving" more than such and such OR running political ads after 60 days before the election DOES NOT APPLY TO NATIVE AMERICANS.
Additionally, a recent Washington state election recount for Governor was
decided by votes "discovered" on large Native American reservations where
the tribe runs the polling station, voting rules, and counting. This is but one leg of that octopus rightly called "the power of incumbency" that is continuing the national slide into darkness. Thus are the growing abuss of  The Endangered Species Act and similar travesties more and more made to appear unchangeable.
I am constantly amazed at the number of people I meet that agree with me but are reluctant to say anything or much less vote for or actively support the changes that are so important to our future. Likewise I am heartened by the large number of people working hard to make reforms possible. For instance,
- Kimberley Strassel writes thoughtful and hopeful editorials in the Wall Street Journal.
- Sharron Angle has made state changes thought impossible as a state legislator and now has a firm hold on discrediting and replacing that disgraceful incumbent Reid in Nevada.
- Sarah Palin, just being Palin, carries a firm grasp of natural resources and the US Constitution, two things you can't go wrong with.
- Michelle Bachmann, simultaneously an outsider and incumbent, represents the finest traditions as she speaks out bluntly where needed and gives hope to the disparate Americans desperately trying to reverse
America's drift into tyranny.
- Sharon in Oregon fights daily for rural America and ranchers in particular.
- Mona in Montana is devoting her life to saving American freedoms.
- Sylvia in New York spends much of her time fighting growing government oppression of animal owners.
- Gloria and Cindy in Washington state work to maintain state responsiveness to rural citizen's needs as urban constituencies try to oppress their rural cousins as happens in Illinois, Massachusetts, California, and too many other states.
- Roni and Kimmi in Colorado work ceaselessly to match defensible scientific knowledge with the wild assertions of radicals with hidden agendas from global warming to expanding federal landholdings with the secret collusions of extremist groups and government agencies. Hey, hold it. Would the ladies please leave the room while we men talk?
Thanks.
Guys, how come our "few good men" in this fight (and fight it is) are all women? Too many of us have indeed become what that "California Goldilocks-from-the-gym" once rightly referred to as "girly-men".
If we are going to meet our obligation as fathers and defenders we can't remain in
hiding while these women do our work. Thank God we've got 'em but we have
to help and this upcoming election is (to quote something I have heard all my life but never has it held such awesome importance as it does today) the most important one in my lifetime.
OK ladies you can come back in.
Reform is needed now or it may be too late. Reform is impossible (I give you Barney Frank and Chris Dodd honchoing financial reform or Snowe, Collins, Graham, and Brown that never met a compromise they didn't like) with the current flock of incumbents. Help the challengers and let them know what you want them to do about the things that are important to you.
If you don't or can't, then it (rural living, hunting, fishing, gun rights, ranching, farming, pets, traditions, and way of life, etc) really isn't worth fighting for and we will just continue to rob each other under the guise of "redistributing wealth" to create the illusion of "progress" (to where?).
The incumbents have the Billions in casino "lobbying" money (to authorize casinos and to stop authorizing casinos too close, per their owners, to existing casinos) to draw on surreptitiously and the reluctance of voters to support new faces or oppose recent changes. Those would-be challengers that would change abuses like The Endangered Species Act need all the help they can get and all of us need to help put them in office or what has become unimaginably bad will become and remain ever more intolerable with inevitable consequences too awful to contemplate.
Stopping Minnesota felons from voting and putting away dangerous bums brandishing truncheons outside Philadelphia voting booths aren't the only
worries we have. Repeal and amendment of a whole host of bad laws must be
done and electing honest and committed representatives is the first step.

DID THE EARTH MOVE FOR YOU?

By  Michael R. Shannon
Last Friday at 5 AM, after a quiet spell of some 13 years, Prince William County, VA had an earthquake. For commuters 5AM is when they're getting ready to head to work. For drunks and night owls it's the time they are arriving home. So thousands of people were out of bed and functioning, more or less, yet only six residents here called 911.
So I'm wondering: if this is a good thing or a bad thing?
The quake was a magnitude of 3.6, which is hardly San Fransiscan in intensity. If you were sleeping, it probably felt like the dog jumped on the bed. But that didn't stop the good residents of Montgomery County, MD from dialing their 911 center. Thousands of residents there called in to report the obvious.
Causing me to wonder if the good liberals in Montgomery thought their government authorities were too obtuse to notice an earthquake, or worse, they wanted them to do something about it?
Some may contend that my criticism is not fair because Montgomery is a larger county and consequently more people would call. True, it's 2.6 times larger than PWC. So multiplying our earthquake calls by a factor of 2.6 gives us a total of 16 callers.
That's not enough people to staff a day-labor center in Montgomery, to say nothing of tie up the phone lines.
On the other hand, it could be that we are too dense to realize that the bed shaking wasn't caused by last night's burrito. A recent study by the Brookings Institution trumpeted the fact that the Washington DC metro area has the best-educated populace in the nation.
Although DC itself remains a sinkhole of bad schools and ignorance; the surrounding counties of Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax, Howard and Montgomery are tops when measured by the number of bachelor's degrees tacked on office walls. Blue-voting Democrat regions simply love these reports because the findings fuel liberal's immense self-infatuation.
They're smart, they vote for Obama and they think earthquakes are against the law.
You may have noticed my county didn't make the list, but I didn't do something stupid like donate to an NPR pledge drive to compensate. Education does not necessarily equal competence. Four years of gender studies and art history may not be relevant in the real world. A University of Connecticut survey found that the longer students stay in college the less they know about American history, government or the economy. Incoming freshmen know more about all these topics than the outgoing seniors.
Which explains why residents here know earthquakes are not a police matter. We just reach over the TV set to straighten Elvis' portrait, touch our plastic Jesus for luck and head off to work - while in Montgomery the highly-educated are still arguing with the dispatcher.
You'd think now that Leftists are running the country they would be titans of self-esteem and confidence. Yet quite the opposite is true. Their faulty belief system only serves to make the average liberal feel individually powerless, which is why they look to government for relief, protection and a big hug.
Case in point: on the Washington Post front page readers were subject to a 1,100-word whinefest about 'seat hogs.' These porcine Metro riders sit in the aisle seat leaving an empty seat by the window or take up a vacant seat with their briefcase, medical marijuana or copy of Obamacare. Diffident, petulant Leftists stand fuming in the aisle because 'seat hogs' didn't notice their predicament.
Vertical liberals are posting heated complaints on blogs, griping to each other and evidently buttonholing Leftist reporters.
But is this front page news?
Only if you think "somebody" meaning the authorities need to "do something" meaning pass a law, have a hearing, solicit a bid or post a sign.
These interpersonal situations aren't complicated. Even a liberal can stand close to the individual who is taking up more than their government-approved ration of Metro space, say "excuse me, please" in a firm voice and then wait for the person to stand and let you by, slide over themselves or as a last resort you can squeeze past them.
There, that wasn't so hard, was it?
As a matter of fact it probably is, because "elite" journalists are busy infantilizing "elite" readers. Take another Post story on blisters: I read it hoping for some useful breakthrough in blister technology. But no, the thrust of this story was blisters can be painful (!) and don't under any circumstances pop a blister. That's a medical procedure approaching a liver transplant in complexity and you should leave it to the "experts."
And I now have my answer: a total of six earthquake callers is good. It indicates we are self-reliant here. We pop our own blisters and confront our own earthquakes.

INCUMBENTS: meet HORATIO BUNCE

By Henry Lamb
Sounding more like a campaigning candidate than a proud President, Obama said that voters will have to choose whether to go backward to the failed policies of the past, or to go forward to the future with him. Wait a minute: where’s the choice? The failed policies of the past are precisely the same policies that Obama and his Marxist majority have rammed down America’s throat since the last election, which he promises to continue until he has totally “transformed” the United States of America.
Let’s see now, what are the most egregious failed policies of the past? No doubt, the most egregious policies are those that ignore the limitation of power imposed upon government by the U.S. Constitution. Many presidents, and both political parties, have ignored the Constitution at various times throughout our history. The champions of this ignorance, however, are Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and now the grand champion, Barack Hussein Obama.
None of them ever met Horatio Bunce. If they ever read Davy Crockett’s speech to Congress on charity, they either forgot it, or simply chose to ignore its truth.
Congressman Crockett was with a group of friends in Washington one night when they saw a massive blaze lighting the sky over Georgetown. The men raced to the fire and worked hours helping to put it out. Crockett and his colleagues initiated an effort to appropriate $20,000 for the victims of the fire. He was bitterly disappointed when the bill failed.
A few months later, while campaigning for the next election, he stopped a farmer who was plowing his field to ask for his support. The farmer politely told him that he had voted for Crockett in the last election, but that he would not do so again. Crockett begged the man to tell him why not.
“Did you vote to appropriate $20,000 for the victims of that fire in Georgetown?” the man asked.
Crockett said that he had voted for the appropriation, and that he thought that would be the last vote anyone would find fault with.
The farmer said: "Well, Colonel, where do you find in the Constitution any authority to give away the public money in charity? The Constitution, to be worth anything, must be held sacred, and rigidly observed in all its provisions.”
The farmer was Horatio Bunce.
Wilson, Roosevelt, and now Obama and his Marxist majority in Congress ignore this question: “…Where do you find in the Constitution any authority to…?” The American people asked this question about the authority to take over privately owned automobile and insurance companies.
The American people asked where do you find in the Constitution any authority to take over the entire health care industry? The American people are asking where do you find in the Constitution any authority to shut down the fossil fuel industry in order to force people to buy exotic alternative energy products that are outrageously and unnecessarily expensive? The American people want to know where do you find in the Constitution any authority to make direct grants to so-called “green” alternative energy companies, or to activist organizations such as ACORN, or to National Public Radio, or to subsidize the media, as is being proposed by Obama cronies.
These are the failed policies that have been imposed in the past with disastrous consequences. These are the same policies that Obama unapologetically declares that he intends to impose in the future. These are not the policies the American people want.
Fortunately, there is another choice.
Since the last national election, a rebellion – no, it is better described as a revival – has swept across this nation. People are sick and tired of seeing their freedoms trampled by a government that ignores the Constitution in order to impose Marxist ideas and socialist policies. People want no more of the quid pro quo shenanigans that pursue political perpetuity rather than the people’s prosperity.
This year, the people have raised a new crop of candidates, most of whom agree with Horatio Bunce: “The Constitution, to be worth anything, must be held sacred, and rigidly observed in all its provisions.”
This year, voters are looking for candidates who agree with Horatio Bunce. Voters are getting organized and volunteering to help in campaigns, and they are getting informed. They are learning how their elected representatives voted on past issues, and they are painting a target on the backs of incumbents who don’t share Horatio Bunce’s reverence for the Constitution.
This year, voters intend to reject Obama’s plans to “transform the United States of America” into a socialist nation entrapped in a system of international Marxist governance. This year, voters intend to raise the American flag over Washington, and declare anew that by God, this nation will remain a nation under God, and under the Constitution He ordained.

ENQUIRIES INTO CLIMATEGATE ARE SIGNIFICANT

By Monckton of Brenchley

Weather or not, it happens!

THE multiple official enquiries into Climategate are significant because their conclusions are insignificant.
The enquiries very, very carefully avoided looking at the actual science being discussed in the thousand emails released by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia last November. Instead, they reached for the whitewash-bucket. All of them did this. Not one did its job properly or independently.
Why this failure to investigate even the most blatant incitement to destroy scientific material in emails from "Professor" Jones to fellow-"scientists"? Why the failure to investigate the "trick" by which Jones had sought to conceal the growing discrepancy between rising real-world temperatures as measured by thermometers and the falling temperatures shown by the tree-ring records that he was trying to pretend were reliable enough to tell us there was no medieval warm period?
Why the failure to investigate why various of the Climategate emailers - a poisonous, malevolent crew from the beastly tone of so many of the emails - had spent a year bullying and cajoling editors of learned journals to delay publication of a result they found uncongenial, so that they could cobble together an attempted refutation to be published at the same time as the paper they disagreed with?
Scientific dishonesty on this scale is not routine, even in the corrupted academe of today. But it was not investigated. The people who ran the enquiries knew what was expected of them. Their job was to look the other way. And why? Because almost the entire governing class of the world has foolishly signed up to the climate-extremist results of the UN's climate panel, and governments never, ever admit they are wrong.
The classe politique has all the advantages of position, status, wealth (ours), and access to an increasingly spineless and fawning mainstream news media. And it knows how to grandstand. Every year, there is a major climate conference - last December at Copenhagen (where the stage-management went horribly wrong), and this December at Cancun, where the theater directors will be taking very good care that nothing shall go wrong at all.
The kow-towing media will be there in all their feeble strength. But the people will no longer be fooled.
The draft Treaty of Cancun - world government lite, in the words of one commentator - is already in draft, and has been studied by officials and world leaders at a still-incomplete series of meetings in Bonn, Germany. The Chinese, who rightly have no intention whatsoever of putting their economic growth at risk by making any serious cuts in carbon dioxide emissions, have offered to hold an additional meeting in Tientsin before December's Cancun session, just to make sure that "the process", as the UN's bureaucrats call it, will not be derailed by the lackadaisical lifestyle of Mexico's mañana republic.
What will Cancun mean? Higher taxes. More regulation. Less freedom. No democracy. The New World Order is upon us, in the name of solving the non-problem of man-made "global warming". Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were fun, while they lasted.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monthly_report/june_2010_co2_report.html