Hattix

I haven’t posted much lately, it’s purely laziness, so here’s a few stories that have caught my eye over the last few days.

BBFC defeated in Manhunt2 release. Morality, especially someone else’s morality, should not be law. The BBFC took a bloody nose in this one, its own regulation didn’t support its position and a government report due later this month supports removing the BBFC as the dominant authority on video game rating.

Glaciers receding faster than ever before. The base rate from 1990 to 1999 was 30cm/year, which is now increased to 150cm/year and still increasing. One glacier in Greenland lost 290cm in 2007, another in Norway lost 310cm in 2006. The number of worldwide glaciers which are actually getting bigger is now in single digits.

BBC’s iPlayer for mobile devices was “hacked” by nothing more complex than pasting the completely unprotected URL into a web browser. While offering unencumbered downloads is to be applauded, it wasn’t the intention here as the BBC don’t have permission or right to offer programming for more than 5 days after air.

Muslim ultra-conservatives win elections in Iran. Because everyone else was banned from running for not being Muslim-conservative enough. I shit you not.

It’s all over the web.

Scientists, especially in the field of climate change, are a conservative bunch. They put in the most favourable, the least changing data and work from that, it’s part of the scientific method’s defences against sensationalism. However, sometimes it means that results are too conservative.

As it is with climate modelling. Supercomputers or even your computer are put to task to model how the future climate will play out given the climate records of history. When put on the weather records of the 19th century, for example, they can successfully predict the weather records of the 20th century, even if the computer was given no knowledge of them.

Just last year a team of respected scientists predicted that the summer Arctic would be ice-free by 2040, but they’d grossly overestimated how much ice was actually there. Mapping the extent of ice is easy, but mapping its volume is not and they’d hugely underestimated the actual volume of ice. (To make this simpler, they’d overestimated the ice area but underestimated the ice depth)

Now, a new study from Maslowsky et. al. from the Naval Postgraduate School in California, USA, have used the most accurate and up to date data yet and arrived at a shocking conclusion; There will be no ice over the arctic at all in just five to six years. They used data from 1979 to 2004, even ignoring 2005 and 2007, where more ice was lost in the summer than ever before. If anything, their estimate is already too timid.

Maslowski is, however, known for undercutting the dates of most other researchers but never by this much. He contends that other models had overestimated the volume of ice and also underestimated the heat delivered by ocean currents and convection. He points out that ice loss from 2000 to 2004 was far in excess of the current models but his model predicted them most accurately.

The BBC also sought comment from Professor Wadhams of Cambridge University, who uses data from Royal Navy submarines to measure arctic ice. Wadhams believes that older climate models have not been using actual reality as enough of a guide. His data shows that the arctic ice is thinning faster than it is shrinking and that ice reflects heat back into space, so a loss of ice causes greater loss of ice.

The last word remains to be said and, like all science, Maslowsky’s work will need to be confirmed and scrutinised by independent researchers who are most likely already hard at work. If he’s right, however, the polar bear will be extinct in the wild by 2015.