Dead software to the rescue

As mentioned earlier, upgrading to QuickTime 7 has the unfortunate side effect of killing the open-source Ogg Vorbis plug-in for iTunes on Mac OS X. Details in the project's bug report suggest to me that this is an architectural issue and it may be a while before anyone can fix it.

The overwhelming dominance of iTunes has had the side effect of turning various commercial competitors into dead and therefore free products. If you don't want to revert QuickTime and you just want to listen to LiveJournal PhonePosts, Wikipedia audio content and such, I've found that the defunct commercial audio player MacAmp Lite X (use the listed registration codes) will play Ogg Vorbis files with no trouble.

My first try was the very pretty Audion 3, which has also become a free product in its afterlife; but while Audion has no trouble with stereo Ogg Vorbis files, it seems to interpret the mono ones used by LiveJournal PhonePosts as stereo and play them at double speed. You can slow them down to intelligibility with Audion's speed control, but they still sound terrible even for telephone recordings, probably because it's trying to play bogus stereo separation data. MacAmp Lite handles them much better.

On RealClimate again...

I didn't get around to linking this when it was posted, but it's really good: Gavin Schmidt, one of the authors of the paper on the planet's energy imbalance that got a lot of recent press as a global warming "smoking gun", summarizes the paper's results and explains the implications.

My impression is that this paper is not a particularly startling surprise; it's in agreement with all the existing research showing that climate models can well explain temperature variations over the 20th century in terms of understood processes, and that the dominant ones have been the result of human activity. They add that there is a lag in the climate's response and that a significant amount of warming is already in the pipeline, in the sense that it will occur even if emissions were to freeze at present-day levels. What's most interesting to me is the breakdown of the different forcings and how they varied over the course of the century: human warming and cooling effects substantially cancelled each other out for a while, but not any more.