Backseat driving

Hello Ethon! Moving my blogging digs to a new Rabett hole

2011-12-25T03:55:00.000-08:00

This is just a note to my fine readers that I will be taking up new digs with Eli Rabett and John Farley at Rabett Run. They've got the science well-covered but I'll put up some uninformed commentary about that, policy, and whatever else.

I hope you all will join me there. As for this blog, I will cross-post both here and at Eli's for at least a while, but I'm turning off the ability to add comments here and really encourage people to go there, especially to read and participate in what I expect will be a vibrant comment community. Starting May 24th of this year, all posts here are crossposts of what I've got up at Rabett Run.

"Date posted", btw, is only going to be a rough approximation here at BSD because the original posts are at Rabett's and I only cross post a bunch of them at a time.

I'll keep bumping this post up near the top of the blog. Thanks again for reading, and see you at Eli's!

Solar power externality and LCOE

2011-12-22T20:25:00.000-08:00

I was talking to a very knowledgeable friend about whether solar power will become cheaper than coal in the next decade, and he pointed out a problem in how solar advocates price their power. It's well known that you can't just estimate a solar panel's value based on its peak production capability, because much of the time that panel is producing less power or none at all, doing nothing to amortize costs.

Solar advocates admit this, and use Levelized Cost of Energy calculations to divide energy actually produced by all costs involved, over time and with a discount rate. While solar's over twice as expensive as coal now, the advocates project the cost differential to continue to diminish at the rate it has in the past, and to disappear in a decade.

So my friend's problem is this doesn't distinguish peaking power costs. He's not using the denialist line that baseload power can't include solar at all, but that you still require additional power when solar can't provide it. That additional power is expensive, and this cost externality isn't included in LCOE calculations.

Mulling this over, I think there's an economic and a political angle to take on it. The economic angle is that if we want to consider externalities, then let's by all means consider all externalities - coal isn't going to do so well on that basis.

The political angle isn't whether we should consider externalities, but whether we will consider the externalities and which ones. Greenhouse gas externalities will not be fully priced in for decades, especially for costs imposed on areas outside of the country where the gases are produced (why should we care about those effects?), but they will start to weigh in, a bit, on costs. The brand new mercury rule shows some of the other externalities of fossil fuels will start getting price tags as well. Overall, I think the political process will catch up more quickly on fossil fuel externalities, if still very inadequately, than on on LCOE pricing.

One other point my friend made that was a good one - discount rates for future costs mean few companies care about costs more than a decade ahead. I thought new coal plant starts would be potentially affected by solar price competition, but maybe that price competition is still too far away.

UPDATE: comments point to a good post at Romm's that discusses the various terms and state of play for solar in the US. Ignoring environmental issues for a second to focus on economics, I think LCOE is fine for any buyer to use to determine whether solar prices out well, but the overall system has to consider other price issues as well. The grid parity at the link works when you're buying electricity at the high retail rates, but it will take a lot longer if you're a utility that can buy wholesale.

NIH recognizes chimps can waive rights

2011-12-17T12:51:00.000-08:00

The decision by the National Institute of Health to nearly completely eliminate invasive medical experimentation on chimps has received a medium amount of attention. Good news, overall, except the advisory committee had no consensus on testing vaccines on chimps. The testing could accelerate vaccine development but requires infecting chimps with potentially horrible diseases. The lack of a consensus doesn't mean testing should go forward, but leaves a vacuum.

One intriguing development is that research can continue where chimps voluntarily subject themselves to it. The chimps are trained to receive treats in return for allowing researchers to take blood samples, and it's up to the chimp to decide whether the research will proceed. I suppose it's not impossible to do something similar with less intelligent animals, but it would be extremely difficult and not considered ethically important.

The other interesting development was the emphasis on testing on other animals instead of chimps - in other words, there's a moral scale and other animals rank below chimps. These two developments inch toward the sapientist position I support - not animal rights, but rights based on intelligence. A long way forward before we get there, though.

Glenn Greenwald is primarily responsible for the failure of progressive legislation since 2008.

2011-12-10T12:39:00.000-08:00

The reasoning's simple: Greenwald's part of the left, just like Obama and the Democrats who controlled the House and had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate for a while. Greenwald's side failed to pass enough progressive legislation, therefore Greenwald's primarily responsible.

If you don't like this reasoning, complain to Greenwald: he used the same reasoning to say voters will determine that Republicans are not primarily responsible for the failure to pass progressive legislation, laying responsibility instead at Obama's feet, especially with repeated reference to the 60-person Senate majority. Greenwald does some really good work on civil liberties but mixes it in with this terrible reasoning. Fault lies primarily with the Republicans, secondarily with the Democratic Senators (and some Representatives) who refuse to vote in defense of the middle class and for scientific reality. Obama is not a Prime Minister. Maybe somewhere Greenwald has laid out how he thinks Obama could've pushed legislation through, but he certainly didn't make that point when I listened to him.

That's not to say Obama is blameless - Greenwald rightly points to the HAMP mortgage modification failure as a self-inflicted wound. On legislation though, he and we have to deal in reality.

Speaking of reality and legislation, we might want to look ahead. A best-case scenario in 2012 elections will bring Obama back along with marginal control of the Senate and House. I'm guessing more likely that Obama returns and we only get one of the two congressional houses, and even worse scenarios are very plausible. The best case scenario, in other words, still has us in worse position than 2009-2010. Things generally get worse in mid-term elections for the majority party, and the majority party starts getting tired and often corrupt after many years in office.

I think the best chance to pass climate legislation for another four years was the one that we had before the 2010 elections. It really is a shame that many enviros failed to push for cap-and-trade, because as marginally, politically viable as it was, it was the best shot for years to come. A national carbon tax was not politically meaningful and will take a lot more changes of political fundamentals before it will be. Some enviros missed the boat last time. We can still work together though do things on a piecemeal basis and at the state and local level instead, and gradually enforce carbon regulation through the Clean Air Act and other laws.

Obama good, Obama ungood

2011-12-08T12:25:00.000-08:00

The good news is decision that gay rights and human rights "are one and the same" in a speech by Hillary Clinton, one that states the Obama administration will work for this concept internationally, and put some money behind it. They also acknowledge imperfections here in American, while being studiously silent on gay marriage.

The foreign policy realists would say this will cost us internationally, just as any other human rights effort will cost us. They'd be correct in some areas, although other places like Europe it should actually help our image and soft power. Long run is a different story though, as history kind of arcs somewhat toward justice.

How this gets reflected in domestic politics will be interesting, because people who are somewhat conservative on gay rights domestically, say hypothetically a political science professor who supports civil unions, would fall on the far left of the spectrum of the countries with the worst discrimination. The natural Republican reflex of opposing everything Obama does will then start looking pretty awful in the context of horrible abuses overseas. Rick Perry lost no time decrying "special rights" promotion, but the actual Republican nominee will probably lose votes while irresolutely dodging the issue. Score one for the good guys.

The ungood side is the decision to overrule FDA's authorization of selling the Plan B contraceptive as a standard over the counter item. Double plus ungood not because of the politics but the false claim that the science gives any reason to do this. To the FDA's credit, they more or less stated their disagreement and weren't suppressed from doing that. This is standard, almost, Republican-style War on Science. Chris Mooney's book on the subject noted the Democrats were guilty too of this offense, but just not nearly to the same extent. One strike against the Obama Administration in this regard.

I don't want to end on that note, so I'll add another piece of good news. Younger Americans are significantly more accepting of climate science than older ones. Now consider that even some Republicans acknowledge their antipathy to gay rights is a dying cause. The very few scientists who don't accept climate science are also aging out (page 12) and not being replaced by anyone except lawyers, so the younger generation is being educated the right way. I'm not sure how many demographically-challenged positions the Republicans really want to take, but maybe they should reconsider.

UPDATE: Chris Mooney on Plan B here. Similar grasp of the obvious.

The Water District reducing GHG emissions and California cap-and-trade

2011-12-05T12:22:00.000-08:00

Today's Water District meeting featured an energy usage work study session. We use a lot of energy moving water across much of the state and then treating it, about 5% of all our costs. While we also have a policy saying we that want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, our policy isn't very clear. I pressed staff on this issue and another director, Linda Lezotte, also followed up:

(Arrgh, something won't let me post more than one video excerpt. It's here for the December 5 2011 meeting at the 01:11:00 mark, for about 4 minutes. Two of us seven directors say we need to do more than merely "cost-effective" efforts to reduce GHG emissions, the other five don't say anything.)

We're pretty good overall in our energy usage. Maybe we can partner with Sonoma County to be better.
We're part of a joint powers authority for buying our power at a rate that's both cheaper and with lower carbon emissions than our local utility provides. Our CO2 emissions are 435lbs/MWh, one-third the national average (see the first link, Attachment 4, p 17). Not the one-tenth that we need, but pretty good.

While California cap-and-trade doesn't apply directly to us, it does apply to the joint powers authority called PWRPA that we helped establish to get our power, and we may have a chance to sell carbon allowances from environmental improvements that we make:

(UPDATE: okay, more linkrot, but it's towards the end of the discussion of Item 4.1 at the link above.)

In addition to what you can see on the video is the 3 hours that we spent in closed (confidential) session to discuss internally the negotiations with labor unions for new contracts. Obviously I can't talk about what happened then, but the financial issues highlight how important the economics of all this is. If doing the right thing environmentally can help us out financially, we're going to do more of the right thing, especially right now when finances are so tight.

Crowd-sourced screening of abusive/misogynist comments for women bloggers

2011-11-30T12:21:00.000-08:00

I've been reading more in the past few weeks about the type of garbage that women bloggers have to put up with, stuff I've never experienced. A recent comparison:

As the New Statesmanblogger David Allen Green told me: "In three years of blogging and tweeting about highly controversial political topics, I have never once had any of the gender-based abuse that, say, Cath Elliott, Penny Red or Ellie Gellard routinely receive."

One way to discourage this is for women bloggers to moderate and screen comments so the abusive ones never get printed. This adds to the blogger's work load, though (and may not be possible at some work blogs), and more importantly, the anonymous abuser still gets away with exposing the blogger to abuse that ranges from mean-spirited to threats of rape.

The idea I'm suggesting is that for the bloggers who want to do so, they should be able to outsource comment screening to third-party volunteers who will kill the abusive comments (or alternatively, set them aside for later review by the blogger if she wants to check, or alert her if comments go beyond misogyny and make actual threats). This would deprive the morons of their ability to directly insult the women they're targeting. I suppose they could try and threaten us reviewers, but they wouldn't even know who we are or what our gender is, so have fun with that.

I don't think it would be too hard to crowdsource the screening: you're reading for abuse, not trying to handle the content, so it would be a pretty quick and easy thing to do. A confidence rating system like Ebay uses could help bloggers decide if they trust the reviewers. We'd need some special software so comments could be redirected in this manner, but I can't imagine it would be that difficult. An enterprising blogging platform could even attach some discrete advertising to make the project pay for itself.

Just an idea I'll thow out there. I'd even put some effort into it if someone wanted to make it happen.

(Probably should re-emphasize that the best solution is for the particular men making the comments, to stop. This is a second-best solution, and only for the bloggers who'd want to make use of it.)

Godfather's Pizza and Al Gore

2011-11-28T12:19:00.000-08:00

The graph shows a partisan change in approval of Godfather's Pizza since Herman Cain declared his candidacy for the Republican nomination (context here). Republicans like his former company a lot more now, and Democrats a lot less.

I have in the past been pretty dismissive of claims from right-leaning and other analysts that Al Gore's prominence in climate change activism has much to do with Republican denial of climate reality. Godfather's Pizza argues in favor of those claims, though.

Obviously, opinion on cheap pizza and on the fate of our climate involve different levels of moral responsibility. If Republicans react poorly to Gore's warnings, that reflects poorly on them and not Gore. Still, efforts like the We Can Solve It campaign might need a lot more reinforcement:

Of course, Gingrich has backed off of his earlier interest in reality. There's only so much you can do, if the Republican leadership is so unwilling to do much anything at all. Maybe there are a enough younger Republican leaders, people like Chris Christie (or maybe others like Romney and McCain if Romney loses next year), to join in the leadership on the climate movement. Otherwise it's up to the public.

Climate related comments elsewhere

2011-11-22T12:17:00.000-08:00

At Same Facts, James Wimberley continues to do a good job IMHO of defending the "solar on track to be cheaper than coal" idea. I wrote:

What I’d be most interested in knowing is the rate of starts for new coal power plants, especially in countries with no local coal supplies (therefore no coal lobby). A new plant takes a couple years to build and 30-50 years to pay off, so [Efficient Market Hypothesis] (if accurate) would expect to see a significant dropoff for these.

At Nature, on a post about whether mastodons got stuck in post-earthquake mud and starved over a period of months, I skepticized:

I follow climate change denialism closely, so I'm very suspicious when non-experts proclaim themselves to be personally incredulous regarding a conclusion by experts.

That said, as a non-expert, I am personally incredulous that partially submerged mammoths couldn't pull themselves out of the soil when liquefaction had ended.

Tar pits I can believe. Full submersion and immediate suffocation I can believe. But being stuck in one spot and slowly starving to death without being able to pull their legs out of the soil, is something that needs to be a little more convincing. Maybe they need to a mechanical analysis of soil strength and compare it to an elephant's strength.

Sure felt like an article I would read on April Fool's Day, but what do I know. (UPDATE: the teeming hordes of pro-stuck-mammoth factionalists attack in the comments, all two of them, and I guess they have a point.)

Finally, not a comment but a link to an interesting NY Times article on growing crops underneath trees. No mention of albedo issues from trees being darker than typical ag, though.

My review of George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire: epic meh

2011-11-21T12:16:00.000-08:00

So I can't exactly pan his books seeing as I've read the entire A Song of Ice and Fire series in less than three months, but if I could go back in time I'd warn myself, don't do it. Or maybe just read the first book, which is the best, and then watch the HBO Game of Thrones show as it gradually recapitulates the books (disclaimer: haven't seen it, but it gets great reviews).

The series is epic, but it's meh. The level of detail is stunning - I've never read a book with such descriptions of each dish of food at so many meals. The battles and intrigues are epic. And they don't lead to anything. Five books later, and I don't have a sense of a plot line that's really advanced from the beginning. The characters just run around in their clown car of a fantasy world, coming and going to various lands and occasionally getting bumped off. It feels like an alternate history, which is fine, even amazing, but after a while it just all fades into one damn thing after another.

Tolkien could wrap up a story arc in three books. Martin hasn't done it in five - he claims he'll do it in seven, but the last two haven't been written yet, so who knows really, and these aren't quick reads like the Harry Potter books. My suggestion is to just watch the show instead (based on all the rave reviews), it saves a lot of time. Of course, it's too late for me - I'll read the books when they come out.

UPDATE: I half-expected to either get flamed or ignored, but apparently the rabbits agree that Martin's overrated. They provide alternatives.

Peiser relies on deception

2011-11-18T12:13:00.000-08:00

Benny Peiser, sadly, appears to be on the upswing in climate change denialism (and possibly wrong elsewhere, although I don't know the Easter Island issues well). My experience with him is that he made an incorrect factual assertion, stopped making it when caught by a knowledgeable audience, and then repeated the original assertion in front of different audiences that didn't know the truth and didn't know about his retraction. This is the person being quoted by news media today.

I laid out the sequence of events here. To summarize, he claimed in a comment thread at Deltoid to have repeated an analysis by climate historian Naomi Oreskes and found a different result. Other comments proved him wrong. Peiser continued to post in the comment thread without but stopped repeating his assertion that he had replicated Oreskes. Several days later he then repeated the original assertion on a different website where people don't know that he'd been refuted. I also found him repeating it in subsequent weeks, despite saying in email correspondence with me "I [Peiser] don't know" if he had done the same analysis.

I know the media has a problem trying to get accurate information on denialists because this type of deceptiveness is so common there, but they should communicate to the public that their sources like Benny Peiser make claims to the public that they refuse to defend in front of informed audiences. A far better approach would be to analyze the denialists, not for the credibility of their claims but for the politics that the denialists are manipulating.

To fluoridate, someday, and a personal announcement

2011-11-16T12:12:00.000-08:00

Previous post dilemmaized over whether and how to fluoridate at my next Water District Board meeting, which was yesterday. Here's the news:

Santa Clara Valley Water District OKs adding fluoride to its drinking water
Silicon Valley's largest drinking water provider took the first steps Tuesday toward adding fluoride to the drinking water in most of Santa Clara County, including San Jose, the largest city in the nation without the cavity-battling additive.
After a lively 90-minute debate at a packed meeting, the board of the Santa Clara Valley Water District voted 7-0 to put the district on record supporting fluoridation.

It could've been 6-1 because of a side issue where I disagreed with my colleagues about creating yet another Board committee to oversee this, but they were willing to split up the vote so I could agree with them on the main issue and then get shot down over the new committee.

If you're so inclined, you can listen to a couple minutes of my comments while looking at uninteresting shot of the board room below (source link here):

I made clear that I wanted public education on infant formula and on reverse osmosis for those who don't want fluoride, and that we keep checking in on the scientific consensus. I think I'll win that fight. When we'll do this and who will pay for it is less clear. I think it's a legitimate expenditure of public funds, but we're not a public health agency. If they want Water District money to fix people's teeth, my vote would be that they have to wait a while. We need to fix our seismic risks at our dams, restore the environment, and reduce flood damages.

So there ends my fluoride series for this blog. My personal announcement is that after nearly nine years at my day job with the Committee for Green Foothills, I gave notice that it's time for me to do something else, starting in January. It's a great place, but it's time for me to do something new. I am very interested in climate change policy work, but am open to other ideas as well. I'm looking forward to seeing what will happen next.

To fluoridate or not to fluoridate, that is the question. Next Tuesday at my Water District Board meeting

2011-11-07T12:03:00.000-08:00

I'll reproduce below most of an old post about fluoridation. I had previously expected to see an identical situation with climate change in terms of the debate, but it's not. I think factors overall favor fluoridating, but not quite as overwhelmingly as I expected. On Tuesday, my fellow Directors and I get to figure out next steps.

Fluoridation opponents have made lots of mistakes in my opinion, but supporters have overstated the consensus. In particular, fluoride levels four to eight times the recommended level do have rare adverse effects, which isn't a huge safety margin in toxicity issues (UPDATE: I mean rare and severe effects - some cosmetic problems to teeth are common). Very slight adverse effects on larger groups would also be hard to rule out.

The Center for Disease Control recommends mixing non-fluoridated water in formula for babies that use formula exclusively. I can also attest to hearing from the significant number of people, if still a minority, who are just anguished that we're putting something they consider toxic in their water. Home-based reverse osmosis systems can remove their fluoride, I think.

And then there's the money cost - over $4m to construct and $800k to operate. We might get funding to construct but get stuck with operating, which people forget is the bigger cost.

So. The staff recommendation is to proceed if someone else pays for it. We'll see. If we do go forward, we may need to educate people about infant formula and let people know they can get reverse osmosis kits if they want.

Anyway, here's most of the old post, with the science:

Fluoridating water, or a funny thing happened on my way to backseat driving
I originally labelled this blog Backseat Driving back in 2004 because I anticipated it to be a blog where I would second-guess decisions made by politicians and other people. That worked out fine more or less until November 2010, when for some reason I was elected to the Santa Clara Valley Water District Board. Turns out that San Jose is the largest city in the US without fluoridated water supplies (in much of the city, anyway), and the seven of us directors have to decide whether we'll help or hinder the fluoridation process. So I'm pushed into the front seat for this one.

We've got some legal and economic issues to handle (it's not quite as cheap as everyone says, I want to know where the money's going to come from), but the relevant issue here is science. I read the guest post at climate blogger Coby Beck's place, The Case Against Fluoride, fairly closely a while back, especially the raucous debate in the comments. As a spectator with some, limited reading of the available information, I'd say the fluoridators seemed more persuasive than skeptics, but it wasn't the absolute demolishing that I expected.

The fluoride skeptics really hurt their cause when say fluoride doesn't prevent cavities - it's so obviously effective that people making this claim are damaging their own credibility. I'd consider it comparable to denying that the planet has warmed in the last 50 years.

The closer issue is adverse effects, and whether a substantial number of people are very slightly harmed by fluoridation, or if a small number of people are substantially harmed. The 2006 National of Sciences report doesn't condemn fluoridation, but it doesn't absolve it, either:
Bone Fractures

....Overall, there was consensus among the committee that there is scientific evidence that under certain conditions fluoride can weaken bone and increase the risk of fractures. The majority of the committee concluded that lifetime exposure to fluoride at drinking-water concentrations of 4 mg/L or higher is likely to increase fracture rates in the population, compared with exposure to 1 mg/L, particularly in some demographic subgroups that are prone to accumulate fluoride into their bones (e.g., people with renal disease)....There were few studies to assess fracture risk in populations exposed to fluoride at 2 mg/L in drinking water. The best available study, from Finland, suggested an increased rate of hip fracture in populations exposed to fluoride at concentrations above 1.5 mg/L. However, this study alone is not sufficient to judge fracture risk for people exposed to fluoride at 2 mg/L. Thus, no conclusions could be drawn about fracture risk or safety at 2 mg/L....

(In California, 2 mg/L was the limit, and 0.7 is the new proposed goal. -Ed)

Neurotoxicity and Neurobehavioral Effects

Animal and human studies of fluoride have been published reporting adverse cognitive and behavioral effects. A few epidemiologic studies of Chinese populations have reported IQ deficits in children exposed to fluoride at 2.5 to 4 mg/L in drinking water. Although the studies lacked sufficient detail for the committee to fully assess their quality and relevance to U.S. populations, the consistency of the results appears significant enough to warrant additional research on the effects of fluoride on intelligence....

Endocrine Effects
The chief endocrine effects of fluoride exposures in experimental animals and in humans include decreased thyroid function, increased calcitonin activity, increased parathyroid hormone activity, secondary hyperparathyroidism, impaired glucose tolerance, and possible effects on timing of sexual maturity. Some of these effects are associated with fluoride intake that is achievable at fluoride concentrations in drinking water of 4 mg/L or less, especially for young children or for individuals with high water intake. Many of the effects could be considered subclinical effects, meaning that they are not adverse health effects. However, recent work on borderline hormonal imbalances and endocrine-disrupting chemicals indicated that adverse health effects, or increased risks for developing adverse effects, might be associated with seemingly mild imbalances or perturbations in hormone concentrations. Further research is needed to explore these possibilities....
(Removed discussion of bone cancer as not very troubling given its rarity. Ed.)

These were the most troubling findings, mostly about what hasn't been proven, and mostly dealing with levels that are five times what's planned for drinking water. The report expressly ignored the benefits of fluoridation. It's important to balance out potential concerns over rare, severe complications related to fluoride with the certainty that rare, severe complications can result from cavities.

The bottom line as a policy maker in my little arena is that I shouldn't try and figure out the science myself, but I should try to figure out what the scientific consensus is, figure out where the consensus doesn't yet exist, and then plug that information into everything else we have to balance.

The science seems to favor fluoridation, but it's not a slam dunk. And we still have potential policy barriers, and the overall cost issues. Figuring this all out will be interesting.

Tidal wetland sediment accretion might keep up with sea level rise in one location. Maybe.

2011-11-06T11:56:00.000-08:00

I attended our annual Santa Clara County Creeks Conference last Saturday, with an even better than usual program that included a panel on tidal wetlands restoration in South San Francisco Bay, where we're bringing back 16,000 acres of tidal wetlands from former saltponds (will post a video link when it's online).

The restoration has barely begun, but the land that sank after being separated from tidal flows has gained sediment rapidly, something that's necessary to create a complex environment of open water, partially submerged, and emergent tidal environments. While it's slowed more after the first few years that individual ponds have been opened to the the tides, they're still adding sediment, two inches annually, far more than the worst projections for sea level rise.

So, good for us. Except that California is a geologically young area with lots of gradients, erosion, and sediment flow. Our particular part of San Francisco Bay might also disproportionately benefit from the "backwash" of sediment from the rest of the Bay.

Our tidal wetlands can keep up where they are, for now, but whether that will work in other places is less clear. Still, it's one small piece of good news that demonstrates the value of restoring tidal wetlands, which have been lost to a far greater extent in the US than even freshwater wetlands have.

Ideal human population is 100 billion. Off-planet.

2011-11-05T11:54:00.000-07:00

My off planet assumptions are for 200-300 years; that the Moon, asteroids, and free-floating colonies have been settled with lots of people; that Martian life discovery protects Mars from colonization; and that Venus hasn't yet been terraformed. And that there's no Singularity - otherwise all bets are off.* There's lots of room out there in space, and changing some of these assumptions make mine a low-end figure.

I think this is the good way to approach it if you're a space nerd who's deeply concerned about population growth and how little any side of the political spectrum has done to address it. We're not anti-human. Live long and prosper! Just as long as it's mostly out there, where you can't take the sky from me.

On planet Earth, we're messing up big time. What the global ideal population would be depends on trading off numbers against resource constraints. If we don't want resource constraints, want everyone to live like kings, and want minimal harm to the environment, then I think we're looking at 100 million people. If you settle for the median American quality of life with some reasonable technological upgrades to reduce environmental impacts, then we're looking at a billion people, one-tenth of what we'll see in 89 years. For larger numbers with modest environmental impacts, the only way I can imagine an ideal life is if people get most of the high quality of life experiences through virtual reality.

It's a rotten shame that the left in the US has mostly forgotten about the population problem due to some overstatements decades ago, and a fear of doing anything that tar them with espousing a policy that's also espoused for racist reasons by racists. The right is even worse, either ignoring the problem for ideological reasons or dog-whistling racist or fear-inducing reasons to control population. All the above gets magnified tenfold when discussing immigration to the US, where we convert the usually-young immigrants into highly impacting Americans, with descendants.

Maybe we can take the latest milestone of 7,000,000,000 people to do something about population, and even about immigration, without playing into the hands of racists.

*I think we'll pass the Singularity point in less than 50 years.

A scientist is a feather, a lawyer is a sail

2011-11-04T11:53:00.000-07:00

Some time ago I guest-lectured to some undergrads in a science curriculum track about environmental advocacy. I said I had read somewhere that a scientist is a feather and the evidence is the wind - the scientist makes no effort to control the evidence but just floats wherever it takes her. Obviously this is an incomplete construct that ignores hypothesis formation etc., but is supposed to represent the ideal of how a scientist reacts to evidence.

The advocate isn't a feather, neutral as to where the wind blow. I didn't have a good analogy then for an environmental advocate/lawyer, but now I think the advocate is a sail and the evidence is the wind - how and where it blows is critical, but you have a role as well in where you're going. I also like the sail analogy instead of a sailor, retaining the ideal that the lawyer is a tool of the client/sailor (ideally) and isn't in charge of the ship.

What the sail analogy doesn't capture is the idea that legal contests are pattern-fitting contests. One side says the present facts and law fit that side's represented pattern of facts and law, while the other side presents different patterns.

Still working it out.

China follows up India in committing to being better than US on per-capita emissions

2011-11-03T11:51:00.000-07:00

As has been covered in a few places, China has committed not to "follow the path of the US" with its current level of per capita emissions. (I agree with Joe Romm, btw, that they're not otherwise likely to hit the US level by 2017. They were at one-third the US level three years ago, and it can't go up that fast.)

India made an even better commitment three years ago, not to exceed the average developed country's per capita emissions (significantly lower than US per capita). These two commitments significantly exceed anything developed countries have done, especially because of the legacy emissions from developed countries over past generations vastly dwarf that of developing nations.

The third line of defense for denialists and delayers is that India and China are the problem because their total emissions are increasing. They have yet to provide a convincing reason why Western nations deserve permanently higher per capita emission levels.

Occupy Wall Street, and I have one-seventh of the vote over several hundred million dollars

2011-11-02T11:44:00.000-07:00

My light-speed brain took over a month to put the two issues in the blog headline together. Santa Clara Valley Water District has several hundred million dollars in financial reserves. I wonder if there's anything financially responsible that the Water District can do with the voters' financial reserves, in light of the abuse of the financial system by Wall Street titans.

Just thinking, no answers yet....

UPDATE: I figured the bunnies would have some ideas.

UPDATE 2: KQED's California Report shows other people thinking about the same thing.

California creates second-largest cap and trade market, to start next year

2011-11-01T11:22:00.000-07:00

Still looking around for the best writeup, but this seems pretty good:

The California Air Resources Board yesterday [Oct. 21] gave its final approval to the state’s cap-and-trade system, which sets limits on carbon emissions starting next year.

CARB unanimously approved details of the regulations over the objections of industry groups, the San Francisco Chroniclereported, with the board’s major actions focusing on the allocation of carbon allowances.

Under the plan approved yesterday, the state will limit carbon emissions from its 350 or so biggest emitters starting in 2012, with enforcement starting in 2013. The carbon cap will drop every year until 2020. Over this time, CARB expects the program to prevent 273 million metric tons of carbon emissions.

The regulations will cover electric utilities and large industrial plants first, later expanding to cover fuel distributors. Each company covered by the program will need to hold allowances for carbon that they emit over the cap, and companies will be able to trade these allowances in the marketplace. This will create the world’s second-largest carbon market behind that of the EU, with about $10 billion in allowances traded by 2016, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Initially 90 percent of allowances will be free, with companies needing to buy the other 10 percent. From there some industries will see the percentage of free allowances drop to about 30 percent. Emitters will also be able to meet up to eight percent of their required emissions reductions through carbon offsets.

In a letter to the board, industry groups and the California Chamber of Commerce called the 10 percent purchase requirement an “unjustified, job-killing tax,” and they said California would lose business to other states and countries. Water agencies are also covered by the regulation, and they told the board that the program would increase water rates.

....

Environmental justice groups had argued that cap-and-trade would increase pollution in low-income neighborhoods near high-emitting facilities, because polluters could simply buy the right to increase pollution.

The board yesterday responded to these concerns by approving an adaptive management plan, which would monitor the air quality of neighborhoods near regulated facilities, the APreported. If pollution does increase, the CARB said it would respond.

Last week Bank of America Merrill Lynch announced it is entering the nascent California carbon trading market with an agreed option to buy several million tons of offsets from TerraPass, through 2020.

Just to add a few comments: limits in 2012 with no enforcement until 2013 sounds to me like the program really starts in 2013. OTOH, the market is already getting moving (see the last sentence from the article), so that's good.

I believe the free allowances are grandfathered from past emissions. That would also be anti-competitive, because new entrants would have to buy allowances. No wonder the Chamber wants them to be all free.

The part about water agencies complaining is news to me. Guess I should look that up.

The enviro justice groups' lawsuit is a huge mistake. This response is cutting it close to the law though - I hope it works out.

Together with Australia's carbon tax and the European Union's cap system finally getting beyond its intentionally-easy stage, we're seeing some incremental progress. We need far far more than incremental progress, but we shouldn't forget that it's happening, either.

Good writeup of the original California program here, by an offset critic who thinks California's system isn't too bad. I believe the finalized program is only marginally different.

My weeklong life as a Washington water lobbyist

2011-09-21T13:29:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure how interested the bunnies are in my spectacularly exotic work at a local water district, but I guess I'll find out. I spent this week as one of two elected directors visiting Washington DC to talk about our local flood control and water supply projects, and to try and scare up some money for more. Some notes:

I can confirm the obvious statement that the budget process is broken. I respect the antipathy to earmarks and am open to replacing them with another process, but what we have instead is virtually no process to provide local input into federal decision-making about local projects. We had multiple meetings with Congressional offices where they often said they could do little to help, and just one with the Office of Management and Budget, which now has all the power.

There is real interest in the Obama Administration in the environment. We talked about environmental benefits to one relatively high-level official in the Department of Agriculture who'd been hired from an environmental organization. She raised Obama's Great Outdoorsinitiative that tries to reconnect Americans to our natural environment, including urban areas. So I pointed to a map that we brought. Here in south San Jose, wild elk will sometimes roam within city limits. In north San Jose where San Francisco Bay ends,leopard sharks swim. Connecting them is Coyote Creek, a major intact riparian system running through central San Jose with migrating, endangered steelhead, a bike/pedestrian pathway, great views of hawk nests. Our flood control project is a major tributary where we want to rip out concrete, replace it with vegetated-earth banks, and add riparian habitat next to an elementary school. She liked it.

We can at least take some actions to adapt to climate change. We're trying to restore 15,000 acres of abandoned salt-making ponds to tidal wetlands, but the pond levees form part of the antiquated levee system protecting urban land in the South Bay. We want to rebuild and strengthen the landward side of the multi-ring levee system, and only then can we breach the bayside of the salt pond levees and restore them to tidal flow and vegetation. This was our one meeting with OMB, and there I emphasized that we're sizing the levees to accommodate 50 years of sea level rise (based on Cal. Academy of Sciences 2006 report, using the high end of three scenarios), and sized so they can be built up higher if needed. The OMB people seemed interested, so we'll see.

I sure wish I knew politically-viable ways to make GHG emissions pay for our climate adaptation projects, either on a local, state, or national level, but it's not jumping out at me (don't forget that "politically-viable" requirement). Our riverine flood protection projects also have to be sized for sea level rise because they empty into the Bay, so the costs add up.

My one other observation is that a lot of people we met with sure are young. Our nation is in the hands of twenty-somethings, presumably because we can get away with paying them nothing and working them constantly. Let's hope it works out.

The most perceptive pro-Palin comment ever written

2011-09-19T13:27:00.000-07:00

In lieu of demonstrating new and independent thought, I've decided to occasionally re-post some stuff from my old blog. As we finally say farewell to Sarah Palin's overextended fifteen minutes,here's one:

Supporters of Palin say they're not using "rational theorizing"

Interesting comment in a post by a pro-Palin conservative:

I think Sarah Palin is indeed a Rorschach test for Conservatives...it’s about what Conservativsm MEANS....
The core idea behind Conservatism is that most of human learning is done not by rational theorizing, but by pattern recognition....
This pattern recognition is called common sense, and over generations, it’s called traditions, conventions etc. Religion is usually a carrier meme for these evolved patterns. It’s sort of an evolutionary process, like a genetic algorithm....
Liberals, Lefties and even many Libertarians want to use only 10% of the human knowledge that’s rational.....
Conservatives are practical people who instinctively recognize the importance of evolved patterns in human learning: because our rational knowledge simply isn’t enough yet, these common sense patterns are our second best option to use. And to use these patterns effectively you don’t particularly have to be very smart i.e. very rational. You have to be _wise_ and you have to have a good character: you have to set hubris and pride aside and be able to accept traditions you don’t fully understand....
Anti-Palin Conservatives don’t understand it. They think Conservativism is about having different theories than the Left, they don’t understand that it’s that theories and rational knowledge isn’t so important.

What's especially interesting is the enthusiastic response following this idea of "going with your gut and calling it wisdom". I think the truth is a lot of what all of us consider reasoned analysis that reaches a conclusion is actually a gut response that's going through the motions, but to not even bother to fight for logic and knowledge is pretty striking.

Media finally listening to what Brian Schmidt has to say about climate change

2011-09-18T13:26:00.000-07:00

Yep:

Astrophysicist Brian Schmidt, 44, named in Sweden as one of three winners of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics, used his first day in the spotlight to appeal to "policy people" to listen to scientists on climate change.
....

"The science is science. Policy is policy. And I would really like the scientists to continue to debate what's right and what's wrong about everything, accelerating universe, climate," he told reporters in Canberra.
"And I'd really like the policy people to debate how to deal with what is coming in from the scientists, rather than an ill-formed scientific debate.

I even like astronomy. This guy is my overachieving alter-ego. He could at least have the common decency of getting old before receiving the Nobel Prize, but no.

Spencer Weart and Never at War

2011-09-17T13:23:00.000-07:00

1. Spencer Weart.

I've been interested for quite a while in the theory that democracies don't fight wars with other democracies, but only recently learned that Spencer Weart, the historian-god of climate change science, also wrote a book in 1998 called Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another. (I'm shamefully cribbing off of wiki rather than his book, but I'll get around to the real thing sometime I swear).

Weart makes the maximalist argument, that any country sufficiently democratic to have let at least 2/3 of male adults to vote and control the government for at least three years will not go to war with a similar democracy. He includes many classic Greek city-states in this category. The book then discusses borderline cases and his theories about why democracies don't fight each other.

Wiki has a quite good general article on the democratic peace theory - as with any other field, you can find some expert who absolutely denies the consensus position, but it seems pretty clear that well-established democracies don't fight each other, and quite likely that even immature democracies are less likely to fight democracies. No consensus on why that's the case however.

My own view: I don't know enough about classical Greece to say anything relevant. I think democracy requires at least a certain level of organization and sophistication before the democratic peace kicks in. Hunter-gatherer and small-scale agricultural societies were reasonably democratic/anarchic and very often violent toward outgroups. Weart's maximalist position may or may not work - the 1999 Kargil War between India and Pakistan that started a year after Weart's book is a contrary example. OTOH, Pakistan's elected parliament didn't really control its military which initiated that war.

That Weart could even plausibly maintain his position suggests the overall strength of the democratic peace theory.

2. Israel.

Israel's antipathy and fear of the Arab Spring is interesting in light of the fact that Israeli policymakers should know about democratic peace theory. Why Israelis thought their security was better protected by a hated 82-year old tyrant instead of a potential shot at Egyptian democratization isn't clear. I guess one response would be to look at how unpopular Israel is now with the average Egyptian, but I suspect that unpopularity itself could partially be a result of Israeli antipathy to Arab democracy.

I think the disinterest in Arab democracy in light of democratic peace theory suggests at least partially that Israel isn't all that worried about its security. It also suggests that Israel does not want democratically elected Arab leaders to be expressing grievances about West Bank and Gaza, because those leaders are much more persuasive that what Israel's had to deal with previously.

3. Labor unions.

Something of a tangent here, but one pithy statement I read somewhere about peace between democracies went to the effect of "yes it works in practice, but can you make it work in theory?" Weart isn't the only one who's tried to explain it, and no one's got a consensus theory for it.

I feel the same way about unions - the increasing inequality and declining middle class seems to be an effect of declining union power, but I don't think there's a good explanation about why unions benefit society generally, as opposed to just their members. I think the data is pretty good that they do benefit society, and there are plenty of theories why, but I'm not convinced as to why.

We'll just have to live with uncertainty.

French nuclear power pricing, and solar power pricing

2011-09-16T13:22:00.000-07:00

Via Romm:

Pro-nuclear power France still has escalating costs for nuclear power. It's not American litigation driving these costs.

Also via Romm:

My opinion is that we should maintain and relicense most nuclear power plants (that's cheap), but nukes don't have an expanded role absent massive Republican governmental subsidies, with an unhelpful loan subsidy assist from Obama. A lot safer than coal, though.

UPDATE: probably should add that widely distributed wind power and grid charging off of power stored in plug-in car batteries could handle much of the night time load.

In America, it's liberal-leftist to say the rich should pay the same percent taxes as the middle class

2011-09-15T13:21:00.000-07:00

That is all.

Eight percent increase in belief in climate change in the US

2011-09-14T13:20:00.000-07:00

Up to 83%, and the Stanford analyst thinks the Republican presidential denialism may be part of it:

As Americans watch Republicans debate the issue, they are forced to mull over what they think about global warming, said Jon Krosnick, a political science professor at Stanford University.
And what they think is also influenced by reports this year that global temperatures in 2010 were tied with 2005 to be the warmest year since the 1880s.
"That is exactly the kind of situation that will provoke the public to think about the issue in a way that they haven't before," Krosnick said about news reports on the Republicans denying climate change science.

I sure hope he's right. The debates were skewed with 1.5 candidates arguing for sanity and the rest denialists, playing to a skewed-conservative audience. If that still helped climate realism, then bring on the national campaign. The increasing recognition of Republican leadership being anti-science is probably sinking in somewhat.

I wonder though if it's more just the particular time, right after record heat and weather disasters. The previous poll was done in early June rather than the end of summer heat. Or maybe fading memories of the made-up nonsense over the stolen climate emails.

Anyway, modest progress for realism.

So what would have been the major headlines if violent crime rose 12%

2011-09-13T13:19:00.000-07:00

The important good news even if it gets ho-hum coverage is that violent crime is down yet again, this time by 12% last year, down 70% from the 1993 high point. Contrary to the article and its unnamed experts, I don't think the experts are necessarily surprised that crime went down in the short-term in a bad economy (longer term impacts to society from the economy are less hopeful tho). What is surprising is that it went down that much, as the article's one expert says.

Regression to the mean suggests stabilization or increase would be more likely than this large decrease. Maybe someday we'll have some certainty on why it's happening. The whole lead-reduction/crime-reduction thing seems really strong, but not definite. The "more porn, less rape" theory also seems to have some support although not as much. "More abortion, less crime" is also interesting and the least supported in my nonexpert opinion (but can be tested overseas).

Anyway, it's nice to have some good domestic news along with the good news from the Arab world.

A tangent: I recently watched Predator 2 after being told it was good (my review: meh). Filmed in 1990 and set in 1997, it took the then-upward crime trajectory and sent it forward to an ungovernable future. Interestingly bad prediction.

John McPhee, pre-1960 geology, and the climate consensus

2011-09-12T13:18:00.000-07:00

A previous post refers to my semi-fruitless quest for a precedent of science in any field being as incredibly 100% wrong as the denialists claim is the case for climate. Commenters there suggested geology before plate tectonics as the best shot. Someone mentioned McPhee's Assembling California for context examining the history of the science of plate tectonics, a book I've had sitting around and unread.

Off to the races!

[Wary of multiple theories by some geologists for what made mountains rise,] many more geologists would not venture further than than to say (indisputably) that "earth forces" or "orogenic forces" had lifted the geosynclines, and that these forces were "not well understood".

[regarding different California mountain geosynclines thrust on top of each other,] "that was the Golconda Thrust. No one knew how this 'orogeny' happened."

[on one side of a mountain range geosyncline] there were shallow-water sediments followed by deep-water material, but there was no other side. "That was never explained".

"the geosynclinal cycle was said to be about two hundred million years. In the Overthrust Belt in Montana, forty thousand feet of Precambrian sediment had been thrust over Cretaceous sediment. As students, we wondered why all that Precambrian was still there. What had the source geosyncline been doing sitting there for a billion years when the cycle was two hundred million? There was no answer."

Halls's idea [orogeny not from tectonics] was not preposterous. It was incomplete. There was, after all, marine rock in mountains. Between the geosyncline and the mountains, though, something was missing, and what was missing was plate tectonics.

(text excerpts pages 38-40).

I think the picture isn't of a scientific field that's confident in a wrong paradigm, but one that has many acknowledged, open questions and hadn't yet accepted a solution that was proven with the subsequent accumulation of evidence. This isn't a matter of overconfidence, the claim made by denialists against climatology.

There's also the issue of whether European geologists were more open to tectonics than Americans prior to 1960, something I don't know anything about.

Granted, this is a pop-sci book, but McPhee's pretty good, so I'll see what else he has to say on this subject.

UPDATE: some great comments below. Read them! In particular, I did wheel reinventing from a 2008 comment at Deltoid:

[tectonics is] a good illustration of one flavor of paradigm shift, in this case, where plausible hypotheses were identified early, but evidence just didn't get strong enough for a long time, but when new kinds of evidence popped up, the discipline pretty much changed views in a decade.

But indeed, the evidence for AGW is (by now) immensely stronger than the evidence for continental drift in 1920. After all, Arrhenius was talking about Greenhouse Effect over 100 years ago, and that wasn't accepted instantly either :-)

And also this:

For a proper comparison in your search for "a precedent of science in any field being as incredibly 100% wrong as the denialists claim is the case for climate.", you really need to consider the supposed "wrong-headed" theory in the light of the existing evidence base. In other words we want a theory that is "bone-headed" in the context of the knowledge-base pertaining at the time.

So Newtonian dynamics isn't a teribly good example since it was a theory that was entirely consistent with the existing evidence base).

Everyone in the country with a concealed carry permit will be packing tomorrow

2011-09-11T13:15:00.000-07:00

(Originally published on Sept 10th)

Here's hoping not a single person in the country is an idiot on September 11. Probably not an easy day to be a practicing Sikh. My apologies to those who are. And of course, here's hoping nothing happens at all, although it would be unlikely that car bombs can kill more people than highways.

And FWIW, I agree with Deltoid's assessment some years back - gun control seems to have little effect positively or negatively on gun violence.

UDATE: looks like we made it.

15% estate tax with $100,000 exclusion?

2011-09-10T13:12:00.000-07:00

I often disagree with the conservative/libertarian/lukewarmist Tigerhawk blogger, but not always (and it's good that he doesn't take himself too seriously). He had this reaction to Romney's proposal to end the estate tax:

Sure. But also eliminate the step-up in basis at death. (My own view is that the best estate tax would be one with a very low exemption -- say, $100,000 -- but also a tax rate so low that people would not go to a lot of trouble to avoid it. I suspect that a 15% rate with a $100,000 exemption would both generate more revenue and redirect estate planners and lawyers to more productive work.)

I think he might be right, especially if you also include that elimination of step up in basis for purposes of calculating capital gains. I googled around and couldn't find stats on average estates at death, but I doubt it's $100,000 (especially including people with no net estate). Even someone with $200,000 would only be effectively taxed at 7.5%. The current rate is 35% and exempts the first $3.5 million. (UPDATE: actually the exemption is $5 million through 2012. It's then caught up in the Bush tax cut issue - unclear what will happen post 2012.)

Tigerhawk misses that his own proposal might even be more progressive than the current system, assuming it does bring in more money. Most of the money would come from people with estates well over $200k, maybe over $500k. These people are far wealthier than the average American. The obvious downside is while it may be more progressive overall, it catches the moderately wealthy at the expense of giving a huge windfall to the superwealthy.

So of course it's not the ideal estate tax system, which would exempt $50k, start at a rate of 15% and gradually ratchet up to 60-90% at $5m (depending on how effective evasion is), but maybe it's worth considering.

UPDATE: See L's comment below, that an on-paper capital loss from the immediate sale of estate capital items (and due to step up, there should always be a capital loss) can be set against an inheritor's capital gains. You get free money and a tax break on your own taxes. I'd like to get that verified, but it seems plausible and amazing.

Disagreeing with Chris Mooney on handling the need for closure

2011-09-09T13:11:00.000-07:00

I'll follow the now-universal practice of recopying comments I left elsewhere, in this case at Chris Mooney's Intersection site. I think in the climate communication field we have not done enough to highlight how skeptics/denialists/lukewarmists rely on multiple massive coincidences to explain why climate change is behaving as mainstream science has predicted since CO2 was identified as a greenhouse gas in the 19th Century. The non-scientist public doesn't generally like reliance on coincidence.

Chris wrote about how anti-evolutionists show a strong need for closure and intolerance of ambiguity. I suggested in the comments that at least in the field of climate communication, we have an advantage over denialists when appealing to fence-sitters with a desire for closure. Chris disagreed. Perhaps Chris may have just needed closure on the idea that we have little we can do with people who need closure.

Anyway, my final comment in that thread:

1. On evolution/creationism, I agree that closure favors denial for those who believe in the inerrant Bible. Evolution isn’t compatible with the Bible being literally true.
2. Climate theory doesn’t have the same trouble with Christianity (edit: Christian literalists). A few climate denialists have tried to use Christian determinist arguments, but they’re pretty weak even from that perspective.
3. On climate, if you accept that temps are warming, as many denialists (and more important, the fence sitters) do, then you have uncertainty and ambiguity. What explains the increase?
4. Climate realists have a theory that eliminates ambiguity – it’s warming because we’re messing up and warming the planet. This theory, btw, is compatible with a Christian frame of humans as immoral screwups who do a bad job as stewards of God’s creation.
5. Denialists who accept warming don’t really have an explanation – they have to rely on coincidence. It’s just coincidence, they say, that we happen to be in a time when temps are rising as part of a natural cycle. It’s just coincidence that Tyndall, Fourier, and Arrhenius more or less predicted what would happen long before it became politicized. It’s just coincidence that Hansen said in 1988 that temps would keep rising, and they’ve risen at the rate he predicted.
6. Some denialists resort to lies to deny their need to argue based on coincidences, but that opens them up to vulnerability when trying to persuade fence-sitters.
7. If denialists fall in the set that deny warming at all, then they have another group of coincidences that they have to explain away (edit: relating to multiple sets of ground/ocean/satellite obs).
8. I agree that some with a strong need for closure and who have already strongly settled on a denialist frame will be very difficult to bring around, but it’s not the committed denialists that we’re concerned about.
9. People who haven’t yet thought much about climate issues are the target. Some of them will have strong need for closure. We have a better story for them by pointing out the other side’s reliance on coincidences.
10. I can be proven wrong. I don’t know this psychological field. If it’s shown that people with a strong need for closure are also strongly tolerant of explanation via coincidence, then I’m wrong.
11. I suspect the opposite is true, that many people are intolerant of explanation through coincidence. It’s kind of an intuitive Occam’s Razor – it’s not science, but it’s not wrong, either. We should use it more – we have an explanation, denialists have coincidences. We have a solution, denialists want to sit there. Who do you trust?

Libya wrap-up: Nato should stay away from Sirte, Alexander Cockburn should stay away from analysis

2011-09-08T13:10:00.000-07:00

1. The hard part in Libya is over, and an easy path to clean, Norway-style petro-democracy lies ahead. (Pssst - no, I don't actually believe that, but so many people are warning us not to believe it that I thought I could drive traffic here by being the only person on the Internet saying it, who could then get linked and debunked by all the wise people out there.)

2. I was pretty unconcerned about Obama's War Powers Act violation, but maybe I can balance it here: Nato/US air support for the final attack on Sirte and maybe Sabha is illegal and unethical, although it might make good politics. I'm not aware of any evidence that Gaddhafi forces are attacking civilians in Sirte, where his tribal affiliations seem to keep him popular. Nato's right of action is to protect civilians, so that legal justification goes away. Ethically, the loss of air support might make the TNC a little more willing to negotiate things to avoid bloodshed. While the TNC has the natural right to revolution and this battle appears to be the final stage of exercising that right, it's their right and not Nato's when civilian protection isn't involved.

3. I am also concerned about a President Rick Perry using the Libya precedent to justify a repeat of the Venezuelan military coup, but this time with US air support in an internal war. Or maybe somewhere else like Bolivia. However, this type of Flubber argument isn't enough to overcome the value of our justified involvement in saving civilians and helping the Arab Revolution continue.

4. It remains mysterious to me why the rebels successfully fought off military force for over two weeks early in the revolution, then collapsed and had to be rescued. This led to my rotten prediction of quick victory in late February, although ultimately it seems correct. The rebels hadtwo weeks of military success in a time period I figured that they would be the most disorganized, so I thought there was no turning back. I've yet to see analysis explain why Gaddhafi was unsuccessful for the first two weeks and then turned things around. I'll guess that he couldn't and didn't trust his own forces and had to fight an auto-coup first, but that's just a guess.

5. News reports generally described the war as a stalemate from late March to end of July, even early August. By mid-May, they were wrong (see the previous link). I think you could start a one-month rule looking forward from that point: virtually no territory rebels held a month earlier would be taken from them a month later, and rebels always held more territory than they did a month earlier. Maybe it was a stalemate in the east, but rebels were slowly winning in Misurata and the west.

6. In the field of Libya predictions that start wrong and stay wrong, let's try Alexander Cockburn, one of the very few lefties who also disbelieves in climate change:

It requites no great prescience to see that this will all end up badly. Qaddafi’s failure to collapse on schedule is prompting increasing pressure to start a ground war, since the NATO operation is, in terms of prestige, like the banks Obama has bailed out, Too Big to Fail. Libya will probably be balkanized.

(Via Juan Cole.) He got his lack of prescience right, at least. I think Cockburn has his own version of hippie punching. He hates liberals from a leftist perspective, so anything moderate liberals believe is therefore wrong. I'm not aware of any evidence that he's backed from his climate denialism, btw, but I'm happy to bet him if he wants to put his money where his mouth is.

7. Domestic politics means the US is locked into a biased position on the Arab-Israeli conflict that will remain a major obstacle in relations with Arabs. However, the same domestic politics creates problems for China and Russia regarding the Arab Revolution. It might take some time, but the US and Western Europe might slowly generate some goodwill, because the Arab Revolution isn't going away.

Climate probabilities have multiple outcomes over time (Roger forgets the Fourth Dimension)

2011-09-07T13:08:00.000-07:00

At the risk of repeating Roger Jr.'s mistake of not really knowing what I'm talking about, it seems like the fact's been obscured that we're betting not on one climate outcome at a single point in time but at multiple points in time.

To go back to the betting on a weighted die analogy, we're not just betting on a single outcome, but how often the die face saying "getting even warmer" shows up at each point in time as the die rolls. And we're able to make new bets at each point in time. From a policy perspective, we're able to use past experience with models to decide if we want to continue to rely on those predictions.

A related flaw in the delayist/denier argument is the alleged long-term consequences of policies - based on supposedly incorrect predictions of change - won't actually happen. If the predictions are wrong, we can stop investing in seawalls and solar panels in a decade or two. We'll have multiple outcomes over time to test those predictions.

(Per the comments, the title has been updated.)

I'm trying not to porkbarrel, but it's complicated

2011-09-06T13:05:00.000-07:00

I haven't written much about my glamorous life as an ~~international spy~~ water district director, but I thought about it today as I spent my Saturday politely sparring with officials from other agencies.

I got elected on an environmental agenda but have spent as much or more time dealing with money and budget issues. That's appropriate - the public doesn't want the Water District dollars wasted.

So here's the real tricky part - I often try to help our taxpayers and ratepayers by fighting with other agencies over who's going to pay for what, but if we're just transferring costs amongst ourselves, are there any real savings?

I think the answer is partly yes - an efficient allocation of resources depends on the communities that receive the benefits being the ones that pay for them (adjusting for any transfers done to fix social problems). Agencies and communities that want our resources without pitching in comparably will demand more than they should, and our community will be willing to pay less than they should.

In today's example, we have a creek flooding issue that crosses two counties, and since more flooding happens on our side, it's somewhat appropriate that we've been paying more. At the same time we also have tidal flooding that will get worse from sea level rise that's partially integrated with our creek flooding (someone tell Roger about that) but is also more evenly spread between the two counties. I supported beginning plans to rebuild the levees to address the tidal flooding, but also said that if damages are more equal between counties then we have to revisit cost allocations. I want the problem addressed and the costs addressed appropriately.

So how does this fit a Stoat post on the failings of politicians? I guess we need to structure elected government so that the ability to win elections derives more from the competence values. If I fight for Water District cost reductions, including some real reductions, maybe that will be rewarded. We'll see.

I also want to see campaign finance reform for our little district, but that's another issue....

Court to Repubs: kill EPA climate regulations and you'll get blowback

2011-09-05T13:04:00.000-07:00

The headline is my takeaway from this Jonathan Adler post at the Volokhs, although it may not be his. Here's the appellate court ruling, about whether actions risking the spread of the invasive species, Asian carp, require a preliminary injunction against a public nuisance:

. . . In our view, the plaintiffs presented enough evidence at this preliminary stage of the case to establish a good or perhaps even a substantial likelihood of harm – that is, a non-trivial chance that the carp will invade Lake Michigan in numbers great enough to constitute a public nuisance.... That does not mean, however, that they are automatically entitled to injunctive relief. The defendants, in collaboration with a great number of agencies and experts from the state and federal governments, have mounted a full-scale effort to stop the carp from reaching the Great Lakes, and this group has promised that additional steps will be taken in the near future. This effort diminishes any role that equitable relief would otherwise play. Although this case does not involve the same kind of formal legal regime that caused the Supreme Court to find displacement of the courts’ commonlaw powers in American Electric Power, on the present state of the record we have something close to it. In light of the active regulatory efforts that are ongoing, we conclude that an interim injunction would only get in the way. We stress, however, that if the agencies slip into somnolence or if the record reveals new information at the permanent injunction stage, this conclusion can be revisited.

(Emphasis added.)

American Electric Power was the attempt to bring a public nuisance case against a variety of companies for greenhouse gas pollution. The Supreme Court, with the support of the Obama Administration, threw the case out because the EPA was regulating greenhouse gas anyway. I argued a while back that the Obama Admin positioned itself this way to provide a disincentive to Republicans for killing (or more likely, defunding) Clean Air Act climate regulations and enforcement, that doing so would revive the public nuisance lawsuits.

Now we have a similar issue, expressly citing AEP, that warns that "somnolence" can bring about public nuisance injunctions. As I said in my previous argument, I'd rather have a public nuisance case and EPA regulations, but there is a reason behind Obama's strategy.

Somewhat tangential: Adler is an interesting type, btw. Previously I would've classified him as a delayer/lukewarmist, and dismiss as unimpressive his position of semi-supporting little other than a politically infeasible carbon tax. I think he may have shifted a bit, though, along with a few other conservative intellectuals who are having troubles with the anti-science positions on their side of politics.

Libya learning and persuasion

2011-09-04T13:02:00.000-07:00

I don't expect the right-wingers to learn, let alone acknowledge, their mistakes on Libya. The one intervention that saved civilian lives (probably), killed no Americans, and cost less than one percent of the Iraq-Afghanistan interventions, and the right opposed it. With a few exceptions like McCain.

We'll see whether the opposition on the left has anything to say. And to be fair, there's plenty of time for things to go badly. The big lesson of Iraq, one that I didn't realize in advance, is that chaos can be even worse than the Leviathon of tyranny (somebody should write that concept up).

Apropos of this, one Kevin Drum post:

I've been a skeptic of the Libyan operation from the start, but if this keeps up — and if the revolutionary government goes on to establish a decent regime — then it looks like President Obama's judgment in this matter may indeed have been better than mine. At a modest cost in dollars, virtually no cost in coalition lives, and no requirement for postwar occupation or rebuilding, we've backstopped an indigenous uprising against a brutal dicatator who was on the verge of slaughtering thousands of his own people. Not bad.

And another on persuasion:

My own experience, which I think is fairly generalizable, is that within the course of a single conversation hardly anybody ever changes their mind — including me.

He says he changes his opinion over time, though. What works for me is new information. Even if I'm not persuaded originally, new info might convince me - but maybe not so much because it's new but because it's a crutch, an excuse that lets me shed my stupid original opinion. Anyway, good for Kevin for reacting to Libya.

Human Events takes anti-Renaissance views seriously

2011-09-03T12:43:00.000-07:00

New Yorker covered Michelle Bachmann's anti-Italian Renaissance ideology with her favorite documentary by Francis Schaeffer:

The iconic image from the early episodes is Schaeffer standing on a raised platform next to Michelangelo’s “David” and explaining why, for all its beauty, Renaissance art represented a dangerous turn away from a God-centered world and toward a blasphemous, human-centered world

This conclusion by Nancy Pearcey that Bachmann supports also demonstrates her thought process:

There may “be occasions when Christians are mistaken on some point while nonbelievers get it right,” she writes in “Total Truth.” “Nevertheless, the overall systems of thought constructed by nonbelievers will be false—for if the system is not built on Biblical truth, then it will be built on some other ultimate principle. Even individual truths will be seen through the distorting lens of a false world view.”

Bachmann doesn't care if she's wrong on such things as science and history, and has no interest in corrections, because her overall thought system is infallible.

Human Events appears to fall in the same category. They're pumping a (somewhat doubtful) claim of malfeasance on drowning polar bears that Eli has checked, and found this expert conclusion:

“I think it’s very illustrative of the problems with government research on endangered species, and raises the question as to whether government should be in the business of science,” Ramey said.

I think Dr. Rob Roy Ramey and some government-supported madrasas in Pakistan should share notes. Incidentally, Dr. Ramey sez the survey was only intended to look for whales, when the protocol was actually to record all sightings:

ERIC MAY: Okay, you mentioned earlier other mammals, so are all mammal observations recorded in that database?
JEFFREY GLEASON: Yes.
ERIC MAY: Okay, so give me an example, what other mammals?
JEFFREY GLEASON: Bearded seals, walruses, ringed seals, polar bears, beluga whales, gray whales. That's sort of the big ones.

Also they took photos:

ERIC MAY: When you did take the photos, were you able to tell what they were?
JEFFREY GLEASON: Most of the time, yeah. We saw some dead polar bears at one time, and it was pretty obvious with the naked eye what it was. But the pictures, they just kind of turned out to be a white blob in the photos. And I can't remember, we probably took three or four pictures, and it's sort of white blob floating in the ocean, so it's pretty hard to tell.

A certain Coyote Blog couldn't handle the truth on that one, saying the resulting study was produced without "even getting a picture of them." I'm also impressed by Coyote's assertion that white bears swimming at the surface are harder to see than grey-colored whales that swim below the surface and only come up every few minutes to breathe.

Not to worry though, the denialist overall worldview is infallible. Or maybe is S Molnar is right, and Bachmann and pals will bring us back to pre-Industrial Revolution, pre-Renaissance economies.

Mitt Romney to win the Republican nomination

2011-09-02T12:39:00.000-07:00

My political prediction accuracy rate has skyrocketed in recent years, from "worth your attention for the wrong reason" to "not worth your attention." We'll see if my Romney prediction keeps the trend moving.

I know Perry's kicking butt in Republican polls right now, just like Fred Thompson did four years ago when he jumped in. That doesn't matter much to me.

What does matter is the California Republican Party example from last year. Our state Republican Party is a lifesaver to America due to its incompetence - not just the usual Republican incompetence at state and federal level* in terms of policy, but also incompetent at winning elections. The national Republican Party would be much stronger if its biggest state party wasn't so terrible.

And even this state Republican Party, last year, chose its more electable candidate over the more true-blooded conservative. They didn't win, but they gave it what they could.

I think that's an indication of how Republicans will vote. They might distrust his religion, however much he tries to unite Republicans in hatred of the non-religious, but the Tea Partiers know that the anticolonial Kenyan-born socialist has to be taken out of office, and they'll go with their best shot, which isn't Perry.

Incidentally, it'll be interesting to see if Romney repeats his pattern of loaning his millions to his campaign instead of donating them, which would open a Romney Administration to legalized bribery as after-the-election donations flow right into his personal wallet. There oughta be a law.

And in other predictions, I stuck some cash back in the stock market last week. We'll see how that goes. I've been meaning to make a small bet against gold too, but have never done that before.

And as for Romney v Obama, let's just hope for a good economy.

*the Republicans I know in local office, by contrast, aren't too bad.

Republican climate cladistics

2011-09-01T12:37:00.000-07:00

Might be useful to have some categories for Republican leaders:

Genus: Science Believers

Species: As good as typical Democrats

examples: Arnold the Governator, the eight Republicans who voted for cap and trade in Congress in 2009, Bush promises during the 2000 campaign (more or less)

notes: functionally extinct, unless McCain starts getting mad at fellow Republicans again.

Species: Proactive, but not as proactive as Democrats

example: Chris Christie. Others??

notes: they'll do something, maybe even without having to be forced to do something. But not as much as Democrats, which in turn isn't enough.

Species: Embracing science, rejecting acting on the science

examples: Mitt Romney, John Huntsman. Maybe Bush post-2005.

notes: this is the leftist side of the Republican Party mainstream. Might actually do something, very limited, if elected to office.

Genus: Wafflers

Species: Incoherent action rejecters.

example: Tim Pawlenty. Plenty of others I'm too lazy to track down. McCain on some days.

notes: results will likely vary if elected to office - they won't do much anything to be helpful, but the resistance they have to sane efforts by others could differ from case to case. Might have something to do with what they "really" believe, although considering that issue is a road to madness.

Other waffler species?

Genus: Denialists

Species: Conspiracy True Believers

examples: James Inhofe, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry (Morano-approved)

notes: I suppose you could try to distinguish between the ignorant and the express conspiracy supporters, but it doesn't work too well. These folks will only do what they're legally bound to do, after they've been sued for failing to do what they're legally bound to do.

So the Republican nomination is a battle between action rejecters and conspiracy true believers. Wonderful.

Our permanent robotic presence in space

2011-08-10T13:57:00.000-07:00

Nothing insightful in this post, just something in the "space is cool" category that I hadn't seen written elsewhere.

I remember when the International Space Station's Expedition I crew arrived in November 2000 that news media said it could mark humanity's permanent occupation of space. That may still hold true, although it happened a generation before it probably should have. When I read that, I remember thinking that we missed marking one milestone for our permanent robotic presence in space, three years earlier.

On September 11, 1997, the Mars Global Surveyor probe reached Martian orbit. Since then, humanity has had at least one satellite in Martian orbit. Three are operating right now and more are planned, from multiple nations and not just the US. We'll never leave.

Somewhat surprisingly, we may also have achieved permanent presence on the Martian surface. In early 2004, two rovers landed on the surface, one of them is still working and making important discoveries, and an even more powerful one is set to land there next year. If it doesn't crash, I think it could last long enough to be there when more landers arrive.

So where else? The moon's had lots of visitors, but most of them were short-lived. From Japan'sSelene mission in 2007 onward though, there's lots of overlap that shouldn't end.

I thought figuring out the start of permanent earth orbit would be hard, but not so (and I'm not counting dead probes, btw, a permanent presence requires operational satellites). Looks like the prize goes all the way back to 1958 with the fourth-ever satellite, Vanguard I, which lasted until 1964. The 1962 probe Alouette operated for 10 years, with countless overlaps since its launch.

My guess is that's it, so far. We have operating satellites at Mercury, Venus, the asteroid belt, and Saturn, but none of them will live long enough to be working when replacements arrive. A probe just launched to Jupiter, but radiation makes that a hard place, and it'll be many decades before we get a permanent presence.

As for future milestones, I think Venus will be the first. A Japanese mission got screwed up going there and is mostly crippled, but the first really operational orbiter that gets there will make things permanent, and I'm sure it'll happen within 10 years. The lunar surface won't be that hard either, maybe 15 years.

A proposed lake explorer on Saturn's moon Titan could get there in the 2020s and last long enough to see a Saturn orbiter years later, so 2020s or 2030s for Saturn. The 2040s for Jupiter, arrival for either a distant weather satellite or a communications satellite to relay info from short-lived probes messing around near its major moons.

I've been foolish enough to speculate this far, but now I'll stop, with no guesses about dates for permanent balloon platforms on Venus, permanent anything near Mercury, the asteroid belts, or elsewhere outside of Saturn and Jupiter. This all assumes no near term fiscal collapse or long term Singularity.

Pretty impressive stuff, overall. The human space program may have stalled out in the last 40 years, but what we've done to get our presence beyond earth has not.

Might as well disagree with Andrew Dessler too

2011-08-09T13:56:00.000-07:00

From my previous post about the To the Point radio show on climate change, Andrew Dessler also showed up on the show to discuss why climate legislation failed. He said that Obama had one bullet and two targets, and for understandable reasons chose to take aim at the target of health care reform.

The way I'd rephrase that is Obama and the Congressional Democrats chose to take a year and a half to fire one bullet, and that killed the chance to push for a second target. There were legitimate reasons for the strategy, but the shared mistake was in failing to simply get the exact same health care reform done quickly in six months and pronounce it the victory that it was, not just the best compromise they could get through Congress. I agree with Andrew that health care was the key to climate action failing, but there's more to it than that.

I'm making this pronouncement having just bought Eric Pooley's book on this subject, The Climate War. I can proudly say the first three or so pages don't expressly disagree with my thesis. Maybe I'll have more to say when I've finished it.

RP Jr. says strength of climate denialism in the US "not a limiting factor" in US politics

2011-08-08T13:54:00.000-07:00

Roger Pielke Jr. on To the Point, which previously had done a good job in picking speakers (speaking around minute 24):

I would say the evidence suggests pretty strongly that public opinion is not a limiting factor in taking effective action on climate change.

All right then. If public opinion is not a limiting factor then you hypothetically could increase public opinion from what it is so that it matches the opinion of climatologists publishing on climate change, 97% of whom accept human effects on climate, and we still wouldn't have passed a climate bill in Congress in '09 or '10. Sounds a little loony to me.

This isn't Roger "The Battle for US Public Opinion on Climate Change is Over" Jr's first attempt to dismiss denialism while demanding people not talk about it. He also concluded that the claim that 57 US Senators accepted climate reality in 2007 was not a problematically low figure. My math places 57 as less than 60, not even taking account the climate realists who bow to lobbyist pressure and the lost potential votes among the 43 who are unlikely to vote to address a problem they doubt exists.

This isn't to say that the forces of denial are going to win in the long run, just that RPJr's dismissal of their influence doesn't sound like sound political science.

Now hidden in his drive to be contrarian is an interesting nugget - back to To the Point:

Public has at least for 20 years been strongly behind climate science and the idea that action needs to be taken. What we have seen is a big partisan divide....It's become part of the culture wars of the United States....as assumption that many scientists and experts carry with them that if only the public understood the science as they understand the science, the public would come to share their values....As a political scientist I look at issues like the debt ceiling or the war in Iraq or the TARP program and when you look at what public opinion was when action was taken on these controversial topics you find out that the strength of public opinion on climate change is at or exceeding the levels for which action was taken for the other issues. So I would say the evidence suggests pretty strongly that public opinion is not a limiting factor in taking effective action on climate change.

The stuff that's not bolded is either wrong or obvious. The bolded stuff, that legislative solutions with equal public support don't get passed at an equal rate suggest there's more to look at. RPJr goes on to say its the voters choosing the economy over their potential long term interest in climate, an Iron Law that's not so irony in practice. I'd suggest that the Iron Law doesn't exist, but that powerful economic interest tied into ideological backwardness can really screw things up in our democracy, especially when the 60 vote requirement in the Senate isn't very democratic.

Flubber arguments are almost as bad as slippery-slope arguments

2011-08-07T13:53:00.000-07:00

I've spent the last week-plus swimming in Sierra mountain lakes instead of watching the Republican Party leadership play chicken with the economy. In the run-up to it all, though, I heard a rehashed version of a bad debating point that I'm calling the Flubber Argument.

Flubber was the fictional material in the film The Absent Minded Professor that bounces back with more energy and a higher bounce than is in the kinetic energy used by Flubber to hit a surface. I've criticized the slippery slope argument in other venues as an excuse to support a position that has little direct support, so some indirect consequence are therefore invented. The Flubber Argument is similar.

In a To the Point podcast last month (sorry I can't remember which), a pollster described a Tea Party argument that debt default was an acceptable price to pay in order to learn to live within our means, and that the ultimate effect would be positive. The Flubber Argument, in other words. In my day job, I've also heard the Reverse Flubber Argument - if we succeed in doing something good to protect the environment, that will just incentivize open space developers to get organized and make things worse than they would have been.

Like other bad arguments, it's not completely wrong. Sometimes the blowback is stronger than the initial effect. What I usually fail to hear, however, is an analysis proving why that's going to be the case.

Bow to Mark Levin with the human body temperature theory of global warming

2011-08-06T13:52:00.000-07:00

June 23 broadcast, heard it the day before I went to measure melting glaciers. (Main link here, might try this if it still works, and go to Minute 101. Below is a rough transcript; the audio was dodgy.)

Caller: [Caller references how body temperature of many people in an enclosed room will raise its temperature, then continues]....It's amazing that the world hasn't gotten warmer than it has since 1980 when the population went from 3 billion to 8 billion 30 years later, there's just no accounting for that if the greenhouse effect were actually true....

Levin: ....interesting point...if it's man-made, then why aren't we a lot hotter than we are now because of the significant increase in population.

Caller: ....[says billions of people walking around at 98.6 degrees, well above global ambient temperature]

Levin: ....[says it's an "excellent point"]

I think we have a theory that might trump Louis Hissink's geothermal warming for its explanatory power. Eat your heart out, Deltoid.

Enceladus rains water vapor on Saturn - how about microbes?

2011-08-05T13:51:00.000-07:00

Badly answered question: 1. Is there life (as we know it) on gas giant planets?

Better answered questions: 2. Can life originate on gas giants? and 3. Can life survive on gas giants?

What I've seen of pop science, and my impression of Planetary Protection standards for spacecraft, is the assumption that because the answer to #2 seems to be "difficult", then the answer to #1 is "unlikely". But what if you drop living microbes through space and into the gas giant atmospheres?

That could be happening on a regular basis with Enceladus shown to drop water vapor from its geysers on to Saturn's atmosphere (blog post at link, pdf of article in the blog post). Enceladus probably has a near surface ocean feeding geysers through cracks in the ice. If it has life, then microbes are also being shot out as the geyser jets freeze.

The water vapor connection to Saturn doesn't necessarily establish that water ice particles will get there, or get there in the same short time frame (<2.5 months) as the vapor, but it makes it more plausible. And there's always the impact delivery of ice chunks from Enceladus to Saturn as a mechanism.

While microbes couldn't survive the deep level heat (which is what would stop life from originating on gas giants), if they can survive long enough to reproduce and randomly spread, then some descendant microbes can escape destruction. All they could need is some weather patterns keeping them out of the deep layers for weeks, unlike the millenia that would be needed for life to originate there.

Besides being interesting and a potential target for astrobiology, there are some policy implications to this. Crashing the Galileo orbiter into Jupiter may have been a mistake - better to have crashed it into Io, Callisto, or Almathea. The plan to eventually deorbit the Cassini mission into Saturn is also mistaken, when the dead-surface moon Mimas makes a better target.

Harm minimization, the space program, and carbon caps

2011-08-04T13:49:00.000-07:00

Same Facts has a nice post tying drug addiction and political demagoguery - sometimes you can only aim for health improvements instead of fully quitting the drug, and it's similarly an issue in politics:

Thus, in some cases, the right policy is to give injection drug users access to sterile needles. In others, the right policy is to give grandstanding congressmen some way to pander to ignorant voters without crashing the economy. We all wish that heroin users would stop using. We all wish that Congressmen would not demagogue the debt ceiling. Neither wish will be granted soon.

I invite reflection among those who have low opinions of politicians and simultaneously advocate for perfect solutions at the expense of solutions that are politically feasible. Those two positions work well together if you're primarily interested in expressing contempt, but not if you're trying to make progress.

With the end of the disastrously expensive space shuttle program, the perfect solution is to let the private sector carry on manned "exploration" of areas that robots explored decades ago, and switch the federal government funding to something beneficial. I see little point in talking about that solution.

Harm minimization, or successful harm mitigation, means alternatives that keep most of the federal money in the same states that it's spent in now, even in some of the same institutions in the same states. Obama's plan for partial privatization of the manned space program might be the best feasible option. I've thought about replacing it with something entirely different, an advanced technology rescue service, but that might be a bridge too far. Maybe we can gradually reduce the scale of the program (an aside - Republicans are fighting for the big-government, socialist style old program instead - how typical).

So, carbon cap and trade. Any number of people have pointed out how a simple, universal carbon tax would avoid all the problems of the compromised cap and trade programs in various parts of the world. Australia's example suggests it is possible to get a modest carbon tax through - but one with many exceptions and that transitions into a cap-and-trade scheme.

Taking a harm minimization/benefit maximization approach, rather than a rigid rationality or nothing approach, will get a better result. I'm all for a carbon tax, but won't let that stop me support capntrade as well.

The tipping point range in land use planning is between 1 house per 10 acres and 10 houses per acre

2011-08-03T13:48:00.000-07:00

Matt Yglesias has been on a tear for the last year or two on 1. how land use restrictions are NIMBY power grabs that are actually bad for the environment, and 2. conservative libertarians screw up the issue by focusing on land use restrictions in rural areas but not in more developed places.

I think he's got something of a point, but has to be careful not to overplay it. In several places, including my actual work blog, I've written how there are tipping points in the density of development for each environmental value where marginal increases become generally beneficial, and below that point are generally detrimental. See the link for more details, but because the tipping point is a gradual transition in each case, and occurs at a different level of density for each particular environmental value (walkability tipping point is at higher density, farming and open space at lower levels), I think it's better to talk about a tipping point range.

At a residential density of 1 house per 10 acres, I can think of no environmental reason to support a marginal increase in that density. That would reduce the natural habitat value, make farming more difficult, and put more SUVs on the roads that have to drive long distances to get anywhere useful, all for a tiny increase in housing stock. This is where land use restrictions make enormous sense from an environmental viewpoint (and where conservatives put all their efforts to eliminate restrictions). At a density of 10 houses per acre, the reverse is true - the environmental advantages of low density for farming and open space no longer exist and so can't be harmed further, while walkability and public transit use are feasible, and increases in density mean large increases in housing stock.

So I agree with Matt on the high density end but not at the low end, leaving the small matter of the two orders of magnitude in the middle unresolved. I think for most environmental values, though, the tipping point range can be narrowed to fall between 2 residences per acre and 5 residences per acre. Half acre lots have some, modest, value for open space and wildlife. Just as I can think of no environmental reason to slightly increase densities at very low levels, there are few reasons to do so at the half acre lot size or lower. Conversely, increases from 5 residences per acre to something higher can at least add significant housing amounts and get closer to urban densities that reduce driving.

Of course, the useless zone of 2 to 5 residences per acre is what most of suburban construction has created in the last 60 years.

UPDATE: I should add that the policy relevance is primarily regarding rezoning areas that haven't been fully developed, and redevelopment of urban areas. Incremental changes like whether to permit "granny units" on parcels also apply. And as per the comments, all the above is a generalization subject to exceptions. Clustering development can maximize open space, and dense development can be a stupid idea in the wrong place (like a local proposal to put new development in San Francisco Bay).

Reversals of consensus in medical science

2011-08-02T13:46:00.000-07:00

My so-far fruitless quest continues for precedent to the denialist claim of incompetence and corruption in climate science. Some skeptics rely on the Galileo Fallacy - "people laughed at Galileo, people are laughing at me, therefore I am Galileo". Others try and find a more reasonable precedent in the last several centuries, and look to medical science as an example.

So there's an interesting blog post on a paper (the paper's behind a paywall, sadly) on medical retractions, claiming a 13% reversal rate on prior consensus for medical practices. To me, that's kind of high and uncomfortable in thinking about medicine, but its application as precedent doesn't quite work. First, these are claims of reversal, not a broad acceptance that the previous consensus was incorrect. And we're talking about consensus that e.g., a previous surgical practice was helpful when a new study contradicts it, a relatively technical level of detail in medical science. Claims that adding CO2 doesn't warm the planet is closer to contradicting germ theory in medical science, a fundamental consensus that hasn't been overturned.

The paper author also thinks the time interval for reversals to occur is about a decade. The modern consensus on climate goes back at least to the mid-1980s, or late-1800s if you consider the basic science. No precedent here. (UPDATE: per the comments, no consensus in the 1800s on the human effect, but there was a consensus about greenhouse gases and CO2. See the link for more info.)

Skeptics have used ulcers as one example of consensus reversal. It would be interesting to see whether the previous belief that stress caused ulcers was a best guess rather than a foundational theory in medicine. More to the point, though, what does a denialist with an ulcer do for treatment today? I suspect the smarter ones usually rely on consensus, rather than make "argument from authority" statements and attempt to rethink medical science for themselves. When you're looking to take action or make policy, trying to cast aside consensus and reinvent science on your own isn't likely to lead to a happy outcome.

So the quest continues.

Measuring and melting glaciers in Alaska

2011-08-01T13:44:00.001-07:00

I've been offline the last two weeks to do a volunteer vacation/vacation in Alaska. As Stoat has mentioned somewhere, volunteering is a great way to ignore your air travel emissions, and this was the third time I've done it by taking GPS measurements of glaciers.

The photo above isn't photoshopped, btw, nor is it my natural complexion. The electric blue lighting inside glacial ice has to be seen to be believed. That photo wasn't inside the glacier we measured though, but a glacial iceberg we recreated in, near Valdez in an outfall lake. As you can see from the photo after the jump, we wouldn't be able to get inside the glacier we measured except by unfortunate accident. Since my niece accompanied me this time, I was somewhat determined to make sure that wouldn't happen.

So this is the glacier we measured, a source glacier for the Teklanika River in Denali National Park. The snow bank at bottom left hangs off the terminus, despite all the rock debris. It continues all the way to the ridgeline horizon, although the bedrock outcrops in the middle show the glacier's about ready to melt down into two smaller glaciers. Only the widest connection is glacial ice, I think, the rest just looks like snow bands.

We walked up to the cirque you can barely see just below that connection, taking measurements along the way. Half of that cirque and almost all of the rest of the bottom glacier has already lost its snow cover, before July. This bottom glacier is doomed. Still, it's helpful to get ground measurements, and walking a centerline like we did might get the actual researchers a little closer to mass measurements. You have to backpack to get to these glaciers, so we vactioneers can save some time for the researchers.

I was a little disappointed not to measure other glaciers, but a sow grizzly and two cubs were in the way on the previous day. I argued to my family team that we could get around them, but apparently I was unpersuasive (and this was before the unfortunate mauling in Yellowstone).

Great vacation otherwise - I used to work in Alaska, and I love getting back. A boat trip from Valdez by the Stan Stephens tour was slightly marred by a captain who pointed out two glaciers that haven't retreated while failing to mention the retreat that's happening generally. One of them was a tidewater glacier, a type that goes through cycles mostly unrelated to climate.

All else was fine, though, and I just need to get caught up.

NIH's disingenuous response on chimps and bioethics

2011-06-16T22:55:00.000-07:00

I'm mostly a supporter of the mainstream scientific institutions, but I'll take a moment here to bash the National Institute of Health and its decision to play politics with research regarding medical experimentation on chimps.

NIH wants to return "semi-retired" chimps to invasive medical experimentation, a proposal that provoked a response by several Senators demanding first a study "about the merits of continued invasive research using using chimpanzees." NIH said, okay fine, and then sent things southward.

The disingenuity is, as told by Nature, the deliberate decision to remove all ethical aspects of the research from the scope of the study. To claim you're creating an objective response to a research request that only considers the category with potential positive aspects and while excluding the category with the most potential negatives, is to be transparent. In a bad way.

What doesn't help is the argument by animal rights types that there's no medical benefit to this type of research. They're trying to avoid an ethical dilemma by claiming there's no reason to do it at all, and shutting their ears to contrary evidence. NIH isn't any better by refusing to think about ethical dilemmas.

Research defenders don't help their cause by deliberately underplaying what they want to do with the chimps. For example, they say regarding testing a Hepatitis C vaccine on chimps that "As inconveniencing tens of chimpanzees impacts the health of millions of humans, it is unethical not to use the chimp model." They don't say how they plan to examine effectiveness, but from my perspective, contracting Hepatitis C after being deliberately exposed, because a vaccine didn't work, is more than an inconvenience.

An even better example of the dilemma is the proposal to use the chimps to research treatments for Ebola. Someone needs to explain to me a humane way of infecting a chimp with Ebola. It remains a dilemma though, unless someone can explain a reason not to explore an avenue for saving human beings from Ebola.

FWIW, I'm not an animal rights type, I'm a sapientist. I'll pick a human over a chimp in some weird hypothetical matchup, but I'd rather cheat the hypo and pay some additional money so I don't have to sacrifice either. Researchers might jeer at that evasion, but their own answer is less clear cut than they think. Medical research on chimps is expensive, but only because we treat them according to modern coddling standards. Drop back to early 20th Century standards of care and willingness to euthanize unneeded specimens, and you could reach your research goals faster or cheaper. Even people who think they have a clear cut answer are actually making compromises.

Anyway, I'm not completely opposed to invasive research that doesn't hurt, scare, or medically harm chimps. Maybe the effect of public review of this issue will be to let us cheat the hypo, and inject some extra government money so we find a way to solve these medical problems without harming chimps more than we already have.

IPCC reports should make projections based on a maximum human lifetime: 110 years

2011-06-15T22:52:00.000-07:00

Supercentenarians - people who live to be 110 or older - are interesting for their own sake and as a reminder of the timescale we should keep in mind for climate change. We aren't just talking about future generations, we're talking about what the world will be like for people who are alive today.

Conveniently, the first IPPC report in 1990 focused on a 110-year time frame ending in 2100. Less conveniently, subsequent reports have each decided to emphasize a shorter time frame than the one before it, because each one also emphasized the 2100 time frame. If the Fifth AR due out in 2013-2014 time frame does the same thing, then people now alive will be in their 80's and still have their remaining lives relegated to a far-off time bin.

Choosing a maximum human life span is a good boundary zone for long term analysis. What that life span would be needs somewhat arbitrary delineation. The link above shows there are hundreds of people now alive who reach 110, so that seems pretty safe as a minimum number for a reasonable, maximum life span even under current, primitive technology, and again it matches what we started with in 1990. It would also have the advantage of reversing the increasing tendency of recent reports to downplay climate impacts by emphasizing shorter time periods.

The Fourth Assessment did look at conditions after 2100, but not in great detail and grouped together with impacts heading out to 2300. The Fifth Report will also look at impacts after 2100, in an as-yet unclear fashion. It should change the categories to say, up to 2125 and then after 2125 (UPDATE: corrected my problems with the advanced mathematics of addition). If not, then at least should provide much more detail as to what could happen in the early 22d Century, because it's appropriate to consider what current generations are going to face.

Double down on Pawlenty's Medicare Option proposal

2011-06-14T22:51:00.000-07:00

Tim Pawlenty has proposed, vaguely, to modify Paul Ryan's scrapping/replacement of Medicare by saying he'd keep Medicare as an option people could choose in competition with privatized alternatives:

"I'm going to have my own plan, John, that will feature some differences from Congressman Ryan's plan. It will feature performance pay rather than just volume pay ... it will allow Medicare to continue as an option, but it will be priced against various options," Pawlenty said.

Recall that Ryan's plan for Medicare for future seniors is to replace it with something very similar to what Obamneycare provides to non-seniors. That makes Pawlenty's proposal, if (Big If) applied fairly, Obamneycare plus a vigorous, already-dominant public option.

Democrats should offer a deal. They should say that they don't think privatizing Medicare is a good idea, but Pawlenty's proposal has some safeguards, so they'll agree to it as long as the Republicans agree to let non-seniors also be eligible (or eligible for a stand-alone public equivalent of the Medicare option in case seniors don't want to share Medicare). If the Republicans are confident that private alternatives can outcompete Medicare among seniors, they shouldn't have any worries about making making the options available to nonseniors. Democrats should have the converse perspective, and then we'll see who's right.

Maybe this offer would do no more than expose the Republican lack of confidence in their proposal. OTOH, if they drink their own Kool Aid, it could get interesting.

Weiner and IPCC's Pachauri: both pursued by ankle-biters, both possibly ineffective

2011-06-13T22:49:00.000-07:00

(UnAmericans may be unaware of our sexting Congressperson, so here's context.)

Congressman Weiner and the IPCC head Pachauri have both been 1. attacked by people of ill intention 2. for reasons that are only tangentially related to their office, but that doesn't mean that 3. we should root for them to stay in office.

Weiner has displayed astounding stupidity and unethical behavior outside of his political office, but whether that makes him a bad Representative is a different matter. I suppose astounding stupidity could be a disqualifier, but if it hasn't been shown in his work then maybe it doesn't matter. His political ethics should be more important to outsiders than the fact that he's a terrible husband/father-to-be. He burned a lot of friends by lying to them to them and sending them out as media surrogates, but that's not the reason he's being called to resign.

It's a little unfair to group Pachauri with a turdbucket like Weiner, but the conflict of interest charges made against Pachauri and the IPCC by ankle-biters are at least somewhat related to his work and somewhat true. The anklers ignore the fact that Pachauri and all the participating IPCC authors work for free and that Pachauri's home institution paid him 45,000 pounds annually - certainly less than that made by many of the anklers. The IPCC's institutional problem is that it does far too important work to rely on people on top with other jobs. Theyneed to be salaried and cut free from conflicts (or downscale the IPCC, but I think we lose a policy tool that way).

One reason to group Weiner and Pachauri together is on the basis of possibly being ineffective for reasons unrelated to the criticism they've received. Weiner has a reputation of being an ineffective legislator who's used by the Dems to beat up the right in the media (link, June 9 podcast). I disagree that being a lightning rod means he can't do legislating. Ted Kennedy for one thing could do both jobs, and Weiner could've done work behind the scenes and left negotiating to others. If he's not good, then get rid of him.

Pachauri has two jobs at the IPCC: coordinate its internal work, and be its outward face. I know nothing about the former job (probably the more important one), but he's not good at the latter. Lately he's been quiet, which is probably for the best, but someone who can better play the competent scientist role would be an improvement.

A Locke on environmental protection and takings

2011-06-12T22:04:00.000-07:00

Time for an environmental law tangent.

I've had an idea for years about applying John Locke's theory of property to environmental regulation that could've taken the form of a scholarly article or test case litigation, except that I've not done anything with it. Given a recent blogalanche of posts on Locke and environmental regulation (two posts that I know of), I thought I'd just blog about it. Somebody else is free to do something more substantive with the idea (maybe they have already* and I missed it), or maybe something will motivate me to do more.

So, the issue: regulation of private property by the US Constitution is limited when it goes too far and becomes a taking of private property that must bring compensation to the property owner. The best test of what "too far" means, so far, is the 1978 Penn Central case, where Justice Brennan sez the following factors must be balanced:

(1) the economic impact of the regulation on the claimant,
(2) the extent to which the regulation has interfered with distinct investment-backed expectations and
(3) the character of the governmental action.

(Wiki for intermediate level detail).

Number 2 there has been somewhat problematic to apply. Enter John Locke!

Sec. 27. Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men: for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.

I see a lot of overlap between investment-backed expectations and the labor theory of property. Mixing your labor to transform the land makes it yours, as does investment that buy the land's transformation done by someone else.

One way to move forward would be to just drop investment-backed expectations and replace it with an analysis of whether the aspect of the land being regulated and protected is something that was created/transformed through human labor versus something that was intrinsic to the land. That, however, isn't going to happen anytime soon, as the law doesn't like to lurch that much. What could happen though is to use the labor theory of property as a means for deciding whether the expectation was reasonable and to determine the moral weight to be placed upon the investment made by the owner.

Environmental protection would generally, but not always, come out ahead under this analysis compared the kludge we have now for takings regulation. Soil and water quality are generally innate to the property and not created by the owner, so protecting them doesn't impinge upon something the owner's labor (or predecessor owner) created. Wetlands were generally there naturally, and similarly could be protected. Important to this is that "failing to harm" the land did not create the environmental values that were there originally. Many landowners who think their years of failing to harm the land gives them the subsequent right to harm it are just mistaken.

But then what if someone decides they want wetlands on their property, create some, and then ten years later change their mind? The labor theory of property would give that owner recourse against environmental regulation that she might not otherwise have. And I think that's okay - on an intuitive level, it makes sense.

Historic preservation has a contrary result where protection would generally, but not always, be lessened under this theory. Imagine a young person erects a distinctive building and then wants to destroy it 60 years later. This theory would give that person or possibly a successor owner a lot more room to claim a historic preservation rule constituted a taking. On the other hand, if a historic event like a battle occurred on the property that was not created by the owner's labor, protection of that historic value could be seen as a public right.

I think this concept could be tested through litigation. Civil rights litigation often preceded by looking at reverse discrimination. For example, gender discrimination in jury selection was thrown out in a case where it was men instead of women that were kept from a jury. I think that would the easiest approach to use to establish for Locke and takings - find a good historic preservation case, or an environmental value on a property that was created through labor and then regulated by government, and defend the landowner. Then we could see the value asserted on behalf of environmental protection more generally.

UPDATE: if anyone wants to collaborate on this, that might be the incentive I need to push it forward.

* A student article by Kraig Odabashian on Locke and investment-backed seems related, but sadly goes to a different concept of a "historic baseline" that I don't like very much. Not sure if anyone else has come closer.

Strange George Mason University interpretations of Virginia FOI requests

2011-06-04T13:57:00.000-07:00

In a May 28th Climate Audit post, Steve McIntyre sees some perfect contrast to George Mason University's provision of documents when requested under Virginia's Freedom of Information law, versus University of Virginia's resistance to a demand for records for a witch hunt under criminal prosecution laws by the state's denialist Attorney General. Ron Bailey, who's worked as a 'science' correspondent at 'Reason', doesn't even understand that the threat of criminal prosecution wasn't a FOIA request.

Steve includes this strange response that GMU sent with the FOI records:

The materials in this USB are being provided in compliance with the Virginia FOIA. Many of the documents are published research papers that are copyrighted by their respective publishers. All other documents are copyrighted by Edward J. Wegman and Yasmin H. Said or by their respective authors. All rights are reserved. These documents may not be forwarded to a third party. Also included in this USB is the George Mason University policy document 4007 on academic misconduct. This policy requires confidentiality for all parties including complainants, in this case Professor Raymond Bradley. This confidentiality requirement was violated by Professor Bradley.

The alleged confidentiality requirement and violation seem wrong. Prof Bradley wasn't an employee of GMU acting in the scope of his employment when he complained that GMU Professor Wegman was stealing Bradley's work, so Bradley could tell GMU to go stuff it when it talks about its confidentiality policy. They'd have to prove he signed a confidentiality agreement instead if they feel like whining.

This FOI response isn't itself confidential and in no way binds the recipient to confidentiality.

The copyright claims are a little trickier. Generally documents created by employees shift copyright ownership to the employer, GMU. That can be changed by agreement with the employer, though.

I have seen before the claim that documents subject to third-party copyright can't be released by government agencies. I think it's a weak argument, much weaker than say, climate data-sharing that was contractually limited from disclosure, but GMU isn't actually saying that because it is, in fact, releasing the documents. It's not clear what GMU is saying other than weirdly warning the journalist to only reproduce the documents to the extent allowed underexceptions to copyright. (Climate law seems to be as much about copyright, libel, and free expression as it is about environmental law. My knowledge of those areas is somewhat limited, and every state and country is different).

Meanwhile, some commenters at Climate Audit try mightily to clear up confusion between criminal threats versus FOI requests, and between narrowly targeted FOI request of GMU versus the 9,000 page FOI request that has also been asked of UVa in addition to the criminal witchhunting. Somehow, though, people aren't listening.

Forbes' James Taylor: 'Initiation' means 'completion'

2011-05-31T15:58:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's beneath my new digs here to go after as easy a target as a Forbes opinion page (and Heartland Institute) writer, but it's not beneath me. I saw the headline in Morano's page "Schneider claimed W. Antarctic ice sheet could melt before year 2000", ignored it for a while and finally clicked through to Forbes "Polar Ice Rapture Misses Its Deadline". Taylor announces:

[Schneider] claimed the west Antarctic ice sheet could melt before the year 2000 and inundate American coastlines with up to 25 feet of sea level rise. Obviously, the west Antarctic ice sheet was not raptured away last century, and New Yorkers can still drive rather than swim to work.

Clicking the provided link, which most denialists probably can't be bothered with, gets one to one Steven Goddard and a recopied old 1979 newspaper article about Steve Schneider predicting warming and ice melt in the next century.

The next hurdle involves actually reading the article. It says that Schneider said regarding the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet that "its initiation cannot be ruled out as a possibility before the end of this century". To be fair to Taylor, though, the word "initiation" wasn't highlighted at Goddard's link. And of course the WAIS hasn't done so well since the end of that century. A 4+ meter rise by 2100 seems pretty unlikely now, but I doubt it was unreasonable for Schneider in 1979 to think it possible.

I can't give Mr. Taylor a very good grade on his effort - the best denialist nonsense takes far more effort to debunk than it does to construct, but I think it was the reverse in this case. He'll have to step up his game to attract a better class of debunker than myself.

The US:Arab Spring as Britain:The US Civil War

2011-05-28T11:30:00.000-07:00

(Crossposted from Rabett)

The analogy for American and British actions 150 years apart is that in both cases, the great power refrained from doing evil actions that would significantly harm the good side in each cause, and that in both cases the great power got little credit for its restraint.

While Republican leaders are now claiming to support the Arab Spring, it wasn't so clear a few months back, and Obama had other pressures to back Mubarak that he ignored. The tepid level of approval or even interest in the Arab world to the US response suggests the Arab people are unimpressed, however.

Wiki has a good article on Britain and the US Civil War - Obama actually comes off a little better than my analogy suggests, because Britain did do some negative things (but could've done much worse), while the US has done some positive things in Egypt and Libya while doing darn little in Bahrain.

I'm guessing the lack of credit in both cases is because "do no evil" is assumed in most people's moral analysis. Given how international relations are traditionally conducted, it may deserve more applause than it gets.

The other obvious problem for the US in the Arab world is our support for Israel, especially in relation to the West Bank/Gaza/Jerusalem issue. I think foreigners fail to understand how little room for maneuver exists in US national politics on this issue. Obama is getting blowback in Democratic circles for being slightly more explicit on 1967 borders as an initial basis for negotiations. Netanyahu is playing a double game of indefinite postponement/opposition to a Palestinian state, or using Israeli occupation as the intial basis and make the Palestinians trade away West Bank land and East Jerusalem in return for getting back some of their land. In American politics from the far right Republicans to many Democrats, that's just fine. Unfortunately, Obama is pushing about as hard as he can.

UPDATE: forgot to add it's a lucky thing we don't have the Commies with us anymore, or the US reaction to Arab Spring could've been a lot worse.

It's not just your plagiarism, it's your reaction to your plagiarism

2011-05-24T21:57:00.001-07:00

(Crossposted from Rabett.)

(Hello folks! I'm Brian Schmidt, newest blogger in the Eli Rabett bunny mill. My old blog's atBackseat Driving and I'll be hanging out here from now on. I can't touch the science as per Eli and John, but as a lawyer I have a nodding acquaintance with plagiarism, and will blog on non-climate stuff as well.)

At WattsUp, a "Professor Bob Ryan" commented on May 19th on one of the Wegman plagiarism posts:

Many students, no matter their origin, paste sections of text into their work files picked up from on-line sources. They then, because they are relatively inexperienced, get these copied tracts mixed up with their own commentaries and two years later when they start drafting their thesis inadvertently plagiarize. Unwittingly, when drafting a paper from one of the chapters for publication, some of this copied text is again inadvertently introduced. I and a co-supervisor working up the paper making corrections as we revise their work may spot the problems but then we may not.

That turned out to be similar to Wegman's defense, if you call it that, as reported by John Mashey and summarized by Andrew Gelman.

Professor Bob continues:

So to any who find Wegman guilty as charged remember this: one day when you are a senior academic and when the fire of self-righteous indignation does not burn quite so bright, it might just happen to you.

Or maybe we might feel differently, and I can speak as someone who came close to standing where Wegman stands some years ago. A large, student-authored project I was involved in stumbled partway into the problem of Professors Bob and Wegman, where shoddily-cited work transformed into un-cited work that was interspersed with all the properly-done work.

Two differences between our student project and Wegman's, tho. First, we caught our own problem before it was published instead of having someone else do it. We actually checked our own cites, and a praised-be student editor turned in the problem to me. Second, we reacted to the problem immediately. I lost a week of my summer tracking down errant paragraphs, digging them out of their rabbit holes, deleting them and replacing them with properly-cited summaries.

By contrast, Wegman knew of his problem since March 2010 (Mashey at 9), and did nothing about it even though it had by then been published in a supposedly-peer reviewed journal. When someone else finally tracks it down, Wegman then offers a minimal errata with citations, not even a removal and redo of the plagiarized material.

So no, I think this story's not over, and as someone who lost a week of California summer reacting differently to a similar situation, I think it doesn't deserve to be over.

How Republicans are encouraging command-and-control environmental regulation

2011-05-18T21:38:00.000-07:00

The short answer is that Republicans encourage command-and-control environmental regulation because they're stopping environmental innovation that's often market-based, and old-style regulation is what's left. Proof:

1. National level. The big thing is climate change. The Republicans, with the help of some environmentalists on the left, killed cap-and-trade legislation. The carbon tax favored by the left environmentalists never got anywhere at all, and that's it for market approaches. What's left is command-and-control regulation through the Clean Air Act and the EPA. Another example is ocean fisheries, where Republicans have killed environmental attempts to establish "catch shares" that individually reward fishers when fish populations grow. So instead, we go with the old-style telling fishers how much of what to catch, when, and how they can do it.

2. State level. Here in California, the geniuses behind Proposition 26 have made it much harder to charge a fee on polluters for the damage they cause to the environment. (Incidentally, I attended a conference last week where a room full of lawyers could not figure out the effect Proposition 26 will have on government regulation, so fun times are ahead.) But all it affects is fees, not direct regulation and prohibitions, so one effect is to push direct control instead of recovery of externalities.

3. Local level. We've been trying with some success in the Bay Area to reduce the use of single-use takeout bags. The plastic bag industry, even before Prop 26, fought attempts to put a small fee on takeout plastic bags by litigation that argued this promoted paper bags with mixed environmental consequences. The result has been a semi-complete ban on plastic bags, ban on paper bags with no recycled content, and a fee on allowed paper bags. The industry efforts converted the fee into an outright command to ban plastic bags.

Conservatives often like to cite the law of unintended consequences when discussing environmental regulation. Not only does this overlook the unintended consequences of environmentally harmful actions, it misses the unintended consequences of promoting old-school environmental regulation instead.

Science bundling for the 2012 election

2011-05-16T17:55:00.000-07:00

Bundling is the practice of organizing multiple contributions from multiple donors to a single campaign. It's a method for people who've contributed the maximum allowed amount to a candidate to solicit more contributions, sometimes for less-than altruistic reasons. Bundling could also have a different use though, as a joint demonstration of why the donors are giving money.

I am exploring the concept of organizing a science-motivated bundling of campaign donations for the 2012 presidential campaign. The science motivations are:

1. Acceptance of human-caused climate change, combined with a willingness to take significant steps to combat the problem.

2. Support for increased science funding by the federal government.

3. Depoliticizing science in government (keeping political actors from altering scientific judgments and from muzzling scientists).

I think this could be a potentially-valuable step to highlight the importance of science. It's abundantly clear at this point that no major Republican candidate for president meets the criteria (Huntsman comes closest, but rejects taking action). So this is about Obama, but really about trying to help/push Obama and the Democrats to realize that they get support to the extent that they support science.

So this is just an initial post - I'll have to think about and research the subject more. I won't need to run myself in 2012 though, and this could be a way for science-motivated people to have an effect and be recognized.

Tipping points for local land use policies

2011-05-11T03:23:00.000-07:00

(Reposting this from the Green Foothills blog.)

In a housing deficient area like here in the San Francisco Bay region, it's wrong to simply say any new house anywhere is a good thing. This is true economically as well as environmentally - a potential house 10 miles due east of San Jose might sound like a quick jaunt away from Silicon Valley, but that would actually put it in a place with no roads, no services, no groundwater in reach, and no geologically-safe spot to build on. It wouldn't sell economically, as well as being bad environmentally.

Alternatively, a potential high-density housing location near a train station might appeal to environmentalists but seem too risky economically. There are different tipping points for different issues, and there's increased opportunities for cooperation where they overlap.

So here are some ideas:

Transportation: adding housing in an area that has little future prospect to use public transit is unlikely to help the transit situation. Transportation goes through a tipping point at a certain level of density that can use transit effectively. Any increase in that density makes transit even more cost effective. Proximity to good transit also creates a tipping point, where any increase in density is beneficial. Inner suburbs might be the tipping point density level.

Walkability: making a low density residential area slightly less low-density isn't going to make the area more walkable, it just puts more cars on the roads. On the other hand, adding more housing to an area that is already walkable means more people will be using the local stores, making them more financially viable. The tipping point is when an area is already walkable, or likely to become walkable. Urban townhouses and brownstones are the tipping point.

Natural open space: at first glance, there doesn't seem to be a tipping point: any increase in density decreases open space and habitat potential. Even a tiny yard might offer potential habitat that an apartment block wouldn't. However, dense housing removes pressure to construct less dense housing somewhere else. And habitat values for common wildlife decrease rapidly once roads and structures take up more land than natural habitat. Low-density suburbia probably constitutes a tipping point for natural open space.

Farming: farming may be even more sensitive to density than natural open space. Rural residential levels of density, one house per acre or even less, probably constitute a tipping point.

Financial: up to a certain point, more is better. Two homes on 50 acre lots are worth more than one on 100 acres. A tall apartment building might be more risky and appeal to a smaller market segment than a small condo building, however.

So what's the upshot of all this? From the environmental perspective, somewhere around low density suburbs, maybe two houses per acre, is the point where almost all environmental incentives are to avoid increases in density. Somewhere around the level found in inner suburbs, maybe 10 houses per acre, the environmental incentives are to support increases in density.

And from the inner suburbs up to city areas where multi-story apartments are possible, the environmental and financial interests are closely aligned.

This is all a simplification, of course. Dense housing in the wrong place is just a mistake. Natural open space in an urban area near a stream can also be very beneficial given the importance of stream environments. But it does point to areas of overlap.

Open-air carbon capture economically unfeasible for decades

2011-05-10T22:09:00.000-07:00

See the report from the American Physical Society. They spotted the not-hard-to-spot issue that it's a lot easier to capture CO2 at concentrated power sources than in dilute amounts in the atmosphere, and that transport doesn't overcome that issue (UPDATE: on second look, doesn't seem to deal with transport - the one advantage of open air capture is that you can position it where your sequestration sites are instead of where your power plants are. Good luck with having that overcome sequestration as a cost savings, though).

Hansen's idea of carbon sequestration from biomass power isn't affected by this, since he still relied on point source capture and can still achieve carbon negative results. Roger Pielke Jr. doesn't do so well however in his dream of an unnamed technological solution that will make all the problems go away for a low low cost. The report's dated April 28th, and we'll see when he gets around to discussing it.

Climate change knocks wheat and corn production down 4-5%, US not hit so far

2011-05-08T21:57:00.000-07:00

Interesting paper saying global production of wheat is down 5.5% from what it would've been without climate change (i.e., increased at a slower rate), and corn down 4%. Rice and soya unaffected.

Staple food tends to have inelastic demand, so a 5% drop added onto a shortage for stochastic reasons could have significant impacts on prices, with resulting social disruptions. Like Michael Tobis, I'm not sure why some people find this climate/food price issue to be such a strained argument.

I should note that the study gave an overall figure and not a specific for extreme conditions. Maybe climate change moderates the extreme conditions - or maybe not, and it makes extreme conditions worse so that the 4-5% figure is an underestimate in bad times. I'd guess the latter is more likely than the former, but we'll have to find out some other time.

The same study says North American hasn't been hit, yet. We'll have our turn at some point though.

Lessons from the decimation of birther denialism

2011-05-07T01:31:00.000-07:00

(Tangential suggestion: normally I don't approve of messing around with author's books in bookstores, but Swift Boat Liar Jerome Corsi is shilling his book, "Where's the Birth Certificate?" Bookstores selling that book deserve to have people leave copies of Obama's certificate in and near the books.)

There's been a mini-boomlet in coverage of how the Birthers' support for their Obama-is-Kenyan-born got cut in half in recent days. And contrary to some incorrect statements, the poll was done before bin Laden's death was announced, so the numbers aren't due to unrelated good news.

The interesting thing is that it's hard to see this is a result of people simply reacting to evidence and logic, or else they wouldn't be Birthers to begin with. I see two overlapping possibilities. The first is Allahpundit's view (at the first link above), that the soft-core Birthers just went with the flow of their companions and information fragments that they disinterestedly absorb. The long-form birth certificate got through their defensive shields and they defected on the basis of actually paying attention for once, leaving only the hardcores behind.

My alternative is that the change comes from the loss of soft-core advocates of Birtherism, not the soft-core believers. The single-issue advocates didn't shut up, but the politicians and wanna-be presidents who dallied at it, all went silent when Obama released his certificate. If one side pushes a victory and the other side loses its major voices, then you'll see results.

So I think that's what we need to have happen on climate change. Conspiracy-centered environment haters like Morano, Michaels, Lindzen etc won't be convinced about anything, but if their political overseers stop talking a big game, then we could then see a change in acceptance of reality.

Playing the credit game fairly

2011-05-05T18:23:00.001-07:00

Somewhere I saw an editorial cartoon showing a bullet's trajectory towards Osama bin Laden. It had 95% of the trajectory labelled as "Bush" and 5% as "Obama".

Equally or even less generously, climate denier/coal magnate David Koch said Obama "didn't contribute much at all."

Moving beyond these in-depth analyses, is there any fair way to analyze it? We could try by assigning credit and blame before you know the outcome, as in what I wrote on January 22:

The Obama responsibility period began this week
With exactly two years since Obama's inauguration having passed, I'm somewhat arbitrarily picking this as the time where his administration bears greater responsibility for anything done well or poorly by the executive branch than any previous administration. Credit and blame can be adjusted on a case by case basis - for example, Bush bears more responsibility for 9/11 than Clinton because he downgraded counter-terrorism efforts - but as a general matter this makes some sense to me.

Of course, the president with the next most responsibility is Bush, without adjusting on a case by case basis.

So on with the adjustments! For Bush, we have screwing up Tora Bora by not committing enough troops and trusting allies he shouldn't have, and generally pulling CIA assets out of Afghanistan and into Iraq, and the small matter of his share of blame for letting 9/11 happen at all. To Bush's credit, there's eventually relying on the patient intelligence gathering game that Obama continued through another 2-plus years.

Obama gets credit for warning in the campaign that he would go after Osama in Pakistan, despite criticism from McCain and Hilary. Obama also gets credit for a manned ops instead of bombs. Bombs may have killed Osama just as well, but there'd be no body, no intel from captured material, much more collateral damage, and massive outrage from Pakistan unleavened with the current mix of outrage plus embarrassment. And Obama reconstituted the CIA bin Laden unit that Bush had demobilized.

Finally, we've got torture. Bushies like to point out that the people they had tortured gave the initial intel that eventually led to Osama. Far fewer of them realize that the captives held out during the torture sessions and only gave up the info months later during standard interrogations. I don't think this particular set of info is entirely clear, but I'd tend to score it against Bush and the pro-torture wing of the Republican Party.

I won't attempt to make a definitive adjustment for the credit game, but qualitatively I'd start off with my initial preponderant share of credit to Obama, adjust upward for his decisions, and mostly adjust downward for Bush's choices.

David Koch, in the end, can add one more facet to his denialism.

My first negative publicity!

2011-05-03T09:15:00.000-07:00

Well that's exciting in theory, although reading it might be less gripping. It's about the fact that I both work on environmental advocacy at my day job and serve on the local water district board:

In March, members of the water district board were discussing at a public meeting whether to shift money for environmental restoration of streams to flood control work. Schmidt openly asked if he might have a conflict.
He asked water district counsel Stan Yamamoto for a ruling. He met afterward with Yamamoto's staff. The lawyers issued a memo spelling out when Schmidt should recuse himself from voting.
"Before I even started the campaign last year, I said I wanted to avoid any conflicts between my job as an environmental advocate and the work the water district does," Schmidt said Monday.
Yamamoto declined to be interviewed.
Asked to make the memo public, Schmidt said he could not, because he isn't the client in the attorney-client relationship, the water district is. Instead, he said, he has asked the state Fair Political Practices Commission for a ruling. He declined to comment on whether he supports making the memo public.

Apparently that wasn't exciting enough/informative enough though (choose your preferred description), so it was buried away from the lede paragraphs.

Overall, the article could be worse and more innuendo-ey, so I can't complain too much. I can complain some though! My main complaint is that I gave the reporter a reason why I shouldn't publicly declare whether the memo should be public, which wasn't included in the article: because the memo's about me, I shouldn't be involved in the process of deciding whether it should be released, and that includes publicly lobbying the Water District to release it (or not).

Second complaint is that no one ever releases attorney-client communication (for the reason that it would impair frank communication), and the article declined to mention that. I told the reporter that I considered that an essential part of the information that the public doesn't know, but he didn't.

Kind of ironic that we were in disagreement over what the newspaper is withholding from the public.

*Regarding the header to this post, I guess I've previously received criticism from denialists and Roger Pielke Jr., if one considers such a response to be "negative". (UPDATE: responding to the comment from RPJr below: yes, his criticism wasn't of my politics, it was instead his deceptive response when I pointed out that he was being deceptive.)

Reviews: Daybreakers and McClatchy's story on restarting chimp medical experiments

2011-04-28T19:36:00.000-07:00

Daybreakers is an above-average vampire flick, partly for the premise: instead of being a hidden minority, in the near-future the vampires have won and run the world, with a small number of remaining humans being all that exists for the carefully controlled, medical blood farms.

There's a certain environmental analogy in the film: some vampires ask their complacent colleagues what will happen when they've drunk the last human blood (there will always be more is the answer). I think we have an even better analogy, though.

McClatchy reports that the US is considering restarting the use of chimpanzees for medical experiments. Just like some vampires in the fictional movie believed it was wrong to use their closely related species of humans, however inferior the humans might be, many people and even a major pharmaceutical company (GlaxoSmithKline) oppose this experimentation on great apes.

McClatchy's reporting is good and detailed and has two flaws: first, it's not clear exactly how the chimps would be used. Many were previously infected with Hepatitis C, so this research could potentially benefit them. More to the point, any research that doesn't hurt, scare, or medically harm the chimps isn't too controversial. I think the researchers' comparison to human volunteers doesn't work, though: you don't have shoot human subjects with anesthetic darts on a daily basis in order to get blood samples from them. Overall, I doubt the proposed research matches the benign standard that I could live with.

The second flaw is the assertion that chimps do not make particularly useful subjects for human medical research. I highly, highly doubt that to be an accurate statement. It treads into the animal rights version of science denialism, and provokes the over-reaction from people like Mark Hoofnagle who can't stand animal rights activists and miss the point that sapient species need to be treated differently.

I suspect a much better version of the utilitarian argument against using chimps for medical experiments is that they're too expensive to use, especially if you accept that we must treat them decently. To me, that would mean teaching them sign language, something you could easily argue is a necessity to avoid unnecessary harm, and should be enough to make it way too expensive to use chimps. There ought to be a law on this, and I think we could get one on a state by state basis.

EPA climate regulation, the budget, and Obama's nuanced-but-wrong view on climate lawsuits

2011-04-24T05:09:00.000-07:00

One under-reported aspect of the Obama budget compromise is that EPA's regulation of climate change gets to move forward, although grants and other programs to directly fight climate change were killed. This seems to me to be an important victory - EPA has another year to get more detailed regulations developed, polluters have to spend a year in compliance and begin their adaptation to regulation. Most importantly, the climate rejectionists only have one more shot to kill EPA regulation in the 2012 budget before the November 2012 elections. New regs should be finished by the time the 2013 budget rolls around, and if we're lucky, the Republican majority in the House will be much smaller (although the same is likely true for the Democratic majority in the Senate, where 2 Dems are up for re-election for every Repub in that cycle). Budgets, not direct overturning of EPA authority, are the things we have to worry about.

Of course, the EPA climate regulations aren't exactly earthshaking, but they are progress. I also expect lawsuits by the enviro community sometime after the regulations are in place - not to suspend them, but to keep them in place while enviros litigate for tougher ones. Comprehensive climate legislation would of course be better, but this is the hand we've got until at least 2013, and quite possibly two or four years later given the difficulty overcoming the filibuster in the Senate.

I think this all plays a role in Obama's nuanced-but-wrong attempts to strike down climate change lawsuits in the courts. It went to oral argument last week, and things don't look good. Lawprof Jonathan Zasloff excoriated Obama for taking the polluters' side last fall, while I took a nuanced-but-critical view in the comments to Jonathan's post. Obama is arguing the climate-as-a-public nuisance is displaced by the Clean Air Act, as long as the EPA is acting to enforce the law:

in the 15 months since the court of appeals issued its decision, EPA has taken several substantial actions pursuant to its CAA authority to address greenhouse-gas emissions. EPA finalized the proposed rule that the court of appeals discussed—the “endangerment finding” (i.e., that greenhouse-gas emissions are reasonably anticipated to endanger public health and welfare). It also adopted standards governing emissions of greenhouse gases from certain motor vehicles. As a result of those regulations, which took effect on January 2, 2011, carbon dioxide is now a “pollutant subject to regulation under [the CAA].” 42 U.S.C. 7475(a)(4).

On December 23, 2010, EPA announced a proposed settlement agreement, under which it would commit to complete, by May 26, 2012, a rulemaking relating to NSPS for greenhouse gases emitted by fossil-fuel-fired electric-utility steamgenerating units (i.e., the category of stationary sources at issue in this case).

Thus, EPA’s actions have triggered a regulatory cascade that will result in the application of PSD requirements to new and modified stationary sources that emit greenhouse gases.

(p. 10)

In other words, if the Republicans take away enforcement, the nuisance case has a strong reason to come back. Obama figures this will reduce the level of Republican incentive to gut the EPA on climate change.

I'm not saying I agree with this, but just that it's a workable strategy. It's a strategy aimed at promoting EPA regulation. If all you wanted was new climate legislation in Congress then you wouldn't do this, you'd instead keep the nuisance suits viable absent any legislation and then offer to kill them in the new legislation as a concession to the rejectionists.

I think it's bad law, in that it basically denies the role of courts in adjudicating public nuisances like they've done for generations, but there's reasoning behind it.

Nisbet/Romm/Mooney/Prop 23

2011-04-22T23:13:00.000-07:00

So, Matt Nisbet, kind of contrarian/kind of gets a lot of people riled up at him as he tells people how to be persuasive, has some paper claiming that the climate hawks failed at passing a climate bill last year despite having a financial edge on rejectionists and a reasonably accurate media portrayal of the science.

Joe Romm, given advance warning by a third party, breaks the news embargo to blister the work. Joe broke the embargo partly because he thought someone else had, but more interestingly because he felt Nisbet was deceptive and wanted his critique available when people read Nisbet's stuff. I'm still mulling that one over, but I think it's okay (he shouldn't have posted Nisbet's full document though).

Joe says Nisbet's deceptive in that Nisbet compares total lobbying across all sectors between business allies of cap and trade and business opponents (and each side's nonprofit allies). Nominally pro-cap-and-trade businesses are unlikely to have spent much of their lobbying budget on this issue. Joe could've strengthened his point by noting that the same issue applies to business opponents of caps, but not as strongly since the fossil fuel corps are highly motivated to throw money at this issue. He also backs this up with a second post showing fossil fuel industry far outspent alternative energy industry in political donations.

Nisbet could've had a decent point that it's not as much as enviros versus monolithic corporate world as it was in the past, given the large portion of the business world that's willing to live with the climate hawk position. But we already knew that.

Joe's other major critique was that Nisbet omits television when he says the media is now accurate about climate change, when Fox News' internal messaging has been to dispute reality. Seems like another legitimate point.

Chris Mooney also jumped in with a pointed defense of his own work showing the Bush Republicans were at war with science and arguing that Nisbet displayed inappropriate false bias about the level of Bushian interference with science. Interesting in that Mooney used to work closely with Nisbet. Nisbet also appears in the comments for a little while, also kind of interesting.

The failed denialist attempt to use Prop 23 to kill California's work on climate also came up, because reality outspent denial on that issue. I think Nisbet might miss three points: 1. good guys won, so are they really as incompetent as he thinks? 2. the big money won, so who has the big money is also important, and 3. most ignored is that the bad guys knew they were going to lose more than a month before the election, and without having seen the campaign expenditures, I'll bet they cut their losses. The bad guys also had a decent backup strategy in the form of the simultaneous Prop 26, keeping polluters from having to pay for the environmental effect of their nonsense. Prop 26 won, and polluters outspent good guys by 3 to 1. We need to watch that strategy harder, and use it ourselves.

Bottom line is that the bad guys are fighting defense in the Senate, and they only need two fifths of the Senate to stop action. Nisbet apparently thinks we can't do a frontal assault at all, and falls back to the research-and-adaptation-only-nonsense. I don't think he's made his point.

My Progressive Caucus/Obama/Ryan budget plan

2011-04-16T17:05:00.000-07:00

1. I'd change everything by following Gore's proposal of ending payroll taxes and substituting a carbon tax for them:

But that completely sound approach is even more unlikely to happen than anything listed below, so moving on....

2. I would reinstate Clinton era levels for estate taxes. I'd split the new revenues 50-50 between reducing deficits and reducing income taxes for the top 10% (this would still be a progressive tax shift, because the people who pay estate taxes are far richer than the top 10% of income earners).

3. From the Progressive Caucus Budget Proposal, I'd keep the new tax brackets for millionaires (minus their share of the estate tax revenues), tax capital gains the same as income, add the public option for ObamaRomneyCare, negotiate market prices for Medicare Part D, and reduce defense expenditures by at least as much as they say, 15%-30%, maybe even more. I would keep half of present troop levels in Afghanistan, though, limited to cities, highways, and portions of the country where Karzai didn't steal the election/where the government is perceived as legitimate.

4. From Obama, I'd keep the phaseout of Bush cuts for incomes above $250,000, and of course ObamaRomneyCare.

5. From Ryan's plan, I would adopt the voucher proposal for Medicare, which is basically ObamaRomneyCare applied to seniors, with some changes. I'd include the public option that would basically be existing Medicare, and the vast majority of seniors would probably just stay in that system. I'd index the vouchers to GDP instead of inflation, because medical costs way exceed inflation but cannot exceed GDP increases forever. And I'd include the cost containment mechanisms of ObamaRomneyCare.

Mostly I'm adopting each plan's version of increasing revenues and cutting costs. And since this is my magical pony wish list, I'll keep going.

6. Limit the dependent child tax credit to one per adult, and then create a new and more generous credit for adopted and foster children with no limit on number.

7. Eliminate oil and other corporate subsidies, and farm subsidies.

I'm sure this will all happen, very soon.

Dupont and ozone, Exxon and climate, fluoride and nobody, evolution and fundamentalists

2011-04-13T22:21:00.000-07:00

On March 22, I sat with the other members of the Santa Clara Valley Water District Board for a workshop on fluoridating San Jose's water system, the largest city in the country that doesn't fluoridate all its water.

The meeting had many residents virulently opposed to fluoridation, I've talked to quite a few of them, and they're as fervent about their cause as many other people are about the science and medical causes they fight. What's different about this fight they have against the scientific establishment is how easily mainstream science can overcome their strong opposition in the political arena. Most Americans drink fluoridated water.

So why does it work for fluoride and not so easily for climate? One answer is the simple establishment message: fluoride is effective, and fluoride is safe. The first part of that message is accurate. The second part is pushing it some - more accurate would be "fluoride is effective, and fluoride's risk is at most small, mainly to certain small subsets of the population, and outweighed by the benefits of fluoride." The establishment doesn't want to say that, except when I pushed them on it. But their simple message works (except for me).

The other answer for fluoride was apparent from looking out at the audience - there weren't any powerful allies for the fluoridation opponents, while the representatives of the health establishment made their preferences clear. The ability to change from no fluoride to fluoridation becomes clearer in the absence of a powerful opponent.

It's similar to the issue Old Eli discusses, ozone depletion. The scientific establishment could've faced powerful industry opposition to phasing out CFC's, but instead it faced Dupont, the early popularizer of the chemicals. Dupont toyed with science denialism for a few years but then backed reality. This probably had less to do with ethics and more to do with expired patents and new competition to produce CFCs while Dupont had a competitive advantage in the replacement chemicals. Had Dupont decided differently, then I think American and the Reagan/Bush Administrations wouldn't have provided the global leadership that they did.

Dupont's counterpart in the climate context is Exxon (and some others), and the behavior difference helps clarify the different political outcome from ozone depletion. It's not the fault of the scientists, maybe only secondarily of journalists. Politicians will have to face their own consciences and whatever theological construct holds true in the end, if any. But I think the primary message is corporate power, especially when playing defense, can hold on for a long, long time.

Teaching evolution is another test of this idea. Basically, the scientific establishment wins from college and up, while only a vague form of evolution is vaguely taught at lower levels of schooling. No corporate power has fought off the scientific establishment in high schools, so I'd agree that the principle isn't that corporate power explains all US politics. Religious beliefs tied closely to conservative political affiliations are an independent power source to fight science in that case, so every situation can be a little different.

One last thought on fluoride - it used to be a politicized issue, with the hard right wing in opposition. That's gone away, so it is possible to depoliticize a science policy issue.

UPDATE: worth noting that Ted Parsons wouldn't agree that Dupont had an easy out. Still, Dupont reacted very differently than the fossil fuel industry to its crisis, both in the politics and the speed at which it shifted its own business model to using substitutes.

Reviews: The Gold Rush (1925) and True Grit (2010)

2011-04-10T08:06:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I subscribed to Netflix was to see the old classics that are the basis of modern films. I haven't done it as much as I should, but I did finally watch Chaplin's 1925 film, "The Gold Rush". The version I watched is kind of a cross-over between silent film and the talkies - in 1942, the film was re-released with Chaplin doing a narration.

Anyway, the slapstick humor passes the test of time, and I can see a lot of carryover into Jackie Chan and Steven Chow. Worth checking out.

The other random film I saw semi-recently was the Coen brothers' version of True Grit. Reviews last year got it wrong, calling it a genre film and not a true Coen brothers' film. More recent reviews, as Pandagon points out, mistake the female lead as being in line with other hypermasculine action flicks that happen to have a female protagonist acting just like a male would. The Coens aren't really holding out any of their characters as true heroes in recent films, with only partial exceptions, and the ending of True Grit makes it clear that the same dark viewpoint continues in this film. It's definitely a Coen film, if you like that kind of thing.

Names of US Congressmembers who deny climate change, so their grandchildren can find them

2011-04-07T23:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, 240 Congressmembers rejected a one-sentence statement that humans are causing climate change and that it poses significant risks. 184 accepted reality as it is. I leave analysis to Joe Romm, and just take this opportunity to highlight the names of 240. I hope they can imitate George Wallace and do something to reverse all the harm they're causing, but the clock is ticking.

From the vote information page (in case the link goes away, Waxman H.Amdt 245, to amend HR 910, vote Roll No. 236 taken 4/6/2011), here are the ones that their grandchildren can examine:

Adams
Aderholt
Akin
Alexander
Amash
Austria
Bachmann
Bachus
Barletta
Bartlett
Barton (TX)
Bass (NH)
Benishek
Berg
Biggert
Bilbray
Bilirakis
Bishop (UT)
Black
Blackburn
Bonner
Bono Mack
Boren
Boustany
Brady (TX)
Brooks
Broun (GA)
Buchanan
Bucshon
Buerkle
Burgess
Burton (IN)
Calvert
Camp
Campbell
Canseco
Cantor
Capito
Carter
Cassidy
Chabot
Chaffetz
Coble
Coffman (CO)
Cole
Conaway
Cravaack
Crawford
Crenshaw
Culberson
Davis (KY)
Denham
Dent
DesJarlais
Diaz-Balart
Dold
Dreier
Duffy
Duncan (SC)
Duncan (TN)
Ellmers
Emerson
Farenthold
Fincher
Fitzpatrick
Flake
Fleischmann
Fleming
Flores
Forbes
Fortenberry
Foxx
Franks (AZ)
Gallegly
Gardner
Garrett
Gerlach
Gibbs
Gibson
Gingrey (GA)

Gohmert
Goodlatte
Gosar
Gowdy
Granger
Graves (GA)
Graves (MO)
Griffin (AR)
Griffith (VA)
Grimm
Guinta
Guthrie
Hall
Hanna
Harper
Harris
Hartzler
Hastings (WA)
Hayworth
Heck
Heller
Hensarling
Herger
Herrera Beutler
Huelskamp
Huizenga (MI)
Hultgren
Hunter
Hurt
Issa
Jenkins
Johnson (IL)
Johnson (OH)
Johnson, Sam
Jones
Jordan
Kelly
King (IA)
King (NY)
Kingston
Kinzinger (IL)
Kline
Labrador
Lamborn
Lance
Landry
Lankford
LaTourette
Latta
Lewis (CA)
LoBiondo
Long
Lucas
Luetkemeyer
Lummis
Lungren, Daniel E.
Mack
Manzullo
Marchant
Marino
McCarthy (CA)
McCaul
McClintock
McCotter
McHenry
McKeon
McKinley
McMorris Rodgers
Meehan
Mica
Miller (FL)
Miller (MI)
Miller, Gary
Mulvaney
Murphy (PA)
Myrick
Neugebauer
Noem
Nugent
Nunes

Nunnelee
Olson
Palazzo
Paul
Paulsen
Pearce
Pence
Peterson
Petri
Pitts
Platts
Poe (TX)
Pompeo
Posey
Price (GA)
Quayle
Rahall
Reed
Rehberg
Renacci
Ribble
Rigell
Rivera
Roby
Roe (TN)
Rogers (AL)
Rogers (KY)
Rogers (MI)
Rohrabacher
Rokita
Rooney
Ros-Lehtinen
Roskam
Ross (FL)
Royce
Runyan
Ryan (WI)
Scalise
Schilling
Schmidt
Schock
Schweikert
Scott (SC)
Scott, Austin
Sensenbrenner
Sessions
Shimkus
Shuster
Simpson
Smith (NE)
Smith (NJ)
Smith (TX)
Southerland
Stearns
Stivers
Stutzman
Sullivan
Terry
Thompson (PA)
Thornberry
Tiberi
Tipton
Turner
Upton
Walberg
Walden
Walsh (IL)
Webster
West
Westmoreland
Whitfield
Wilson (SC)
Wittman
Wolf
Womack
Woodall
Yoder
Young (AK)
Young (FL)
Young (IN)

It seems strange to call out as brave someone who just admits the obvious, but Dave Reichert is the lone Republican Congressman who accepts reality. And three Democrats deserve special attention for denying it, the Hons. Boren, Peterson, and Rahall.

Wish I didn't have Shellenberger on my (partly) pro-nuke side

2011-04-04T19:28:00.000-07:00

Nuclear proliferation issues are probably the second-biggest problem with nuclear power after economics. Michael Shellenberger spent much of this Forum discussion pretending it wasn't a problem at all. "You don't build nuclear power to get a nuclear weapon." Oh yes, you do. There's a huge amount of overlap in the technology.

France used civilian nuclear energy program to develop and disguise its nuclear weapons program (Shell completely screws this up). Other nuclear powers did the same thing. For Shell to claim the Iran example supports his position when so much of its program was built with the assistance of the UN, is really stupid. I have trouble believing he actually believes it.

Shell also made a somewhat misleading cost comparison of "built" nuclear power, which ignores the massive upfront construction costs. Existing nuclear capacity is cheap, but building new plants is a totally different issue that he glides by.

Also annoying is Shell's "I used to be against it, now I'm for it" conversion trick that climate denialists think give them credibility. It doesn't.

Getting back to proliferation, it's not an easy thing to solve because throwing taxpayer money at it, the Republican solution to nuclear power, won't work. I think a solution that expands nuclear power to other nations would require much more powerful UN control, not just inspections, of nuclear plants. I also don't know how you get this unless existing nuclear powers offer up the same degree of restriction on sovereignty. Tell that to the Tea Party.

Congressional Republicans admit they can't handle the truth

2011-03-31T23:29:00.000-07:00

I meant to comment on this a while back:

A group of Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives is proposing to shift funds from NASA’s climate change research coffers to the agency’s manned spaceflight program, an effort they say could preserve what they described as the agency’s core mission even as the new GOP-controlled House seeks to make good on vows to roll back federal discretionary spending this year.

It's not just moving money from the most scientifically-useful part of NASA to the least useful, although that does nicely symbolize the Republican hatred of science. Most Republican leaders admit that the planet's warming, but they usually say the case for it being anthropogenic is unproven. Trying to deny information that would provide further proof is a solid indication that they can't handle the truth. I suppose they could claim that they have definitive proof that the warming's not human-cased, and that the proof is so solid that there's no longer any need to study the subject, but that makes them all the more idiots.

I recall this happening before, and I'm sure it'll happen again. The second-level question though is why do they bother? The evidence that we're changing climate is mountainous and they ignore it, so why do they bother trying to stop still more evidence from coming in?

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to fear hypocrisy

2011-03-24T19:23:00.000-07:00

Came up with the quote above myself. I really hate the argument that you're not allowed to do something good unless you always do that good thing. Mostly lately used to say the US shouldn't be allowed to stop Qaddafi because we've not bombed Yemen's dictator. Not that we should rush in everywhere, and I even think there are reasonable arguments not to get involved in Libya, but everywhere or nowhere isn't a good argument.

We're no angels, and hypocrisy is a good argument to make if we claim to be angels, but it's not an argument for inaction.

I often see its counterpart argument, btw: someone says they should be allowed to do something wrong because other people have done something wrong previously. Land developers make this argument constantly, "people ten years ago built their homes right into the streamside habitat, therefore I should be able to as well." No.

So why is a partitioned Libya worse than a Qaddafi-ruled one?

2011-03-20T22:14:00.000-07:00

I'm not getting the argument behind the fear of a partitioned Libya. The alternative is more Qaddafi, more oil purchases from Qaddafi, and more weapons sales to him.

In a partition, the rebels will continue to assemble a government and maintain oil sales, while Qaddafi can't. Eventually they'll take care of him. Given that we've created a no-fly/no-armor/no-artillery zone, if the rebels can't fight off infantry at this point, then they don't have the support and drive to maintain a revolution.

As for Josh Marshall saying no genocide=no humanitarian reason to intervene, I think the rebuttal argument makes itself.

It's definitely a roll of the dice, but doing nothing isn't such a great play either. And while eastern Libya has been a hotbed of Al Qaeda recruitment in the past, a chance at a more democratic society could help there, and meanwhile we're destroying every weapon in Libya that can shoot down aircraft.

Nuke power: still too safe, still too expensive, and no one's changed their mind

2011-03-16T14:57:00.001-07:00

Stoat refers to the latest go-around on nukes following the catastrophe in Japan (also here). I don't think people are changing their minds on the overall issue, and who am I to buck that trend?

While I find it pretty murky to figure out exactly what's happening in Japan, it seems that the radiation released is still much less than Chernobyl. Maybe the radiation could get as bad as Chernobyl, maybe not, but it definitely won't result in as many lives lost. Compare that to the million people annually who die from from fine particle emissions, in large part from fossil fuels, and it's no contest. Meanwhile, Germany and China partially suspend their nuclear programs while their coal plants chug away, actions that don't help safety unless they later plan to make up for lost time.

So I'll stand by what I wrote in 2005, that nuclear power is too safe relative to fossil fuel competitors. I suppose you could argue it's worthwhile to make the worst 10% safer while making new plants less safe than otherwise planned, but that wouldn't change the analysis. I also suppose it's less safe than the industrial accidents from renewable power (don't really know the answer to that), but that's not the binary choice we have in our current system.

I tried to figure out what could change my mind on safety, and it would have to be getting a lot of Chernobyls. However, nuclear power could be ruled out with only a few Chernobyls because they have the effect of making significant land areas uninhabitable, an adverse economic effect. Nuclear power is just too expensive to be more than a minor contributor to climate solutions, unless we go along with the conservative push for giant subsidies for nukes. Maybe we need to, but that doesn't make it optimal.

One other point: Matt notices that nuclear power is only safe due to governmental regulation, and still conservatives love it.

And another: this BBC article points to a proposal to put a nuclear waste depository in the already-uninhabitable Chernobyl area. It doesn't make much sense in the thousands of years that we'd theoretically need to store it, but it does make sense for the actual century or two that's needed, and afterwards a much more advanced technological society can figure out a better solution.

Checking for next steps in House Republicans science denial

2011-03-15T23:14:00.000-07:00

Talking Points Memo reports that none of the 31 Republicans on the House Energy Committee will admit that climate change is real and caused by people, directly repudiating both the real world and their own 2008 presidential campaign.

The more constructive side of my personality thinks they should be asked if temperatures will continue to go up in the next ten years at the rate predicted by the IPCC, then will they change their minds. I can't imagine how much trouble we'll be in if there's still serious resistance to action ten years from now, but there probably will be, so we might want to start blunting it.

The more political side suggests seeing how far we can test these geniuses. I bet many would reject an amendment declaring that CO2, methane, and other gases have globally increased in concentration and humans are responsible. A commenter also suggests testing them as to whether the earth is over 6,000 years old, which could be done by an amendment declaring that the earth is many millions of years old and therefore a study of the paleoclimate over the millions of years helps us understand modern climate.

Let's see how far they'll stick their heads in the sand. Showing how the Republicans can't acknowledge reality is a good way to start wedging them apart from any educated supporters.

Fluoridating water, or a funny thing happened on my way to backseat driving

2011-03-10T21:23:00.000-08:00

I originally labelled this blog Backseat Driving back in 2004 because I anticipated it to be a blog where I would second-guess decisions made by politicians and other people. That worked out fine more or less until November 2010, when for some reason I was elected to the Santa Clara Valley Water District Board. Turns out that San Jose is the largest city in the US without fluoridated water supplies (in much of the city, anyway), and the seven of us directors have to decide whether we'll help or hinder the fluoridation process. So I'm pushed into the front seat for this one.

We've got some legal and economic issues to handle (it's not quite as cheap as everyone says, I want to know where the money's going to come from), but the relevant issue here is science. I read the guest post at climate blogger Coby Beck's place, The Case Against Fluoride, fairly closely a while back, especially the raucous debate in the comments. As a spectator with some, limited reading of the available information, I'd say the fluoridators seemed more persuasive than skeptics, but it wasn't the absolute demolishing that I expected.

The fluoride skeptics really hurt their cause when say fluoride doesn't prevent cavities - it's so obviously effective that people making this claim are damaging their own credibility. I'd consider it comparable to denying that the planet has warmed in the last 50 years.

The closer issue is adverse effects, and whether a substantial number of people are very slightly harmed by fluoridation, or if a small number of people are substantially harmed. The 2006 National of Sciences report doesn't condemn fluoridation, but it doesn't absolve it, either:

Bone Fractures
....Overall, there was consensus among the committee that there is scientific evidence that under certain conditions fluoride can weaken bone and increase the risk of fractures. The majority of the committee concluded that lifetime exposure to fluoride at drinking-water concentrations of 4 mg/L or higher is likely to increase fracture rates in the population, compared with exposure to 1 mg/L, particularly in some demographic subgroups that are prone to accumulate fluoride into their bones (e.g., people with renal disease)....There were few studies to assess fracture risk in populations exposed to fluoride at 2 mg/L in drinking water. The best available study, from Finland, suggested an increased rate of hip fracture in populations exposed to fluoride at concentrations above 1.5 mg/L. However, this study alone is not sufficient to judge fracture risk for people exposed to fluoride at 2 mg/L. Thus, no conclusions could be drawn about fracture risk or safety at 2 mg/L....

(In California, 2 mg/L was the limit, and 0.7 is the new proposed goal. -Ed)

Neurotoxicity and Neurobehavioral Effects
Animal and human studies of fluoride have been published reporting adverse cognitive and behavioral effects. A few epidemiologic studies of Chinese populations have reported IQ deficits in children exposed to fluoride at 2.5 to 4 mg/L in drinking water. Although the studies lacked sufficient detail for the committee to fully assess their quality and relevance to U.S. populations, the consistency of the results appears significant enough to warrant additional research on the effects of fluoride on intelligence....

Endocrine Effects
The chief endocrine effects of fluoride exposures in experimental animals and in humans include decreased thyroid function, increased calcitonin activity, increased parathyroid hormone activity, secondary hyperparathyroidism, impaired glucose tolerance, and possible effects on timing of sexual maturity. Some of these effects are associated with fluoride intake that is achievable at fluoride concentrations in drinking water of 4 mg/L or less, especially for young children or for individuals with high water intake. Many of the effects could be considered subclinical effects, meaning that they are not adverse health effects. However, recent work on borderline hormonal imbalances and endocrine-disrupting chemicals indicated that adverse health effects, or increased risks for developing adverse effects, might be associated with seemingly mild imbalances or perturbations in hormone concentrations. Further research is needed to explore these possibilities....

Genotoxicity and Carcinogenicity
....Whether fluoride might be associated with bone cancer has been a subject of debate. Bone is the most plausible site for cancer associated with fluoride because of its deposition into bone and its mitogenic effects on bone cells in culture....Several epidemiologic investigations of the relation between fluoride and cancer have been performed since the 1993 evaluation, including both individual-based and ecologic studies. Several studies had significant methodological limitations that made it difficult to draw conclusions. Overall, the results are mixed, with some studies reporting a positive association and others no association.
On the basis of the committee’s collective consideration of data from humans, genotoxicity assays, and studies of mechanisms of action in cell systems (e.g., bone cells in vitro), the evidence on the potential of fluoride to initiate or promote cancers, particularly of the bone, is tentative and mixed. Assessing whether fluoride constitutes a risk factor for osteosarcoma is complicated by the rarity of the disease and the difficulty of characterizing biologic dose because of the ubiquity of population exposure to fluoride and the difficulty of acquiring bone samples in nonaffected individuals.

These were the most troubling findings, mostly about what hasn't been proven, and mostly dealing with levels that are five times what's planned for drinking water. The report expressly ignored the benefits of fluoridation. It's important to balance out potential concerns over rare, severe complications related to fluoride with the certainty that rare, severe complications can result from cavities.

The bottom line as a policy maker in my little arena is that I shouldn't try and figure out the science myself, but I should try to figure out what the scientific consensus is, figure out where the consensus doesn't yet exist, and then plug that information into everything else we have to balance.

The science seems to favor fluoridation, but it's not a slam dunk. And we still have potential policy barriers, and the overall cost issues. Figuring this all out will be interesting.

UPDATE: I'll give the anti-fluoridators credit for quickly finding their way here. Personally, I'm not going to attempt to judge the quality of their sources. I don't care what any single paper or PhD says, I want to know what the consensus says.

Beware pundits selling a new look at some bad people

2011-03-06T20:14:00.000-08:00

Brad DeLong on political scientists not behaving well, quoting Mother Jones:

....Harvard professor Joseph Nye Jr.... sipped tea for three hours with Muammar Qaddafi. Months later, he penned an elegant description of the chat for The New Republic, reporting that Qaddafi had been interested in discussing "direct democracy." Nye noted that "there is no doubt that" the Libyan autocrat:
acts differently on the world stage today than he did in decades past. And the fact that he took so much time to discuss ideas—including soft power—with a visiting professor suggests that he is actively seeking a new strategy.
The article .... noted that Nye had gone to Libya "at the invitation of the Monitor Group, a consulting company that is helping Libya open itself to the global economy"... [but not that] he [was]... as a paid consultant of the Monitor Group.... And Franklin Foer, then the editor of the magazine, says, "If we had known that he was consulting for a firm paid by the government, we wouldn't have run the piece."...

And Nye wasn't the only one who did this stuff. I'm familiar with my friends at Burson Marsteller and at Hill & Knowlton from when I used to do something useful campaigning for Burma. Looks like this Monitor Group is another firm to watch.

I guess the lesson is to be careful when a pundit says something contrarian, about a powerful bad guy turning over a new leaf....

The Carbon Inception

2011-03-04T08:21:00.000-08:00

Everything's better with music.

Yup, nothing to worry about here, it's just a bad dream....

Evolutionary psychology wars aren't helpful to climate denialists

2011-03-03T22:40:00.000-08:00

Climate denialist/skeptics face a problem in trying to argue that 97% of the practitioners in the field are fundamentally wrong in accepting climate change: how likely is it that a field of science could get that screwed up? Generally, denialists don't care about whether the unlikelihood of their claim and whether it suggests they themselves are in the wrong. Instead they just say that climatologists don't understand climatology.

My question is whether this has happened before in modern science. If it hasn't, then denialists have to get us to assume pretty heroically that the scientific process has failed in a way that it's not failed before, and I think it might make us consider whether in fact, the denialists are wrong and the 97% of climatologists are right.

I should note that this isn't about science getting something wrong - that happens all the time. This is about the claim that the field of climatology is fundamentally unsound, which is the basic claim of denialists. And even if it did happen elsewhere, that doesn't mean it's happening now in climatology, but the precedent would make the claim a tiny bit less implausible.

I looked once before at whether modern science engages in conspiracy, in the far smaller group of scientists examining Jupiter's moon Europa and its ice cover, and I didn't think it was helpful to denialists.

So how about another potential example, in the field of evolutionary psychology. This area attracts a lot of controversy, possibly because amateurs try to use it to as a pop-scientific justification of whatever moral belief they advocate, possibly because its supporters sometimes overstate some of their conclusions, and possibly because biologists don't like psychologists encroaching on their turf. But is the field discredited?

The short answer is no, at least not the way that climate denialists think that 97% of climatologists are wrong. Even critics of many papers published on evolutionary psychology think the field can reach and has reached appropriate conclusions, like Jerry Coyne:

Now I don’t oppose evolutionary psychology on principle. The evolutionary source of our behavior is a fascinating topic, and I’m convinced that the genetic influences are far stronger than, say, posited by anti-determinists like Dick Lewontin, Steve Rose, and Steve Gould. Evolved adaptations are particularly likely to be found in sexual behavior, which is intimately connected with the real object of selection: the currency of reproduction. I’m far closer in my views on this topic to Steve Pinker than to Steve Gould. And there are many good studies in the field, so I don’t mean to tar the whole endeavor.

It's also worth noting that compared to climatology, evolutionary psychology is a "soft" scientific field with ethical barriers to experimentation that climatology doesn't experience. Even so, aside from the view of possibly a tiny number of critics, it's not gone as far off the rails as denialists claim has happened for climatology. The denialists are going to have to look somewhere else for a precedent.

Personally, I think evolutionary psychology is fascinating and likely to have significant insights. I think it's facetious to believe that in our psychology, which is crucial to our survival, we'd have escaped the evolutionary influences that affect every other species on the planet. Great apes are clearly smart enough to have differing individual psychologies that must have affected their survival rates over time. Getting deep and subtle insights about human evolutionary psychology will be difficult, but denying that field's validity is as about as smart as climate denialism.

Gaddafi out by the end of next week

2011-02-26T13:20:00.001-08:00

(UPDATE: guess I'm back to my pre-2008 predictive ability. I still think Gaddafi's toast, though.)

We'll see if this prediction is as bad as my political predictions usually are, although I've improved a bit in recent years. My prediction is based on Gaddafi's attempt to retake eastern Libya with military force, an attempt that's apparently failed. If the opposition could stand up to him miltarily with one week of organizing, then they're only going to get stronger.

I don't know what the long term holds for Libya - the strong tribal structure seems worrying for national unity. I was very mistaken in the case of Iraq to think in early 2003 that chaos would be preferable to the rule of an incompetent tyrant. I won't assume chaos is preferable in Libya either, but I'm hoping the wave of people power in the Arab world might also lead to a different result.

One other note: conservative blowhards condemn Obama for not taking stronger action in Libya, while failing to notice that hundreds of Americans and other foreigners were still in Tripoli. Now that they're gone, Obama is taking stronger action. Adults are moving things forward.

UPDATE: See here for the American version of why it's important to remove the bad guys from power - that clears the way to punish them for their crimes. We didn't do that with the financial leaders of Wall Street, and now they're getting away.

Offsets and cap-and-trade: coming soon to the Clean Water Act

2011-02-24T17:30:00.000-08:00

I'm attending a water law conference in San Diego this week. Today's presentation included a discussion of attempts to limit pollution in the Chesapeake Bay. The presenter said that nitrogen and phosphorus pollution is likely to be set at certain maximum levels pretty soon, and following that, anyone who wants to do something that adds pollutants will have to find offsetting reductions. He speculated that a cap-and-trade market might even emerge.

I think this is still more evidence that there's nothing innately wrong with offsets and trades in greenhouse gases, and that the only real question is whether the programs are done well or done poorly.

One other piece of info that was climate related: another presenter discussed cost-benefit analyses in federal environmental regulations. I asked whether international effects were considered. He said not as a usual matter, but climate change is forcing them to think about it. They now give two different prices for the cost effect of increased greenhouse gases: one price is if they assume the US is all that counts, and another if they assume that we live on planet Earth. We'll see which one ultimately wins out.

Climate betting update for 2010

2011-02-20T03:47:00.000-08:00

I had my annual friendly email exchange with betting partner/opponent, David Evans, several weeks back. Our bet:

We have three bet periods -10, 15, and 20 years - and two bets for each period - an even-odds bet and a 2:1 bet in David's favor. The even-odds bet centers around a temperature increase rate of 0.15C/decade with a 0.02 void margin on either side (bet voids if temps increase between .13 and .17C/decade). The 2:1 bet centers on 0.1C/decade with a .01 void margin. Even-odds bets are for $1,000 each, and the 2:1 bets increase over time, with me betting $1,000, $2,000 and $3,000, and David betting half that. My exposure is $9,000; his is $6,000.

We use the NASA GISS dataset, and the baseline is the five-year average for 2007 (.55C above the long-term average), compared to five year averages of each of the three bet periods. Years 2010 through 2014 won't "count" in the sense of not being measured in the five year averages, but they will give a sense of who's winning.

So who's winning? Interestingly, David and I both focused on the news that was bad for our own side. In 2010, the global average temp was a record .63C above the long-term, an increase of .08C in just three years from 2007's multi-year average, and a pace that far exceeds what I need to win all of the bets. That's the perspective David took.

By contrast, I compared five-year averages: we're now able to calculate the five-year average centered on 2008, and it's only .01C above 2007's multi-year average. The reason for the small change is that the only difference between the averages is that 2007's average included the record year 2005, while 2008's average dropped the record year 2005 and replaced it with the record year 2010. At a .01C annual increase rate, I will lose half of my bets and void the other half.

Looking forward to this time next year, our perspectives might shift again, assuming 2011 plays out as another warm year but La Nina-cooled from 2010. The five year average for 2009 will eliminate 2006, which was only typical and cooler than 2005, and replace it with 2011. Any 2011 temperature above .58C should put me in good shape for the five-year average, even if it's not as blistering as 2010. So we'll see.

Meanwhile, James Annan continues his too-easy path to climate betting riches with Russian skeptics. I've been meaning to reach his betting opponents to see if they agree that their goose is cooked, and if not, whether they'd like to double down.

UPDATE: The skewed prediction-market bet that exaggerated the short-term warming anticipated by the IPCC turned out to be insufficiently skewed, and the "Al Gore side" won the bet. The website promoting the bet on behalf of denialist Scott Armstrong has been mysteriously silent about this development, talking only about a longer, proposed bet that's still artificially skewed by lying about the predicted short-term warming. And just in case that bet disappears down the memory hole, here's how Theclimatebet.com describes it:

“Now, assume that Armstrong and Gore made a gentleman‟s bet (no money) and that the ten years of the bet started on January 1, 2008. Armstrong‟s forecast was that there would be no change in global mean temperature over the next ten years. Gore did not specify a method or a forecast. Nor did searches of his book or the Internet reveal any quantitative forecasts or any methodology that he relied on. He did, however, imply that the global mean temperature would increase at a rapid rate – presumably at least as great as the IPCC‟s 1992 projection of 0.03°C-per-year (NOTE: untrue statement, no short term IPCC prediction was made in 1992, and later reviews made lower decadal predictions - ed). Thus, the IPCC‟s 1992 projection is used as Gore‟s forecast.”

Finally, the small bet I've got with Joe Romm on whether 90% of Arctic sea ice will disappear by 2020 (with me taking the cold side) chugs along. Joe does have a chart here showing that recent decline rates, projected linearly, would have him winning. I'm not so sure, although I'm also less sure of my side than I was when I took the bet.

All according their plan that we've ignored

2011-02-19T12:15:00.000-08:00

I got tired last year of enviros saying that EPA regulation of climate change was unlikely to be overruled by Congressional legislation. People thought that amending the Clean Air Act to stop action on climate change would be defeated by a Senate filibuster and a presidential veto. I said it would be attempted through budget resolutions and budget reconciliation bills. So now the Republicans have passed budget legislation in the House that will cut "EPA funds for curbing greenhouse gas emissions". They're also trying to defund the IPCC, a wrinkle I hadn't thought of, and generally trying to destroy the environment.

So fighting on the budget is what we should have been focused on all along. It's obvious that this Republican wish list isn't going to get through the Senate and past the president, but that's also not the end of the story. I wrote in my link above from last November:

Complicating this is the Republican threat to de-fund health care reform. I could easily seeing the Republican controlled House passing a budget that both de-funds health care and prohibits spending money to enforce the Clean Air Act. They will then attempt horse-trading, and I fear the concession that they'll ask for.

And yes, the Republican House did de-fund health care in the continuing resolution from this last week. We'll see who blinks on a potential shutdown versus a compromise and what gets sacrificed in a compromise.

Modding what Gavin Schmidt said about the science-policy interface, slightly (UPDATED)

2011-02-17T21:55:00.000-08:00

Eli's post refers to the non-scientific controversies over climate change. Gavin Schmidt (no relation) doesn't want to participate in a "science" discussion with denialists that ignores the politics that the denialists are using. Gavin says:

The fundamental conflict is of what (if anything) we should do about greenhouse gas emissions (and other assorted pollutants), not what the weather was like 1000 years ago. Your proposed restriction against policy discussion removes the whole point. None of the seemingly important ‘conflicts’ that are *perceived* in the science are ‘conflicts’ in any real sense within the scientific community, rather they are proxy arguments for political positions. No ‘conflict resolution’ is possible between the science community who are focussed on increasing understanding, and people who are picking through the scientific evidence for cherries they can pick to support a pre-defined policy position.

I agree with all of that except the bolded section. Leaving the denialists behind us, there are important real-world scientific disagreements with policy implications. For example, in my position at the Santa Clara Valley Water District, we build flood control projects and levees that are supposed to last for 50 years, built to contain San Francisco Bay and many low elevation, potentially-flooding creeks. The height of what I'd guess to be over 100 miles of rebuilt levees should be designed to be sufficient to compensate for sea level rise for the next 50 years. It would sure help if we knew what that rise would be under realistic emission scenarios, and might even save us money by not having to overbuild. With budget cuts, we're also thinking of postponing these rebuilds - we need to know how long we can postpone. Getting the science nailed down on this is important.

Getting regional and smaller levels of climate change predictions would also help on policy. That's not exactly a scientific disagreement - the science is barely touching on this level yet - but it's a crucial component for planning water supply and flood control. It's not enough to know that there will be less water when we need it, more water when we want it to not flood, and more water demand created by a warmer climate. We need quantitative predictions where the science will ultimately help us a lot in determining policy, so the sooner we can get those scientific results, the better.

UPDATE: to rephrase a little, the denialist perception of a conflict in the science over whether sea levels are rising is not a real conflict in the scientific community, and I agree with Gavin there. The conflict over how much sea levels will rise in 50 years is a truly open question, and one with immediate policy ramifications.

Weird realist morality on the Egyptian revolution

2011-02-15T21:48:00.000-08:00

I should probably get back to climate blogging at some point, but just to finish up thinking about all the good news from Egypt:

1. Key turning point no one seems to be talking about:

....unable to break the protesters’ discipline or determination, the Mubarak forces resorted to guns, shooting 45 and killing 2, according to witnesses and doctors interviewed early that morning. The soldiers — perhaps following orders to prevent excessive bloodshed, perhaps acting on their own — finally intervened. They fired their machine guns into the ground and into the air, several witnesses said, scattering the Mubarak forces and leaving the protesters in unmolested control of the square, and by extension, the streets.

Mubarak's thugs were giving the demonstrators a hard time even without using guns. Say whatever you want about people power, but it's not going to work in the short term when only the bad guys have guns. The military intervention was crucial.

2. Whether Obama did a good job or bad job depends on whether you grade on a curve or as an absolute measure of what's right. See the article linked above for where the pressure was coming from - compared to most of his top advisors, the Israeli and Arab leaders, and some European leaders, Obama leaned in the correct direction. OTOH, it's not hard to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys here, despite the blindness of a number of American conservatives. Decide for yourself how you grade, I guess. I usually lean toward the curve, with the understanding that that diminishes my estimate of the person. Anyway, interesting assessment of Obama here in Foreign Policy.

3. I find the strange morality of the foreign policy realists to be truly weird. They seem to think we're morally obligated to back evil dictators because that's what we've been doing all along. I sillyly thought that the point of realism is to chuck morality, that of course you throw someone under the bus when they no longer serve, and that the First Rule of Realist Club is you always back the winning horse.

Israeli leaders have their own version of this - they seem to think that moralistic analysis requires foreign support of the Israeli state, the "shining light" of democracy in the Middle East, but also that morality must be chucked out the window when one consider the realist analysis of pro-democracy revolution in Egypt and its possible effect on Israeli security. I'm not buying this yoga position, and I don't think that either a realist analysis or a moralist analysis gives the US much reason to support Israel's occupation of West Bank and Gaza.

USA (heart) Tahrir

2011-02-08T21:57:00.000-08:00

About twice a decade, I actually get off my duff, pick up a sign, and exercise my right to peacefully assemble for redress of grievances. It seems to take young people dying in foreign countries, but in the case of Burma last time and Egypt now, I finally made a tiny effort and joined the demonstration in San Francisco last Saturday. People loved the sign, btw, and a dozen strangers took photographs of my wife and myself holding it. Maybe it will help in some little way to make up for the fact that the US government hasn't exactly come out swinging to demand Mubarak get the heck out.

My Egyptian neighbor pointed out that only if Mubarak is out of power can they have a chance of following Tunisia's example and dissolve the corrupt ruling party and chase down the billions of stolen funds. This transition period we're working on will instead give the bad guys lots of time to hide their money and make sure it benefits the economies of Switzerland and the Cayman Islands instead of Egypt.

Let's just hope it works out.

(And an interesting factoid: Egypt has had the most news coverage of any international news story since tracking began four years ago, and the fourth highest of any news story at all in that period. Maybe people are paying attention. While the role of Twitter and Facebook may be overplayed within Egypt, the new social media might be helping with international attention.)

UPDATE: and following the good news today (Feb 11), the Swiss have frozen Mubarak's assets. My neighbor was right.

Conservative incoherence on Egypt

2011-02-01T23:17:00.000-08:00

I don't have anything innovative to say about Egypt, except wishing Obama would push a little harder. I've found the conservative incoherence about Egypt pretty interesting though - the movement can't make up its mind. They would call it vigorous debate, I suppose, but since no one denies the possibility for an anti-American future polity, what it really comes down to is whether that possibility outweighs a present and possible future democracy. I don't consider that a particularly hard one to call. Some conservatives, even particularly unimpressive ones, agree with me, but others are letting their nationalistic and anti-Islamic bias triumph over everything else.

One thing the US can do is get ahead of the curve for other Arab countries. Things in Jordan and Yemen are heating up, so maybe some external influence on those governments could have a modest impact.

UPDATE: I don't know enough about international human rights violations to decide if this legal argument works, but if the US and Europe made the argument ASAP that thugs attacking demonstrators will be subject to arrest worldwide, that might have a slight deterrent effect.

Spotted: the elusive alarmist equivalent to denialists

2011-01-29T16:44:00.000-08:00

RealClimate has a good writeup on a small NGO whose analysis is that temperatures will rise 2.4C by 2020, an increase that's not far from the low end of what mainstream analyses think can happen by 2100.

I think this example helps explain the process that a denialist goes through with the denialist's own ridiculous analysis. In the NGO's case, they took a relatively simple equation used to calculate the equilibrium result for climate change based on increased CO2, and applied it themselves, without seeming to care that all the established climatologists had totally different result. Unsurprisingly, they did it wrong.

It seems like a combination of incredible hubris, thinking they could do a simple thing right that everyone else had done wrong for some reason, and further thought, according to journalist Stephen Leahy, something like "well at least it will get a conversation going about this important issue." In other words, accuracy is less important than getting attention in the direction they want to see it go.

Straight denialist-like/skeptic-like motivations, with the exception of a few denialists who may be completely lying or utterly uninterested in the accuracy of their claims.

UPDATE: And of course, I personally would never take a simple argument, like tidal amplification, and claim to find a new effect that no one's ever noticed.

Random comments I've posted elsewhere

2011-01-27T13:22:00.000-08:00

On whether the Singularity's a problem:

Those who deny the Singularity also have to assume a near-future end to Moore’s Law and virtually no improvement thereafter. I think the contrary assumption is more probable, that Moore’s Law will continue to operate and may even accelerate in the 21st Century (and beyond, but that’s not essential).

I think it takes little imagination, that someone, somewhere, will use AI to make our lives better. I don’t expect AI to instantly turn our smart toasters into killing machines, and maybe they never will, but 10-20 Moore’s Law generations after the point of AI sapience, we’ll have little choice over the outcome.

We also might merge with the machines, but again, the biological part won’t be able to keep up with the non-biological part for very long.

On whether the biologists critiquing evolutionary psychology go on to condemn the entire field (I'm going to come back to this, it's relevant to climate denialism):

Carl, I think Coyne would disagree with your statement that he thinks evo psych can’t be done at all. This is from your link to him:

“Now I don’t oppose evolutionary psychology on principle. The evolutionary source of our behavior is a fascinating topic, and I’m convinced that the genetic influences are far stronger than, say, posited by anti-determinists like Dick Lewontin, Steve Rose, and Steve Gould. Evolved adaptations are particularly likely to be found in sexual behavior, which is intimately connected with the real object of selection: the currency of reproduction. I’m far closer in my views on this topic to Steve Pinker than to Steve Gould. And there are many good studies in the field, so I don’t mean to tar the whole endeavor.”

An older one on why the Obama administration took so long to partially fix the Republican War on Science:

One potential reason for delay is that there was an internal battle between this okay document versus pure drivel, this okay document versus something with more heft, or a combination of both. Just speculating.

And on a denialist claim that you can construct a climate model to say anything:

I’m not aware of any climate models that fail to show warming. I think Mr. Calhoun is talking out of his hat. And it’s not like the coal and oil industry is too poor to create a model. My guess is that they’ve fooled around with it privately, but the mangling they have to do to get the outcome they want is so bad that they’ve never trotted it out. Yet more evidence against the denialists, as if more was needed.

The Obama responsibility period began this week

2011-01-22T21:22:00.000-08:00

With exactly two years since Obama's inauguration having passed, I'm somewhat arbitrarily picking this as the time where his administration bears greater responsibility for anything done well or poorly by the executive branch than any previous administration. Credit and blame can be adjusted on a case by case basis - for example, Bush bears more responsibility for 9/11 than Clinton because he downgraded counter-terrorism efforts - but as a general matter this makes some sense to me.

A different question is when the current administration bears more responsibility than all previous administrations combined. I'd give about four years for that one.

I realize these are somewhat unfair and rushed periods, saying that a president has the responsibility to fix the mistakes of previous 200 years in four, but it's not supposed to be an easy job.

Global coolers not fessing up, and a SECOND not-wrong (?) Roger Pielke Jr. post

2011-01-19T21:31:00.000-08:00

Green Grok catches a few denialists saying in 2008 that we're about to cool off, and asks them to fess up (Watts Up, of course is one of them). Good luck with the fessing up, though.

Deltoid had something similar with Andrew Bolt, who's equally unlikely to fess up.

I seem to see Don Easterbrook showing up more often in various places for who knows why. He predicts cooling, but won't bet on it.

In other news, 2011 is off to a good start. The year's barely begun and yet there's a post by Roger Pielke Jr. that's not obviously wrong, claiming the media does a decent job of portraying scientific understanding of sea level rise. While I didn't exactly RTFR as Eli Rabett demands, I did skim TFR that the post is based on and it still looks okay, and both the post and FR are free of hippie-punching. Progress! RP Jr also had a not-wrong post in 2010, and quite likely more that I've simply missed.

BTW, I swear I was going to skip the snarking, but on my way to recover Roger's post, I found this regarding climate change and tropical storms:

It is simply logical that a signal that cannot be seen for decades is not immediately relevant to judgments of near-term risk.

No, it's not logical to say that when we can derive damage from climate change, even if we can't distinguish it from the huge amounts of noise.