Wickersham's Conscience

WC has mentioned The Heartland Institute before. It’s the Neocon think tank that tries to dress as a sheep and talk about climate change: Bah, bah, bah.

The sheep disguise slipped off recently, when the Institute bought Cook County billboard space for this gem:

Heartland Institute’s Billboard

That’s objective analysis of global warming, isn’t it? That’s a reasoned response in a discussion about science.

There was a surprising amount of criticism to the billboard, and the billboard came down in 24 hours. Afterwards, not before, the Institute announced it had been an experiment. If the Institute thought that was a science experiment, that goes a long ways to explaining its confusion about the science of climate change.

In a blog post ranting about the public’s and donors’ reactions to the billboard, in sequential paragraphs, mainstream climate scientists and critics of the Institute’s efforts are first called Hitler-deniers and then Holocaust deniers. A failure of reflection, to say the least. Finally, the Institute takes refuge in that playground favorite, “he-called-me-names-first.” So a failure of maturity, as well.

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent for theBritish paper  The Guardian, has identified the likely reason for the Institute’s schoolyard responses: the sponsors for their dubious climate conference are deserting in drove, and taking their checkbooks with them. Some staff have quit in protest.

Goldberg reports:

Board directors quit, conference speakers cancelled at short-notice, and associates of long standing demanded Heartland remove their names from its website. The list of conference sponsors shrank by nearly half from 2010, and many of those listed sponsors are just websites operating on the rightwing fringe.

But the conference has been saved. Both the Illinois Coal Association and Heritage Foundation stepped in to fund this week’s conference, after other corporate donors began backing out in protest at the offensive Kaczynski ad. Of course, any remaining shreds of the institute’s credibility and claims to objectivity vanished with the Institute’s acceptance of money from the coal lobby.

Sometimes, the best way to deal with crackpot fringe groups is just to keep giving them rope.

WC notes that Richard S. Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is once again trumpeting his unproven cloud theories as the solution to climate change. It’s Dr. Lindzen’s view that clouds will save us, that as CO2 from the unrelenting burning of fossil fuels continues to heat the atmosphere, changes in cloud patterns will ensue and reduce solar input, preventing significant warming. There’s just one problem with Dr. Lindzen’s theories.

The theories aren’t supported by any science.

Dr. Lindzen’s published works have been thorough refuted by mainstream climate scientists. Even Dr. Lindzen admits his analyses have been proven wrong.

That doesn’t stop Dr. Lindzen from having rock star treatment from the usual crowd of global warming deniers. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R, Calif) and Sen. James Inhofe (R, OK) are big fans. But in the words of Christopher S. Bretherton, an atmospheric researcher at the University of Washington, “Lindzen is feeding upon an audience that wants to hear a certain message, and wants to hear it put forth by people with enough scientific reputation that it can be sustained for a while, even if it’s wrong science. I don’t think it’s intellectually honest at all.”

Delicately put, Dr. Bretherton. WC will be more blunt: it’s pandering. If Dr. Lindzen were to change his position, he wouldn’t get standing ovations from The Heartland Institute.

But let’s try and put this in terms that even Sen. Inhofe can understand. Let’s assume you are in a poker game, and the pot is $1 million.  Assume the odds are 97% that if you take the next card, you will bust your straight and lose the pot. Do you take the card?

Because 97% of climate scientists – not scientists, climate scientists – believe that anthropogenic CO2 and methane are creating a climate crisis. They don’t think that some unspecified, unproven mechanism is going to rescue humanity from the problem it is creating. In fact, the consensus among scientists, who admit that cloud atmospherics are incompletely understood, is that clouds are likely to be climate-neutral, at best.

So Dr. Lindzen, Rep. Rorabacher, Sen. Inhofe and the cheering crowds at the fake “climate conferences” like Heartland Institute’s are betting the future of the planet that the 97% consensus are wrong.

By the way, WC’s poker metaphor is slightly misleading in at least two senses. The odds of drawing to an inside straight are about 9%. Just 3% of climate scientists disbelieve in global warming. And the “pot” in this case is trillions of dollars, millions of lives, thousands of species and the health of the planet.

Oh, and you have no choice about whether you are going to play.

Apart from a few crackpot politicians and flat earthers, no one who has seriously looked at the issue denies that the polar sea ice is melting. Because it’s the habitat of polar bears, no one except Governer Sean Parnell denies that the melting sea ice presents a crisis for polar bears. But it was all right, somehow, in the minds of a discouraging number of citizens and scientists. Because polar bears were just specially adapted brown bears, really. Somehow, and WC was never very clear about this logic, “just pale grizzlies.” So it was okay to extirpate them. There’s lots of grizzlies.

Now we know that the idea polar bears are just adapted brown bears is a lie. A comfortable lie, but a lie. A recent article in Science Magazine (paywall) examines the DNA of polar bears and concludes they separated from a common ancestor with brown bears some 600,000 years ago. They can still interbreed with brown bears, but they’ve been their own species for much longer than had been previously thought. We really are on the verge of extirpating a genuine species.

There’s even genetic evidence that there have been warming periods before, when comparatively small portions of the polar bear population survived. But the difference in those earlier episodes is that they happened slowly; only the current, anthropocene warming episode is happening over the course of a few decades. The evidence from gases preserved in glacial ice and elsewhere is that earlier warming episodes occurred over centuries.

It’s difficult to assess how the new science will impact the pending litigation. The US Fish & Wildlife Service has issued a special Interim Rule classifying the species as threatened in response to an earlier lawsuit challenging the 2008 determined that the species was endangered. The critical habitat designation still stands, making most of northern and northwestern Alaska critical habitat. Governor Parnell is suing over that, but at this date the habitat classification still stands and, based on precedent, the habitat classification is unlikely to be successfully challenged.

Some years ago, WC was privileged to visit The Magic Castle. Over a very good supper, WC watched a number of magicians, amateur and professional, perform a number of tricks and illusions. One builds a ten story high house of cards, putting together the whole thing in a matter of two and a half minutes. Then he proceeded to pull cards out of the middle and bottom, asking the audience how many he could remove before it collapsed. The answer was eight. Then the whole edifice collapsed.

Take it as a metaphor.

Readers will recall that Senator James Inhofe (R, OK) doesn’t believe in anthropogenic global climate change, and has even written a very bad book about it, The Greatest Hoax. His arguments are a mix of appeals to ignorance, big lies and bad biblical scholarship. It’s not a mindset that is easily influenced by evidence. But there is still more evidence that the polar regions, the areas that climate science predicts would show the first and most dramatic evidence of warming, are behaving as predicted.

The European Space Agency has published maps showing in high detail warming of the permafrost zones in the polar regions. This animated GIF is pretty explicit:

Polar Satellite Image - Thawing Permafrost

Melting of permafrost creates two separate sets of problems. First, it causes the ice in the soil to melt. The ground collapses; the technical term is subsidence. The collapse of ground not only changes the surface topography. Anything built on it – roads, bridges, buildings, pipelines – will collapse. The Transalaska Pipeline is famously built with thermopiling to keep the permafrost frozen; when it thaws as  result of climate change, the technology will fail.

Even more importantly, frozen soils are laced with organic material. Because they are frozen, they are preserved. If they thaw, the organics will decay, rot and give off staggering amounts of CO2 and methane, accelerating the rate of increase of greenhouse gases and, in turn, accelerated global warming.

And there are truly immense amounts of CO2 in those frozen organics. About half of the world’s organic carbon is frozen in northern permafrost. It’s more than double the amount already in the atmosphere as CO2 and methane.

So as you watch ESA’s nifty graphic, and see for yourselves have much more extensive the thaw regions are becoming, and how rapidly, consider it represents not just an engineering nightmare, but also a tripling of atmospheric greenhouse gases.

Senator Inhofe may take refuge in his invincible ignorance, or in his biblical interpretations. But he’s the man in the burning house, who pulls his pillow over his head because the smoke alarm is shrieking. The issue is what the good voters of Oklahoma were thinking of when they elected this fool.

Repsol has officially plugged the blown-out gas well on the North Slope. Readers will remember that the well blew out at 10:29 AM on February 15, 2012; the well was officially plugged at 1:30 PM on March 18, 2012. If you had your stop watches going to see how long it would take to plug a blown-out well on land, the answer is

32 days, 3 hours and 1 minute.

As Shell presses ahead with its plans to drill in the Chukchi Sea, 30-50 miles off shore from Wainwright, ask yourself this question: how long will it take to plug a blow-out there?

Proposed Shell Offshore Wells

Doesn’t it seem obvious it will take even longer? And what will be the impact on the admittedly fragile Chukchi Sea in the meantime?

Don’t say a blowout won’t happen, because it has. Don’t say we have the technology to deal with it, because we don’t. Ask instead, at what point does our addiction to petroleum and natural gas become to expensive to bear?

Dear Senator Inhofe -

WC doesn’t usually let himself get dragged in to arguments with right wing religious nut-jobs, but he makes an exceptions for U.S. Senators who fit the bill. And your comments on the Voice of Christian Youth America’s “Crosstalk” on March 7 were so far over the top that you can’t even see the hills of sanity from where you are.

You said, while flogging your new book The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future,

Well actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that ‘as long as the earth remains there will be seed time and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night,’ my point is, God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.

Now WC could simply ask you about the Passenger Pigeon, where exterminating a population of tens of millions of birds seems to have been God’s will, by your definition. WC could simply condemn your incredible arrogance in claiming to know the mind of your God.

But instead, WC will remind you of Martin Luther’s criticism of Copernicus back in 1539. Your knowledge of religious history and astronomy, on the evidence, are a little sketchy, so WC will refresh your recollection.

Martin Luther was that guy who broke away from the Catholic Church and founded, you know, Lutheranism. He was the first Protestant. You’re reportedly a Presbyterian; that’s what John Calvin and the Scottish Reformation did to Lutheranism.

Nicolai Copernicus was the first guy to suggest that the earth orbited the sun, rather than the sun orbiting the earth. He even wrote a book about it. His work led to the work of Galileo. Both were controversial, although Copernicus escaped Galileo’s fate at the hand’s of religious zealots like you.

Your Bible says, telling the story of the Battle of Gibeon in the Book of Joshua, that the Hebrew forces were winning but their opponents might escape once night fell. This was averted by Joshua’s prayers causing the sun and the moon to stand still. Joshua and God didn’t make the earth stand still; they made the sun and the moon stand still.  Martin Luther derided Copernicus’ theory because it contradicted the Bible in Joshua 10:12.

So it goes now. Whoever wants to be clever must agree with nothing others esteem. He must do something of his own. This is what that fellow does who wishes to turn the whole of astronomy upside down. Even in these things that are thrown into disorder I believe the Holy Scriptures, for Joshua commanded the sun to stand still and not the earth.

Now it may be that you think the Bible is right, and that the Sun orbits the earth. But everyone but the Flat Earthers and absolute Bible literalists understand that Martin Luther was wrong, and that the Bible is wrong. The Bible reflects the world view of a bunch of bronze age shepherds and might be, you know, a little out of date. Specifically, the Bible might not be accurate as a tool of science.

Luther was wrong in criticizing Copernicus simply because Copernicus’s theory contradicted the Bible. Just as you are dead, flat wrong in criticizing man-caused global warming because you think it contradicts the Bible.

All right, that involves that complicated, Godless science stuff. WC can see you are puzzled and offended. So let’s approach the issue another way, as a parable:

There was a Baptist preacher who lived in the woods near Wasilla, Alaska. He liked to walk through the woods to go to his church to preach.

His parishoners warned him, “There’s bears in those woods. It’s dangerous. You shouldn’t walk there. At least you should carry a gun”

But the preacher just laughed. “God is good. God is great. God loves. I love God. God will protect me.”

And then one day a big old black bear jumped the preacher as he was walking through the woods, and nearly killed him. After a mighty tussle, the preacher crawled out of the woods at this church. There were big bite marks all over him, he was all clawed up and bleeding pretty bad.

“Preacher,” asked his parishoners, “What’s happened to you?”

“Children,” the preacher told his congregation, “God is good. God is great. God loves. I love God. But he ain’t worth a damn in a bear fight.”

Senator, God’s not so hot at science, either. If you prefer, the guys who received the word of God weren’t so hot at science, and might have misunderstood what God was telling them.

Relying on the Bible as your authority for climate change is as dumb as Luther was in arguing about where the Sun was in the cosmos. But that was just cosmology. Climate change involves the future well-being of your children and grandchildren. America. The frigging planet.

Luther was dumb. You are being criminally stupid.

/Wickersham’s Conscience

So, according to Republican ex-Senator and Presidential Wannabe Rick Santorum,

“I refer to global warming as not climate science, but political science,” surging Republican presidential candidate and conspiracy theorist Rick Santorum said Monday in Steubenville, OH. “A lot of these environmental sciences are just that – political sciences. They have nothing to do with … real understanding of how we have to value both the environment and its impact on man and the world.”

More recently, Tin Foil Rick appeared on the PBS News Hour to repeat his belief that global wamring is “political science,” not “climate science.”

Before we all break out our tin foil hats and join Santorum (BS, Political Science, MBA, JD) in his conspiracy delusions, let’s have a brief look at what would be required for the ex-Senator to be right.

• A vast network on scientists, who can’t agree on anything else, all agree to engage in a conspiracy to delude the world in thousands of studies, all supporting the existence of global warming. Not one, not a single scientist ‘fesses up.
• The vast conspiracy, the scoop of the century for any mainstream media outlet, is not reported. Not even the supermarket journalists, who previously documented Satan;s escape from Hell through a North Slope oil well. This may mean they are a part of the vast conspiracy, too.
• Most of the United Nations, excepting only a few political hacks appointed by former Pres. Bush, fall for the vast conspiracy, or may be part of the conspiracy as well.
• High school physics experiments in which teenage students demonstrate increased CO2 concentrations elevate temperatures are somehow wrong, suggesting the vast conspiracy has the power to reach into high school classrooms and booger the data.
• The oceans are becoming increasingly acidic, not as a result of absorbing CO2 but from some other, as yet undocumented source. Perhaps the acidic bile spewing from the mouths of Republican presidential candidates?
• The arctic ice cap has not disappeared, suggesting the the vast conspiracy has the power to booger satellite images as well as high school lab experiments.
• Rush Limbaugh was correct about something.

WC wants to introduce the ex-Senator to a logical principle, Occam’s Razor. It says that “a principle that generally recommends that, from among competing hypotheses, selecting the one that makes the fewest new assumptions usually provides the correct one, and that the simplest explanation will be the most plausible until evidence is presented to prove it false.” The professedly Catholic ex-Senator should like this principle; it was invented by a Catholic, a Franciscan friar, William of Okham.

For climate change to be true, known, demonstrable physical laws – the so-called “greenhouse gases – have to be true. For Santorum to be right, for climate change to be wrong, not only do the physical laws have to somehow be wrong, but also there has to be a truly gigantic conspiracy to hide the fact that those physical laws are false. Occam’s Razor makes quick work of Santorum. The late Carl Sagan put it another way: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” Ex-Senator Santorum, where’s your extraordinary proof?

It’s easy for politicians to pander. It’s patently obvious politicians can be ignorant; look no further than the last Republican vice presidential candidate.

But this is the future of the freaking planet you are talking about. Whether you are ignorant, pandering or flat out delusional, it’s way beyond stupid to be taking these kinds of chances with your children and your grandchildren’s future.

The ex-Sentator is far too dangerous to the planet to allow his idiot views to go unchallenged. WC declares intellectual warfare on Rick Santorum. Sure, it’s an unfair battle, but WC will do his best to keep up with some of the filthy stream of misogynism, sexism, homophobia, Christianisim, anti-intellectualism, debased pandering and general bigotry that spews from this alleged human being.

WC is unsure that the Iowa caucuses have any real political meaning, but based on the latest polling, Ron Paul, the latest Not-Mitt, has sagged back in to a tie with Romney. The historical chart is interesting:

Source: Real Clear Politics

The peaks by Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Gingrich and Paul – the Not-Mitts – paint an interesting picture of a Republican party in serious disarray. Ron Paul appears to have peaked and started to sag as the Not-Mitt de jour, although commentators predict a dead heat among Romney, Paul and Santorum.

But while Iowans do whatever their highly changeable minds decide to do, WC thinks it is more interesting to review the appeal of Ron Paul. Libertarians, and Ron Paul is a proud Libertarian pretending to be a Replublican, don’t fit the traditional Republican/Democrat duality of American politics. Libertarians opposition to big government appeals to the right; their opposition to drug laws appeals to the left. Respected conservative blogger Matt Stoller thinks the intellectual bankruptcy of liberalism is exposed by Libertarianism. In a recent essay, he takes an incredibly selective and distorted tour of the from Lincoln to Roosevelt to spin an anti-government fantasy.

But progressives don’t have to look further than December 16′s headlines to see that central government does have an important role, and that Libertarian fantasies of a weak federal government aren’t just unlikely but dangerous. After more than 20 years of studies, drafts and abject collapses in the face of industry pressure: the Environmental Protection Agency finally issued regulations limiting the amounts of mercury, other metallics, dioxin and particulates from coal-fired power plants.

Power plant emissions have no regard for state boundaries; emissions in Delaware wreak havoc in West Virginia and Tennessee. The power plants are owned my multi state – multi-national – corporations. A single state is nearly powerless to regulate the hazard. The existence of the hazard is really beyond dispute. The regulations will save an estimated $150‐$380 billion and prevent 18,000 – 46,000 premature deaths, 540,000 asthma attacks, 13,000 emergency room visits and 2 million missed work or school days each year. For each dollar of expense in retrofitting emission controls, there’s a savings of $3 to $5 in expenses associated with the emissions. The amendments to the Clean Air Act that made these regulations possible were enacted by a bipartisan Congress, just to prove that it used to be possible. Big government? Yes, WC admits it. Necessary big government? Yes, WC asserts it.

Libertarians seem to reject the reality of a modern economy. Libertarians seem to ignore the necessity multi-state regulation, and multi-state corporations. Libertarians seem to deny the reality of corporate greed, short-sightedness and corruption. Ask the 29 miners at the Upper Big Branch coal mine who were killed through the outrageous negligence of the owner. Self-policing doesn’t work. Big corporations can buy state legislatures – and state inspectors – even more easily and inexpensively than they can buy a Congress and federal inspectors.

This progressive, at least, isn’t confused by the Ron Pauls of the world. Libertarianism is a doctrine for a world that hasn’t existed since industrialization. It’s premised on fantasies and backed by folks with serious denial issues.

WC stumbled across the blog of George Monbiot after a tip by Mrs. WC.

While Monbiot writes about a wide number of topics, his primary focus is on conservation of the environment. And unlike too many enviornmentalists, likely inlcuding WC, he’s eloquent without being shrill. A sample:

But the global collapse of biodiversity hurts almost beyond endurance. The sense that the world is greying, its wealth of colour and surprise and wonder fading, is so painful that I can scarcely bear to write about it. Human welfare, as measured by gross domestic product, is doubtless enhanced by the processes which drive extinction. Human welfare, as measured by the heart and the senses, is diminished. We have no use for most of the world’s natural exuberance; it cannot be commodified or reproduced. Biodiversity does not belong to us: that is why it is worth preserving.

Fine stuff, well-researched and well-written, from a British perspective. Recommended.

Despite the wretched outcome of his wishes for 2010 and wishes for 2011, WC will once again set out his wishes for 2012. While it is tempting to moderate those wishes, WC is not inclined to lower his expectations in the hope of greater success. So here they are: WC’s wishes for 2012:

1. Overpopulation. Among the crises facing the planet is human overpopulation. During 2011, we rolled the odometer over to an estimated  7 billion. To a deplorable extent, especially in the Western world, the rate of population growth is a function of religious teachings. The Catholic church’s and the Latter Day Saints’ crazed obsession with large families would be two examples. When religious dogma have counter-survival effects, it’s past time to change them. WC calls on those latter day saints and infallible pontiffs to have a revelation: that further growth of human populations is terrible, and must be controlled, that more than two chldren is a sin by whatever definitions they use.
2. A second great crisis facing humanity is anthropocentric climate change. The way things are going, to paraphrase Pratchett and Gaiman, we are going to scourge all intelligent life from the planet, leaving nothing but dust, cockroaches and fundamentalists. The time for denying man-caused climate change is past. Can we at least shift the debate about how to deal with it? And can all the global warming-denying politicians who have sold their small, dark, crabbed souls to the fossil fuels industry have a look in the mirror and ask themselves, “Do I care about my gtandchildren?” There will come a day when fossil fuel lobbyists and the politicians they have purchased will be held in the same contempt as Congressmen who defended slavery, or claimed tobacco was harmless. Why not now?
3. The health care crisis facing facing America threatens to sink the economy of our country. The Affordable Care Act remains the only half-way comprehensive solution presented. The need for health care is not going to magically vanish if Medicare and Medicaid are repealed. Passing a reduced amount of money out as vouchers isn’t going to reduce spending or lower costs. It is absolutely clear that traditional capitalist solutions are an abject failure in controlling costs. We’ve been trying it for the last 50 years and it has gotten us where we are. The neocons have to come up with  specific, functional proposals to fix a real crisis, or shut up. Not more of the same. Real solutions.
4. Despite the Republican presidential wannabes’ lies, distortions and self-deception, President Barack Obama as a national leader is vastly superior to Mitt Romney and all the Not-Mitts. Despite the protracted and concerted efforts of the Republicans to blow up the economy rather than allow him to effect reasonable repairs, the economy has improved. He has done more to slap down Islamofacsist terrorism than his predecessor managed with two land wars in Asia, up to and including the assassination of bin Laden and the liberation of Libya. He has gotten us out of George W. Bush’s disastrous, ill-conceived and unnecessary war in Iraq. He has stopped and repudiated the use of torture as an instrument of national policy. He has enacted the first real health care reform in the United States since Medicare. He has saved the plutocrats from their own greed and folly. And he has done all this is the face of an unscrupulous U.S. House that would tear the country to shreds if it had its way. Re-elect him. And while we are at it, pitch the Teabaggers out of the U.S House.

So there you have it: four modest, sensible and practical wishes. WC cautions against holding your breath while waiting to see if they come true.

Happy New Year, everyone.

However much humankind may injure and maim the planet, we don’t control nature. Nature bats last. WC introduces a new category of year end reviews, noting instances in this calendar year when we’ve had to be reminded of that lesson once again.

One of WC’s all-time favorite books is John McPhee’s The Control of Nature (Amazon link). McPhee examines three instances of man’s interactions with nature: the massive volcanic eruption at Vestmannaeyjar, near Iceland, and the efforts to protect the harbor there from advancing lava flows; the efforts by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to keep the Mississippi River from changing its course at the Atchafalaya Channel; and the City of Los Angeles’s efforts control the massive mudflows coming down out of the San Gabriel Mountains. McPhee’s message is that mankind may have short-term successes, but can’t win in the long haul. Nature bats last.

Each year, mankind gets a fresh set of reminders that for all out vaunted science, engineering and technology, we’re here at sufferance.

The list might both begin and end with the March 11 Tohoku ML9.0 earthquake and 40-foot high tsunami, which devastated northeastern Japan and wrecked the Fukushima nuclear power plant.   The tragedy has so far resulted in 15,842 deaths, 5,890 injured, and 3,485 people missing across eighteen prefectures, as well as over 125,000 buildings damaged or destroyed. Radiation contamination has resulted in a 20km exclusion zone, likely to last for decades. The engineering that went into the reactor and safety design was woefully inadequate for a foreseeable disaster.

The drought in the southwestern United States continued. From 2010-11, Texas experienced its driest August–July (12-month) period on record. Wildfires, crop failures and animal deaths are the worst since the Dust Bowl. Droughts also afflicted places as far flung as China, East Africa and Tuvalu, Micronesia. To some extent, they are probably the result of the extended La Niña in the Pacific Ocean, but the devastation, particularly in East Africa, is horrific.

In Joplin, Missouri. a devastating EF5 multiple-vortex tornado struck late in the afternoon of Sunday, May 22, 2011:

May 2011 Path of Tornado Through Joplin

There’s an estimated $3 billion in damage, and 161 people were killed.

Hurricane Irene caused 56 deaths and $7 billion in damages, with the worst of the damage from flooding in Vermont, which experienced its worst flooding in centuries. A fairly modest Category 1 hurricane when it came ashore in the northeast, it carried enough water and was moving slowly enough that it caused catastrophic problems. We think of hurricanes as a disaster afflicting the southeastern states; we’re wrong.

Earthquakes, particularly big quakes, are consequence of living on a geologically active planet. But there’s increasing evidence that some quakes are man-made, with fracking -– hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas – as a primary cause. The near-unprecedented weather extremes in 2011 – flood, drought, heat waves, tropical storms – may be the result of anthropogenic climate change. Warmer air carries more water, contains more energy and could generate more violent weather.

Death rates and property damage levels aren’t a particularly good analysis tool. There are more people and more improvements to land every year. But if you measure weather by the number of hurricanes, the energy level of hurricanes, the number of tornadoes and the intensity of tornadoes, then it does appear that nature is batting last.

WC was brought to believe that Henry David Thoreau, under-bathed proto-hippy and general rabble rouser, was America’s first environmentalist, with Ralph Waldo Emerson in a supporting role. WC was taught wrong.

Teabaggers, presumably, will be appalled to learn that the man who on May 12, 1818 said:

[W]e can scarcely be warranted in supposing that all the productive powers of its surface can be made subservient to the use of man, in exclusion of all the plants and animals not entering into his stock of subsistence; that all the elements and combinations of elements in the earth, the atmosphere, and the water, which now support such various and such numerous descriptions of created beings, animate and inanimate, could be withdrawn from that general destination, and appropriated to the exclusive support and increase of the human part of the creation; so that the whole habitable earth should be as full of people as the spots most crowded now are or might be made, and as destitute as those spots of the plants and animals not used by man. 

turns out to be the Father of the U.S. Constitution, co-author of the Federalist Papers and Father of the Bill of Rights, James Madison. You don’t get much more Founding Father than that.

Heh. WC can hear the screeches of outrage already.

But it’s true. Speaking to the Agricultural Society of Albemarle, Virginia in 1818, about a year after the end of his second term as president, Madison sounded an awful lot like David Brower, founder of the Sierra Club.

So, Teabaggers, in your reverence, your near-worship of the early leaders of our country, do you agree with Madison? Do you agree that, say, the Endangered Species Act has its roots in the thinking of the guy who wrote the Constitution?

WC awaits your response.

Why Fairbanksans have been a little cranky lately.

Six of the last seven days set new record lows. Any questions?

Update: as of this morning, it has less colded (“warmed up” just doesn’t seem appropriate) to 2 above zero. Cue up Martha Reeves! It’s a heat wave.

There’s a long and thoughtful study on the impact of high energy prices from The New America Foundation that WC strongly recommends. There are some very effective charts and interactive graphics, too. While the study’s focus is on gasoline prices, those of who live in northern climes recognize the same issues apply to heating oil and natural gas.

Read the article, but WC would summarize the key point this way: affordable housing leads to a long commute. A long commute means more gasoline. A tough economy means it’s difficult to buy a more fuel-efficient vehicle. One result is high price inelasticity for gasoline; that is, when the price goes up demand doesn’t go down. And because demand doesn’t go down, neither does price. In the meantime, those who can move closer, which reduces the value of homes further from the jobs, creating a whole new liquidity trap for the middle class.

Politicians who want to solve the problem by “finding more gas” don’t recognize that the combination of worldwide demand and increasingly expensive production costs means you simply can’t produce your way out of the problem. It also means that, subject to bumps up and down, over time the price of gasoline will only increase.

There aren’t any elegant solutions. We’re in for a long, painful period of weaning ourselves off of gasoline.

It’s a very good report, and the more you think about the implications beyond the report, the more concerned you will be.

When you encounter information on the web, it is increasingly important that you run down the source. WC tries to link to sources for key points. And to bring a skeptical approach to positions that seem to contradict informed experts. Usually, it is a matter of following the money. Two examples.

New Attacks on Climate Science
There’s been a spate of recent attacks on climate scientists through lawsuits seeking their emails and records by an outfit calling itself the American Tradition Institute. For example, the Institute for Southern Studies has an excellent article on a lawsuit against the University of Virginia, which seeks emails and other documents related to former professor Michael Mann, an award-winning climate scientist who has become a focus of the climate-denial movement because of his research documenting the recent spike in earth’s temperature. The American Tradition Institute was launched in Colorado in February 2009 as the nonprofit Western Tradition Institute, changing its name to ATI last year.  WTI, in turn, was a spinoff of the Western Tradition Partnership (WTP) — a 501(c)(4) political advocacy group backed by energy interests. The group is led by Paul Chesser, who they described as a “noted climate scholar.” In fact, Chesser is not a scientist but and accountant, and has long worked in what environmental advocates call the “climate denial machine”: a network of organizations, many backed by energy interests, that work to create doubt about the science of human-caused global warming. ATI’s biggest funder is Montana businessman Doug Lair and his Lair Family Foundation; they contributed $5,000 and $135,000 respectively to the group last year — over 75 percent of its total income. Lair’s fortune comes from Lair Petroleum, the family business that was sold in 1989 to William Koch, the lesser-known brother of Charles and David Koch. The Koch Brothers are beginning to approach Rubert Murdoch in WC’s satanic characters contest.

But what we have is an instance of the fossil fuel industry funding attacks on climate scientists. If you think that ATI cares one rotten fig about the accuracy of climate science, WC renews his offer to sell you the Cushman Street Bridge. IT’s all about FUD – fear, uncertainty and doubt. If you are old enough to remember the tobacco industry’s attacks on lung cancer research, you know exactly how this story goes.

Income Immobility
Paul Krugman points out that income immobility – the inablity of the 99% to break into the 1% or, for that matter, the inability of the 90% to break into the 10% – is real, despite the attempts by outfits like the Tax Foundation to persuade folks otherwise. It’s especially real when you measure wealth by net worth and not net income. A taxpayer who makes $0.95 million in 2009 and $1.05 million in 2010 hasn’t demonstrated meaningful economic mobility. That’s why economists work with aggregates across groups and years in measuring matters like economic mobility. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office report says as much:

Household income measured over a multiyear period is more equally distributed than income measured over one year, although only modestly so. Given the fairly substantial movement of households across income groups over time, it might seem that income measured over a number of years should be significantly more equally distributed than income measured over one year. However, much of the movement of households involves changes in income that are large enough to push households into different income groups but not large enough to greatly affect the overall distribution of income. Multiyear income measures also show the same pattern of increasing inequality over time as is observed in annual measures.

Income Trends Made Easy - Krugman

The whole belief that Americans as a class have unrestricted economic mobility is a “Zombie idea.” An untruth that will not die. And apparently devours the brains of some persons exposed to it. To quote Krugman:

Look, let me make a public service announcement: if you rely on bought and paid for sources on income inequality, you’re going to embarrass yourself again and again. These people never get it right, because their whole reason for being is to obfuscate. You should never, ever, trust what they say on this issue.

Remember, there is a department of disinformation, run by smart folks whose job is to confuse less smart folks. You don’t have to fall for it.

WC wrote a series of popular posts on the extinction of North American bird species since the founding of the United States. In particular, WC points to the late John Muir’s descriptions of the flocks of Passenger Pigeons that used to darken the skies of the midwest states for days at a time.

Mrs. WC came across this video, which gives you a taste, just a taste, of what our former bird populations were like. Multiply the two minutes of this video by a thousand and you’d have an idea what passenger pigeon migration must have been like. Sure, they’re just starlings, but we live in impoverished times.

Thanks to Sophie Windsor Clive for capturing this footage.

Republican Presidential Wannabes

WC wanted to have a scary post for Hallowe’en. WC can’t think of anything much scarier than the current batch of Republican presidential wannabes.

After careful study of the field, WC has arrived at a simple list of the qualities and beliefs currently required to be a Republican candidate for President. As a service to his readers, WC sets them out here:

1.Stretch your arms wide. Assume the geologic history of the earth is the width of your reach. 4.6 billion years spread over about 72 inches. An inch of arm then equals about 64 million years. If we start with year zero as the fingertip of your left hand, the dinosaurs vanished from the earth a little past the knuckle on your right fingertip. A moment’s effort with nail clippers can obliterate the entire time the Homo genus has been on the planet. A single pass of a nail file obliterates recorded history. Being a Republican requires you to believe the dusty bit from the nail file is the complete history of the planet. You have to ignore all of the rest of the arm span.

2. The world is burning fossil fuels – coal, petroleum and natural gas – at the rate of 130 Mtoe (Megaton oil equivalent) per year. That’s injecting 35 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. And the rate is increasing. To be a Republican, you have to pretend that isn’t happening. You have to be able to say, with a straight face, that volcanoes (from 0.13 gigaton to 0.44 gigaton per year) are the source of any increased CO2.

3. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. A grade school kid can demonstrate the greenhouse effect in a classroom experiment. But being a Republican means denying CO2 is a greenhouse gas.

4.Ice in Greenland, Antarctica and continental glaciers is melting. The ocean level is rising. The island nation of Tuvalu is at risk of being completely submerged. Satellite data show unequivocally that the ocean levels are rising. A Republican has to be able to deny this is happening. Pay no attention to the water; it isn’t really there.

5. There is overwhelming, uncontroverted evidence for evolution. Evidence derives from the fossil record, from changes to DNA, from biology and anatomy, from dozens of other sources. It’s been observed and documented in the field. Being a Republican requires you to deny evolution exists, to deny that it is responsible for the diversity of life on the planet and the existence of Homo sapiens.

6. You are required to believe that by taking in less money by reducing taxes you can not only balance the federal budget but reduce the deficit. Presumably that also requires you to believe you can afford a better home by quitting work, that less is more and that trickle down is anything more than the dog peeing on your leg.

7. You are required to be able to say with a straight face that it is “class warfare” to point out that income inequality is at near record levels in the U.S. You are required to ignore recent data from the Congressional Budget Office pointing out that all but the richest 20% of Americans have suffered a net decrease in purchasing power from 1979 to the present. And you have to be able to say, again with a straight face, that taxing the richest Americans will make the disparity worse, not better.

8. You have to be able to accept tens of millions in campaign contributions from rich, right wing ideologues and tell voters that the contributions won’t affect the way you treat the rich SOBs.

Whew.

The White Queen, Alice and the Red Queen

Even Lewis Carroll’s White Queen could only believe six impossible things before breakfast. Of course, the voters sometimes remind WC of chickens clapping for Colonel Sanders. But that would be a different story. And maybe that’s just the secret herbs and spices talking.

The Neocons have a lot of problems. One of them centers on their famous denial of anthropogenic climate change: specifically, their denial that humankind’s injection of vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere hasn’t caused and won’t cause any climate change. Never mind that the overwhelming majority of climate scientists have uncontroverted data proving otherwise.

Still more awkward facts have come up recently. The research vessel Polarstern has returned from 16 week-long voyage across the Arctic Ocean. Early reports are available on-line the Alfred Wegener Instittue’s website.

Bad news for the climate change deniers: there’s even less sea ice left than climatologists thought. Sea ice levels are at the record 2007 levels. Or lower. And the ice that is left is thinner, single season ice, not the more durable, thicker multi-year ice that is 2-5 meters thick. Even at the North Pole, the ice measured only 90 cm – about three feet – thick. Multi-year ice only remains at a few places.

Light penetrates better through thin ice, so overall the water temperatures in the Arctic Ocean are warming still more.

Of course, it may just all be an astonishing coincidence that CO2 levels are at record highs and Arctic sea ice is at a record minimum. And it may be a coincidence that smokers develop lung cancer. It’s possible that it’s all a coincidence. Just extremely unlikely. WC would discuss the statistics involved, but the effort would be wasted on science deniers.

Some years ago, an education coordinator was explaining bird migration to a group of home schooled kids at a bird banding station in Fairbanks. “Why do some birds stay in Alaska and others migrate?” the education coordinator asked. “Because God made them that way,” one of the home schoolers answered.

Superstition has an answer to everything and explains nothing. Eclipses and earthquakes are messages from God and not the product of plate tectonics and astronomy. God wills it. The polar ice is melting? God wills it. The slightly less religion-obsessed will babble about climate cycles, ignoring the research that has conclusively eliminated climate cycles as significant factors.

We ignore nature at our peril. We depend upon these ecosystems for our survival. And as Mrs. WC says, “Nature bats last.”

In a blog post titled “Proposition 2: A Classic Case for Limited Government, a blogger named Pete Alexion writing for an organization called Alaskans for Limited Government calls supporters of Fairbanks North Star Borough Proposition #2 “advocates of unlimited government.” But to understand the illogic of this claim, WC’s readers need some background.

Fairbanks sits in a bowl, with the north, east and west sides closed in by the foothills of the White Mountains. Combined with the air inversions we get here, where lenses of warmer air sit on top of colder, lower air, and you have a natural trap for polluted air. Fairbanks has a long history of horribly bad air quality. When coal was the principle heating fuel here, the winter months were ghastly. Combined with tail pipe emissions, prior to the federal environmental laws of the 1970s and the arrival of affordable home heating oil, there were extended periods when Fairbanks’ air was chokingly bad.

Much cleaner-burning heating oil has supplanted coal as the primary heating fuel since construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. But recent spikes in heating oil prices have sent some citizens scurrying to alternative energy sources, including external wood-fired boilers. These are essentially giant wood stoves, set away from the house, that furnish hot water for heat. Some of these products produce truly appalling amounts of air pollution, partly as a result of wretched design and partly because their owners burn green wood, automobile tires, coal, dog crap, plastics and worse. When such a boiler is located in an urbanized area, the fumes are inflicted on the neighbors. When such a boiler is located next door to an elementary school, the problem is even worse. It’s a known, acknowledged health hazard.

There’s been an immense amount of legal and legislative sparring and wrangling over the problem. A current effort is a citizen initiative, Borough Proposition #2, which would regulate these point sources of air pollution.

It’s the context of this relatively mild effort to solve a very serious health issue that Alaskans for Limited Government has weighed in with an extended blog post, claiming that anyone supporting Proposition #2 is an “advocate of unlimited government.” For an organization that claims logic and reason as its guideposts, that an appalling example of hyperbole. In fact, the entire blog post is chock full of the kind of silly errors and excitable hyperbole WC has come to expect from the anti-tax, anti-government crowd in Interior Alaska.

Some examples:

Most armchair environmentalists, in spite of their good intentions, refuse to consider the entire impact of their decisions and remain myopic to their personal agenda. For example, paper sacks were frowned upon because trees were consumed in the process. Industry responded with plastic bags that would remain toxic to landfills. The end result of frantic emotions was the creation of a greater threat to Mother Earth and the human race.

That turns out not to be such a good example. The switch to plastic bags was an industry effort to reduce costs; plastic bags are cheaper to make than paper bags. Environmentalism didn’t enter into the decision. You can still ask for paper and not plastic at most grocery stores. The plastic bags are designed to break down in the environment. All major stores recycle plastic bags. And, in any event, those “arm chair environmentalists” you deprecate generally bring reusable bags. And WC is unaware of any evidence that the cumulative effect of plastic bags is actually worse than the cumulative effect of the same number of paper bags.

Another quote:

Let’s not forget that many businesses and homeowners switched to wood and coal to decrease dependency on fossil fuels. When demand decreases, supply increases and price decreases. All of us benefit from their actions.

There are two items in this quote that should make a responsible blogger cringe. First, coal is a fossil fuel. Seriously, Mr. Alexion, think about it. Burning coal is burning a fossil fuel. It doesn’t reduce dependency on fossil fuels. It’s swapping one kind of fossil fuel for another.

Second, petroleum is famously price inelastic. Reducing demand for heating oil, a petroleum product, in Fairbanks, Alaska, isn’t going to have any impact at all on the price of heating oil. The tiny fraction of North Slope production we consume isn’t going to have any impact at all on the price we are charged. Before you opine further on economics, WC recommends you study the subject just a bit.

But once you get past the bad examples, the bad economics and the hyperbole, Mr. Alexion’s point seems to be that we should all be able to get along. He’s asking, “Can’t we just work this out without the government getting involved?”

That hasn’t worked so well, has it? Even the subsidized exchange of the really bad furnaces for less horrible ones hasn’t worked. Scofflaws refuse to pay even part of the price for a new furnace. Of course, if we were all good neighbors, none of us would drive drunk. Or burglarize houses. Or clog the courts with domestic violence cases. Sometimes it takes the force of law to bring a scofflaw around to reason. It’s the reality. Not everyone plays nice without the threat of the government.

All of which is why WC will be voting in favor of Proposition #2. And yes, WC has a wood stove, and uses it for heat into early winter. And yes, it is a modern stove that meets environmental requirements. And no, WC bought it with his own hard-earned money, not with a government subsidy. And yes, WC burns only seasoned wood. The guy down at the bottom of Summit Drive? No so much.

By the way, WC would claim Rocky MacDonald, this organization’s treasurer, as a friend. But it doesn’t make him, or his organization, right about this issue.

So vote “Yes” on Borough Proposition #2.

This is WC’s own opinion, not paid for by anyone else. No money was expended in creating or posting this blog entry.

Governor Perry, at the Republican presidential wannabe debates on September 7, has the gall to invoke Galileo in defense of his denial of anthropogenic climate change. Governor Perry isn’t qualified to lick the boots of Galileo, doesn’t understand Galileo’s “crime” and brings the same vast incomprehension to history that he does to science.

Galileo was persecuted by the Catholic Church, dragged before in Inquisition and forced, under dire threat, to recant his proofs of heliocentricity, that the sun was the center of the solar system around which the planets revolved, as opposed to Church doctrine to the contary. Legend has it that after being forced to recant, Galileo muttered, “E pur si muove” which translates as “And yet it moves.” Galileo was a champion of observed facts and mathematical proof facing a Biblical firestorm of superstition.Galileo wasn’t “outvoted,” he didn’t have a vote and barely had the opportunity to respond before being sentenced to house arrest the remainder of his life.

When Governor Perry, in his ignorance of both science and history, compared himself to Galileo on matters of anthropocentric climate change, he had the situation exactly backwards. Perry, with his anti-science denial of evolution and climate change, is acting from his Fundamentalist Christian religious beliefs, against champions of science, reason and logic, like Galileo. Perry is the Catholic Church, denying science because it doesn’t mirror the Church’s interpretation of the Bible, or Perry’s interpretation of reality. Galileo was a man of reason; Perry is an unprincipled politician. Much closer to, say, Pope Urban VIII than to a Renaissance  scientist.

Apologists are quibbling about this, but they are being far too kind to Governor Perry. Shortly before his untimely death, Carl Sagan in his excellent The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Amazon link), provided a “baloney detection kit” to his readers.

What’s in the kit? Tools for skeptical thinking.

What skeptical thinking boils down to is the means to construct, and to understand, a reasoned argument and – especially important – to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument. The question is not whether we like the conclusion that emerges from a train of reasoning, but whether the conclusion follows from the premise of starting point and that premise is true.

- Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World, p. 210

And one of the tools is particularly helpful when using the Baloney Detection Kit in thinking about evangelical Christian politicians: they argue from authority, the premise that the Bible is the literal word of God. Sagan on “authority” -

Argument from authority carry little weight – “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.

- Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World, p. 210-211

WC urges readers to apply Carl Sagan’s useful Baloney Detection Kit to the arguments, and especially the anti-science arguments, of politicians like Governor Perry. And to beware of unprincipled hacks like Governor PErry who attempt to lend credibility to themselves and their beliefs by wrapping themselves in the ill-fitting mantles of their betters.