We wrote about this remarkable man’s commencement speech at Stanford some time ago. Now he’s gone, and we all pray for him and his family. He’s in the company of Edison, Bell, the Wrights, Ford, and others we praised for creating this wonderful world of technology, profit, and affluence. May he rest in peace.
First, here’s a story from AP:
Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate and an Obama ally, told a radio interviewer this past week that there were not 60 votes in the Senate now for Obama’s bill.
That’s not what he said; he said he couldn’t get to 50 Democrats. Then there’s Arianna Huffington:
voters, including those mythical swing-vote independents, want the same thing everyone does: jobs and a strong economy.
The mythical swing-vote independents aren’t so “mythical”: they flipped by 33 points in November 2010. And of course there’s the good ole NYT:
The devastation extends worldwide. The great euphorbia trees of southern Africa are succumbing to heat and water stress. So are the Atlas cedars of northern Algeria. Fires fed by hot, dry weather are killing enormous stretches of Siberian forest. Eucalyptus trees are succumbing on a large scale to a heat blast in Australia, and the Amazon recently suffered two “once a century” droughts just five years apart, killing many large trees. Experts are scrambling to understand the situation, and to predict how serious it may become. Scientists say the future habitability of the Earth might well depend on the answer…forests have been absorbing more than a quarter of the carbon dioxide that people are putting into the air by burning fossil fuels
Go out and buy a fishbowl and 10,000 blue marbles. Put the marbles in the fishbowl. Take out one blue marble and put in a green marble. You’ve just demonstrated how much CO2 has increased in the air in the last 300 years. If that’s a catastrophe, we’re all dead no matter what we do. So much rubbish, so little time.
We don’t really know that much about what constitutes 95% of the universe. And even the things we think we know may not be true. BBC:
The speed of light is the Universe’s ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics — as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his special theory of relativity — depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it. Thousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit.
But Dr Ereditato and his colleagues have been carrying out an experiment for the last three years that seems to suggest neutrinos have done just that.
Neutrinos come in a number of types, and have recently been seen to switch spontaneously from one type to another. The team prepares a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, sending them from Cern to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy to see how many show up as a different type, tau neutrinos.
In the course of doing the experiments, the researchers noticed that the particles showed up a few billionths of a second sooner than light would over the same distance. The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 15,000 times, and have reached a level of statistical significance
Lots of theories in the comments section here; we blame global warming for the anomaly. Time for the another look at the amusing LHC video again.
Reuters wondered where global warming has gone:
Climate scientists have long wondered where this so-called missing heat was going, especially over the last decade, when greenhouse emissions kept increasing but world air temperatures did not rise correspondingly…where did the missing heat go? Computer simulations suggest most of it was trapped in layers of oceans deeper than 1,000 feet during periods like the last decade
Thank goodness for computer simulations. Otherwise we might have thought something else.
NYT:
China has sent the price of compact fluorescent light bulbs soaring in the United States. By closing or nationalizing dozens of the producers of rare earth metals — which are used in energy-efficient bulbs and many other green-energy products — China is temporarily shutting down most of the industry and crimping the global supply of the vital resources.
China produces nearly 95 percent of the world’s rare earth materials, and it is taking the steps to improve pollution controls in a notoriously toxic mining and processing industry. But the moves also have potential international trade implications and have started yet another round of price increases for rare earths, which are vital for green-energy products including giant wind turbines, hybrid gasoline-electric cars and compact fluorescent bulbs.
General Electric, facing complaints in the United States about rising prices for its compact fluorescent bulbs, recently noted in a statement that if the rate of inflation over the last 12 months on the rare earth element europium oxide had been applied to a $2 cup of coffee, that coffee would now cost $24.55. An 11-watt G.E. compact fluorescent bulb — the lighting equivalent of a 40-watt incandescent bulb — was priced on Thursday at $15.88
Actually, that’s the price for a pack of three. You can get a regular old light bulb for a dollar or less. But that’s a bad idea. Those old bulbs are terrible — they’re cheaper and they contain less poison than the new ones!
We’re of the opinion that twitter is mostly a bad idea, but it does have its moments:
From thorninaz: “Hey #attackwatch, I saw 6 ATM’s in an alley, killing a Job. It looked like a hate crime!”
From chuckdevore (Republican state legislator in California): “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean a big majority of us isn’t out to get you…”
From EddieRobbins: “My neighbor removed his Obama bumper sticker. I think he’s a racist.”
From DickMeyers: “Bless me #AttackWatch for I have sinned. I have muttered naughty words about our Dear Leader 9 times & have doubted his divinity a few times”
From joaniekensil: “Ate refried beans & chips for breakfast which is sort of racist foodist – Carbon emissions to follow.”
From PoliticalGravity: “Saw a kid with a lemonade stand and she didn’t have a permit.”
From DrFreeLance: “I saw a werewolf drinkin a pina colada at Trader Vic’s, and his hair was perfect.”
Funny stuff. (More amusing things here and here.) But as the twitter revolution demonstrated, you don’t actually have to be using twitter to make a fool of yourself.
For some reason we happened to keep a copy of the Tuesday, October 20, 1970 city edition of the New York Times for all these years. The story pictured above was below the fold, in the lower left corner. Construction work on the north tower began in August 1968, though site preparation began earlier. So from the time that construction began until the WTC became the tallest building in the world was 26 months.
Now it’s 120 months since 9/11, and we’re told that the replacement for the north tower is “expected to open in the fourth quarter of 2013.” Pathetic. And that’s not the worst of it. Check out this NYT video of the memorial fountains and garden, which seem to have been designed with vast and unnecessary complexity in mind. The required maintenance alone boggles the mind.
We were in the rebuild the ugly muthas camp. Knock us down and we get back up, taller and better. The world’s biggest office building was completed in a mere 16 months after all. But alas, NYC has become the kind of town where the mayor manages the fats you eat, and it takes a dozen years or more to build a building. In 2006, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin (yes, that Ray Nagin) said, “You guys in New York can’t get a hole in the ground fixed and it’s five years later.” Another five years have now passed. The country is in desperate need of a restoration of the can-do spirit that once built a great nation.
U.S. policies which encourage the development of new and existing resources could, by 2030, increase domestic oil and natural gas production by over 10 million boed, support an additional 1.4 million jobs, and raise over $800 billion of cumulative additional government revenue.
We’ve been saying this for a long time now (see Part II of this piece). It’s so painfully obvious what the country needs to do to get out of this mess, and it’s not even that hard to do. Yet, blinkered by a ridiculous ideology that borders on a strange religion, the effete among us oppose the things that are counseled by common sense.
Our question: how large is the group of Americans who believe the nonsense that prevents us from getting out of a self-inflicted economic mess? (Our guess is 25-30%, but it includes a disproportionate number of opinion shapers.) HT: PL
An EDF officer in the NYT:
You reduce, reuse and recycle. You turn down plastic and paper. You avoid out-of-season grapes. You do all the right things. Good. Just know that it won’t save the tuna, protect the rain forest or stop global warming…
Leading scientific groups and most climate scientists say we need to decrease global annual greenhouse gas emissions by at least half of current levels by 2050 and much further by the end of the century. And that will still mean rising temperatures and sea levels for generations…individual action does not work. It distracts us from the need for collective action…
you’re willing to make real sacrifices. Sell your car. Forsake your air-conditioner in the summer, turn down the heat in the winter. Try to become no-impact man. You would, in fact, have no impact on the planet. Americans would continue to emit an average of 20 tons of carbon dioxide a year; Europeans, about 10 tons…
Every ton of carbon dioxide pollution causes around $20 of damage to economies, ecosystems and human health. That sum times 20 implies $400 worth of damage per American per year. That’s not damage you’re going to do in the distant future; that’s damage each of us is doing right now.
What an unpleasant life. Our advice: see below, for what’s it’s worth.
Next time try Lindzen, Spencer, or even Lomborg. Better still, put a team together as we suggested, and refer the specifics to them.
David Brooks in the NYT:
California was awarded $186 million in federal stimulus money to weatherize homes. So far, the program has created the equivalent of only 538 full-time jobs. A $59 million effort to train people for green jobs in California produced only 719 job placements. SolFocus designs solar panels in the United States, but the bulk of its employment is in China where the panels are actually made…Johnson Controls turned $300 million in green technology grants into 150 jobs — that’s $2 million per job…Evergreen Solar, the recipient of tens of millions of dollars in state support, moved its manufacturing facility to China before filing for bankruptcy protection. The U.S. Department of Energy poured $535 million in loans into Solyndra, a solar panel maker backed by George Kaiser, a major Democratic donor. The Government Accountability Office discovered that Solyndra had been permitted to bypass required steps in the government loan guarantee process…Solyndra announced that it was ceasing operations, laying off its 1,100 employees.
Don’t forget the 14 jobs in Seattle that cost a million and a half dollars apiece.
Paul Krugman in the NYT (HT: HA):
Let’s talk about the economics. Because the ozone decision is definitely a mistake on that front. As some of us keep trying to point out, the United States is in a liquidity trap: private spending is inadequate to achieve full employment, and with short-term interest rates close to zero, conventional monetary policy is exhausted.
This puts us in a world of topsy-turvy, in which many of the usual rules of economics cease to hold. Thrift leads to lower investment; wage cuts reduce employment; even higher productivity can be a bad thing. And the broken windows fallacy ceases to be a fallacy: something that forces firms to replace capital, even if that something seemingly makes them poorer, can stimulate spending and raise employment. Indeed, in the absence of effective policy, that’s how recovery eventually happens: as Keynes put it, a slump goes on until “the shortage of capital through use, decay and obsolescence” gets firms spending again to replace their plant and equipment.
And now you can see why tighter ozone regulation would actually have created jobs: it would have forced firms to spend on upgrading or replacing equipment, helping to boost demand. Yes, it would have cost money — but that’s the point!
Good faith beliefs, bad policy. Raising costs in a business today can be a good thing if you produce a better product that people are willing to pay more for. It’s not good business if you produce the same product and it just costs more. That costs jobs, since being anything other than the low cost producer of a commodity product fritters away money that would have been better spent elsewhere.
Now you might argue that air with a little less ozone is a better product and that somebody, somewhere, someday might live a little longer on account of that. Who knows? You might be right. But the jobs are killed today, and the hypothetical person enjoying a hypothetically longer life is on a far horizon. The jobs are killed today, and no benefit is felt today.
We’ve argued repeatedly that fixing the economy is not that hard, and that is true. However, this NYT piece illustrates well that the vested interests in the academic-media-government-centric world are dead set against many of the kinds of things that are required to revive the economy, and it’s going to be a fight with them every step of the way. (The fight will not lack for amusing moments, however.)
Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi write:
CO2, a relatively minor greenhouse gas, has increased significantly since the beginning of the industrial age from about 280 ppmv to about 390 ppmv, presumably due mostly to man’s emissions. This is the focus of current concerns. However, warming from a doubling of CO2 would only be about 1 degree C (based on simple calculations where the radiation altitude and the Planck temperature depend on wavelength in accordance with the attenuation coefficients of well-mixed CO2 molecules; a doubling of any concentration in ppmv produces the same warming because of the logarithmic dependence of CO2’s absorption on the amount of CO2) (IPCC, 2007).
This modest warming is much less than current climate models suggest for a doubling of CO2. Models predict warming of from 1.5 degrees C to 5 degrees C and even more for a doubling of CO2. Model predictions depend on the ‘feedback’ within models from the more important greenhouse substances, water vapor and clouds. Within all current climate models, water vapor increases with increasing temperature so as to further inhibit infrared cooling.
Clouds also change so that their visible reflectivity decreases, causing increased solar absorption and warming of the earth. Cloud feedbacks are still considered to be highly uncertain (IPCC, 2007), but the fact that these feedbacks are strongly positive in most models is considered to be an indication that the result is basically correct. Methodologically, this is unsatisfactory…
Our study also suggests that, in current coupled atmosphere-ocean models, the atmosphere and ocean are too weakly coupled since thermal coupling is inversely proportional to sensitivity (Lindzen and Giannitsis, 1998). It has been noted by Newman et al. (2009) that coupling is crucial to the simulation of phenomena like El Niño. Thus, corrections of the sensitivity of current climate models might well improve the behavior of coupled models, and should be encouraged. It should be noted that there have been independent tests that also suggest sensitivities less than predicted by current models. These tests are based on the response to sequences of volcanic eruptions (Lindzen and Giannitsis, 1998), on the vertical structure of observed versus modeled temperature increase (Douglass, 2007; Lindzen, 2007), on ocean heating (Schwartz, 2007; Schwartz, 2008), and on satellite observations (Spencer and Braswell, 2010).
Most claims of greater sensitivity are based on the models that we have just shown can be highly misleading on this matter. There have also been attempts to infer sensitivity from paleoclimate data (Hansen et al., 1993), but these are not really tests since the forcing is essentially unknown given major uncertainties in clouds, dust loading and other factors. Finally, we have shown that the attempts to obtain feedbacks from simple regressions of satellite measured outgoing radiation on SST are inappropriate.
One final point needs to be made. Low sensitivity of global mean temperature anomaly to global scale forcing does not imply that major climate change cannot occur. The earth has, of course, experienced major cool periods such as those associated with ice ages and warm periods such as the Eocene (Crowley and North, 1991). As noted, however, in Lindzen (1993), these episodes were primarily associated with changes in the equator-to-pole temperature difference and spatially heterogeneous forcing. Changes in global mean temperature were simply the residue of such changes and not the cause.
Meanwhile from the UK:
CERN’s 8,000 scientists…have made an important contribution to climate physics, prompting climate models to be revised. The first results from the lab’s CLOUD (“Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets”) experiment published in Nature today confirm that cosmic rays spur the formation of clouds through ion-induced nucleation. Current thinking posits that half of the Earth’s clouds are formed through nucleation. The paper is entitled Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation. This has significant implications for climate science because water vapour and clouds play a large role in determining global temperatures. Tiny changes in overall cloud cover can result in relatively large temperature changes…
Climate models will have to be revised, confirms CERN in supporting literature: “it is clear that the treatment of aerosol formation in climate models will need to be substantially revised, since all models assume that nucleation is caused by these vapours and water alone.” The work involves over 60 scientists in 17 countries.
Apparently some of these folks may be found in the 2% of nincompoops cited here. HT: RS
Paul Krugman in the NYT:
the scientific consensus about man-made global warming — which includes 97 percent to 98 percent of researchers in the field, according to the National Academy of Sciences — is getting stronger, not weaker, as the evidence for climate change just keeps mounting.
In fact, if you follow climate science at all you know that the main development over the past few years has been growing concern that projections of future climate are underestimating the likely amount of warming. Warnings that we may face civilization-threatening temperature change by the end of the century, once considered outlandish, are now coming out of mainstream research groups…
multiple investigations into charges of intellectual malpractice on the part of climate scientists have ended up exonerating the accused researchers of all accusations…
only 21 percent of Republican voters in Iowa believe in global warming…one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.
So very sure of himself and his superiority to many of us. He’s fairly dripping with contempt for those who dare disagree with him. (And he shops for his statistics at the same store as Richard Cohen.) Final point: if this is what they say in public about those who disagree with them, what do you suppose they say in private?
A reporter watched Rainstorm Irene on CNN:
“We are in, right, now…the right eye wall, no doubt about that…there you see the surf,” he said breathlessly. “That tells a story right there.” Stumbling and apparently buffeted by ferocious gusts, he took shelter next to a building. “This is our protection from the wind,” he explained. “It’s been truly remarkable to watch the power of the ocean here.” The surf may have told a story but so too did the sight behind the reporter of people chatting and ambling along the sea front and just goofing around. There was a man in a t-shirt, a woman waving her arms and then walking backwards. Then someone on a bicycle glided past.
All the cable news coverage was deeply offensive. They were all overacting, all breathlessly saying the same stupid things, as if the viewers had never seen it rain before. Someone could have made a career for himself by saying into the camera, “It’s just raining. There’s really nothing to see here.” Now that would have been good TV.
The boxers or briefs moment was in 1994, and variations of it have continued ever since. CNN’s debate moderator continued with the fatuous and puerile questions in a recent GOP debate.
It looks like the time for this nonsense may finally have passed, and thank goodness for that. The leading GOP candidates are speaking very plainly these days about their opinions — the “monstrous lie” that is Social Security, the “radical environmentalists” who are preventing the exploitation of America’s enormous and untapped energy resources, and so forth. It is going to make the wise men in the media even more apoplectic than they already are, if that’s even possible.
We hope the moderator in the next debate tries the nonsense questions one more time, if only to hear the response he gets.
About half of both men and women in the U.S. will be obese by 2030…Obesity…will add an extra 7.8 billion cases of diabetes, 6.8 billion cases of heart disease and stroke, and 539 billion cases of cancer in the U.S. within the next two decades. Some 32 per cent of men and 35 per cent of women are now obese
Your government at work. BTW, we changed some numbers in the story above, but who notices these little details anymore?
Eat less meat to fight warming…”Industrial agriculture is a part of the problem,” Gore said Friday during an interview with FearLess Revolution founder Alex Bogusky. “The shift toward a more meat-intensive diet”…and the reliance on synthetic nitrogen for fertilizer are also problems…Gore advocated organic farming and relying on “more productive, safer methods that put carbon back in the soil”…
The former vice president also criticized climate change skeptics, urging those who support curbs to greenhouse gases to “win the conversation” when it comes to global warming. He compared the struggle against climate skeptics to the fight against racism during the civil rights movement.
It’s remarkable that we’ve reached this point in our nation — those who consider themselves elite believe such silly things, and evince such contempt for those who disagree with them that real debate is impossible. What to do, what to do?
As of the last few days “Rick Perry and His Eggheads: Inside the Brainiest Political Operation in America” has been making the rapid rounds on Kindle (#2 in “politics and current events”). This download is actually a longish chapter excerpted from a work-in-progress by Sasha Issenberg — “The Victory Lab” — about new, scientifically-based campaign techniques said to be transforming the American electoral process.
The chief architect of Perry’s strategies — and central figure in the chapter — is Dave Carney, a hulking three hundred pound, six foot four political pro from New Hampshire who once worked for George H. W. Bush. Said to be camera shy, if Perry wins, or even if he is nominated, Carney is likely to become as much of a household political name as Karl Rove or David Axelrod.
Indeed, if I were Axelrod, I would have been up last night poring over “Rick Perry and His Eggheads.” It’s filled with radical ideas about campaigning. Carney abjures such staples as lawn signs, targeted mailings, robocalls (Thank God!) and even, to a large extent, TV ads. He advocates instead personal appearances and flesh-pressing by the candidate, taking it to the people, as it were, something for which Perry clearly has a gift. This, in turn, generates a constant flow of media coverage on old and, perhaps more importantly, new media (Twitter, Facebook, even ye olde PJM).
Indeed, the MSM is almost purposefully disdained (up to a point, anyway). In his recent campaign for governor, Perry refused even to meet with the editorial boards of leading Texas newspapers, preferring to spend time with actual voters.
This strategy — which is counter to decades of conventional political wisdom — comes from research undertaken for Perry and detailed by Issenberg in the chapter. Several years ago Carney brought in a pair of liberal Yalie academics to test the efficacy of various traditional campaign techniques and came up with the surprising findings. This resulted in changes in tactics and the supposedly-dumb Texas governor won re-election big, twice.
One of the most interesting issues in current politics (for the right side of the aisle anyhow) is how to deal with a media establishment that votes 90% or more for your opponent, and often worships the ground he deigns to trod. How does a conservative candidate deal with that? Maybe by using the media’s disdain to generate street cred, at least of this stage of the campaign. It will be very interesting to see how this develops.
Richard Cohen, yes that Ricard Cohen, in the WaPo:
Perry waxed wrongly on global warming. He rejected the notion that it is at least partially a product of industrialization, asserting that “a substantial number of scientists have manipulated data” to make it appear that mankind — our cars, trains, automobiles, not to mention China’s belching steel mills — is the culprit. He said that an increasing number of scientists have challenged this notion and that, in conclusion, he stood with them — whoever they might be…
there are some scientists who are global warming skeptics, but these few — about 2 percent of climate researchers — could hold their annual meeting in a phone booth, if there are any left. (Perhaps 2 percent of scientists think there are.)
Perry’s quaint belief in the utter innocence of mankind when it comes to polluting our precious atmosphere might seem like a innocuous tick, a conviction without consequence. In this, it could be likened to the entirely wacky conservative belief of yore that the fluoridation of drinking water was a communist tactic…
just as important is the reason Perry clings to his belief. It’s not that he has studied the science, pored through the reports and all. It’s rather that global warming is global and reversing it would take global programs. This means that standards and limits have to be imposed by the much-reviled federal government — and it, in turn, has to cooperate with other nations.
This is how those on one side of the aisle think and, given the tone of moral superiority, it is a legitimate question whether any evidence could convince them otherwise; we’ve seen that before. As you know, the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere in recent centuries has been trivial, and AGW, whether it exists or not, is neither important nor urgent. But our betters think otherwise, and we’re going to be hearing a lot more of this in the days to come.
