Kit Stolz

Obama: American businesses sitting on two trillion

Give credit to the NY TImes: they still put whole speeches of note on the front page and on the record. Speaking to the Chamber of Commerce today, President Obama pledged co-operation, but defended sensible regulations (such as we didn't have in the financial meltdown) and added a verbal jab:

So if I've got one message, my message is now is the time to invest in America. Now is the time to invest in America. (Applause.) Today, American companies have nearly $2 trillion sitting on their balance sheets. And I know that many of you have told me that you're waiting for demand to rise before you get off the sidelines and expand, and that with millions of Americans out of work, demand has risen more slowly than any of us would like.

We're in this together, but many of your own economists and salespeople are now forecasting a healthy increase in demand. So I just want to encourage you to get in the game. As part of the bipartisan tax deal we negotiated, with the support of the Chamber, businesses can immediately expense 100 percent of their capital investments. And as all of you know, it's investments made now that will pay off as the economy rebounds. And as you hire, you know that more Americans working will mean more sales for your companies. It will mean more demand for your products and services. It will mean higher profits for your companies. We can create a virtuous circle.

Here's the money the president is talking about, as a percentage of GDP:

This chart comes from A Macroeconomic Plan for a Green Recovery, an English plan to steer those billions in the corporate mattresses towards green technology investments.

Severe weather in 2010: food price inflation in 2011

As I've said before, it's just not fair that Paul Krugman is not only the best lefty writing about the economy, he's also the lefty best able to write about the consequences of global warming.

From today's column, a taste…more below the virtual fold.

While several factors have contributed to soaring food prices, what really stands out is the extent to which severe weather events have disrupted agricultural production. And these severe weather events are exactly the kind of thing we’d expect to see as rising concentrations of greenhouse gases change our climate — which means that the current food price surge may be just the beginning.

Now, to some extent soaring food prices are part of a general commodity boom: the prices of many raw materials, running the gamut from aluminum to zinc, have been rising rapidly since early 2009, mainly thanks to rapid industrial growth in emerging markets.

But the link between industrial growth and demand is a lot clearer for, say, copper than it is for food. Except in very poor countries, rising incomes don’t have much effect on how much people eat.

It’s true that growth in emerging nations like China leads to rising meat consumption, and hence rising demand for animal feed. It’s also true that agricultural raw materials, especially cotton, compete for land and other resources with food crops — as does the subsidized production of ethanol, which consumes a lot of corn. So both economic growth and bad energy policy have played some role in the food price surge.

Still, food prices lagged behind the prices of other commodities until last summer. Then the weather struck.

Consider the case of wheat, whose price has almost doubled since the summer. The immediate cause of the wheat price spike is obvious: world production is down sharply. The bulk of that production decline, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, reflects a sharp plunge in the former Soviet Union. And we know what that’s about: a record heat wave and drought, which pushed Moscow temperatures above 100 degrees for the first time ever.

The Russian heat wave was only one of many recent extreme weather events, from dry weather in Brazil to biblical-proportion flooding in Australia, that have damaged world food production.

The question then becomes, what’s behind all this extreme weather?

To some extent we’re seeing the results of a natural phenomenon, La Niña — a periodic event in which water in the equatorial Pacific becomes cooler than normal. And La Niña events have historically been associated with global food crises, including the crisis of 2007-8.

But that’s not the whole story. Don’t let the snow fool you: globally, 2010 was tied with 2005 for warmest year on record, even though we were at a solar minimum and La Niña was a cooling factor in the second half of the year. Temperature records were set not just in Russia but in no fewer than 19 countries, covering a fifth of the world’s land area. And both droughts and floods are natural consequences of a warming world: droughts because it’s hotter, floods because warm oceans release more water vapor.

As always, you can’t attribute any one weather event to greenhouse gases. But the pattern we’re seeing, with extreme highs and extreme weather in general becoming much more common, is just what you’d expect from climate change.

Hansen sees rapid sea level rise this century

Back in l981, as a relatively young man, a physicist named James Hansen led a team that reported in Science on Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.

The paper predicted that the warming signal would emerge clearly from the noise of natural variability by the end of the century. In the 21st century, said Hansen and his co-authors, we would see the opening of "the fabled Northwest Passage."

It's now a commercial shipping route.

Well, last year Hansen with a colleague published another paper, in which in his quiet way he predicted, in broad strokes, what will happen this century if we do not phase out fossil fuel consumption very soon.

It's called Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change.

There's a lot to it, and I encourage readers to take a look, but for today's purposes, I will focus solely on the sea level rise part of the paper. Hansen points out that we do not need to look to climate models to estimate how much ice Greenland will lose, and Antartica may lose, with global warming. We can look to the past, when we know from isotope records how warm it was, and, correspondingly, the sea level.

He writes:

Earths paleoclimate history shows that eventual sea level rise of many meters should be anticipated with the global warming of at least several degrees Celsius that is expected under business-as-usual [BAU] climate estimates. Yet the danger of sea level rise has had little or no impact on global energy and climate policies.

Hansen is right, of course, about our society's slow response to the threat. He goes on to say why this threat has been ignored:

The explanation, at least in part, must be belief that ice sheets respond only slowly to climate change.

Being a thoughtful, logical man, he assumes we must be the same.

He gives us too much credit, I fear. Though it's true some people are up in arms…

Via Tom Toles sketchbook.

The lives of the harvesters

Grist features a photographic essay about the immigrant farmworkers who harvest the fruits and vegetables in California, earning little, working hard, feeding the nation.

According to The Migrant Project, California agriculture produces about fifty percent of the nation's food supply, which means that these folks do about half the fieldwork in the country.

The photo below depicts part of an eight-man team from Texas specializing in watermelons. For $80 each man moves several tons of fruit a day with no gear, no protection, no insurance.

I'm always astonished when people claim that "Mexicans are lazy." What could be further from the truth?

Cold this winter? Take another look at the Arctic Paradox

As another huge storm turns south towards the Midwest, some say that the cold winter can be explained by the Arctic Paradox, which links a natural phenomenon (the Arctic Oscillation) to a man-made phenomenon (diminishing ice in the Arctic), which combines to let polar winds escape southward.

First question: Is ice in the Arctic really diminishing?

This chart, from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, says yes:

How does this link up with existing climatological patterns? Climate Central explains:

The atmospheric circulation in question is the same weather pattern that contributed to the post-Christmas blizzard in the northeastern U.S., and the extreme cold and snow that gripped much of Europe during December. Known as the Arctic Oscillation, this pattern is a large-scale variation in surface air pressure between the Arctic and the mid-latitudes. When the Arctic Oscillation is in a strongly negative mode, which has been the case recently, air pressures are higher than average in the Arctic and lower than average in the mid-latitudes. This sets up opposing temperature patterns, with a greater likelihood that cold air will spill out of the Arctic and into North America and Europe.

Scientists refer to weather patterns featuring an abnormally mild Arctic and an unusually cold U.S. and Europe as the "Warm Arctic/Cold Continents Pattern" or an "Arctic Paradox," and it is the subject of ongoing research.

It's still not fully clear to yours truly. But he appreciates new descriptive metaphors, when they come along. Here's one from a recent NY Times story that likened the declining pressure differential between the polar north and the northern hemisphere to a weakening fence, no longer able to restrain the masses of cold air from the arctic from escaping southward.

I got it! I think…

Update: Susan Orlean, the wonderful New Yorker writer, meditates on-line on the wintriest winter in her time in New York.

The political wit of Jeff Tweedy (with music too!)

Sometimes I think the Internet is the greatest invention ever, and sometimes I think it's the greatest waste of time in world history.

But sometimes you can split the difference. You can listen to music and do other stuff at the same time. Plus, of course, the music can be pretty darn wonderful.

Such as a Jeff Tweedy solo outing, streaming for free here on Wilcoworld.

Tweedy's wry comments to the Washington, D.C. crowd in December, were pretty funny too, in the political context of the infamous "shellacking" the Democrats took in the midterm elections.

"It's good to be back in D.C. I was here a few weeks ago, for the Rally to Restore Sanity. Unfortunately, it didn't work. Well, it worked for me — it restored my sanity. Somewhat."

The encore includes a wonderful version of Woody Guthrie's At My Window Sad and Lonely.

David Brower sees a UFO

Gotta love an autobiography in which a man will confess to everything he's ever seen, even if it makes him sound a little crazy. Here's David Brower, in his delightful autobiography For Earth's Sake (l990):

When I was eight, walking home one day [in Berkeley], I happened to look up at the sky and saw a brilliant object streak across it, leaving what I would now call a vapor trail. The object itself glowed red and tapered to a point in front. I described it excitedly when I got into the house, but there were no other witnesses and my parents must have thought I imagined it. My first UFO mystifies me still.

Brower's not the only famous person who saw a UFO. FOr what it's worth, so did John Lennon.

The fate of the mountains under climate change: a ray of hope for the Sierra?

In his inimitably far-sighted way, John Muir considered the fate of the Sierra Nevada in an era of climate change, long before global warming even began to take hold.

In August 1875, in his journal, he wrote:

I often wonder what man will do with the mountains…Will human destructions like those of Nature — fire and flood and avalanche — work out a higher good, a finer beauty? Another universal outpouring of lava, or the coming of a glacial period, could scarece wipe out the flowers and shrubs more effectively than the sheep. And what then is coming? What is the human part of the mountains' destiny?

Most of the prognostications about climate change and the mountains have been, indeed, dire — more drought and higher temps forcing species up the slopes. As ecologist Tim Flannery wrote in his excellent book about climate change, The Weather Makers, alpine species globally have moved about twenty feet up the montane slopes per decade, and "the implications are outrageous" for tropical rainforests.

But it's possible — stress on possible, not known for certain — that the Sierra may be spared. For reasons still unclear, the second half of the 20th century was wetter in California mountains than the first half, and the rising temps of climate change have resulted in many mountain species moving not upslope, as expected, but downslope, towards wetter, colder local environments, as discussed in a Science study, and noted in Bettina Boxall's excellent LA Times story.

For whatever reason, [researcher] Abatzoglou said the Sierra was 5% to 10% wetter in the final half of the 1900s than in the first half, allowing tree and shrub species to take hold at lower elevations.

Comparing historic vegetation data from 1905 to 1935 to information gathered from 1975 to 2005 by researchers and federal agencies, the study found that about five dozen species had on the whole migrated downhill an average of about 264 feet.

This may be what climate researcher Kevin Trenberth calls "local embroidery," and of little long-term meaning. Or it might mean the survival of species, such as the pika, that some researchers think are doomed. Researcher Connie Millar, with the US Forest Service, is surveying the pika population, which she suspects is not doomed, at least in the Sierra. She has found the same trend — pika moving downslope, towards shadier, cooler areas — in their populations.

If you're a backpacker or mountain-climber who recalls seeing pika in the mountains, Millar would love to hear from you about the critters you saw, where and when and how many.

American Have-Nots: Too poor to afford Hollywood?

The collapse in revenue generated by the entertainment business has analysts thinking deeply:

The anemic economy…is widening the gulf between the haves and the have-nots, making it tougher for some consumers to justify paying for cable or tossing a new DVD into the shopping cart.

"Right now it is a tale of two cities," [Craig] Moffett, [stock market analyst for Sanford Bernstein]said.

"On the high end, people can't go up-market fast enough," he said, referring to affluent consumers who are buying the latest in mobile phones, portable tablets, or Internet-connected TV sets. "Then you have this other half of the country that is being largely ignored in this discussion."

The "other half" encompasses the lower 40% of American earners, who, after paying for food, housing and transportation, are left with just $100 a month to pay for healthcare, clothing, phone service — and entertainment, Moffett said.

It's amazing the ignored Have-Nots spend anything on the movies, if that story is true.

How to reduce greenhouse gas levels

Research brings forward two possibilities from the past:

Kill a lot of people:

Over the course of the century and a half run of the Mongol Empire, about 22 percent of the world's total land area had been conquered and an estimated 40 million people were slaughtered by the horse-driven, bow-wielding hordes. Depopulation over such a large swathe of land meant that countless numbers of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests.

Or, set off a lot of nuclear bombs:

This study suggests that the cause of the stagnation in global warming in the mid 20th century was the atmospheric nuclear explosions detonated between 1945 and 1980. The estimated GST [global surface temperature] drop due to fine dust from the actual atmospheric nuclear explosions based on the published simulation results by other researchers ….has served to explain the stagnation in global warming. Atmospheric nuclear explosions can be regarded as full-scale in situ tests for nuclear winter. The non-negligible amount of GST drop from the actual atmospheric explosions suggests that nuclear winter is not just a theory but has actually occurred, albeit on a small scale.

This site endorses no such violent techniques, no matter how well they work in the movies.