In honor of the cold beauty of Earth Day 2010 in California, and in honor of the yosemite pool on Flickr…
Okay, this blogging thing is getting out of hand
Wondering where that cold air over California is coming from?
Do your own jetstream tracking at home, via NOAA, and find out!
No, I'm not kidding. That's what Bad Mom, Good Mom did, and then wrote up the scientific recipe for home consumption, in a post called Do you know where that's been?
Here's a picture of the cold air mass she tracked, perhaps at home from her kitchen table.
Where's it coming from? Well, she ran a backwards trajectory from the NOAA data, and traced it…to Siberia!
People amaze me. Maybe that marks me as naive, but I'm just going to say it anyhow.
Theme song for the drought-averse in SoCal
It's raining, slightly, and yes, I'm happy…we're now at about 110% of normal, which is pretty much right on the button of what Terry Schaeffer, forecaster extraordinaire, predicted for Ventura County in January.
Try, try again for a climate bill in Washington
For all the flaws of the climate bill that passed the House but ground to a halt in the Senate this past winter, the need for action to reduce the risks of costs of climate change remains as acute as ever.
The practical attitude towards this central question, as expressed recently by Ron Brownstein, an astute political observer for years with the Los Angeles Times and many other publications, is that the U.S. must act, and so — in time — it will.
President Obama and the trio of senators expected to soon release a compromise bill are making extraordinary efforts to address the concerns of energy interests and legislative moderates on both sides who have resisted action on climate. If those incentives can't break the logjam, the result could be a sustained stalemate that prevents the United States from advancing in any direction on energy.
Reading between the lines, Brownstein sounds almost a little optimistic. So too does veteran business journalist Steven Pearlstein for the Washington Post:
Six weeks ago, it looked as if there was no chance that Congress would
approve climate change legislation this year.
The bill that had passed the House was so long, so complicated, so
punitive to the coal-dependent Midwest economy, involved so many
political compromises and so much money to be redistributed by the
federal government, that it became the whipping boy of choice for
conservative politicians and commentators.
Passage of health-care legislation, however, may have changed all that.
Democrats and their liberal supporters saw how much good could be
accomplished by not allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good.
And Republicans and the business lobby were reminded of the concessions
they could have won but didn't by their decision to abandon bipartisan
compromise and instead try to kill the legislation altogether.
At a climate change symposium I reported on for the Ventura County Star this Friday, the final speaker, Terrapass founder Peter Freed, reminded the dwindling crowd that "everyone is waiting" for the US to act.
That's true both at home (utility companies, as Brownstein mentions in his piece, are waiting for a signal on fuel pricing) and abroad (China has as much to lose as we do from a changing climate, and may well be willing to make a deal — if we are really willing to act).
Could this simple fact be the best argument for action to reduce the risks and costs of global warming?
That the world is watching, and that we cannot let the planet down?
Happy Fortieth, Earth Day
Well, my story about the fortieth birthday of Earth Day for the Ventura County Reporter is a few days early, but what the heck — the occasion does deserve celebrating, and a few questions for local enviros.
Let me recommend it to you.
My favorite quote, from Paul Jenkin, of the Ventura County chapter of Surfrider:
“A recent river clean up by the Main Street Bridge near the Ventura River estuary netted over five and a half tons of debris. A similar clean-up last fall netted even more. This is the result of large populations of people living in the river bottom. I think this is a real sign of how our society and its neglectful inability to address social problems has environmental ramifications.”
Reasons to love Barack (vol. 9003)
Despite the Obama's inability to nudge this country, far less the world, towards climate sanity, there remain plenty of reasons to love the guy. Here are a couple of examples I've been meaning to post:
In the popular inside account of the 2008 campaign, Game Change, we learn what happened at the crucial meeting on the economy in the fall of 2008, when John McCain canceled a debate appearance to demand a meeting on the economy, and then — at the meeting — failed to act.
Barack took over.
Joel Achenbach recounts the scene:
Skimming the book, one passage jumped out: The account of White
House meeting of President Bush, Barack Obama, McCain, Nancy Pelosi and
other top officials during the financial crisis of September 2008.
Obama, the authors write, all but ran the meeting, even though McCain
had sought it. McCain said nothing for 45 minutes and then had little
that was helpful to contribute. It's impossible to know who is
channeling the story to the authors, since it's all anonymous, but it
seems to me that Bush was one of the sources (or Rove, Bush's brain?)
and that he gave McCain some payback for all the guff McCain gave him
over the years.
One Republican in the room mused silent, If you closed your eyes and changed everyones' voices, you would have thought Obama was the president of the United States. [p. 388]
… Bush was dumbfounded by McCain's behavior. He'd forced
Bush to hold a meeting that the president saw as pointless — and then
sat there like a bump on a log. Unconstructive, thought Bush. Unclear. Ineffectual. [p. 389]
And in New York, a boy pollster finds the same general reaction to the president in the public at large, despite a tremendous slump in the popularity of Congress and politics in general:
Little boy to dad: Do you like Obama?
Dad: Yes, son, I like Obama.
Boy: You like Obama, mom?
Mom: Yes, I like Obama.
Boy: You like Obama?
Sister: I like Obama.
Boy: Hey, people, you like Obama?
Random people: Yes, we do.
According to a story yesterday on All Things Considered, today the President will deliver a major address about NASA. The administration proposed a new position on rocket development at the agency a few weeks ago, which — all agree, even within the administration — has been poorly explained.
It's a policy that can be defended, and appears to possibly be a far-sighted approach that could actually be supported by many critics of NASA, but somehow its good points have been lost in translation.
The solution? The usual one.
Send the president out to make a speech. Few can resist him, at least in person, it seems…
The reductio ad absurdum of climate change skepticism
Because the vast majority of scientists on the planet agree that climate change is happening, and because this consensus view is shared even among most members of the public — although that consensus is eroding — the curious result is that most of the discussion about global warming is now happening at the ideological fringes of the debate.
Notably, on sites that question or flatly deny the reality of climate change, such as the extremely popular Watts Up with That?
Good thing? Bad thing? Not sure, but it's a fact. And some scientists, trying to make this exceedingly complex subject understandable, have resorted to going into the virtual lion's den to answer questions for this self-selected crowd of skeptics, deniers, and independent thinkers.
This past week, Dr. Walt Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center picked up a gauntlet thrown down by Willis Eschenbach on "Watts Up…" Eschenbach challenged scientists to answer some skeptical questions about the science of climate change.
To yours truly, a lot of the problem here is the nature of scientific language, which often translates poorly into English, but Meier does bring real depth to some of his answers, even if they still don't fall gently off the tongue like Shakespeare, or even newspaper prose.
Here's his answer to a logical and frequent complaint from skeptics — that is, if you can't predict the weather more than ten days out, how on earth do you think you can predict the climate decades into the future?
How can a more complex situation be modeled more easily and
accurately than a simpler situation? Let me answer that with a couple
more questions:
1. You are given the opportunity to bet on a coin flip. Heads you win
a million dollars. Tails you die. You are assured that it is a
completely fair and unbiased coin. Would you take the bet? I certainly
wouldn’t, as much as it’d be nice to have a million dollars.
2. You are given the opportunity to bet on 10000 coin flips. If heads
comes up between 4000 and 6000 times, you win a million dollars. If
heads comes up less than 4000 or more than 6000 times, you die. Again,
you are assured that the coin is completely fair and unbiased. Would you
take this bet? I think I would.
But wait a minute? How is this possible? A single coin flip is far
simpler than 10000 coin flips. The answer of course is that what is
complex and very uncertain on the small scale can actually be
predictable within fairly narrow uncertainty bounds at larger scales. To
try to predict the outcome of a single coin flip beyond 50%
uncertainty, you would need to model: the initial force of the flip,
the precise air conditions (density, etc.), along with a host of other
things far too complex to do reasonably because, like the weather, there
are many factors and their interactions are too complex. However, none
of this information is really needed for the 10000 toss case because the
influence of these factors tend to cancel each other out over the 10000
tosses and you’re left with a probabilistic question that is relatively
easy to model. In truth, many physical systems are nearly impossible to
model on small-scales, but become predictable to acceptable levels at
larger scales.
Now of course, weather and climate are different than tossing a coin.
Whereas coin flips are governed largely by statistical laws, weather
and climate are mostly governed by physical laws. And climate models, as
I mentioned above, are far from perfect. The relevant question is
whether climate can be predicted at a high enough confidence level to be
useful. As mentioned in NH2 [null hypothesis two — scientific language, sorry], we find that climate has largely varied
predictably in response to past changes in forcing. This is clearly seen
in ice core records that indicate a regular response to the change in
solar forcing due to changes in the earth’s orbit (i.e., Milankovitch
cycles). If climate were not generally predictable, we would expect the
earth’s climate to go off into completely different states with each
orbital change. But that doesn’t happen – the earth’s climate responds
quite regularly to these cycles. Not perfectly of course – it is a
complex system – but close enough that the uncertainties are low enough
for us to make reasonable predictions.
It is worth mentioning here that while the general response of
climate to forcing is steady and predictable, there is evidence for
sudden shifts in climate from one regime to another. This doesn’t
invalidate NH2, it merely suggests that there may be thresholds in the
climate system that can be crossed where the climate transitions quickly
into a new equilibrium. When exactly such a transition may occur is
still not well known, which adds uncertainty suggest that impacts could
come sooner and be more extreme than models suggest.
This makes sense, but doesn't appear to have impressed the crowd at Watts Up, which includes some deniers of astonishing density.
Here's my favorite excessive response to Meier's thoughtfulness, from "NewEyes":
Ok, that’s where I get out of the boat because I do not believe that “step one” in science, OBSERVATION, is accurate.
I have come to believe that the reporting of observations is false and that the observations themselves are twisted.
Can we measure temperature?
Don Blankenship: A coal-black villain worthy of Oliver Stone
Though Oliver Stone is reviled and sometimes revered for his political opinions, those who love the movies of the last three decades know him (or should) as the screenwriter mostly likely to understand — and bring to life — villains.
In Platoon, it was the alcoholic sergeant Wall Street, Sgt. Barnes, played by Tom Berenger, a vile-tempered alcoholic, a tough guy, likely to keep a recruit alive — or so it seemed. Only over time did his true depravity emerge.
In Wall Street, it was Gordon Gekko, of course, whose immortal lines and sheer bravado helped Michael Douglas win an Oscar. The character is so indelible he's coming back for a second turn in the limelight.
Alfred Hitchcock liked to say that "the stronger the villain, the stronger the picture" — a lesson Stone clearly has taken to heart. But it's not just that Stone's villains are evil; it's that their villainy makes sense to them, so much so they want to prove their worth through it. You believe that they believe it — every word of it. That's why is Nixon is so memorable. He's sincerely evil.
In that light, the nation should hope that Stone takes a look at Don Blankenship, the unapologetically greedy CEO of Massey Energy, the coal firm on whose watch twenty-nine miners died last week.
David Roberts of Grist lays out the facts against Massey and Blankenship, and they just don't quit. Here's just one set, relating to the Upper Big Branch mine where the men lost their lives.
1,342 Safety Violations: Since 2005,
The Site Of The Massey Coal Mine Explosion That Killed 25 Mine Workers
Was Cited For 1,342 Safety Violations. "The Upper Big Branch
coal mine, the site of Monday's explosion, has been cited 1,342 times
for safety violations since the beginning of 2005." About a third of the
violations – 458 were cited just last year – "including 50 that federal
regulators said were 'unwarrantable failures to comply.'" [Washington
Post, 4/7/10;
Charleston Journal Gazette, 4/8/10]
But those are just facts, along with the fact that this is the worst mining disaster in this country in forty years. What makes Blankenship so suitable for Stone as a villain is his unabashed certainty. He's right and he knows it, beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Here he is speaking on the subject of mining safety and other topics last fall, via Jonathan Chait:
As someone who has overseen the mining of more coal than anyone else in
the history of central Appalachia, I know that the safety and health of
coal miners is my most important job. I don’t need Washington
politicians to tell me that, and neither do you. But I also know — I
also know Washington and state politicians have no idea how to improve
miner safety. The very idea that they care more about coal miner safety
than we do is as silly as global warming.
It's over the top, isn't it? Too bad — too melodramatic — to be true.
But that's the nature of monsters, their unbelievability. We cannot quite believe that someone could be that ugly, that unashamedly evil, until we see it — or hear it in their dialogue — for ourselves.
Oliver Stone, our nation turns its mournful eyes to you…show us this monster, from his point of view. Bring him to life. Expose his prideful certainly. Reveal him in all his peacock glory, his hideous logic laid bare. Show us what we have to fear.
And then ruin him — dramatically. For all time. If you can. Please. Make him the Citizen Kane of the coal industry. It's the least we can, as a country, is destroy his image, after what he has done.
[Here's Blankenship, displaying his usual attitude towards the press]
Dangerous gases, by Tom Toles
Love the mordant subhead on this one by Tom Toles, who once again insists on keeping his eye on the ball.
Well, that is, once again he insists on making us look at what we must face but would rather not, which is threat of climate change.
Is there a better advocate for confronting the issue on a daily basis?
Surely not.
Who could it be?
These dreams are full of portent: Werner Herzog reads Madeline
Werner Herzog movies will take you aback, and can make you gasp and even mutter to your significant other sitting next to you, equally astonished by what you have just seen, but the man himself in conversation is no less startling and perhaps even more memorable.
In conversation with Pico Iyer this past Wednesday at UC Santa Barbara, Herzog said that he thought that despite his love for cinema, and his great accomplishments in the form, it's possible that he was a better writer than he was a filmmaker.
After seeing him this past evening, I think he might be right. Must read his just-released Conquest of the Useless, a book of diaries, and will do so asap.
Don't believe that he could be that memorable as a writer or speaker?
We, here's the simplest possible example of his verbal genius: Herzog reads Madeline.
I guarantee you, you will never forget this reading of a book you thought you knew.
(More on Herzog's thoughts on our future… soon.)
h/t: Nancy Rommelman
Kit Stolz 