The Biggest Control Knob: Carbon Dioxide (Richard Alley Explains All)

For those who would like to get the Richard Alley lecture straight from the source, the American Geophysical Union, here's the video. It's forty-two minutes long, but not a bit boring. Alley has a unique ability to explain complex topics in simple language.

Here's an example of his clarity, from Alley's excellent book The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future.

In the passage Alley is explaining why ice, which to most of us civilians appears to be cold and solid, is to physicists a hot substance, "one of the hottest natural solids around."

"Hot ice" may seem strange to anyone who has ever sat on a snowdrift on an outhouse seat, but it is true. In discussing how materials behave, a "cold" solid is one that is far below its melting point, and a "hot" solid is one that is close to the melting point. In a freezer, an iron horseshoe and a chocolate bar are both stiff and brittle, and neither will flow. In your back pocket, though, the horseshoe will remains stiff and brittle, but the chocolate bar will "smoosh" as it warms near its melting point. Have a blacksmith heat the horseshoe white-hot, almost to melting, and the horseshoe will become nearly as soft as the pocketed chocolate bar. Because ice is typically within a few degrees or tens of degrees of melting, it is more like white-hot iron or a pocketed chocolate bar…ice can flow. The flow of ice isn't fast, but it happens.

And here's a picture of Dr. Alley from his university, Penn State. Could the outfit be a hint? 

Richardalley

CO and Temperature Changes: Richard Alley Explains

In his talk to thousands of scientists this week at the American Geophysical Union, Dr. Richard Alley, perhaps the best communicator" of all climatologists today, explained with a wonderfully simple metaphor why changes in levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere slightly lag behind changes in global temperature.

It's important because this fact seems to challenge the cause and effect relationship between carbon dioxide and global temps. Alley opened his talk by quoting from a letter than an alum recently wrote the university for which he works, Penn State. The alum complained that for his work on global warming, Alley "should be dealt with severely to prevent such shameful activities in the future," and pointed to this lag between changes in the levels of CO2 and changes in global atmosphere as the "shameful" part of Alley's argument.  

Here's Alley's example. If he was to overspend on his credit card, his credit card company would delightedly raise the interest rate he is charged on the debt he owes. This would in not too long a time raise the amount of debt he owes the company. But nonetheless, the overspending would come first, and so one could argue that the raise in the rate of interest lags the change in the level of debt, and hence there is no cause and effect relationship between debt and interest.

 But as anyone who has ever dealt with debt knows, the interest rate is "the big control knob" on the amount of debt an individual owes, in another of Alley's wonderfully simple metaphors.

Similarly, changes in C02 track changes in global temperatures extremely well, but don't necessarily precede changes in temperature. They lag, slightly. This doesn't change the fact that CO2, more than any other factor, controls global temps…

Fig1-CO2_and_Temp2sm

Joosed: Ventura County takes on caffeinated alcohol

From my cover story this week in the Ventura County Reporter:

In his presentations on the hazards of alcoholic energy drinks
around Ventura County, administrator of the Behavioral Health
Department Dan Hicks likes to show a photograph of the aftermath of a
horrific accident in 2007.

A car driven by a young man hit a tree so hard it nearly came apart.

“This
accident happened at the intersection of Williams and Gonzales, which
is right outside my office,” he said. “The Oxnard police responded, and
they interviewed the passenger and asked him if he had been drinking.
‘Well, we had some energy drinks,’ ” he said.

In the car, the
police found a can of Joose Blue, which is nearly 9 percent alcohol by
volume, in a can about twice the size of a beer can, which makes it
equivalent to close to four beers, though it costs about $2.50.

“That
was a real eye-opener,” Hicks said. “The fact that they survived says a
lot more about the side impact bags on a Nissan than it does for the
skills of a driver on ‘Joose.’ ”

Even Hicks, who has been
working to reduce underage drinking in the county for nearly five
years, hadn’t fully realized how popular alcoholic energy drinks were
among young people — and how little adults knew about the risks.

“It’s sort of like a generation gap in awareness,” he said. “When I was
a kid in high school, we used to hide our beers in plastic wraps.
Today, the beverage companies take care of that for you. A lot of
adults don’t even know that energy drinks can contain alcohol. A
counselor in San Diego gave a presentation to some teachers at a middle
school, and went out at lunchtime and counted 12 students with
alcoholic energy drinks. They didn’t need to conceal it because the
adults didn’t even know these drinks existed.”

For the rest of the story — which really was eye-opening to yours truly — please click here. 

And here's a picture of one such energy drink. 

Cocaine-drink

"Joose." "Nitrous." "Cocaine." 

These are all names for such
alcoholic energy drinks, or names of energy drinks which are designed to be
consumed with alcohol, and marketed with alcohol.

Can you spot the trend?

Only in poetry can we really talk…

…about what the sense of being lost in life –useless — feels like.

(And, by the way, it's not all bad.)

Here's what I mean, from "Li Po" by Martha Ronk:

There is the watery, uneasy feeling, that one has
been there before, has encountered that reservoir of emotion, some
other year, under one's fingertips if one could only remember when and
where; and how often of late I find myself seeking it in the utterly
useless as if I were, as I sometimes feel myself to be, the ancient
Chinese poet gazing at the moon's reflection and longing for comrades
of old from the other side of the mountains. Having been or having
thought myself to be committed to the useful, I now find myself
wandering into patches of sunlight for no reason but to be there,
looking down for long stretches at the arrangements of moss on stone,
floating on my back in a pond looking up at clouds. Uselessness is the
purview of the very young and very old whose gift is the finding out of
these reservoirs—even time falls off the edges, unrelated to anything
and especially not to you.

[h/p: Poetry Daily]

And here's a nice photo of that familiar, watery, lonely feeling, from my old friend Cary Odes, taken looking northeast
over the Clark Range from Lower Ottoway Lake, in the Yosemite
backountry:

IMG_3501

Palin vs. Gore on Climategate

Super-blogger Andrew Sullivan has an intriguing feature on his site called The Odd Lies of Sarah Palin in which he catalogues the way the most popular so-called "conservative" in the country today lies seemingly reflexively, even about topics which are not the least bit controversial. (For instance, whether or not she consulted her daughters about accepting the nomination to be Vice-President last year.)

Well, here's another one. Yesterday Palin published an op-ed in the Washington Post, in which she claimed that global warming is real, but "a natural, cyclical environmental trend."

In an interview yesterday, Al Gore scoffed:

"The north polar ice cap has been there for 3 million years, the
size of the continental United States, and it is disappearing before
our very eyes. What do the skeptics think is causing that? Could it
possibly have anything to do with the fact that we are putting 90
million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere here every
24 hours and that these consequences have been predicted for decades by
the scientists?"

Gore chuckled, then added, "It is not sun spots."

"This is physics, it is not politics. Gravity is well understood.
The fact that the earth is round is pretty well accepted now. The moon
landing was not, as some claimed, staged on a movie lot. If there was a
large budget from carbon polluters designed to promote controversy
about those findings, I am sure we would have a debate about it. The
fact that carbon dioxide is trapped in the atmosphere is not
complicated. Not controversial. Not in dispute. And we are putting so
much of it up there every day, that the heat buildup is proceeding as
the scientists warned it would. There are lot of reasons why some
people don't want to accept that. It is, to coin a phrase, an
inconvenient truth for many, but it is a reality that we have to accept
and respond to."

To which Palin tweeted:

 "amazing 2 see Al Gore's denial of the controversy–it's like denying gravity"

One has to almost admire the audacity of her misleading. Al Gore did mention controversy, denial, gravity; so why not claim that he is denying the controversy as if he were denying gravity?

Only Palintologists and those in the stodgy reality-based community will care..

[pic courtesy of the phenomenon's 2009 Calendar, put out by her photgrapher friend Judy Patrick]

Sarah_calendar_cover_web_h23u

John Lennon on your Dreams

A couple of months ago the interesting LA Times book blog Jacket Copy for some inexplicable (but wonderful) reason put up the late great rock critic Lester Bangs' thoughts on the death of John Lennon.

Bangs was, of all critics, the truest of believers in rock and roll and, for that reason, the man most likely to understand what Lennon meant when the rock star told his followers that "the dream is over."

As Bangs said, just days after Lennon's death (when no doubt it would have been much easier to say something softer):

…the Beatles were certainly far more than a group of four talented
musicians who might even have been the best of their generation. The
Beatles were most of all a moment. But their generation was not the
only generation in history, and to keep turning the gutted lantern of
those dreams this way and that in hopes the flame will somehow flicker
up again in the '80s is as futile a pursuit as trying to turn Lennon's
lyrics into poetry. It is for that moment — not for John Lennon the
man — that you are mourning, if you are mourning. Ultimately you are
mourning for yourself.

But because he understood Lennon, sez me, Bangs also understood Lennon's real message, which was most directly put in "Nowhere Man," with its indelible chorus –"The world is at your command." Lennon was forever asking his listeners to open their eyes (as in "Strawberry Fields"); to see their own lives, to find their own way.

And so, on the anniversary of death, let me bring up the quote from Lennon that Bangs used to close out his eloquent obituary. Lennon said:

"Produce your own dream. It's quite possible to do anything… the
unknown is what it is. And to be frightened of it is what sends
everybody scurrying around chasing dreams, illusions."

That's what made Lennon inspirational. Not his faith in his own talent. His faith in yours…

Why Resistance to the Idea of Global Warming Is Rising: The “More So Syndrome”

Ice This morning Richard Harris of NPR's Morning Edition filed a typically excellent report on why, according to polls, substantially fewer Americans believe in global warming than believed just two years ago.

According to the (unaffiliated) Harris Poll, now only 51% of Americans believe that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will cause the earth's temperature to rise, down from 71% just two years ago. 

Some chalk this up to the so-called "Cimategate" scandal. Others are not so sure. 

Anthony Leiserowitz of the Yale University School of Forestry puts
one reason above all the rest: "First of all, it's the economy,
stupid."

People can only worry about so many issues at one
time, he says. So it's no surprise they worry about issues that hit
closest to home.

"And the economy is still by far the No. 1 concern of Americans, which just pushes all other issues off the table."

And there is data in the poll cited above to support his view. Most Americans don't know what the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen is about, according to the poll, but 9% of those polled thought it was about the economy.

That's a partial explanation, but not nearly as convincing to yours truly as a compelling — if complex — paper published this year by an ecologist at Cornell named Janis Dickinson.

Her paper has a terrible title, methinks, so instead I'm going to call it the More So Syndrome.

Here's how it works, in simple language: As people age, they tend to become more set in their ways. The aging mother of one of my best friends noticed this among her friends and cohorts and dubbed it called it the "More So Syndrome," because people tend to become "more so" of whatever it is they were already. 

In the language of language of the paper, which based on the works of Ernst Becker, author of The Denial of Death, which won the Pulitzer back in l973, and has now become the basis of a new school of sociology/psychology called Terror Management Theory, this is known as "defense of the ego." 

It's a fascinating paper — truly. I'm tempted to insist that you all just go there right now and read it. But I know that few if any of us have the time to read academic papers, and after all what is blogging for but to make complex topics understandable quickly.

So instead of trying to present the whole paper in one paragraph, I'm going to present a) a central contention, b) evidence for that contention, and c) an example of that idea in our society today. 

Here's the central contention:

The behaviors that people exhibit [when reminded of death] are not necessarily those that reduce the risk of death, and in fact they may sometimes increase it as long as they also bolster the individual's symbolic self and the complex, immortality-striving hero system that defines it. 

The fascinating aspect of this concept of "mortality salience" is that it is testable, scientifically.

Here's evidence for the reality of the central contention:

Scientists in Israel, led by O.T. Ben-Ari, in l991 published the results of "an experiment in which subjects who linked driving with self-esteem drove faster and became more reckless in response to stimuli that made them think about death, sacrificing true safety for false safety in the form of defense of the ego." 

And here's what author Janis Dickinson predicts we will see, as people who feel threatened by climate change harden their attitudes:

If the perception of risk, including the risks associated with climate change, increases death thought accessibility, and this becomes increasingly likely as the impacts of climate change reveal themselves, then efforts to move people towards environmentally responsible behaviors may have the opposite effect, causing them to urchase large gas-guzzling vehicles, listen to Rush Limbaugh, join fundamentalist cults, or, in the case of university faculty, hunker down and write more scientific papers. 

Jeez. That doesn't sound like a prediction. That sounds like a present-day fact.

Global warming scientific consensus reaffirmed in popular press

In response to a hacked theft of thousands of emails from a British research center, an attack which implicitly challenges the idealism of scientists studying climate, three of our most popular science publications have rushed to reaffirm the scientific consensus on the subject.

Yes, global warming is a reality on the planet today, unfortunately. 

It's not news, but it's still true.

In Scientific American, in a piece called Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense:

1998 was the world's warmest year in the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre’s records; recent years have been cooler; therefore, the previous century's global warming trend is over, right?

Anyone with even a glancing familiarity with statistics should be
able to spot the weaknesses of that argument. Given the extended
duration of the warming trend, the expected (and observed) variations
in the rate of increase and the range of uncertainties in the
temperature measurements and forecasts, a decade's worth of mild interruption is too small a deviation to prove a break in the pattern, climatologists say.

Recently, Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein asked four
independent statisticians to look for trends in the temperature data
sets without telling them what the numbers represented. "The experts found no true temperature declines over time," he wrote.

In the NewScientist, in a piece called Why there's no sign of a conspiracy in hacked emails: 

Forget about the temperature records compiled by
researchers such as those whose emails were hacked. Next spring, go out
into your garden or the nearby countryside and note when the leaves
unfold, when flowers bloom, when migrating birds arrive and so on.
Compare your findings with historical records, where available, and
you'll probably find spring is coming days, even weeks earlier than a few decades ago.

You
can't fake spring coming earlier, or trees growing higher up on
mountains, or glaciers retreating for kilometres up valleys, or
shrinking ice cover in the Arctic, or birds changing their migration
times, or permafrost melting in Alaska, or the tropics expanding, or
ice shelves on the Antarctic peninsula breaking up, or peak river flow
occurring earlier in summer because of earlier snowmelt, or sea level
rising faster and faster, or any of the thousands of similar examples.

None
of these observations by themselves prove the world is warming; they
could simply be regional effects, for instance. But put all the data
from around the world together, and you have overwhelming evidence of a long-term warming trend.

And in Popular Mechanics:

Climate Science Not a House of Cards

Perhaps the most worrisome part of this incident is that it could
easily leave the public wondering about the science of human-induced
global warming. But do the potentially unethical acts implied by these
e-mails invalidate the hypothesis that human output of greenhouse
gases, most notably CO2, creates a serious risk of rapid climate change? No.

Outspoken critics often portray climate science as a house of
cards, built on a shaky edifice of limited data and broad suppositions.
However, it's more realistic to think of the science as a deck of
cards, spread out, face up. Some data and interpretations of those data
are more certain than others, of course. But pulling out one or two
interpretations, or the results of a few scientists, does not change
the overall picture. Take away two or three cards, and there are still
49 or 50 cards facing you.

The "house of cards" view results partly from the representation
of human-induced climate change in opinion polls and in the press,
which split the debate into "believers" and "skeptics." This dichotomy
is misleading for many reasons, particularly because it implies that
those who are concerned about human-induced climate change believe
every single claim made by every scientist on this topic, in the way
that some fundamentalists claim to believe in the literal truth of
every word in a religious text. Similarly, it implies that all skeptics
doubt the entire theory.

Could this attack by unknown hackers on the climate consensus turn out to be self-defeating?

It certainly seems to have brought out the worst from the denier community.

Centrist (and former right-winger) Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs links to an astonishing BBC confrontation between a flack for the Senate's most prominent denier, Mark Morano, and an English scientist in East Anglia. It's a scene some are calling Climategate vs. Arseholegate. Worth a look:

Men Driving Us Mad: George Packer Explains the Fascination

George Packer of The New Yorker, editor of the great collection of Orwell non-fiction called Facing Unpleasant Facts, explains why Mad Men is so frustrating…and so fascinating.

Don-susan1-IMG_0874

He writes on his blog Interesting Times:

So the question is obvious: what’s so interesting about this annoying show?

Beneath the mesmerizing retro sheen lies the inversion of manners
and morals: everything forbidden us is permitted to, even encouraged
of, these men and women—smoking and drinking to excess, office sex up
to and including blatant harassment, parental neglect, a kind of frank
selfishness about ends and means. No one has to smoke outside the
building like a furtive criminal, no one has to pretend to like his
colleagues, adultery is a perk for men on the level of an
expense-account Martini dinner. Relations between the sexes are openly
exploitative, with only Peggy trying to make her way in a man’s world
and paying a high price (among other things, she’s more single-minded
and cut-throat about work than the men). Meanwhile, they go to
self-destructive lengths to conceal what we accept and even advertise:
childhood poverty, homosexuality, out-of-wedlock pregnancy. “Mad Men”
is all about repression—every character has a tell-tale tic, and
stiffness reigns over every scene—but it’s also about the license to
indulge impulses that would soon be socially forbidden. Who wouldn’t
like just once to leave their picnic garbage right where they finished
eating it?

[cut]

“Mad Men” shows the last years of a social order in which middle-class
American men were little kings—slimy, anxiety-ridden, petulant,
lifeless, but kings nonetheless. It’s all about to come undone—Peggy is
the harbinger of the change—and soon give way to an age of confusion
and improvisation, which is the age we still live in. Watching “Mad
Men” might be what it was like for Americans of an earlier age, around
the time of Lincoln, to see an eighteenth-century European costume
drama: this is what the world looked like just before the old order
fell. The roles were rigid and constricting, but they had the advantage
of being roles, ready-made for men and women to put on and live in.

Now that the "little kings" are dead, who will we become? I'm interested to find out…