Kit Stolz

Denier “Science”: How to Miss the Forest for the Trees

At the ever-entertaining Watts Up With That, well-known global warming skeptic Roger Pielke Sr. links to the following graph:

In a challenge to a NASA/GRL study released last week that shows a sharp decline in Arctic sea ice coverage, Pielke Sr. writes: Since 2008, the anomalies have actually decreased.

No, I'm not kidding! That's his analysis of the graph above. (Check out the link if you don't believe me.)

Is there a better example anywhere of a scientist unable to see baselines shifting?

Or, as they used to say, not able to see the forest
for the trees?

Agnosticism: Sweeping the Nation

Well, maybe not the nation, but agnosticism does seem to be sweeping the Internet.

Maud Newton, a leading book blogger, a novelist, and probably something else in her spare time for money, agrees with me that agnosticism has gotten a horrifically bad rap, from atheists and believers alike, and in Book Forum writes a defense. Here's her first entry, from — irony alert! — the Bible:

Eccelsiastes

By far the most heretical book of the Bible, this candid, downbeat, and
gorgeously poetic meditation on the seeming meaninglessness of
existence—“all is vanity and a chasing after wind”—has incited
controversy throughout the approximately twenty-three hundred years of
its existence. The narrator, Qoheleth, advocates acceptance of fate and
an absent, somewhat neglectful creator—“the race is not to the swift,
nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the
learned, nor favor to the skillful: but time and chance happeneth to
them all”—and the simple pleasures and innumerable mysteries of life.

Newton posts this with a painting from Caravaggio, featuring "Doubting" Thomas. Not sure if Saint Thomas with the risen Savior fits her point, but it's such a great painting I'm going to follow suit:

The Writer vs. the Artist

One of Tennessee Williams' most accomplished (and least appreciated) plays is the last one he wrote, Vieux Carre. It's worth reading just to experience Williams characterize himself as a young man, living in New Orleans, encountering the human wrecks he would glorify in his immortal Streetcar.

A month or so ago Hilton Als of The New Yorker gave a Manhattan production a spectacularly insightful review. Unfortunately, The New Yorker site has taken an anti-blogger attitude that routinely excludes those of us — even subscribers — who would admire and link to these sort of pieces. Here's the one passage from their on-line "abstract" of the review that survived an incredibly brutal editing:

Here [the Williams character, as an old man] is called the Nightingale,
and he is an openly gay quick-sketch artist, rueful and warm. He quiets
the Writer’s hysterics and tries to inspire in him what Blanche Dubois
called “the opposite” of death.

Intriguing, no? Wish I could quote more. Als himself quotes at length from the gorgeous play, focusing on the back-and-forth between the ruthless Nightingale and the idealistic Writer. Fascinating stuff.

And here's the playbill image from the Pearl Theater, which put it on…had I been within a hundred miles, I would have gone myself, but 3000 is a bit too far…

Weeping for What Does Not Matter

The long-winded but extra-smart Sharon Asytyk ruminates on the meaning of Michael Jackson's death:

Michael Jackson is not Michael Jackson the pop star, or Michael
Jackson the boy from the silly Jackson Five, or Michael Jackson the
child abuser – he’s simply an empty space of fame into which we can
pour our need for saints and stories of redemption.

And of course, we have an endless sack of grief to call upon. We
are, of course, not permitted to mourn dramatically for things actually
worth grieving over – it is either normal or trivial that we cannot
safely fish in the water, that small frogs that I once captured and
released no longer exist, that we face a world of declining resources
and a great deal of conflict over those resources. We are not
permitted to grieve extravagantly or get maudlin over the fact that we
pass on less to our children in every generation, or that we have a
much less secure future than we once did. Instead, our grief is channeled into spectacles, into the iconic representation of all that
is trivial about a generation – as the media prepared to run
all Jackson, all the time, the front piece of yesterdays MSM page
included the quote “New book says Jackie Kennedy may have had
Torrid Affair with RFK.” Gee, that’s relevant – let’s also bring up
the trivial losses of a previous generation, into which they could pour
all their fantasies.

Anything so that we don’t have to think about the world as it
actually is. Anything to wipe the death of all green shoots off the
page. Anything to harken back to less important questions than whether
your kids have a future, how hot the planet will get, how poor you will
be. Anything to give us outlet for our emotions so that they may be
expelled pointlessly on things that do not matter. Anything to let us
feel passion for things that are totally harmless, conveniently
distracting, and, bluntly, make us dumber just for being near them.

Weep now. Stop all the clocks. He is dead. He was not
our North, our South, our East or West, but he’ll do in place of actual
content, meaning or a moral compass. After all, a great many things
worth grieving over are truly dead, and we never even wept for them.

Unlike Sharon, I actually liked a good deal of Michael Jackson's music, but I can only agree with her that the mourning over his death (quite possibly due to prescription drug abuse) shows how pathetically confused we as a nation are about what matters for our future, and for our children's.

Sierra Water: It’s Cleaner Than You Think

That's according to an ER doc and professor at UC Davis named Robert Derlet, who has been testing water at the most popular Sierra wilderness sites for years for the Wilderness Medicine Society.

Here's a study on the subject he authored a few years ago for the WMS, and here's a terrific story about his work from The Los Angeles Times, back in the good old days when they had an outdoors section.

Three take-away points: chances are good that you can drink water straight from Sierra streams and lakes without any filtration and stay healthy. The parasite giardia is not likely to harm you:

The threat is comparable to the chances of beachgoers being attacked by
a shark, according to University of Cincinnati researchers who studied
the danger giardia poses to backpackers, namely "an extraordinarily
rare event to which the public and the press have seemingly devoted
inappropriate attention."

(Derlet agrees, and in the aforementioned study points out that tests in the last few years on backpackers who did develop diarrhea in the backcountry found that giardia was not the cause. He's also skeptical that water filters, which easily clog, would successful remove giardia cysts.)

Second, the most likely risk is the familiar bug e. coli, which can be spread, for instance, by cattle manure falling in water, but even in heavily traveled backcountry sites the numbers are reassuring. Backpackers can safely drink water straight from backcountry lakes. Derlet told the Times reporter:

Most people think the
water is better from a nice, running stream because it's so fresh and
churned up. But the top few inches of lake water are zapped with
ultraviolet rays from the sun, which are a very powerful disinfectant.

Third, the most likely pathway to infection is by poor hygiene, and according to experts, washing your hands with alcohol hand gels after a visit to the wilderness privy is "incredibly effective" at preventing you from infecting others.

To yours truly, this fear of wild water is part of a larger fear of nature itself, and an absolute plague on American society… to help us overcome it, let me repost some beauty at Pioneer Basin from the astounding (and generous) wilderness photographer Buck Forester, a hero I have yet to meet…

Obama Frames Climate Change

The Obama administration is coming back from the G-8 meetings with no agreement from other nations — both European and developing — on reducing emissions of heat-trapping gases such as CO2.

This has not been clearly reported; as so often seems to happen these days, the clearest statement on a murky news situation comes not from the news pages, but from the editorial, as in this from the NYTimes:

Before the leaders gathered, their negotiators had already settled
on a draft communiqué, committing to a 50 percent cut in worldwide
greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The industrial countries would cut
theirs by 80 percent, and the developing countries would make
“significant” if unquantified cuts. But on Wednesday, things fell
apart. The developing nations flatly refused to commit to the 50
percent goal by 2050.

It was not immediately clear why they
balked. (My emphasis.) Some repeated an old demand: that the United States and the
other industrialized nations — which bear responsibility for the
buildup of greenhouse gases since the beginning of the industrial
revolution — should do more and do it faster. Otherwise, the developing
nations would be left with an unfair share of the burden while their
economies were expanding rapidly.

What is clear is that Mr. Obama
and the other leaders of the developed world have yet to come up with
the right mixture of pressure and incentives to get the developing
countries to commit.

The administration's cap-and-trade plan can be criticized, but I don't see how anyone who wants to see the world act to reduce the risks of climate change could argue with Obama's closing statement:

Ultimately we have a choice. We can either shape our
future or we can let events shape it for us. We can fall back on the
stale debates and old divisions, or we can move forward and decide to
meet this challenge together. I think it's clear from our progress
today which path is preferable.

Of course, that's not to say that some (such as Ted Rall) won't snipe…and memorably so:

Larry King Turns Out to be a Very Likable Guy

Had a chance to interview Larry King last week. He's doing a book tour, and so took questions for fifteen minutes from me at CNN, followed no doubt by fifteen minutes with another reporter from some other part of the country, and so on. Still, I found myself liking the guy, despite his hunger for fame and fortune. He's a good listener, and takes questions seriously, and he's funny. Here's my favorite Q&A:

When asked what people get wrong about him, the famous interviewer for a moment was stumped.

“They think I must be a pretty cool guy, but I’m not,” he said.
“Food falls on me. I’m not hip. I couldn’t tell you one song on the
Billboard 500. I like young people and they usually like me, but
sometimes they think I’m with it. I’m not with it, I’m around it. I’m
just about ready to accept the fax machine.”

Fish and Sheep Know Globe is Warming: Why Don’t We?

Talk to climate change skeptics, and they will take you into the weeds of global temperature measurement, the supposedly overlooked importance of the sun, and so on. They will invariably cite the obvious fact that global temps have risen and fallen over the eons.

But they will not mention that the glaciers and plants and animals, with whom we share the planet, are responding to the rise in global temps in predictable and difficult to deny ways. In the 19th century, there were 150 glaciers in Glacier National Park; by 2030 they will be gone, according to the crazy wild-haired radicals at the Parks Service. Sheep, which have been weighed for other reasons for decades on a remote Scottish island, are shrinking due to global warming, according to a new study reported in Science. Dozens of other natural examples have been cited and photographed.

Many are in a new presentation for the US Fish and Wildlife Service by Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech (who has also written a book for Christians on the subject). She cites a study of fish habitat off Alaska by F.J. Mueter and M.A. Litzow, from 2007, which includes an excellent graph:

All this raises an inevitable question: When will those of us in Southern California be smart enough to shift
our habitat?

After all if we continue down the path of
uncontrolled emissions, drought in our region will look something like
this:

Anyone else thinking we may have to move north someday before it's too late?

Arctic Ice Trends Sharply Downward: Few Notice or Care

It's frankly shocking to me how many people I encounter who still cling to the idea that the globe is not warming, despite vast scientific libraries of evidence to the contrary.

Here's the latest example, from data compiled by NASA and ICESAT:

For more, see NASA's story New NASA Satellite Survey Reveals Dramatic Arctic Sea Ice Thinning

Two take-away points from the chart above. One, the red indicates multi-year ice; two, the blue reveals thin seasonal ice, which will return in the winters…but has little of the density or the staying power of what has been lost. In the words of Ron Kwok, writing for the GRL:

The total area covered by the thicker, older "multi-year" ice that
has survived one or more summers shrank by 42 percent.

Which raises the question: What will it take to convince doubters? The loss of Miami?

(Sorry.)

Palin to Run on Oil Development Platform in 2012

Really. Outside of her flaming display of hurt feelings, it's about the only thing that makes any kind of sense in her resignation "statement" (if we are so generous as to characterize it in that way).

(You'll have to ignore the eccentric capitalization and odd verb choices; clearly, Palin without a speechwriter is like Bush on steroids — all the malapropisms, but none of the focus.)

We aggressively and responsibly develop our resources because they
were created to be used to better our world… to HELP people… and we
protect the environment and Alaskans (the resource owners) foremost
with our policies.

Here's some of the things we've done:

We created a petroleum integrity office to oversee safe development.
We held the line FOR Alaskans on Point Thomson – and finally for the
first time in decades – they're drilling for oil and gas.

We have AGIA, the gasline project – a massive bi-partisan victory
(the vote was 58 to 1!) – also succeeding as intended – protecting
Alaskans as our clean natural gas will flow to energize us, and
America, through a competitive, pro-private sector project. This is the
largest private sector energy project, ever. THIS is energy
independence.

And ACES – another bipartisan effort – is working as intended and
industry is publicly acknowledging its success. Our new oil and gas
"clear and equitable formula" is so Alaskans will no longer be taken
advantage of. ACES incentivizes NEW exploration and development and
JOBS that were previously not going to happen with a monopolized North
Slope oil basin.

In other words, Palin's most noteworthy accomplishments as a governor, according to Palin herself, all relate to oil and natural gas development.

Logically, one can only conclude that this will be her platform for a national run. "Drill, Baby, Drill II."

And then she concludes:

In the words of General MacArthur said, "We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction."

Wow. Steve Brodner takes a look at this craziness and makes the suddenly obvious connection to another flaming narcissist: