Bad News: Methane Release Threatens Planet — Good News: LA Times Still on the Climate Beat

Here's a strange good news/bad news story. This Sunday the top story on the front pages of the Los Angeles Times was a full-scale feature, complete with excellent graphics, on methane released by the softening of the permafrost.

The good news is that the newspaper is still covering the climate beat in a serious way.

The bad news is that the balance in our climate is tipping towards rapid warming.

No point in me encapsulating a first-story; as they say, read the whole thing. 

But I will make a couple of points. First, I like the way the writer Margot Roosevelt explicitly sourced the metaphor of methane as a "time bomb" to reputable researcher Katie Walter. This is a term of art in the reporting on methane, but folks new to the story may not realize how factual that metaphor is.

Second, I love the personality she allowed us to see in Walter and her story. As Chris Mooney has said more than once, this issue cannot escape the back pages of science reporting until scientists are seen as individuals — and even, in some cases, as "rock stars." Roosevelt makes that happen with Walter.

Plus, here's a video feature featuring the star herself…great work, congrats to all concerned.

http://video.latimes.com/global/video/flash/widgets/WNVideoCanvas.swf

Good News about Stress — Believe It or Don’t

Newsweek may be disappearing from newstands soon, but its medical coverage as of late has been superb. A couple of weeks ago came a story on The Two Sleeps that literally changed my life. (Instead of taking drastic measures to sleep through the night, do what nature suggests — sleep one shift, get up, take care of business, read, whatever — then sleep a second shift when the sleepiness returns.)

Now comes a thoughtful, wry story by Mary Carmichael on why stress in moderate doses may be good for us. To wit:

The stress response—the body's hormonal reaction to danger, uncertainty
or change—evolved to help us survive, and if we learn how to keep it
from overrunning our lives, it still can. In the short term, it can
energize us, "revving up our systems to handle what we have to handle,"
says Judith Orloff, a psychiatrist at UCLA. In the long term, stress
can motivate us to do better at jobs we care about. A little of it can
prepare us for a lot later on, making us more resilient.

Even when it's
extreme, stress may have some positive effects—which is why, in
addition to posttraumatic stress disorder, some psychologists are
starting to define a phenomenon called posttraumatic growth. "There's
really a biochemical and scientific bias that stress is bad, but
anecdotally and clinically, it's quite evident that it can work for
some people," says Orloff. "We need a new wave of research with a more
balanced approach to how stress can serve us." Otherwise, we're all
going to spend far more time than we should stressing ourselves out
about the fact that we're stressed out.

Wonder if Carmichael got on to this story because she was stressed out about losing her job…

Hard Times, Kind People — What We Need in 2009, Says Lao Tzu

Have been reading a fascinating book about affective science, called Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

So what, you might say. These are hard times! I can't waste energy on frivolities!

But what if the race amongst us hominids — chimps and people alike — goes not to the biggest, brawniest, and most intimidating, or even the meanest, but to those best able to mediate conflict? To those able to see beyond themselves? What if those who are most concerned with their own survival are often too frightened or timid to take care of others, and thus less useful to the group? What if maximizing self-interest leads to small lives?

More on this soon. But for now, let me quote a lovely poem from the book, by Lao Tzu:

When man is born, he is tender and weak
At death, he is stiff and hard
All things, the grass as well as the trees, are tender and subtle while alive
When dead, they are withered and dried.

Therefore the stiff and the hard are companions of death
The tender and weak are the companions of life
If the tree is stiff, it will break
The strong and the great are inferior, while the tender and the weak are superior. 

And here's an image from an Asian photographer known as photocello called, yes, Tree in the Wind. 

Treeinthewindbyphotocello

Oscar Forecasting by Logical Regression

Though he doesn't state his confidence level, super-statsman Nate Silver predicts the Oscar race in the major categories for New York Magazine with a regression analysis and a database thirty years deep.

His logic appears impeccable: for instance, on Best Picture:

Best Picture

Slumdog Millionaire
won all three awards associated with Oscar success: the Directors Guild
Award, the Golden Globe, and the BAFTA. It’s also a serious film, which
the Academy favors. If there’s an upset (which would be a shocker), it
will be Milk; guilt over Prop 8 and the Brokeback snub of ’06 could split the vote, with Boyle getting Director and Milk getting Picture.

To be specific, Silver runs the numbers and concludes that Slumdog has a 99% chance of winning Best Picture, Milk has a 1% chance, and all the other candidates have 0.0 chance.

But the major awards are the easy ones! Try picking the best editing from amongst The Dark Knight, Frost/Nixon, Benjamin Button, Milk, and Slumdog Millionaire.

Regress that, Silver.

Biggest Storm of the Season? That’s It? C’mon now…

If this weekend's rain, totaling less than two inches in wet Upper Ojai, is the "biggest storm of the season" according to the Los Angeles Times, then we have problems.

The prediction was for between one and three inches of rain. Hardly an awesome figure for a weekend.

To date in the mountains of Ventura County, we are at about 11 inches for the year — which is within range of normal, about 75%, but has yet to get the streams running, which is surely a better measure of ground water saturation. Usually by now the streams would have been running for at a month or two.

We're at nada.

To be fair, flatter areas and coastal areas (which attract more rain and less snow) are at about normal, which is good news. But the claim that a modest little Gulf of Alaska storm such as this one could end California's state drought…c'mon now. Stop dreaming.

California drought

Global Reality vs. George Will

Sunday in the Washington Post, in the news:

The pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent
predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased
more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering
self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, scientists
said Saturday.

"We are basically looking now at a future climate that's beyond
anything we've considered seriously in climate model simulations,"
Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution's
Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said at the annual
meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Sunday in the Washington Post, in George Will's opinion:

[A]ccording to the World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade.

So Will concluded his misleading spew. (As one of my editors gently puts it: George Will is an Idiot.)

This is standard denier script, and — as most of my readers probably already know — it all goes back to the simple fact that we had a monstrously big El Nino event in l998, massively distributing warm energy from the Pacific around the world, and leading to a temperature spike that still stands as a highpoint in much of the temperature data (see James Hansen and the GISS).

Or, as the WMO said, contra Will:

The long-term upward trend of global warming, mostly driven by
greenhouse gas emissions, is continuing. Global temperatures in 2008
are expected to be above the long-term average. The decade from 1998 to
2007 has been the warmest on record, and the global average surface
temperature has risen by 0.74C since the beginning of the 20th Century.
[…] "For detecting climate change you should not look at any
particular year, but instead examine the trends over a sufficiently
long period of time. The current trend of temperature globally is very
much indicative of warming," World Meteorological Organization
Secretary-General, Mr Michel Jarraud said in response to media
inquiries on current temperature "anomalies".

The problem for Will is that even though he pretends to quote the World Meteorological Organization, he can't actually listen to what they say about the trend because that would make him look like, yes, an idiot.

(h/t: TPM)

The Melting in Antartica: Much Worse Than Predicted

Yale's potent Environment 360 site interviews a leading glaciologist, Richard Bindschadler, and hears some alarming news about the melt in the coastal Pine Island and Thwaites ice shelves….

e360: I know that the IPCC was saying maybe 1 ½ feet or a
half-meter of sea level rise in the 21st century. Is it your opinion
that we could be looking at significantly larger sea level rise?

Bindschadler: Yeah, I think there’s sort of an unspoken
consensus in my community that if you want to look at the very largest
number in the IPCC report, they said 58 centimeters, so almost two feet
by the end of the century. That’s way low, and it’s going to be well
over a meter. We may see a meter by the middle of the century.

e360: Oh my gosh.

Bindschadler: And if this behavior that we’re seeing in Pine
Island, and even Greenland continues — and we don’t see any reason why
it wouldn’t continue — well, over a meter by the end of the century, I
think is almost certain.

e360: And some people are saying that two meters is certainly not out of the realm of possibility in the 21st century.

Bindschadler: Absolutely. That’s correct, yeah.

e360: Have you been taken aback by the rapidity of the changes in the ice sheets and glaciers both in West Antarctica and Greenland?

Bindschadler: Yeah, absolutely astounded.

As they say, read the whole thing. Here's a picture of what's happening (via NASA)…as you can imagine, the purplish areas represent the melting, the greenish areas represent the softening.

Antarctica-glacier-map-final

The Romantic Museum of Great Russian Writers

On this Valentine's Day weekend, it's fitting to link to Geoff Manaugh, who likes to think about landscapes and the future, and comes up with an insanely romantic idea for a new museum.

Begin with a relatively simple fact: Russian forensic scientists are testing blood samples found on a certain sofa where the great writer Alexander Pushkin is said to have died, two days after he was shot  in the gut in a duel. Then let Manaugh take off:

1) It's the forensic sciences applied to antique furniture in
order to find the otherwise undetectable remains of a dead Russian
novelist. One might even say residue here, not remains
at all; it is the barest of traces. Suddenly, though, it's as if those
old stuffed sofas, fading carpets, and tables of hand-worn wood in
obsolete interiors around the world have been transformed into a kind
of archaeological site, in which the chemical traces of literary
history might yet be discovered. The sofa is Pushkin's Calvary, if you
will – a chemical reliquary. Furniture becomes a kind of hematological Stargate into literature's mortal past. Who else might they find in there?
You go around the world performing genetic tests on antique furniture
to see which novelists ever used it – traces of Sebald, Hemingway,
Tolstoy.

2) Two words: Pushkin Park. We clone Pushkin and start a theme park. Like a thousand Mini-Me's
well-versed in storycraft, Pushkin – one man distributed through a
thousand bodies – wanders the artificial landscape, and like some
strange Greek myth wed with Antiques Roadshow, he tells the crowds, "I sprung forth, fully formed, from a sofa…" And there begins a tale for stunned tourists.

Then Carolyn Kellog, of the under-appreciated Jacket Copy, throws in her version:

I think it'd be more fun to have a theme park
full of all the Russian greats — Chekhov and Dostoevsky and Gogol too.
You probably couldn't call it an amusement part — probably more of a downer park — but it couldn't end as badly as Michael Crichton's "Jurassic Park."

Well, Chekhov can be hilarious (ever seen "The Proposal?") Nonetheless, Kellog has a point. Don't think it'd keep the Russians away, though.

Nor me…here's Anton, via the incomparable David Levine:

Chekhov

“Information Wants to be Free”…

Apparently at the first Hackers' Convention, way back in l984, Stewart Brand declared that "Information wants to be free." It's a great phrase, unless you are a writer, a musician, an artist, or another "content provider," in which case the phrase is a ticket to poverty.

The correct translation is, I believe, "people are freaking cheap."

I am not going to recap this media conflict, which now has taken on generatlonal tones, nor am I going to delve into apocalyptic scenarios, like bankruptcy at The New York Times.

But I am going to link to an interesting think piece that heads up this week's Time, How to Save Your Newspaper, that is the talk of the journo world. Walter Issacson argues that this may be the year that we shift from an "unsustainable" — that is, bound to crash and burn — model towards a "micropayment" model for information. Well, we can hope. But this comment of his rings so true…

Another group that benefits from free journalism is Internet service
providers. They get to charge customers $20 to $30 a month for access
to the Web's trove of free content and services. As a result, it is not
in their interest to facilitate easy ways for media creators to charge
for their content. Thus we have a world in which phone companies have
accustomed kids to paying up to 20 cents when they send a text message
but it seems technologically and psychologically impossible to get
people to pay 10 cents for a magazine, newspaper or newscast.

How true, how true…thus Verizon is making billions from kids texting "R U BORED" to each other in class under the nose of their teachers, and media companies have more readers than ever, but revenues are falling off a cliff.

Progress: What a crock.

Arrrrgggggghhhh.