Kit Stolz

The recession still isn’t over, and here’s proof

The indefatiguable Dylan Matthews for Wonkblog finds a stunning graph:

Writes Matthews:

The core issue here is that the unemployment rate only counts people
actively looking for work. That means there are two ways to leave the
ranks of the unemployed. One way — the good way — is to get a job. The
other way is to stop looking for work, either because you’ve retired, or
become discouraged, or begun working off the books.

The yellow line on the left shows the official unemployment rate
since 2008. It’s fallen from over 10 percent to under 8 percent. But the
red line on the right shows the actual employment rate — that is, the
percentage of working-age adults with jobs. What should scare you is
that the red line has barely budged.

What does this mean? America isn't gaining job holders, just losing job seekers.

Scientific language for non-scientists: climate change x10

Deborah Byrd, founder of the great EarthSky network, has always had an ear for the language as well as an eye on the sky, and writes this week of two climate change studies, both of which found that the change was happening ten times faster than in the past…in fact, faster than in the past sixty-five million years.

These phrasings seem pretty straightforward, and possibly even hard-hitting, in contrast to the blandly bureaucratic diction of an NOAA administrator, releasing a 2012 State of the Climate report.

“Many of the events that made 2012 such an interesting year are part of the long-term trends we see in a changing and varying climate — carbon levels are climbing, sea levels are rising, Arctic sea ice is melting, and our planet as a whole is becoming a warmer place," said Acting NOAA Administrator Kathryn D. Sullivan, Ph.D.

"Interesting?" I guess I'm too sensitive, as a famous poet named Dylan once said, but this kind of bizarrely unemotional language about vast and harmful changes in our world just drives me crazy. Sounds like a mortician discussing an unusual disease detected in an autopsy.

Back to Deborah, who I think does a much better job of putting the news in context.

"Two recent studies suggest that the climate warming occurring on Earth today is happening at a dramatically fast rate. It’s this rate of change, scientists say – the speed with which average global temperatures are expected to climb over the coming decades – that will make the ongoing climate warming troublesome for living things on Earth. Both groups of scientists used the phrase “10 times faster” to describe climate changes. One study, from Stanford University, suggests that climate change is happening 10 times faster than it has at any time in the past 65 million years. The other study, from the University of Texas, suggests that Antarctic permafrost is now melting 10 times faster than in 11,000 years, adding further evidence that Earth’s Antarctic is, in fact, warming just as Earth’s Arctic is.

Climate warming 10 times faster than in 65 million years. In a study announced August 1, 2013, Stanford University climate scientists say that Earth is undergoing one of the largest climate changes in the past 65 million years. They say, moreover, that the change is currently on pace to occur at a rate 10 times faster than any change in 65 million years. Without intervention, these scientists say that this extreme pace could lead to a 5-6 degree Celsius spike in annual temperatures by the end of this century.

Noah Diffenbaugh and Chris Field, both senior fellows at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, published these results as part of a special report on climate change in the August 2013 issue of Science. They conducted a “targeted but broad” review of scientific literature on aspects of climate change that can affect ecosystems, and they investigated how recent observations and projections for climate change in the coming century compare to past events in Earth’s history.

For instance, they compare the current warming to the 5-degree-Celsius temperature hike that occurred 20,000 years ago, as Earth emerged from the last ice age. They say that change was:

… comparable to the high-end of the projections for warming over the 20th and 21st centuries.

The difference is that, at the end of the last ice age, the warming took place over thousands of years. The same warming now is expected to occur over decades. Diffenbaugh and Field note that, as the climate warmed at the end of the last ice age, plants and animals moved northward to cooler climates. Similar (but possibly less successful?) migrations are expected in the coming years.

Diffenbaugh and Field also say in their press release that:

… some of the strongest evidence for how the global climate system responds to high levels of carbon dioxide comes from paleoclimate studies. Fifty-five million years ago, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was elevated to a level comparable to today. The Arctic Ocean did not have ice in the summer, and nearby land was warm enough to support alligators and palm trees."

[graphic from the NOAA report]

Climate warming 10 times faster than historic rate.

Climate Changing 10 Times Faster than in Past 65 Million Years

Climate change occurring 10 times faster than at any time in past 65 million years

Two studies use phrase "10 times faster" to describe climate warming

How is it even possible to hike 42 miles a day on the PCT?

Un-freaking-believeable. This vegan athlete, Josh Garrett, is averaging 42 miles a day on the Pacific Crest Trail, and is expected to break the all-time record in the next couple of days.

In an interview, he said:

The current speed record is 64 days and eleven hours. I hope to finish in 63. That means I will have to average just over 41 miles per day. That can be hard when you are crossing the desert in summer, or climbing the Sierra Nevada or Cascade Mountain ranges when the peaks are covered in snow. In fact, I had to take a day off the trail in my first week as I got heatstroke crossing the desert, but I have since made up the time. I am feeling stronger every day and did a 44 mile day yesterday. I expect to be back on track for the record, with a 41.2 mile per day average, by the end of this week.

Word from a Seattle newspaper blog is that Garrett is actually ahead of his schedule.

Not everyone likes the Pacific Crest Trail

I'm just saying, while on a family vacation….

This was near Big Bear. Hope to get back on the trail in September.

California’s “golden gulag” — prison thru a painter’s eye

Here's a great story on KCET's arts blog, about an exhibition at UC Riverside called Geographies of Detention. Title sounds heavily academic, but the paintings serve what may be art's highest purpose — to tell hard truths with sly beauty, as in this painting of Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, by Sandow Birk.

Writes Nicolette Rohr for KCET's arts blog:

Birk shared [at a panel discussion] how he came to paint the prison landscapes displayed in the [California Museum of Photography's] first floor galleries, remarking that he had been drawn to the idealized visions of California depicted in 19th Century paintings when he heard on the radio that California had the largest prison population in the world. He then decided to paint prisons. He'd never really seen one, but the figure seemed to complicate those early, idyllic images of California as Eden.

Unforgettable.

Flying today: the dominance of the upper class

Wondering why you don't like flying as much as you used to? If you're a member of the middle class, Harold Meyerson — a left-leaning columnist for the Washington Post — has an answer for you.

Airline seating may be the best concrete expression of what’s happened to the economy in recent decades.

Airlines are sparing no expense these days to enlarge, upgrade and increase the price of their first-class and business-class seating. As the space and dollars devoted to the front of the planes increase, something else has to be diminished, and, as multitudes of travelers can attest, it’s the experience of flying coach. The joys of air travel — once common to all who flew — have been redistributed upward and are now reserved for the well-heeled few.

Lufthansa is hardly alone. Delta, United and American have all announced plans to upgrade their business-class seats for cross-country and transcontinental flights. Then there’s Emirates, which now sells first-class suites — complete with a shower — that go for a tidy $19,000 on the New York-Dubai route.

Airlines haven't forgotten the middle and lower classes, Meyerson points out. One of the most successful of new airlines, Spirit, has low ticket prices, but also one of the lowest customer satisfaction scores Consumer Reports has ever recorded. This airline doesn't offer reclining seats, charges for water, and from $35 to $100 for a carry-on bag. (To be fair, not all new airlines are so predatory — Virgin is widely loved, and treats its coach customers well.)

But Meyerson points out that one of the best of the new airlines, JetBlue, once catered exclusively to the middle-class, with no first class and, consequently, shockingly good legroom and wide seats, Now like other airlines JetBlue is is going for the money of the well to do.

JetBlue’s change of cabin configuration highlights what the changes to our broader economy have meant. Its ability to provide its customers with more spacious seats was the direct result of not having a first-class section. Airplanes, like stagnating economies, are finite, and if one class takes up more space or commands more resources, the other class gets less.

Guess which?

For some of us, air travel today has a toy prison aspect. Means having to prove your identity, turn everything in your immediate possession over to the authorities for inspection, taking your clothes off at command, enduring body searches — albeit electronic ones –, and then of course being confined into too-small rooms and miniature seats, looking out tiny windows, down at houses that look as if they ought to be on a Monopoly board. It's surreal, but not in a cool, amuzing way, but as in a nightmare.

Hard to believe people ever saw this ordeal as a joy, but once upon a time, yes, they did. .

Alice Eastwood: I only go to the mountains for the flowers

Alice Eastwood, who wrote the first guidebook to the flowers of the Sierra Nevada, and was president of the Tamalpais Conservation Club, campaigned for the state park known in my home town of Mill Valley as Mt. Tam.

"I am not a true mountain climber as I go only for the flowers and for the views to be had from the lofty heights," she said.

I'm with you, Alice! Here's a cute little one, name unknown to yours truly, from my most recent section on the PCT. Readers, if you know what this is, please write in!

Ted Nordhaus: Republicans will act on climate change

A thorn in the side of the environmental movement in the last decade has been Ted Nordhaus, who has trumpeted "the death" of the movement in books published with co-author Michael Shellenberger, and sharply criticized environmental strategists. Together they lead a "green think tank" called The Breakthrough Institute which today calls for a revival of nuclear energy to combat global warming.

To avoid snark, will avoid commenting on their past attacks on the movment, and focus instead on a claim Nordhaus made in a recent interview with The Washington Monthly. To wit:

Ted Nordhaus: Republicans and conservatives are reconsidering where they are on a lot of issues right now, and climate is one of them. I think we’re going to start seeing them drop this purely denialist position and start defining a conservative position on climate change. That, I think, is going to be a lot of things that environmentalists hate—like nuclear and gas. But I would welcome that, because it would mean that conservatives were actually engaging the issue.

This reporter would also enthusiastically welcome Repbulican advocacy of any solution to the crisis of climate change, for the simple reason that until both parties in Congress agree we have a problem, we're not going to see meaningful legislative action on climate change.

But where is the evidence that the GOP is going to "drop this purely denialist thinking?" Well, it's true that thoughtful conservatives, have been thinking about the issue. For example, Andrew Bacevich earlier this year did call for a new "countercultural" conservativism that included the environment.

In February Bacevich wrote in The American Conservative that conservatives should advocate:

"Protecting the environment from the ravages of human excess. Here most emphatically, the central theme of conservatism should be to conserve. If that implies subordinating economic growth and material consumption in order to preserve the well-being of planet Earth, so be it. In advancing this position, conservatives should make common cause with tree-hugging, granola-crunching liberals. Yet in the cultural realm, such a change in American priorities will induce a tilt likely to find particular favor in conservative circles."

That sounds like acting to restrain the worst of climate change. So: The response from the right to this prominent and respected advocate, speaking for conservative action to conserve the earth?

Zip. Zero. Nada. Not only did the idea not attract followers, it didn't even attract comment.

Why? Because most conservatives care more about their status in the group than the planet, and action to save the planet simply isn't popular on the right.

An unfair and defamatory claim? No, it's simply a fact, according to a Pew Research poll of Republicans. Pew's widely respected and reported poll revealed that conservatives are divided, and believe — by a 54% to 40% margin — that if anything the GOP should more conservative. The environment wasn't one of the top five issues, but the poll did ask respondents about a lot of different issues.

The poll question was: Do Republicans and GOP leaders need to "reconsider" their positions on various issues –immigration, Social Security, the environment, etc — to have a chance in a national electon? (Funny that the Pew poll used the exact same phrase Nordhaus did.)

The answer?

1% of Republicans thought the party needed to rethink its position on the environment.

One percent!

So why does Nordhaus think the GOP is going to advocate action on climate change?

It's an utterly wishful claim, given the disinterest of the party with which he identifies, and exactly the sort of fatuousness for which he criticizes the environmental movement.

Pitiful.

Shale oil: Overhyped?

Two weeks ago at a conference on fracking in Agoura, an industry analyst named Gordon Pickering told about 150 geologically sophisticated insiders that natural gas companies are seeing rapid rates of decline in production in the Bakken formation in North Dakota.

"It's requiring more and more drilling, and becoming increasingly energy intensive," he said. "The natural gas industry is becoming more like a manufacturing process than a typical oil and gas exploration. The decline rates can be managed by additional drilling. Decline rates in gas shale plays are very high, but companies can take advantage of that by drilling four or five wells per pad."

Last week in the Wall Street Journal, via Kevin Drum, news that Shell Oil had to take a $2 billion writedown because its shale oil production in the U.S. is not meeting expectations. To wit:

Royal Dutch Shell PLC on Thursday posted a 60% drop in
second-quarter profit, largely because the oil and natural-gas giant
wrote down the value of its North American shale assets by more than $2
billion after tax, highlighting the difficulties that energy companies
face in finding new oil they can pump at a profit.

….Shell cited disappointing drilling results at its North American shale assets, which it said turned out to contain less oil than it had hoped.
Even excluding the charge on those assets, Shell's earnings fell well
short of analysts' expectations as the company struggled with production
declines and rising costs.

Here in Ventura County, it's well-known that the oil fields are "distorted," such that geologists I have spoken to have expressed doubts that horizontal drilling — which is where fracking really pays off — will work. (Although other methods, such as acidizing, might still produce oil from tapped-out fields.)

Here's a chart of the rich Ventura oil field area compiled by the California Division of Oil and Gas.

Doesn't look simple, does it? The Bakken field is flat and easily fracked by comparison.

The healing tree that revived photographer Mark Hirsch

Mark Hirsch was a professional photographer and editor who suffered a couple of crippling blows in life; first, being laid off from a job he loved editing photos for an Iowa newspaper, and then being literally hit by a truck. For CBS News, he wrote:

After the crash, I was unable to work. I had trouble sleeping . . .
memory issues. I lost my drive and ambition. I was irritable and short
with the family I love.

Then I got an iPhone — not to take pictures with, of course. What
self-respecting photographer would do that? Well, a friend and
photographer I respected had, and suggested I give it a try.

My first picture: A 160-year-old Bur Oak tree sitting in a cornfield
near my Wisconsin home. I had driven past that tree every day for 19
years, but I had never really looked at it.

That would change!

I decided to make a photo of that tree every day for a year — before
sunrise, after sunset, anytime, really. I was there, waiting and
watching, taking note of the simple beauty I had missed for so long.

A darting blackbird . . . a nest of eggs . . . the full moon setting.

The valley of that tree became for me a foreign land full of strange
and wonderful discoveries: a katydid, backlit by the sun; a moth
camouflaged against the tree's bark; a firefly painting a yellow
brushstroke as it flew past my lens.

I'm a sucker for "a tree saved me," having experienced that myself (less dramatically). Thank you, Mark Hirsch, for noticing…and thanks to "That Tree."