Putting bad air down under (in the Up-Goer Five Way)

(I made this in the Up-Goer Five way, using Up-Goer Six.  Also, Up-Goer Five does let me say "Mr. William" and "Goer", so there.)


Mr. William says putting bad air way down under takes too much money, and then says why keep trying it?  One answer would be that it's not working out right now but may in the future, and given we use so many things that make bad air, it's too important to stop.

An even better reason to me is do it because it could make good party-office sense even if it doesn't make the best money sense.  It will be a lot less hard in party-office work to put the bad air business through change that will hurt it than to kill it (not to mention the fire air business down the road that we will need to do something with too).  It's the same reason for saying yes to getting power when we break apart really really small things - the only little-bad-air choice that the party-office right does like - I'll say yes to some of it as part of a big deal to act on bad-air change.

As I've done before, I see this as a lot like the office-party stuff at my water office-work.  We have the most-big city in the US that hasn't put stuff in its water to help keep the hard part of our mouth we use to eat from getting hurt because of the sweet things we eat or drink.  A poor part of the city has many problems in children with this.  While a personal story is not very good way to help reason out this party-office fight, I can say I've felt really bad mouth pain and would never want a small child to feel the same.  So we're going to put that stuff to the water.

But, many people are very angry about this and come when we meet to try to either change our mind or tell us what bad people we are.  One reason they give is that of the three things we can use in the water to help the hard part of our mouth, the one used most is just no-good stuff that comes out from the end of making other no-good stuff, and they say we're being made to drink bad water just as an easy way to throw away the no-good stuff.

I don't really buy that reason, but right now I might say that if we have to pay only a little more for the other two things than that one thing they don't like, then we should use those instead.  As a matter of party-office things, it gets us to a good choice when the "perfect" money-sense choice might cause a lot more of a party-office fight.

For a decision on how to fix bad air over a long time, same thing - we can't keep the party-office side out of it.

Brian's call to Santa Clara County environmentalists to vote for the Safe Clean Water Measure

After the jump below is a shortened version of a letter I'm sending far and wide to the local environmental community in support of a funding measure for the Santa Clara Valley Water District that I represent.  The funding goes to watershed restoration, water supply, and flood control, with this appeal directed to environmentalists.  Mail-in ballots will go out next week.

Letter to Santa Clara County Environmentalists about the Safe Clean Water Measure

Brian Schmidt

October 4, 2012

As a long time environmentalist with what I hope is some “street cred” on valuing the environment and knowing the Water District, I urge you, I beg you, to support the Safe Clean Water measure - Measure B - on the November ballot and to tell your friends to do the same. This fall might be our only chance for a decade or longer to get expanded environmental funding, and it definitely is our best chance based on what we currently know about future circumstances.

(More after the jump....)

Time to set up the American Business Chamber

JBowers makes a good catch in a prior comment thread.  From one chamber to another:

Climate change dispute erupts with Aspen telling U.S. Chamber of Commerce to take a hike 

Aspen's chamber of commerce isn't the first to sever ties with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over political differences. The chamber in Homer, Alaska, made national headlines when it canceled its membership last year....  

At a retreat on Tuesday, the Aspen Chamber Resort Association's board voted 11 to 1 to withdraw its membership from the national organization. Tension between Aspen's chamber and the national one existed for years. The 680-member local chamber penned a letter to the national group in 2010 delineating its differences. But this year — which saw the driest winter in Aspen since the 1976-1977 season — politics are in overdrive thanks to the coming November general election. Several weeks ago, Aspen's chamber began feeling pressure from Schendler and his Aspen Skiing Co. bosses, the mayor, a pair of county commissioners and residents who had had enough of the local chamber's affiliation with the right-wing U.S. Chamber and its obstruction of solutions to climate change. .... 

The local chamber's recap continued: “Aspen’s economy is inextricably tied to the future of the global climate and all area entities have deeply embraced the idea of reducing our carbon footprint. With our resignation from the U.S. Chamber, the ACRA shows its solidarity with this position.” 

Two small cities are more than enough to christen this a trend sweeping the entire country.  Okay, maybe it's just a good sign, but I'll take it.  There are plenty of other small liberal resort towns and ski towns.  As the article notes, there are also a number of large businesses that have had enough of the US Chamber and its decision to favor conservative-leaning businesses over moderate and progressive businesses.

I think our local Silicon Valley chambers, and other places with strong green energy business interests, should be following the same steps to support their local business interest, along with the national and human interest.  I've gone back and forth in the past over whether businesses should fight to change the US Chamber from the inside or the outside, but I think the outside is looking more like the best alternative.

There already exists a Green Chamber of Commerce, pushing for business-friendly environmental solutions.  I think that's a great idea, but in addition to that maybe we need an umbrella American Business Chamber to be the Gandalf to the US Chamber's Saruman - to be what the US Chamber should have been.  The Green Chamber, local Chambers, and individual businesses rejecting Saruman could join a politically neutral, national level American Business Chamber rather than one that's decided to be a tool and player on one side of the political spectrum.  They should get back to ABC.

Skinny people dieting to reduce human biomass

So concludes David Appell about Mexico's new climate change law (my paraphrase).  Kinda hard to find detailed info about the law - David has useful stuff, a little more at Nature, and then way too much to sort through at the official legal gazette in Spanish.

The 50% below 2000 levels by 2050 will attract attention, but short term is what counts most to me.  They want 30% below business as usual by 2020, which sounds impressive but vulnerable to weird accounting.

They set overall limits and allow emission trading, so this is cap-n-trade for those who don't like that kind of thing.  I think it can be done well or done poorly.  Hopefully the American and European experiments will help Mexico figure out a good system.

Mexico's drought may have spurred political support for the law.  Too bad we've seen less action here in the States, although climate weirding has seemed to pick up some popular notice.

Progress, a bit at a time.

UPDATE:  what I really wanted to find out is if the law has a counterpart to what's been in American proposals - a tariff on imports from foreign nations that don't control carbon emissions.  That would be interesting, and entirely appropriate.  I skimmed the long Spanish web page but ran out of steam before I could find out.

Live blogging the new EPA coal plant rule - this'll be exciting

The rule discussed by Eli will require new coal plants in the US to emit no more CO2 than natural gas plants do.  Thought I'd take a closer look at it, so here it is.  Below are a few topline comments, then after the jump are specific callouts and leg-shivering quotes from the doc.

• If you want to see our existing coal plants required to either install carbon capture and storage, do offsets that hopefully work, or get shut down, then you should hope that this proposed rule results in new coal/coke plants get constructed and use CCS.  Given the economics favoring natural gas over coal for new plants after the next few years finish coal plants that are already in the pipeline for construction, then the only way this will happen is through subsidies for CCS.
• This is a regulated utility market we’re talking about, not a regulated free market.  Don't expect classic economic principles to work here.
• This proposal is meant to help get carbon capture and storage going. The way it does that is that it requires CCS for new coal plants, and because CCS is required, utilities can add it and then pass on the costs/risks to customers. Absent the requirement, then the utility might not be allowed by regulators to pass on the costs. Consider this proposed rule to be a “permission slip” to do carbon sequestration.
• Big implication: if CCS gets off the ground for new plants and proves to be not too expensive, then it may be required for old plants.  See for example, discussion of plant modifications on p. 42-44.
• Treating new coal plants as having to meet natural gas emission standards, rather than establish special standards for coal, is important precedent for future attempts to regulate existing coal plants.
• I think I may submit actual comments to the EPA, see discussion of pages 48 and 62.  Anyone want to join in?

Specific comments/excerpts after the jump.

First try doesn't quite imitate a 13 year old's science experiment

Previous post refers to a kid's video about proving "global warming in a jar".  I'm not sure I'm proving anything given the comments, but I thought I'd try it out anyway.  Today was a dry run, so no video of my misadventures.

I wanted to do it cheaper, first of all, so no heat lamps or seltzer sources.  My thought was carbonated water versus regular water, and my heat source is the sauna at the gym.  I followed the NASA recipe where I hit my first snag, with trouble finding thermometers that I could stick through bottle caps.  No luck at the hardware store, and then thought I had the genius solution of using perfect-sized digital thermometers from the drug store.  Failing to read the fine print, I missed that these medical thermometers only register temps between 90 and 110F.

I thought it might still work though by placing them on the floor of the sauna.  Filled the bottom quarter of two bottles with water in one, cabonated water in the other, both waters starting at the same temp (kept the source bottles together in the backpack before pouring into receiver bottles), stuck them on the sauna floor and sweatily waited five minutes.  First reading was 107 for carbonated, 108 for regular.  Both increased temperature while I watched - within seconds, carbonated was warmer than regular, then within a minute it hit 110 and became useless.  The other took about three minutes to do the same.

I remove the bottles and me from the sauna.  The water at the bottom of both still seemed cool to touch, all the warmth was at the top of the bottles.  I was chagrined to realize I had put just slightly more water in the control than soda water in the experimental bottle, so even my very limited data has a problem.

So obviously the next step is get the right thermometers.  I'd also like to try it outside on dark pavement on a sunny day, but the sunny days lately have been pretty windy.  I think if I could leave the bottles in the sauna long enough, I might also be able to get enough water vapor to have an effect/feedback.  Maybe one bottle with baking soda and vinegar, one with water, one with carbonated water, and a control.

George Mason creates copyright risks for outside publishing of work by its academics

John Mashey has a thorough and sad rendition of the whitewashing done by George Mason University to protect a tenured, climate denialist professor from the consequences of plagiarism.  After receiving complaints, GMU found plagiarism existed in one case where an outside journal had already reached that conclusion and forced retraction of an article.  In another case where no outsider had made a decision, GMU not only found no plagiarism but found "no misconduct," even though less of the same copied material was in the second case, the infamous "Wegman Report" to Congress that criticized climatologists.

Deep Climate has an update that the plagiarized material, also found in other material by GMU academics affiliated with Wegman, has been cleaned up with little explanation and no admission of error.  DC doesn't speculate much on the motive for doing it but I will - it's the copyright, stupid.

Copyright and plagiarism violations are not the same but overlap greatly.  Copyright is a legal property right, enforceable in court, to one's way of expressing ideas.  Plagiarism is an ethical concept, usually not enforceable in court, that authors' ideas must be attributed to them when others use those ideas.  Plagiarism is about the ideas, copyright is only about the way the ideas are expressed.

Plagiarism is generally a much broader concept because you can change the way of expressing the ideas and no longer violate copyright but still plagiarize if the new expression is done without attribution.  In a Venn diagram, plagiarism is a big circle, copyright is a small circle, and all of the small circle sits within the big circle except for a tiny little bit sticking out.*

The legal relevance of this is that a strong culture at a university against plagiarism also protects against copyright violations, and outside publishers will know that submissions by academics are less likely to have stolen text that will blow up at some later point in a lawsuit against the publisher.  After reviewing the color-coded material that John provides in the pdf at the bottom of the first link, I think the copyright violation is obvious (and because it's unattributed, it's obviously plagiarism) but GMU considers it to be no misconduct, i.e. an acceptable way to do scholarship.

The best that outside journals and publishing houses can hope for is that GMU is just demonstrating rank hypocrisy for one especially-favored professor and his PhD students, and that won't happen again for him, his students, or anyone else at GMU.  But can they count on that?  GMU has very publicly found that this level of copyright violation isn't misconduct in this case, so it will be much harder for it to make the contrary claim about violations by other academics and students.  Wegman and the others involved in this will find it almost impossible to enforce against plagiarism themselves - I can't imagine the level of wikipedia copying that will go in papers in his classes.

The ramification of the committee’s finding of no misconduct therefore includes the risk that GMU will not have a culture that reduces copyright violations in submissions by GMU scholars to outside journals and publishing houses.  Those outside publishers will have to weigh the increased legal risk of publishing a GMU scholar, knowing that competing authors submitting from other universities come from academic cultures that have undertaken steps to minimize copyright violations.  Not only would publishers become more vulnerable to lawsuits, they might be unable protect their publication of GMU academic work from copyright theft (because the author never owned the material while claiming otherwise).  The publishers might even mistakenly bring a copyright claim against another outside author, only to find that author, and not the publisher, owns the publisher’s material that the publisher claimed was stolen.

John speculates on page 28 of his pdf as to why GMU did this.  Here I'm speculating on legal consequences - DeepClimate has shown that others have already started to clean up material, which I think was done to limit copyright violations (it doesn't eliminate the legal harm already done, however).**  Things could turn out worse for those publishers, and the implication to publishers in general is that they assign increased legal risk to material from GMU academics.

-----------------------------------
*The theoretical exception, where you can commit copyright violation without plagiarism, is by copying extensive material from the original author while clearly attributing the copied material to the original.  As a practical matter, outside of overt piracy this is unimportant because the potential copyright violation sticks out like a sore thumb and alerts reviewers to the problem.

 **Much of the material was also copied from Wikipedia, which maintains no copyright to its work (UPDATE:  maintains limited copyright only, see comments).  This distinction makes no difference as to plagiarism however.  You can still do a thought experiment:  1. if wiki had copyrighted the material, 2. if sufficient amount was copied verbatim, and 3. if inadequate attribution, then you've established plagiarism.

Who are these people that John Christy is refuting?

Maybe Christy is just being polite by failing to name the people he describes below:

"The dramatic claims about snow disappearing in the Sierra just are not verified," said Christy, a climate change skeptic and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. "It looks like you're going to have snow for the foreseeable future."

I'm somewhat surprised that people were saying that a massive mountain range with much of the elevation exceeding 10,000 feet was not going to have snow in the foreseeable future.  As kind and fair as Christy is, I think he should gently criticize by name the people who've said that, as well as the experts who've said that we currently see a decline in the Sierra snowpack.  Of course the article has a contrary expert:

Mike Dettinger, a climatologist and research hydrologist at the Scripps Institute of the U.S. Geological Survey, said Christy is picking and choosing data while misleading people about what climate change scientists are actually saying.
....
Recent studies by Scripps scientists have found that over the last 50 years the southern Sierra snowpack has gotten larger while the northern Sierra pack has shrunk. Although they have predicted the overall state snowpack would decrease over time as a result of climate change, nobody has claimed that it has happened yet, Dettinger said. 

What's significant in terms of global warming, he said, is the fact that the snowpack has declined over three quarters of the western United States, an area that includes Montana, Wyoming and New Mexico. Scripps researchers, in coordination with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists, have concluded that 60 percent of that downward trend is due to greenhouse gases. 

"There is a popular conception that the snowpack has declined everywhere, but that is not what the science says," Dettinger said. "What we're saying broadly is that across western North America there have been declines in spring snowpack."

Might have been helpful to include this info near the beginning of the article instead of at the end.  Christy can always counter the criticism by naming names.  Go to it!


Also worth noting that he's combining different measurement systems over time to reach a conclusion, the exact thing that denialists criticize about temperature and sea level records used by climatologists.  So now we know it can be done, apparently.

Time to call it climate change and acidification

I think ocean acidification should stop being considered just one of the effects of GHGs and give it top-line billing.  That the oceans are acidifying faster than anytime in the last 300 million years received moderate press (I think Wired had the best pop-science coverage, would love links to other good pieces).  People had to read fairly deeply into coverage to read that we only stop at 300 million years because there's no decent geological record before then.  Those denialists who point out that temperatures were warmer than present way back when the earth was a growing ball of lava might not have an irrelevant precedent to point to in this case.

Not only are the oceans acidifying faster, they're doing at a much faster pace, with pleasant information like this at the link:

The boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic included a large increase in atmospheric CO₂ (adding as much as 1,300 to 2,400 ppm) over a relatively short period of time, perhaps just 20,000 years. The authors write, “A calcification crisis amongst hypercalcifying taxa is inferred for this period, with reefs and scleractinian corals experiencing a near-total collapse.” Again, though, it’s unclear how much of the catastrophe can be blamed on acidification rather than warming.

While our CO2 level won't go as high, it's moving much faster, and the rate of change is what drives acidification and the loss of carbonates needed by calcifying species.

Additional niceties, our current ocean chemistry is even more vulnerable to change:

The ratio of magnesium to calcium in ocean water changes over time due to differences in volcanic activity along the mid-ocean ridges, among other things. When magnesium is high (as it is today), a form of calcium carbonate called aragonite becomes dominant. Aragonite is more soluble than calcite, so “aragonite seas” are more susceptible to the effects of acidification. Even though the PETM did not feature aragonite seas, it was a tumultuous time for many marine species.

I haven't seen much discussion about how ocean acidification will affect climate, possibly because we have no idea.  Maybe it'll be wonderful!  I imagine tho that drastically changing the ocean biosphere is likely to have an effect, and because we're adjusted to the biosphere that we have, that effect is unlikely to be wonderful.

I'm sure that effect will be studied further.  Wiki links to a paywalled article about potential albedo decreases due loss of oceanic clouds, presumably from reduced nucleation particles from calcifying organisms getting into the atmosphere.  Wiki also speculates that acidification will help the ocean draw out more CO2 from the atmosphere.

David Archer sez calcifying plankton scatter light on their own, so their reduction can reduce albedo (Long Thaw, p. 118). OTOH I vaguely recall somewhere in his book he said that our killing off coral through acidification would leave more carbonate in solution, assisting the ocean's absorption of CO2.  I interpret that as part of the road to victory in the battle against Mother Earth, but others may differ.

I almost titled this post, "Time to panic over acidification" but tried to go with something slightly more constructive.  Time to get worried, at least.

A gem from James - HADCRUT4 also says 2010 was the Best In Show for bad temperature news

Two months old, but hasn't had much play that I've seen.  The HADCRUT global surface temperature dataset, often preferred by climate denialists who play at such things, got an upgrade with more Arctic coverage.  Like other datasets, that Arctic climate amplification is enough to put HADCRUT4 2010 over the top of previous record holders 1998 and 2005.  I guess the denialists won't play with it as much now.

I have no idea if the difference for 2010 is statistically significant, but that's not an adverb that denialists care about.

Hey Anonymous Donor - fund this kid instead of Heartland

(UPDATE:  sadly, there may be problems with the first video - see the comments and this article.  The article mostly deals with convection from open containers, but argues that closed containers have problems too.  No problems identified yet with the second video.)



I doubt Heartland's anonymous donor would ever do anything sensible, at all, but this kid could provide sensible, accurate information and how-to guidance instead of the lies that Heartland wants to put in children's education.

My vision is to see him tooling around the country on a biodiesel bus with his entourage, all of them dressed up in Ray-Bans and Bill Nye Science Guy bowties, laying on the science and helping kids run their own experiments.  Too bad it won't happen.

NASA, btw, agrees with his experimental proof.  I thought he stole it from NASA but his video is four years old, so maybe the theft went the other way.  The NASA link also describes how to do it cheaper, without seltzer siphons and heat lamps, so I might try that and put up my own video.

Also relevant, "Visual proof that CO2 absorbs infrared radiation," with this BBC video:

Emissions match Hansen Scenario B; Keystone delay is a victory; EDF Insider podcast; and Machete Order Star Wars

Three climate shorts here.

First, maybe others have already known this for years, but I'd been bothered by claims that Hansen's 1988 worst case emission scenario matched actual emissions while temps were far cooler.  Of course that's not true.  Actual emissions were slightly under Hansen's middle road scenario.  Temps were also under the middle scenario, partly because of emissions.  His model may have been slightly oversensitive for temperature reaction to GHGs but overall looks good. David Evans sadly has it wrong, is strongly criticized by William.


Second, in my comments elsewhere:

In my career, I've won much more often than I've lost when I'm on defense, trying to stop something I oppose, rather than trying to achieve something I support.

We're on offense on many aspects of climate, but on Keystone we're on defense.  I've also found in my career that delay is good when you're on defense.  Keystone now has to spend money while waiting longer to make a profit, making it somewhat more likely that they'll throw in the towel.  And even if they do build their monstrosity, doing it later makes it more likely to happen when the evil Harper/Santorum government of Canada is replaced by something reasonable that would put some restraints or mitigation on the project.


Third, Environmental Defense Fund did another of their irregular podcasts.  Highlights include a non-rejection of a carbon tax approach to climate mitigation.  OTOH, they say that in the end, groups should coalesce around a single approach at the national level, and we can predict what has the best chance of being that approach.  They also say that things  may get so bad that we might need to consider geoengineering and should be trying to figure out how we can research that approach carefully.  Sounds reasonable enough, sadly.


Finally and unrelated:  watching Star Wars movies in Machete Order.  Good way to introduce them to newbies.

Keep your eye on the ball

Here's an aside in a post I wrote about Roger Pielke Jr. two years ago, who was mad about a study criticizing his father but didn't have much substantive to say about it:

an interesting choice of tactics here - during the whole stolen climate emails thing, some people wanted to focus on the privacy invasion and illegal theft, which I thought would be viewed as an attempt to distract people from the content when the content wasn't that bad.  Here, denialists and unhelpful types like Pielke Jr. are ignoring the PNAS study content and screaming about blacklists.  Maybe it's like the lawyer's saying that if you can't pound any arguments in your favor, pound the table instead.

I'm just trying to be consistent here.  Content is king.  Set aside the strategy document.  Heartland has now had plenty of time to review and deny the accuracy of the other documents and it hasn't.  The docs seem generally supportive of John Mashey's analysis of public records.  The outrage you're hearing from the denialists are attempts to distract people from the content when the content is bad.

Time to send the IRS and state attorney generals after these fake charities.

On being reasonable

Nice video:


Like most humans, I find this difficult.  If you don't, you might check on Dunning-Kruger.

I especially agree with the idea of self-identifying as a truth-seeker rather than as conservative, progressive, libertarian, climate hawk/sceptic etc.  Still doesn't make it easy though.

And just to balance out the reasonable video with a vitriolic one about sports:


via MT.


UPDATE:  a previous post on persuasion that I forgot about, referring to Kevin Drum:

And another on persuasion: 

My own experience, which I think is fairly generalizable, is that within the course of a single conversation hardly anybody ever changes their mind — including me. 

He says he changes his opinion over time, though. What works for me is new information. Even if I'm not persuaded originally, new info might convince me - but maybe not so much because it's new but because it's a crutch, an excuse that lets me shed my stupid original opinion. Anyway, good for Kevin for reacting to Libya.

Steve Goddard steals Pat Michaels' trick of deleting inconvenient data

Pat Michaels got in trouble for repeatedly deleting data that is inconvenient to his denialist viewpoint.

Now Steve Goddard is trying his hand at the same "hide the incline" trick.  He puts up a post with this graph to claim sea levels aren't rising:

and adds a link to the dataset that inconveniently omits the much more extensive datasource that comes with its own graphs.  Shall we help out Mr. Goddard?  Yes!  Just click the link, click "Time serie" and away we go!

First graph:

What do you know - same data (Envisat, no inverted barometer, no seasonality removed, no isostatic adjustment), but it comes complete with nifty smoothing and an inclined trendline.  Instead of just pasting in the url for this graph, Goddard downloaded the data and recreated a graph without inconveniently trending trendlines.

Still, it's not going up quickly, so that's something.  Or is it?

Same data, except with inverted barometer:

I've poked around about whether applying the inverted barometer adjustment is a good idea.  My best guess is it's unnecessary in the long term, but this short data set makes it helpful (see Realclimate).  Goddard denies it, but in general I find him unpersuasive.

How about other data?

Maybe Jason:

Maybe Multi-mission:

Plenty more variations out there for you to try yourself, but the pattern sticks.  Goddard cherrypicked a short dataset that most favored his position and then recreated the graph to hide the incline.  It then got picked up by Watts (who tempered it slightly) and spewed everywhere (I found it first at TigerHawk and traced it back).

The one useful conclusion to this is if you do feel it necessary read Goddard, do so by reading ReallySciency who's watchdogging him, including on this issue.

The dead are allowed to vote - on the Board of Directors of a denialist, tax-supported charity

John Mashey has his latest opus up, on the malfeasance of various denialist organizations that should be investigated for violations of their IRS 501 c/3 tax-deductible charity status.  I greatly enjoyed assisting him a bit with some of the research on this.  John's work is separate from the leak of secret documents from one of those groups, the Heartland Institute.

Please go read what John has to say, but the summary is that Fred Singer's Science and Environmental Policy Project, the Heartland Institute, and possibly others have given more than sufficient grounds for IRS agents and/or state Attorney General offices charged with supervising charities to start using some subpoena power.  They're supposed to be educational, but are the opposite.  In SEPP's case, they appear to have a non-functioning board, including a chairman who continued to supervise Singer two years after the chairman had died.  They sign affidavits saying they're not lobbying when they sure appear to be doing so.  And money flows are incredibly weird, with assets disappearing and sometimes reappearing in strange ways.

I'll just pull out two examples:  first, on page 23, rows A36 and A37 - over $100,000 in assets mysteriously disappears between the end of 2003 and the beginning of 2004.  Must've been quite a New Year's Eve party, but I think IRS might want to check the bank statements.  Second is on page 181 where they use 6-degree polynomial overfitting to pretend there's a decline in temperature.  Statistical nonsense like this is possibly the best arguments for why Heartland et al. aren't educational for 501 c/3 purposes, because there's no counterargument that they're right.  There's no minority opinion, no Richard Lindzen-style stats professor out there who would defend that analysis.  The fact that it's delivered to an unsophisticated audience who won't figure it out on their own magnifies the problem.  The likelihood that whoever created the analysis is also sophisticated enough to know it's wrong means it's an intentional attempt to reduce public understanding of climate.  They're not just non-educational, they're anti-educational.

If mutual fund managers issued a prospectus using a 6-degree fit to show they're beating the market, they could go to jail.  Heartland wants a tax break for doing the same thing.

Climate betting update - back to where we started, and I'm not worried

Several weeks ago I received my annual friendly email from David Evans, my betting partner/opponent over future temperature increases, with the 2011 temp data from GISS.  Bet details are here, summary is that I've bet $9,000 and David $6,000 for a series of decade-plus bets over whether temps will increase somewhat near the IPCC projected rate or at a much lower rate.

David mentioned that the five-year average we're betting on is, for 2009, back to where we started in 2007, which would be very bad for my side of the bet, but he also politely added that we've had some La Ninas to affect things.  I'm not too worried for my pocketbook - the five year average for 2009 overlaps too much with 2007 to expect a lot of movement.  The five year average for 2012, which we won't know until 2015, will be the first that has no overlap.  First bets pay out or are voided in 2020, so as David says, this betting will take a while.

One way to look at it is to assume a counterfactual that the bet started in 1989 and ended in 2009 - fair from my viewpoint of expecting past rises to continue/accelerate, but not what David expects.  My calculation is that I win all three of the low end bets, void one of the high end bets, lose the other two high end bets, and come out ahead $1000.

Not much other activity from me on the climate betting front, and I haven't heard much from others either besides William's sea ice, unless I've missed it.  I've been thinking that sea level rise might be less noisy than temps, allowing shorter bet periods and maybe using three year averages.  Maybe will look into that later.

Last year's betting update here.

One of these things not like the other?

The ad that so offended Karl Rove:


The ad that didn't (AFAIK):

I have a hard time seeing the difference, except that Rove is sorry that things worked out well in Detroit.

Incidentally, that second ad is kick-ass. That's the kind of thing that the green side of the equation needs.


FN.  Clean coal is a misnomer if it includes mountaintop removal or excludes carbon sequestration.  I'm not yet prepared to say it's always a misnomer, though.

Energy-disaster conversions by Arthur Smith

I don't have much value to add, just go read him convert between energy scales between earthquakes, nuclear bombs, power plants, and the sun.  What interests me is how large human energy uses are, that a 1 GW power plant produces more energy in a year than is released in fifteen Magnitude 7 earthquakes.

In the end, the sun wins.  Go solar!

"Israel Firster" versus "climate denialists" versus Lindzen

An interesting article by Spencer Ackerman sounds off against the term "Israel Firster" as used by the American progressives as a label for Americans that support every Israeli policy and interest, especially the most aggressive and anti-Muslim policies.

My most left-wing views concern Israel, its shameful treatment of Palestinians, and the accurate description by Israeli politicians of that policy as "apartheid".  Still, I think I agree with Ackerman, not entirely but enough to say that the Israel Firster term should be dropped.  The key to me is that the term originates in anti-Semitism (this is my first and probably last positive reference to anything written by David Bernstein).  While the African-American community has shown how to reappropriate words with disgusting historical origins, that's not something to be done lightly.  Let this term go.

Juan Cole does a better job with the term Likud-supporter, describing the American politicians who reject as anti-Israel the positions favored by a significant strand of progressive Israeli politics.  I'm not sure that captures the thought of politicians who can't see any divergence between American and Israeli interests, but it's good enough for now.

By contrast, I've never bought the claim that "climate denialism" must not be uttered because of its similarity to "Holocaust denial".  I used climate denialism years long before it was claimed by opponents to be derived from Holocaust denial terminology.  Even if it was for some, the connection isn't nearly as seamless as the term "Israeli Firster" is with anti-Semitism.  These people truly are climate denialists and it has a connection to being anti-science, not to anti-Semitism.

And since we're on a related subject, there's the issue of Richard Lindzen claiming to be offended by the term climate denier because he claims to be a Holocaust survivor.  His claim is based on the fact that his Jewish parents emigrated from Germany in 1938, and he was born in 1940.  Even the broadest-accepted definition of Holocaust survivor would only include his parents, not him (and many would not include his parents, although they undoubtedly faced severe persecution).  Actual Holocaust survivors would have good reason to be offended by Lindzen.