Rauch's "perverse voting" = contrarian = stupid

My grand theory on being contrarian as a general preference is that it: a. only works reasonably well in the business field; and b. even there it only works a minority of the time. When it does work in business, though, it pays off big, addicting some people to the idea that being contrarian in general is more likely to be right than otherwise. Perfect example of this wrong approach:

The Lab's work is guided by two founding principles:

1. Just because an idea appeals to a lot of people doesn't mean it's wrong.
2. But that's a good working theory.

Jonathan Rauch is another example of this, saying that people who want action on climate change should support McCain, because only bipartisan legislation will stay enacted in the long run (Dems would run over minority Republicans otherwise) and because "McCain is running on carbon-emissions limits that are not much different from what Democrats want."

As to Rauch's first point on the necessity of bipartisan legislation, he provides no evidence. I can think of several counter-examples (tax cuts by Reagan and Bush, increases by Clinton) that weren't bipartisan and have been fairly stable. I can't think of dramatic (mono?)partisan legislation that was later overruled.

And on the issue of climate change, they're not the same. Obama would auction carbon permits that McCain would give away freely, and use the money to finance investments in alternative energy. McCain makes fewer promises for alternative energy, doesn't say where he'll get the money from, and his combined Iraq war support plus one-year non-military spending freeze plus tax cuts for the rich would severely limit his budget options.

I agree that McCain could convince Republicans to support climate legislation better than Obama can, but the converse possibility of Republican pressure on McCain to weaken his position is equally likely, as promised by McCain surrogates Tim Pawlenty and Steve Forbes on national television. That's a wash.

Finally, I think it's appropriate to punish the incumbent president's party for malfeasance in office when the incumbent's termed out. If McCain had run on a complete repudiation of Bush that would be one thing, but he didn't. There should be some form of accountability for the disaster that Bush has been on climate.

Being contrarian on the choice of president is like between contrarian on the reality of climate change.

UPDATE: I should add that on a one-time basis, a few scientists have done well with a single contrarian position that's ultimately proven correct, giving them enormous street cred in the science ghetto, with their paradigm shifts and all that. What I'm not aware of is non-crank scientists who consistently take contrarian positions and generally are right. Nor can I think of a single public policy based on a scientific opinion of a tiny minority that's worked out well.

UPDATE II, Feb. 2010:  Well, given the problems in getting climate legislation past, I'm less certain that I was right.  McCain has veered hard right, showing questionable political integrity, but maybe he would've been different in the imaginary world that would have elected him as president.

Local candidates for office

Some postings on local candidates for office (I did a post on propositions below). Your comment, input and links are welcome. Disclosure: I work for a tax-exempt non-profit, the below represents my opinions only.

Santa Clara County:

Richard Hobbs (Supervisor, County District 3): I know him a bit, and he's a good environmentalist.

Alex Kennett (County Open Space Authority, District 1): I know Alex well, another good environmentalist. (More disclaimers! Alex is on the board of the organization I work for.)

Mountain View:

Mike Kasperzak (City Council): I also know Mike a bit, and unlike the present City Council he's willing do something to address the ridiculous jobs-housing imbalance in the city.


Other folks to talk about? I don't see much point in addressing local candidates for state and federal office, though; they're all foregone conclusions.

UPDATE: I'm embarassed to be a lawyer and not know much about the Ritchie-Liroff contest for judge. Both candidates seem highly qualified. Liroff is ahead in endorsements, but I like Ritchie's work for the underdog a little more. A real tossup. UPDATE 2: went for the underdog, there are plenty of prosecutors-turned-judges.

UPDATE 3: Forgot to include Jerry McNerney, the Congressman who beat the evil Richard Pombo in a Republican-leaning district that includes Morgan Hill. He's now matched against a pretty-bad Republican - Grist has the info.

Bay/California Propositions: input welcome

I'll put up a separate post for local candidates, but comments are welcome, and I'm more interested in propositions that I'm unsure about:

Statewide propositions:

Prop 1A (high speed rail): I actually have some local-area environmental concerns, but despite that this seems like a good idea.

Prop 2 (farm animal treatment): easy yes.

Prop 3 (children hospital bonds): harder one. Hate the heartstring pulling, and I'd rather have the legislature determine funding, but California's moronic two-thirds vote for state budgets pushes the other direction. Leaning against. UPDATE: voted no.

Prop 4 (abortion parental notification): no.

Prop 5 (nonviolent drug offenses): leaning in favor, but there a lot of ways for voter micro-management of criminal punishment to go wrong. The countering problem is that the legislature is totally screwed up by the prison-industrial complex, and by limits imposed by California's moronic Three Strikes voter initiative. Also, many of these drugs should be legalized. UPDATE: voted yes.

Prop 6 (crime and police funding): easy no.

Prop 7 (renewable energy mandates): no, unfortunately.

Prop 8 (eliminate same-sex marriage right): easy no.

Prop 9 (victim rights changes): Easy no. I don't know why anyone thinks elected legislators have incentives to be soft on crime. They can handle this issue.

Prop 10 (alternative fuel vehicles): Leaning no, but I'm kind of following the environmental herd on this one and need to do some research. UPDATE: voted no.

Prop 11 (redistricting): yes. I think it fixed some problems that made me vote against Prop 77 in 2005, particularly by leaving Congress out of it. (Good links on Prop 77 here, btw, took me a while to find them to remember why I voted against 77.)

Prop 12 (veterans' bonds): leaning against for the same reasons as Prop 3. UPDATE: changed my mind and voted yes - these are just loan guarantees that have been done for years - if they had worked out poorly in the past there would've been evidence of that.

Local propositions in Santa Clara County:

Prop A (hospital retrofit): yes

Prop B (BART to San Jose): cons slightly outweigh the pros for me. While new money for light rail is good, it would also have the effect of redirecting money from previous propositions that would otherwise be spent more efficiently on bus lines. UPDATE: voted no.

Props C and D (VTA stuff): yes, I guess. Do we really have to vote on this?

Again, comments and links are welcome.

Note to Chicago Climate Exchange: your product quality IS a business concern

Interesting article in today's Wall Street Journal despite its overblown headline, "Pollution Credits Let Dumps Double Dip". It's about potential problems with carbon offset additionality although it fails to use the term.

The particular problem it talks about isn't all that bad - some landfills that decided some years ago to capture outgassing methane for sale are now selling carbon credits. Sounds like it fails additionality until you learn deep in the article that landfills legally required to capture methane can't get credits, leaving only smaller ones eligible. The only time they gave actual money figures was for one system that makes a 3% return on the capture system by selling methane without offset credits, and it's not even clear if that's net of ongoing maintenance costs. Three percent isn't much financial incentive, so I think in most cases the additionality criteria will be met, and the few times it's not aren't very important.

If this constituted the worst scenario for offsets, I'd lose all my caution about them.

On the other hand, there's this part of the article interviewing Richard Sandor of the Chicago Climate Exchange:

Mr. Sandor says the exchange's main goal is to help develop a commodity that has financial value under any possible future U.S. law that to regulates greenhouse-gas emissions. The debate over whether or not a polluter would have cut its greenhouse-gas emissions without the financial incentive of credit sales is "quite interesting, but that's not my business," Mr. Sandor says. "I'm running a for-profit company."

If the product doesn't provide additionality, it doesn't provide value, and I should hope they realize that.

(UPDATE: edited with better link for "additionality".)

Health of the mother and late-term abortion

McCain is taking a lot of heat from left blogs for what they call "scoffing" at health-of-the-mother exceptions to bans on late-term abortions. I think we can afford to be fair to McCain given that he's going to lose - he's talking about mental health exceptions that could be so broad as to make the exception swallow the rule.

To be fair to Obama, though, he says he opposes a broad definition of mental health, and implies that clinically-defined mental health disease should be the litmus test. For voters who think that a late-term fetus is/may be a person, I doubt this balances out well, but that's a messier issue regarding abortion.

A tangent - I wrote in February that I thought Obama would win the nomination because "people tended to like Obama more as they heard him more and got used to him as presidential material." I thought that was clear for the Democratic voters, and voter reactions to the presidential debates seem to show the same on the national election level.

Alliance for Climate Protection ad censored by ABC

This has appeared in a few places (best coverage at Grist), but it's an ad criticizing fossil fuel lobbyists that ABC wouldn't run, while the network is happy to run lots of feel-good messages from those industries.



Here's the link for emailing ABC about it.

The Arab-Obama thing's gone farther than I expected

I'd thought Rush Limbaugh's spouting off on the "Obama's not black, he's Arab" idea was just an example of the so-called rat-effing that even the dimmest of New York Times reporters might pick up on. It seems to have spread more among the rightwingers than I'd expected, though.

I suppose it could just have accidentally resonated in minds driven by ignorance, fear, and anger. The other possibility is that it was focus-group tested, and its test result was the reason why Limbaugh gave it so much play. Always interesting to speculate about what goes on behind the scenes on the dark side.

The other interesting thing to think about is that this made-up nonsense hasn't worked now, so in four years people are going to be even less interested in lies about Obama's distant past. Republicans will be forced to deal with Obama's record instead.

A one-species ecosystem

Interesting Astrobiology Magazine article: at the deepest level beneath the earth's surface, the only living thing is a single bacteria species. What interests me is that a stable environment that's existed for millions of years hasn't created a diverse ecosystem.

I think it's likely that life is common in other solar systems (I'm less certain about other parts of our own solar system). I also think intelligent life is likely, based on the idea that as biological systems become more diverse, one of those branches of diversity that will be explored in many places would be through species becoming more intelligent.

I don't really expect intelligent life to arise anywhere like miles beneath the surface where multicellular organisms can't exist, but I had expected something like a rule that biological systems tend towards diversity, or at least a certain level of diversity. This example says the rule isn't always true.

Volokh Correction #23: RealClimate v. Volokhs on climate change - guess who wins

Zywicki at Volokhs is unimpressed with Biden's statement that climate change is "clearly" man-made when the IPCC gave it an over 90 percent chance of being true. Somehow he sees a huge gap in the two positions.

RealClimate says, "maybe he left out the kind of caveats and qualifications you'd attach to the attribution of the recent loss of (North) polar sea ice if this were an AGU talk instead of a vice-presidential debate. Overall,though, the statement gets to the heart of the matter."

Zywicki thinks Palin's confused response, what RealClimate calls a garbled attempt to reiterate her old denial of human caused warming together with McCain's position, is "nuanced." Right.

As Biden, RealClimate, and any normal human being could point out, you have to understand a problem, or know if there is a problem, before you can find a solution. Palin's position that you don't need to understand the problem makes no sense.

In other news, McCain was a lot stronger on climate change in tonight's debate than he's been in the past. Not that it matters though, since he won't be president.

Burn After Reading: we're all babies

While I don't like every movie by the Coen brothers, I am a pretty big fan, and I thought No Country was the best movie of the decade. I had to hesitate though before finally deciding to recommend Burn After Reading. See it if you liked Fargo, otherwise maybe not.

A line by George Clooney's character about being a baby is what the movie, and maybe the Coens, think about all of humanity. Their visual depiction of humanity is the expression on Brad Pitt's face when he and Clooney finally meet (watch for it though, you get to see it only briefly).

Acting was fantastic, especially Pitt, and may be another reason to see the movie. This is dark comedy with far more emphasis on dark than on comedy, though. Enjoy!

(BTW, comments are welcome as usual, but please warn if you post any spoilers.)

A reluctant No to Cal. Prop. 7 and to James Hansen

(I'm throwing Hansen in there just for effect, he's one of the celebrity endorsers of Prop. 7.)

I attended a Community Media Center debate on California Proposition 7, which attempts to double the current legislative mandate to increase renewable power percentages, from a 1% increase to 2% annually. The Investor-Owned-Utilities oppose it, unsurprisingly, but so do virtually all environmental groups and renewable energy business associations. That's weird.

The No campaign says it's poorly written (every No campaign says that, but that doesn't mean it's not true). In the debate, they said that it locks in cost increases, freezes out small renewable producers, and limits financial punishment for utilities that fail to meet mandates. Afterwards, I asked the No proponent why it had been so poorly written - didn't the Yes side come talk to the environmentalists? He said they had but only in a cursory manner and weren't willing to change anything.

So this measure is some billionaire's idea. I suppose it's possible that the enviros have spent too much time working with the utilities to know when to oppose them and support a drastic change (I don't know So Cal Edison, but I do know that PG&E is about as pro-environment as you're going to find in a major corporation). All in all though, my best guess is that the groups oppose it for the reasons they say. Too bad. Maybe we can get a drastic measure that works in 2o10.

(I'll also just insert a waffle statement here, that I could be wrong and will see what else I learn about Prop 7.)

In other climate news, the US Geological Survey discusses "wetland carbon farming." Restoring farmed, former wetlands to actual wetlands in the San Francisco Bay Delta can store significant amounts of carbon while rebuilding the wetland soils. They're trying to verify that it more than makes up for methane emissions. I've read elsewhere that tidal wetlands don't have methane emissions, so we need that type of restoration even more.

A website business I'd invest in

It would be a website aggregator of opinions by people known to generally be on one side of a political question where they favor the opposite side's view for a particular issue. There could be a left wing defection site and a right wing one, and maybe different ones for different countries.

Maybe it's just me, but I think those defecting viewpoints would be some of the most interesting, like the conservatives who can't stand Palin.

I'm not prominent enough to be one of the contributors, but I'd defect and agree with conservatives that Gwen Ifill has a conflict of interest. (The perceived bias could even work the other way, but it's still a problem.) (UPDATE: somewhat less of a problem now - she's just writing a chapter in the book, and hasn't written it yet.)

Meanwhile, my vice-presidential debate prediction: Palin will answer every question with one somewhat coherent, responsive sentence that any middle-schooler could've come up with after some research, followed by a bridging sentence, and then broad platitudes with an occasional memorized zinger. Biden will have a gaffe-free but toned-down performance that ignores Palin and occasionally attacks McCain. Palin will be viewed as having done exceptionally well and their ticket will get a 1 or 2 point bounce in the polls that will fade away after a week.

UPDATE 2: So the debaters performed much like I expected, but the public didn't. They read through Palin's generalities and all three polls I saw gave the win to Biden. Credit where due (to the public, I mean). (Also, everyone says to be skeptical of snap polls - why? As a measure of public opinion, I don't know why they're worse than any other poll.)

UPDATE 3: Ifill responds in a videocast here - the whole book is hers, but she hasn't written the Obama chapter yet, so she doesn't have to screw up the McCain campaign to support some predictions. To the extent it's about intergenerational change in African-American leadership, it almost doesn't matter if Obama wins or loses. Still, it's a little bit iffy.

I'm in

I've been sitting on a fair amount of cash and just today put a large chunk on a socially responsible index fund (DSEFX), that tracks the S&P 500 pretty closely. We'll soon see if now was the right time.

They're baaack - more credit card scammers with nonexistent global warming conferences

Inel has the goods on these credit card scammers/potential identity thieves. Same thing as before: a fake conference on global warming ("Working Group on Global Warming and Climate Change") that isn't going to happen in November in London. Presumably the same goal as before: get personal information off the registration forms, and try to get credit card numbers from a fake website pretending to be that of a real hotel.

I hope both skeptics and believers in climate change learn about and stay away from these guys. Wherever you stand on the issue, they're looking for a way to reach into your pocket.

I submitted a complaint to IC3 last time, by the way, and heard nothing. I don't think Inel did any better with the London police. I'd guess they're waiting for the problem to get bigger first.

A Casablanca/Palin mashup needed

News item:

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who has made a crackdown on gift-giving to state
officials a centerpiece of her ethics reform agenda, has accepted gifts valued
at $25,367 from industry executives, municipalities and a cultural center whose
board includes officials from some of the largest mining interests....

About a quarter of the entities bestowing gifts on the governor are
represented by one of Alaska's most influential mining lobbyists....

On forms disclosing the gifts, Palin, who is the Republican vice
presidential nominee, routinely checked "no" when asked whether she was in a
position to "take official action that may affect the person who gave me the
gift"....

Records show that 23 of the gifts were offered during Palin's
early months in office, when she was pushing the legislature to address a state
corruption scandal by passing a package of ethics reforms....

Palin has come under fire for speaking out against a statewide
initiative, Proposition 4, that would have imposed costly environmental
regulations on mining operations....

So someone with more video editing skillz than me just needs to float Palin's head on top of Claude Raine's. Maybe even blank out the last part of the audio and substitute this dialogue:

I'm shocked - shocked! - that there's corrupt gift-taking in here.

Your gifts, Governor Palin.

(Crossposted to the Obama website.)

The Oreskes-Nierenberg thingy

This is very inside-baseball climate blogging, so normal humans might not be interested in reading it. I don't even reach a final conclusion, so even more reason not to bother with this. Still, I've tried to understand the Oreskes-Nierenberg controversy with some difficulty, and here's what I've got so far:

Naomi Oreskes is a respected science historian, hated by climate denialists for her work charting a lack of scientific controversy over climate change.

William Nierenberg was a respected physicist who, very late in his career, became an extreme climate change skeptic and helped found the George Marshall Institute, a worthless denialist spin machine. His son, Nicolas Nierenberg, understandably attempts to defend his reputation.

This fight, unlike others, isn't a standard Oreskes-versus-denialists.

Oreskes traces the beginnings of climate denialism to a National Academy of Sciences report published in 1983, saying the science in the report was fine and appropriately frightened, but Nierenberg's synthesis of the report ignored the science (she makes a similar version of this argument here and I believe in a forthcoming book, but I haven't focused on those). This presaged even more emphatic moves by the George Marshall Institute and countless other ideologues to deny the science.

There's much Sturming and Dranging over other stuff, but the question of ignoring the science is the key - so is Oreskes right? To my knowledge, she's done more work on the historical issues than anyone, so her fairness is an important issue. And unfortunately, the report that's the basis of all the argument isn't online. The Executive Summary is online though, and it clearly doesn't ignore the science. To the extent Oreskes can support her argument from the summary, I think it really comes down to this excerpt:

20.
....
(b) We do not believe, however, that the evidence at hand about CO2-induced climate change would support steps to change current fuel use patterns away from fossil fuels. Such steps may be necessary or desirable some time in the future, and we should certainly think carefully about the costs and benefits of such steps; but the very near future would be better spent improving our knowledge (including knowledge of energy and other processes leading to creation of greenhouse gases) than in changing fuel mix or use. (Chapters 1, 2, 9)

So the question is whether Chapters 2 and 9 support Nierenberg's point (not Chapter 1, though - see below). If they don't, there's not much left of Oreskes' argument (maybe the full synthesis has more science-twisting, but the Executive Summary is what everyone reads). William's posted some pages from the report here, maybe he'll do more. Or maybe I'll finally get down to the Stanford library and look it up myself.

One last note - I know from experience that newspaper editors will sometimes edit Op-Eds without notice to authors, so problems with Oreskes' Op-Ed might not be all her fault.

UPDATE: See Nicolas Nierenberg's (NN) comment to this post. He points out that Chapter 1 is the synthesis chapter written by William Nierenberg (WN). Since that chapter is only supposed to synthesize the work of others, Summary Point 20(b) has to accurately reflect Chapters 2 and 9. I've edited this post to reflect that.

Also, at least one of the chapter authors was mad at WN:
As far as the summary statement of the Report was concerned, as the Preface states: there were "no major dissents". That means no one chose to fight with the chairman. It was poor, sickly job, deliberately made so for political reasons characteristic of the corruption of governmental purpose in the Reagan regime. Naomi Oreskes has it right.

UPDATE 2: Nicolas adds that Ausubel, not WN, is the primary author of the synthesis.

Start-up problems

My wife's friend operates a start-up business in Karachi. It was 100 feet from ground zero of the attack. It's totalled. Fortunately for them, though, no employees were in the office. Many others were in far worse shape.

Not the usual hazard you expect in trying to start a business.

Even McCain's fig leaf on torture is a lie

I knew that McCain betrayed his anti-torture principles by allowing CIA to torture while prohibiting the military from doing it. I didn't know that military interrogators could be temporarily designated as CIA officers. There is nothing left of McCain's anti-torture stance.

UPDATE: Somewhat tangential issue regarding Troopergate. Palin's use of her official power to fight her ex-brother in law is unquestionably corrupt, but I had thought it had a modest level of justification in him being a rogue cop. Turns out though that many of the allegations aren't as bad as she says.

Shorter Michael Scherer: what idiot said "by their fruit ye shall know them"?

The headline above paraphrases Time Magazine's Michael Scherer, criticizing the Obama campaign for pointing out McCain's long record of opposition to alternative energy. Scherer points to promises McCain is now making and says these outweigh his record, even if the promises are vague.

Some historical figures may disagree with that analysis. See Gristmill for a different view. I'll just add one additional point, that one can look to a candidate's record for an assessment of his judgment. Even if every promise McCain now makes is sincere, his record of past mistakes is an appropriate argument for voting against him because he has bad judgment.

UPDATE: Scherer admits that examining the record is a legitimate technique, so some credit where some credit is due.

A question for Bob Woodward

If this new, supersecret counterinsurgency technique is so game-changing in Iraq, why hasn't it been used in Afghanistan, where things have been deteriorating for over a year?

Maybe I'm too hard on Woodward, but he seems to be the David Broder of confidential sources. Broder takes the conventional wisdom on any subject and pronounces it like an amazing revelation, or possibly something he claims to have heard from a local yokel somewhere. Woodward's books on the Iraq war does the same thing with confidential sources whose information just mirrors conventional perception of whether the war's going well or badly, whether Bush is a good or bad leader, etc.

The utility of either journalist is limited. Maybe a slight edge for Woodward in providing sources for historical analysis, long after the fact.

Brinley Evans, 1967-2008

Brinley Evans was a good friend of mine from high school. She died last week after a long battle with breast cancer. Brinley was a family and immigration lawyer in Toronto, survived by a great husband and two young children. The obituary's here.

I have nothing original to say about what a shame it is to lose touch with great friends. My main knowledge of her is as a teenager and a little bit older. She was fiercely protective and nurturing of children even when she was only a little older than a child herself. We did have occasional contact over the years, though, and I know she created a happy life for herself and her family.

Anyway, I'm thinking that when her kids are older they'll use whatever the Internet's become to learn more about their mother. Maybe they'll come across this and see how she touched people even when she was young, made them laugh, and shared the occasional feeling that high school was a parochial trap, but one that you could also escape (or outlast) with the help of your friends.

Hope versus belief in holy war

I will agree there's been a slightly unfair attack on Sarah Palin regarding the "holy war" issue. The full quote:

“Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God. That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.”

People from a non-religious background might miss that praying that the war is God's plan is different from announcing that it's God's plan. What the full-throated Palin defenders then miss, though, is that the gap between hoping something is God's plan and believing it to be God's plan is likely pretty small. A believer who thinks God's approval or disapproval is discernable and extends to virtually every action would presumably believe that the Iraq war has God's support, or the believer would oppose the war. So Palin might not be making the assertion as a matter of faith, but to the best of her judgment it is a holy war.

On the other hand, her Lincoln quote-mining appears to be one of the many fake Lincoln quotes.

More McCain campaign backing away from cap-and-trade

More retreating from McCain's promise of a weak version of cap-and-trade, by McCain surrogate Tim Pawlenty:

First of all, anything that adds cost to energy prices right now is going to be viewed with a great amount of concern. And so, you notice the cap and trade debate has kind of faded into the background and it’s unclear what that would look like when and if it reemerges. I would also state Sen. McCain supports that approach, but how you do it is really important....you can argue that the world, the globe is warming as it always has for natural reasons. But I think the weight of the science indicates that at least some of it — you know you could argue it’s half a percent or something more substantial, you know — is caused by human behavior. So there are some things that we can reasonably and voluntarily do to reduce the human impact.... in the wake of this energy crisis, where people are, you know, struggling to pay the bills, that debate on cap and trade has fallen to the background for understandable reasons.

Bush waited until after the election to backtrack, but we're seeing it beforehand.

UPDATE: Some good news though - Palin is now waffling about anthropogenic climate change instead of outright denying it, and denying that she previously denied it. Progress through lying! (Though her statement that you need to do something about it regardless of whether it's natural or artificial hardly lends confidence in her ability to analyze.)

Full remarks of Republican National Convention speakers on climate change

Think Progress says the words "climate change" and "global warming" were mentioned all of one time each at last week's Republican National Convention. Neither mentions were by McCain, let alone by his denialist running mate.

I dug up the two references. Here's the first:

In a world of hostile and unstable suppliers of oil, this nation will achieve strategic independence by 2025....By expanding domestic oil and natural gas exploration and production; by changing the way we power our cars; by investing in clean, alternative sources of energy ... and under President McCain's leadership we will become a leader in the new global green economy; by protecting our environment and addressing climate change; by promoting energy efficiency; and, finally, by cracking down on the speculative pricing of oil.

That grammatically-suspect reference is from the remarks of Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico, Luis Fortuno.

The other reference:

If John McCain was just another go-along partisan politician, he never would have led the fight to fix our broken immigration system or to do something about global warming.

But he did!

From Joe Lieberman, who apparently failed to notice McCain not leading the fight on Lieberman-Warner, the less-than-adequate climate-change legislation from this year.

That's the extent of attention this issue received, which should give some idea of what priority it would get in a McCain-Palin Administration.

Refuting the lying McCain-Obama comparison email that's going around

Maybe this response will help other folks that have received similar emails from their relatives or friends.

Note that the "sources" the email uses are general info about each candidates, not specific cites. They're counting on people not bothering to click the links and instead just seeing a reputable website and thinking it must be true. In other words, including a few reputable links does nothing to verify the lies.

Finally, I'm including these refutations not because I necessarily agree with the policy positions (I wish Obama supported gay marriage) but because I want to counter deliberate lies meant to elect a far worse candidate.

The text of the email I'm responding to is at the bottom of the post.

1. New offshore drilling: Obama said he would support it as part of a comprehensive plan:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/08/02/campaign.wrap/

2. Judicial activism: conservative judges are more likely to strike down laws and regulations than liberal judges

http://www.scotusblog.com/wp/ask-the-author-cass-sunstein-tom-miles-part-i/

One can go back and forth on judicial activism forever, but basically one person's judicial activist is another person's constitutionalist.

3. Military service: they got this one right! A+!

4. Time served in US Senate: 173 days is not the number of days the US Senate has been in session since Jan. 2005 when Obama joined it, not to mention all the days of Senate Committee work. It's simply wrong. McCain's been there for 21+ years, Obama for 3+ years.

5. Socialized health care: is Medicare socialized health care? If so, then both McCain and Obama count as "yes" here. Obama's program involves insurance subsidies, mandatory responsibility of parents to get insurance coverage for children, and a Medicare-like option, not a mandate, for those under 65.

good info here:

http://healthpolicyandmarket.blogspot.com/2008/03/detailed-analysis-of-barack-obamas.html

6. Supports abortion throughout pregnancy: a lie.

http://www.ontheissues.org/Social/Barack_Obama_Abortion.htm

7. Troops out of Iraq immediately: another lie - Obama said one or two combat brigades a month, roughly equivalent to what the Iraqi Prime Minister has also called for. Obama's left unclear whether and how many non-combat troops would stay. Obama has wanted to increase troops in Afghanistand, which is impossible unless we draw down troop levels in Iraq:

http://www.slate.com/id/2190661/

McCain, by the way, tends to always support more US military involvement - for example calling for US ground troops to intervene in Kosovo in 1999:

http://www.reason.com/news/show/128142.html

8. Gun rights: Obama has for years stated he believed the 2d Amendment created an individual right to gun ownership, although like McCain he supports regulation. The difference between the two is how much regulation.

http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2007/11/obama_my_wife_sees_need_for_ru.html

A big gun nut should support McCain, but this chart shouldn't lie about the difference.

9. Gay marriage: lying liars. Obama opposes gay marriage, supports civil unions.

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/issues/issues.samesexmarriage.html

Granted, he opposes the Cal. Prop. 8 initiative too (the initiative would amend the California Constitution to ban gay marriage). Hard to square that position except by Obama's believing that banning gay marriage should be flexible and therefore part of state law but not part of state constitution.

10. Tax increases: see Factcheck cited below, but I'll add that both McCain and Obama would increase deficits, with McCain increasing them far more. McCain's proposed repeal of business health insurance tax deduction is a huge tax increase as Republicans usually define it.

11. Official English: mostly correct! More info here, along with info on McCain's Spanish-language website pandering:

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/05/05/giuliani-spanish-2/ (unsure what Giuliani has to do with it)

12. Social Security for illegals: both McCain and Obama supported an amnesty program that would let illegal aliens join Social Security

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=3&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.humanevents.com%2Farticle.php%3Fid%3D24987&ei=a7jCSNa5JJnMsAPu6fX1Bw&usg=AFQjCNE-XqTloKkIyTYXPWKjapOuyRVdfw&sig2=NI3aMDmYTT9v87syNaNGpg

This is related to one of McCain's many flip flop issues, though, so hard to say where he stands now. If someone he believes to be illegal makes fun of his hair, I'm sure he'll be against it.

Okay, taxes. This nonsense has been refuted by Factcheck.org, a non-partisan organization that Cheney referred to in the 2004 debates. I'm not going to go into specifics, but they're all here:

http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/would_obama_tax_my_profits_if_i.html

It's all wrong, and Factcheck concludes it's a deliberate lie.

Feel free to forward this to anyone you'd like!

Brian
Backseat Driving: http://backseatdriving.blogspot.com/

lying email that's being forwarded

2008 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE COMPARISON TALKING POINTS (Ed. note: mostly lies)

ISSUE		JOHN McCAIN	BARAK OBAMA
Favors new drilling offshore US		Yes	No
Will appoint judges who interpret the law not make it		Yes	No
Served in the US Armed Forces		Yes	No
Amount of time served in the US Senate		22 YEARS	173 DAYS
Will institute a socialized national health care plan		No	Yes
Supports abortion throughout the pregnancy		No	Yes
Would pull troops out of Iraq immediately		No	Yes
Supports gun ownership rights		Yes	No
Supports homosexual marriage		No	Yes
Proposed programs will mean a huge tax increase		No	Yes
Voted against making English the official language		No	Yes
Voted to give Social Security benefits to illegals		No	Yes
CAPITAL GAINS TAX
MCCAIN	0% on home sales up to $500,000 per home (couples). McCain does not propose any change in existing home sales income tax.
OBAMA	28% on profit from ALL home sales. (How does this affect you? If you sell your home and make a profit, you will pay 28% of your gain on taxes. If you are heading toward retirement and would like to down-size your home or move into a retirement community, 28% of the money you make from your home will go to taxes. This proposal will adversely affect the elderly who are counting on the income from their homes as part of their retirement income.)
DIVIDEND TAX
MCCAIN	15% (no change)
OBAMA	39.6% - (How will this affect you? If you have any money invested in stock market, IRA, mutual funds, college funds, life insurance, retirement accounts, or anything that pays or reinvests dividends, you will now be paying nearly 40% of the money earned on taxes if Obama becomes president. The experts predict that 'Higher tax rates on dividends and capital gains would crash the stock market, yet do absolutely nothing to cut the deficit.')
INCOME TAX
MCCAIN (no changes)	Single making 30K - tax $4,500 Single making 50K - tax $12,500 Single making 75K - tax $18,750 Married making 60K- tax $9,000 Married making 75K - tax $18,750 Married making 125K - tax $31,250
OBAMA (reversion to pre-Bush tax cuts)	Single making 30K - tax $8,400 Single making 50K - tax $14,000 Single making 75K - tax $23,250 Married making 60K - tax $16,800 Married making 75K - tax $21,000 Married making 125K - tax $38,750 Under Obama, your taxes could almost double!
INHERITANCE TAX
MCCAIN	- 0% (No change, Bush repealed this tax)
OBAMA	Restore the inheritance tax Many families have lost businesses, farms, ranches, and homes that have been in their families for generations because they could not afford the inheritance tax. Those willing their assets to loved ones will only lose them to these taxes.
NEW TAXES PROPOSED BY OBAMA
New government taxes proposed on homes that are more than 2400 square feet. New gasoline taxes (as if gas weren't high enough already) New taxes on natural resources consumption (heating gas, water, electricity) New taxes on retirement accounts, and last but not least....New taxes to pay for socialized medicine so we can receive the same level of medical care as other third-world countries!!!

You can verify the above at the following web sites:

http://money.cnn.com/news/specials/election/2008/index.html

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/issues/issues.taxes.html

http://elections.foxnews.com/?s=proposed+taxes

http://bulletin.aarp.org/yourworld/politics/articles/mccain_obama_offer_different_visions_on_taxes.html

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/candidates/barack_obama/

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/candidates/john_mccain/

Obama's role in McCain's veep stumbles

With months to prepare, why did McCain find out politically-relevant information about Palin only two days before the election and had met her only once face-to-face? The Post buried a nugget in the last lines of this article:

But another official said the "process almost by definition is going to be back-end-loaded."

"We expected the last two weeks after Senator Obama made his selection to be pretty frantic," the official said.

In other words, they wanted to do their vetting based in part on finding the best person to match against whoever Obama selected, and waited for the selection. Except that Obama didn't give them two weeks, delaying the announcement so that McCain only had half the time. I think it's possible that the Obama campaign had figured this out and that it played a role in the decision to delay an announcement.

It's questionable judgment on McCain's part to cut down to two weeks what should have been a much more thorough process. Still more alarming is that they apparently failed to react to the unexpected contingency of Obama's delayed announcement when they should've kicked into high gear two weeks before the announcement, regardless of what Obama did.

A little like Edward's infidelity - regardless of whether the controversy should be part of the political process, it's the underlying judgment that's at issue.

And since I don't think it's been emphasized enough, Palin is a climate change denialist who thinks Intelligent Design should be taught in schools. As Mark Kleiman points out, she has a 21% chance of temporarily or permanently acting as President due to McCain's potential for disability or death at his age.

UPDATE: I've since read that the McCains met Palin in early 2008 too, but that hardly improves the vetting process.

Unilateral geoengineering against the global interest

A RealClimate piece on geoengineering through pumping massive amounts of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere doesn't make it seem very attractive. While it can control temperature, it does nothing to stop ocean acidification, and I assume we end up with the Mother of All Acid Rain-damaged ecosystems on land (pretty sure that's the case but I've not seen verification). Massive pollution would have to be continued as long as humans kept adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and for many decades afterwards, or temperatures would quickly rebound to the highs they would otherwise have achieved. Finally there's the issue RealClimate addresses, that significant decreases in precipitation could result from this plan.

Two points I would add to this depressing picture: first, as bad as it sounds, it's not as bad as what the Lovelock-types project. While I don't think 11C warming will happen, if it did head that way, we'd choose the sulfur-geoengineering future instead.

Second, all climate scenarios, including this geoengineering scenario, have winners and losers. Right now this looks like a bad deal for everyone, but we can't predict with certainty how specific countries will be affected. Twenty years from now, some medium-sized or larger nation may figure out that its precipitation pattern won't do too badly, and so for that specific nation, geoengineering will be the best option, and then it will simply go ahead and do it.

I came up with this little problem myself, but it turns out of course that a lot of others have thought of it too. Solution's not clear other than a treaty forbidding geoengineering without international consent (along with coordinated punishment against a transgressor). I expect that would tie conservatives into knots - they'd hate a treaty, but don't want to give China a free hand.

Bad radio test for Kathleen Sebelius

Turning on the radio without knowing who's speaking, I thought she was some female Clinton supporter dragged up on stage and reluctantly pushing the unity thing for Obama. Wow. She was my vice-presidential pick, but at least for speechmaking, Biden's better.

Clinton was pretty good, and Schweitzer. Mark Warner, not so much.

A few mentions of climate issues, not a lot. I reluctantly agree with an NPR commenter that Obama will have to make health his top priority - people just care about it more than anything else.

Meanwhile, the DNC website is crashing when I try to view speeches. Get with it, guys.

Inel spots your more typical Internet con artists on the climate change beat

The "Global Warming and Climate Change International Conference & Exposition" in London this September doesn't really exist and appears to be a way to steal credit card numbers. Anyone who signs up will likely be out of far more money than the hotel reservation. Seems more sophisticated and targeted than your typical email phishing, which is a little disturbing.

Inel has the details here.

Rush Limbaugh, other conservatives insult Cindy and John McCain

Glenn Greenwald found a bunch of abusive quotations from the 2004 election criticizing John Kerry for marrying a wealthy heiress, and implicitly criticizing his wife as someone who patronizes a prostitute.

I assume people like Rush Limbaugh would never be two-faced, so they must be criticizing McCain the same way. To help them out, I took Rush's words, substituted McCain for Kerry, put in the correct dollar figures, and substituted Bush and war for Kennedy and programs. Everything else is just as Limbaugh said, so I'm sure he'd have no objection:

I mean, [McCain]'s been there, but he's basically a
skirt-chaser, folks. He's a gigolo. . . . McCain is cheap. Most gigolos
are. I mean -- I think it -- I think it goes with the, with the definition. . . .
[W]hat do you consider a fair wage? John McCain considers a fair wage a
wife with 100 million. So, he had to find a company that had one. Well,
there aren't too many of these companies that have little heiresses running
around that are single, have 100 million that some guy can marry into. . . .
Because see, Al Gore's daddy was a senator and Al Gore's daddy worked his way
up from wealth and power to wealth and power. I mean, he got more of it than anybody
ever dreamed of for having as little to go on. I mean, he's one of those old
boys. You know how that worked back then. Then John McCain 's daddy is his
wives. (laughter) I mean, he's a gigolo. Everybody knows this. There's
nobody in our party really has much respect for this guy and you can see it
last night, but I can't say that. I mean, you got sugar daddy wife back then. You
got sugar daddy wife now. He worked his way up from a blue blood to a platinum
American Express card, and it doesn't have his name on it.

Another:

[McCain] has lived the life of a millionaire living off
the inherited wealth of his two wives.... [As a]
millionaire who did not have to work for his fortune, Mr. McCain
never had to worry about the money he earned, the taxes he paid, or the war
he and George Bush forced the rest of us to pay for. . . . Mr. McCain is not
effected (sic) when these neighborhoods are destroyed and working class
families lose the largest asset in their retirement plans -- their home's value.

Recently I read at the Corner a whine that Dems supposedly opposed criticizing the wealth of a candidate's wife in 2004 but now embrace it. I think this type of abusive language is inappropriate but I haven't seen the Dems use it. I'd agree that any Dems who said noone's allowed to point out that Kerry was rich in 2004 would be two-faced to do something similar to McCain, but I'd like to see the Corner find an example.

UPDATE: I deleted an Ivy League reference that doesn't work for McCain, who instead was a legacy admit to the Naval Academy.

Biden and the Universe

I think the universe has two purposes: to irritate me, personally; and to make it blindingly obvious to anyone whenever I, personally, am an idiot. Note that the second purpose complements the first.

So Obama picked Biden, and I don't like the choice. He failed the same radio test that Obama passed spectacularly: I turned on the radio one time to hear someone give a speech without knowing who. In Biden's case I kept asking myself why this guy is so annoying.

My opinion didn't change during the primaries although I'll admit that he did well in the last debate I watched, and also I can't say I really know that much about him. I was disappointed to see Biden was a big supporter of Kosovo independence and supported the Iraq war resolution (although he and Richard Lugar did try to replace it with something more moderate until they were sandbagged by Dick Gephardt). Anyway, I don't see a Chris Dodd figure taking unorthodox stances that turned out to be right. Maybe I'm wrong.

So if Biden's a bad choice then it fits the universe's first purpose, and if he's a good choice then it fits the second purpose. We'll find out which.

UPDATE: After having just read the relevant section of this, possibly the last (only?) intelligent thing written by Glenn Reynolds, I'd say Biden's 1988 plagiarism scandal was overblown.

Error bands and known unknowns

Mostly just rehashing something I've mentioned in the past, but this time in response to Mark Kleiman's point regarding climate change that "uncertainty actually argues for more precaution, not less. Current estimates could be wrong in either direction; that's what 'error band' means."

Yes he's right, but there's more. The error bands involve uncertainty about currently-quantifiable factors, but there are a number of as-yet unquantifiable factors that with best-case scenarios have no effect but under any other outcome will make things worse. I'm not aware of unquantified factors that work in the reverse direction. In other words, the "true" error bars should be skewed to show a greater chance that things will be worse rather than better than the predicted outcome. All the more reason to start reducing emissions, quickly.

This point doesn't get enough attention, IMHO.

The Rove/McCain Campaign understands about keeping surrogates on message

They might not be able to control McCain and his occasional verbal wanderings, but the graduates of the Bush/Cheney campaigns know that surrogates can only say what they're allowed to say.

So when "senior McCain surrogate" Steve Forbes says on CNN that "cap and trade is going to go the way of some other things....I don’t think those things are going to get very far," that's because Forbes is being allowed to say it. Bush made similar promises and reversed them after getting elected. Now we're getting a warning.

(And I don't actually question that McCain vaguely wants some kind of greenhouse gas regulations, but I expect Bush actually believed what he was saying in 2000 too. The issue is what McCain would actually do, and it doesn't look good.)

UPDATE: Turns out that McCain policy adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer is from a dirty energy, privately held company (Koch Industries) and ran a climate denialist, astroturf group called Americans for Prosperity. Policy advisers are likely to transition from the campaign to the administration if McCain's elected, so people like her would be in charge of McCain's climate policy. Wonderful.

Recommending Papa John's whole wheat pizza crust with light cheese

I love pizza, and it's terrible for you. Apparently Papa John's is the only major pizza chain that offers a whole wheat crust, which they only started two months ago. I ordered one with light cheese and a few other toppings (IMPORTANT UPDATE: by "light cheese" I meant "not much cheese", not the dreaded low-fat stuff), and it was really good. Baby steps in the right direction.

Unfortunately they don't give nutritional info for whole wheat or light cheese. I know the light cheese helps alot, and whole wheat has got to be at least a little better that white flour.

Denialists excited by Albertan engineers' disagreements over climate change

This showed up in Wikipedia and may be used elsewhere by denialists: a survey of members of the Association of Professional Engineers, Geologists, and Geophysicists of Alberta found a majority of respondents felt the debate over scientific causes of climate change isn't settled. Alberta is an oil-producing province so it's a skewed sample to start with, but the main response is these people aren't scientific experts on climate change. Only 3% of the respondents were geophysicists, most were engineers, and only 23.5% had dealt with climate change as part of their professional duties (which still doesn't qualify them as experts on the science - I've dealt with the issue professionally and that doesn't make me a scientific expert).

All that should be enough to dismiss it, but I might as well go on:

• This wasn't a random survey - all the members were asked to respond and so the ones who did were self-selected.
• The survey report doesn't say what response rate it had in percentage terms.
• The survey could be completed online or faxed in, and the report doesn't describe any security methods (a past online survey of "climatologists" by Dennis Bray had been crashed by denialists who gained password access). Providing identifying information is listed as "optional."
• The question on the cause of climate change is inadequate: it asks to choose between primarily natural factors, primarily human factors, or both factors together. The third option is a different question. They should've asked if it was primarily natural, primarily human, or if the science wasn't clear enough to judge which cause is primary.
• Amusingly, only 20% trust the climate models, but a solid majority think climate change is a significant risk to public safety. How do they know that if the models stink? I guess they trust the theory, or just take a ruler to the instrumental record and extend the upward-sloping line out a few decades. Whatever. (Might be evidence against the idea that the poll was crashed, though.)

Bottom line: somewhat useful for Albertan engineers to know what Albertan engineers think, maybe, but not relevant to the existence of a consensus.

UPDATE: 52,000 members, 1,000 self-selected to respond back.

Support for Kosovo independence comes home to roost

I was right on this one (unfortunately). From Crooked Timber:

...this is part of the long pay-back for Kosovo. When Russia was strong-armed on the UN Security Council into accepting Kosovan independence, they made it clear that the precedent would ring out in the Caucasus and indeed any where else the Russians want to destabilize. Again, the rights and wrongs of springing Kosovo free of the Serbs can be argued, and so can the means of doing it. But the outcome is that Russia believes it has a free hand to prop up Russian or other minority nationalities anywhere geopolitically convenient within its Near Abroad.

It's sad that the same sovereignty fetish that made the West want to recognize Kosovo is also what motivated Georgia to try and retake the areas of Georgia that had been semi independent:

Georgians are intensely nationalistic, and viewed these de facto states on their border as an intolerable violation of sovereignty. Mr. Saakashvili cashed in on this deep sense of grievance, vowing to restore Georgia’s “territorial integrity.”

For those thinking that Georgia is 100% in the right (from the same link above):

The Abkhaz talk about the Georgians pretty much the same way that the Georgians talk about the Russians. On that point, the Abkhaz share much with the South Ossetians. For them, as for the Ossetians, Georgia is the neighborhood bully.

Not that I have much any idea what to do about it all. I don't think having a lobbyist for Georgia's government on McCain's payroll is a great idea though.

UPDATE: I'm reading that Georgians took encouragement from Bush too seriously as one reason for their quick strike into Ossetia. Shades of Bush 41. (And in this case, the Russians might have taken Putin's mastery of Bush as a reason not to hesitate on their side).

UPDATE 2: For what it's worth, I'd support a quick membership for Georgia in NATO, but only with mutual self defense obligations starting outside of the two disputed provinces and south of wherever Russian forces are when the treaty's signed. Russia can (unofficially) keep what it's taken; they just can't take any more. Given that their presence is likely popular in South Ossetia and Abkhazia but would be an occupier in Georgia proper, it's not the worst of outcomes.

So much for my candidate John Edwards

Good thing the voters didn't follow the lead of us Edwards supporters.

Among the other things I'm mad about is that my policy of paying attention to people when they turn out to be right meant I had to read an entire Mickey Kaus blog post. Disgusting.

So Edward's toast now for any high level elected position, which I think is about right. Forget the morality issue, he's shown himself not to have the good judgment those positions require. Maybe an appointed position would be alright, sometime in the future.

Somewhat controversially, I don't think Elizabeth Edwards comes out all that great either with this - not because of the adultery, which is 100% his fault, but because she pushed his candidacy while knowing he had this secret that could kill his campaign and the Democratic party's chances if it came out after Edwards secured the nomination. If John Edwards deserves blame for running with this secret in his background - and he does - she doesn't escape the blame entirely either.

And while I'm mad at Edwards, I might as well also mention I'm annoyed they took down all the blog posts at the Edwards website, including quite a few I posted. I can understand freezing the posts when they no longer have staff to monitor them, but taking them offline was unnecessary.

UPDATE: Eli correctly notes in the comments that McCain is getting a free pass for similar behavior. That's true, but it was also a long time ago (assuming the Vicki Iseman affair isn't true) and not when he was running for president, and not a secret either. Edwards knew the political rules and the risks.

Mucking my way through Pielke Jr. (and the Volokhs)

I haven't paid too much attention to Roger Pielke Jr. lately, as it's just too much work to sort through his stuff. I don't even know how to categorize him - not a denialist, exactly. Maybe just contrarian for the sake of it, a climate change nihilist.

But let's go through the exercise. Jonathan Adler at the Volokhs does his usual uncritical citing of RP Jr. to take potshots at Joe Romm who pushes for rapid action. This is how it works, by the way. Even if RP Jr. doesn't directly oppose attempts to mitigate climate change, he's used extensively by people like Adler who does.

RP says a new climate study doesn't support the idea of emphasizing how climate change makes weather more extreme. A casual reader might think RP is saying that weather won't get more extreme, so RP gets to send that message without actually saying it. To support his argument, he says the study finds in the US that

3. Despite increases in some measures of precipitation , there have not been corresponding increases in peak streamflows (high flows above 90th percentile).

Again a casual reader might think this means that things aren't getting worse. What RP leaves out is this compares high flows within a single period, not against the past. If total precipitation increases, the 90th percentile can also increase compared to what would have been a 90th percentile flood, fifty years ago. In other words, things are getting worse and it supports the opposite of what RP implies (this could be wrong, see updates below).

Another example - RP says the study (available here) emphasizes flooding when in fact "there has been no increase in streamflow" and is therefore ignorant or misleading (RP also says damage has decreased as a percentage of GDP, but he's ignoring the effect of flood control measures). TokyoTom valiantly tries to figure out in the comments what he's talking about regarding "no increase" in streamflow. RP says, "The report is not discussing flooding when it says it is discussing flooding. It is discussing precipitation. They are not at all the same thing, and implying that precip = floods is in error, and misleading." RP is accusing the study of doing what he just did - implying (not saying directly though) that streamflow is a proxy for extreme weather and it's not getting worse. Eventually RP cites to yet something else he wrote, but I'd had enough by this point.

UPDATE: Good grief, that was quick - Roger has a response in the comments. I'm not satisfied. And in somewhat related news, "Scientists studying variations in tropical heat and rainfall since the mid-1980s have found a strong link between warm periods and a rise in the frequency of the most extreme downpours."

UPDATE 2: Thinking some more about the comments, I did the same wrong leap from more extreme precip = more extreme flooding. It does ceteris parabis, but not over time with heavily managed and altered watersheds. Going back to the study itself, it's pretty measured on streamflow issues (p. 53), so I don't see the problem. More broadly, extreme events and their possibilities do motivate people, and is an important part of the economic analysis. They shouldn't be overplayed or downplayed.

Guest post: The Dumbing Down of America

(This is a guest post from Dad. I don't have too much to add, except that while playing Dungeons and Dragons as a kid might not have helped my tan, it did help me with numbers. Maybe that's what kids today need. -Brian)

The first major sign this author encountered was the switch years ago by merchandisers to the use of electronic calculators that figured out what change is owed the customer. When I was a cashier for the A&P in 1958, we did not have those and each of us had to be able to make change in our head. I can still do that now, and do that to check the machine. But forget having the clerk do it. As a result our clerks are dumber than those in developing countries that LACK those crutches, er I mean, machines.

Recently, one more example: Turns out that Office Max no longer gives you an instant rebate on used ink jet cartridges turned in at the store. Instead you have to join their "club" and they will SEND you a coupon for you to use, if and when you remember to bring it in again. When I complained Office Max was counting on some of us never turning in the coupons, I was told no, that is not the reason. Turns out the only cartridges ever available for the refund were HP cartridges (which is what I use), and some clerks were unable to make the distinction when they were turned in, and instead paid out willy-nilly. So instead of teaching their clerks how to be smarter, we have this new system.

The dumber we get, the worse is the service we get.

Two recent Obama policy mistakes

1. Obama caved in on his previous proposal to delay the "Constellation" successor program for the space shuttle in order to pay his early education program. He also didn't specify where he now plans to get the money for his education program, and he wants an extra flight of the dangerous space shuttle in 2010, after it's supposed to be decertified (IIRC), and I presume without the expensive program of recertification.

2. Obama now proposes letting the Michigan and Florida delegations get seated at full strength, with no penalty for violating the primary calendar rules. If Obama with all his advantages can't stand up to swing vote states, then we can hardly expect future candidates to do anything. The next election will have primaries in November.

Obama is getting hit for the wrong things, and not for the right ones.

Clearing up some confusion over Hansen 1988

A while back, commenter "Nick" made some assertions in the comments to this post about James Hansen's famous 1988 paper that I didn't have specific responses too. Some good recaps elsewhere make that possible. Nick says:

"We take the Scenario A prediction that is in line with what has happened with non human causes for climate change and CO2 output."

This is a little confused, but Scenario A was meant to show exponential growth in emissions, as opposed to Scenario B's more accurate linear growth. "Scenario A, since it is exponential, must eventually be on the high side of reality."

"Well, there are reasons for not using scenario B. Hansen put in a volcanic erruption to show its effects. Over the post Pinatobu period there has not been a major erruption. Scenario B therefore has a downward bias that makes the prediction look better than it should. (The erruption that didn't happen would have depressed temperatures.)"

Hansen in 1988 assumed a major volcanic eruption in 1995, and one actually happened in 1991. In other words, his assumption doesn't bias the outcome (it would have if he assumed two major eruptions when only one occurred).

"The claims are still being made that we have an escalating CO2 problem. That's scenario A."

No. Scenario B also had escalating CO2. Only Scenario C didn't.

More info at RealClimate.