Volokh Correction #26: plenty of proxies don't use tree ring reconstruction

Jim Lindgren, normally one of the non-ridiculous posters at Volokh, screws up with a long quotation of someone else that begins

The bristlecone pines that created the shape of the Hockey Stick graph are used in nearly every millennial temperature reconstruction around today....

Of course, RealClimate shows three reconstructions from the year 1600 or earlier without bristlecones or any other tree rings, and multiple other reconstructions without the particular Yamal tree rings that Lindgren is now going on about. (Update: above sentence corrected from four reconstructions starting in 1500, my thanks to Glen in comments for spotting this.) I haven't followed the Yamal controversy that closely except to know that most people who have think it's nonsense. Maybe there's something new here, but I doubt it. (It appears to be all about the data not being available, refuted at Deltoid two months ago.)

Lindgren is pumping out the usual nonsense (by implication, not directly) that the climate consensus is based on a single piece of information, and that info is corrupt. He needs to get his head on straight before accusing other researchers of being ethically-challenged.

Lindgren earned a lot of credit by taking on his fellow conservative, the ethically-challenged John Lott. He's used up a bit of that credit now.

UPDATE: and Lindgren's repost about false Australian temperature data is, of course, wrong.

My Freedom of Information-type work and relation to the hacked emails

My legal work in the past has included a fair amount of activity regarding the California state equivalent of the Freedom of Information Act, called the Public Records Act. The PRA borrows heavily from FOIA, so I knew FOIA pretty well (I'm not current on latest developments). I know squat about the British version of FOI, other than it's relatively new, so many vague aspects may not have been resolved yet through legal interpretations.

I've both filed PRA requests and responded to them, working on behalf of government agencies. The two worst weeks I had in the law were spent responding to a single, huge PRA request by a litigious millionaire, paging through thousands of documents to figure out which he could see and which he couldn't. A huge waste of my time and of the taxpayer dollars that were paying for my time.

In the case of the CRU emails, I doubt the climate researchers had included this line item in their grant requests: "80 hours to respond to ridiculous, repeated, massive data requests from people who don't understand the information and will lie about it in order to cause harm to the scientific process and to society as a whole." So the researchers probably had to eat the time spent responding.

They've got my sympathy, but still. If email records were deleted, if the responder knew for certain that the records were required to be given, and if, contrary to reality, the responder had been a lawyer and not a scientist, I would consider that a firing offense. A scientist might not understand the gravity of his violation, and his knowledge is less certain than a lawyer's over whether the record he's destroying is responsive to the request. I'd hope a scientist would understand that destroying information is not a legal way to avoid turning it over, but who knows. (If you have grounds for refusing to turn over information, in the US you create a privilege log that describes the documents you're not going to turn over, and you give that log together with all the responsive info.)

The other "ifs" in the paragraph above still apply: whether emails were destroyed, whether they were responsive to the requests, whether any exemptions apply to the legal responsibility to turn them over, and what the researchers knew about their obligations.

All this is a long way of saying the email thing may be more than nothing regarding Phil Jones, and may require some response or reprimand, probably short of permanent dismissal. I don't know if it's more than nothing about anyone else. Most of the rest of the allegations are unimportant: the "trick" is minor, attempts to fire incompetent editors and disregard bad science are justifiable, the 1980s climate data is still available in its original form from national agencies. I don't know about database quality, but I doubt there's enough there to really say the instrumental record for every database is meaningless.

But as Jon Stewart said, the moral here is don't cut corners. On the PR side, this might be a good time to point out on the Sadly Wish It Was A Longer List Of Things I Admire In Roger Pielke Jr.'s Work, is his unflappable demeanor (Eli Rabett gets the same kudos on a longer list). Keeping that demeanor might make it easier to deal with the nonsense.

Do the skeptics have a point about a 300-year typo in the IPCC?

(Welcome, Just One Minute readers. I appreciate Tom's link, but I'd also encourage you to look at my proposed bets with people who dispute anthropogenic global warming. With a few honorable exceptions, the loudest skeptics have been very uninterested in putting their money where there mouths are.)

Skeptics say:

According to Prof Graham Cogley (Trent University, Ontario), a short article on the future of glaciers by a Russian scientist (Kotlyakov, V.M., 1996, The future of glaciers under the expected climate warming, 61-66, in Kotlyakov, V.M., ed., 1996, Variations of Snow and Ice in the Past and at Present on a Global and Regional Scale, Technical Documents in Hydrology, 1. UNESCO, Paris (IHP-IV Project H-4.1). 78p estimates 2350 as the year for disappearance of glaciers, but the IPCC authors misread 2350 as 2035 in the Official IPCC documents, WGII 2007 p. 493!

I tried to run down the truth in a comment thread:

Let's go p. 493, shall we?

"Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other
part of the world (see Table 10.9) and, if the present rate
continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035
and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at
the current rate. Its total area will likely shrink from the present
500,000 to 100,000 km2 by the year 2035 (WWF, 2005)."

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg2/ar4-wg2-chapter10.pdf

The WWF cite:

"WWF (WorldWildlife Fund), 2005:An overview of glaciers, glacier retreat, and
subsequent impacts in Nepal, India and China.WorldWildlife Fund, Nepal Programme,
79 pp."

On to the WWF:

In 1999, a report by the Working

Group on Himalayan Glaciology (WGHG) of the International Commission for Snow and Ice

(ICSI) stated: “glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world

and, if the present rate continues, the livelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 is very

high”.

The ISCI is where I run out of direct online sources. But I did find this ref, also from 1999:

"The glacier will be decaying at rapid, catastrophic rates. Its total area will shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square km by the year 2035," says formerICSI president V M Kotlyakov in the report Variations of snow and ice in the past and present on a global and regional scale.

This is a problem. Back to Kotlyakov's report (p. 66):

The degradation of the extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be apparent in rising ocean level already by the year 2050, and there will be a drastic rise of the ocean thereafter caused by the deglaciation-derived runoff (see Table 11 ). This period will last from 200 to 300 years. The extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be decaying at rapid, catastrophic rates— its total area will shrink from 500,000 to 100,000 km² by the year 2350.

If the IPCC's chain of citations does indeed reach back to and rely on Kotlyakov 1996 alone - and I'm not sure that it does - then the skeptics have a point. Worth noting that Kotlyakov assumed linear changes in warmth, which is optimistic under business-as-usual scenarios, but that won't erase a 300-year difference.

UPDATE: Skeptic Tom Maguire gets a little further than me, but no real results. So far it's looking like sloppy work, although the sloppiness isn't with the IPCC but the predecessor citations. Maybe someone else can get a better answer than Tom or me.

Romm, Roger wrong; Rabett right

What Eli said about the obvious relevance of population control to the climate crisis. Call me crazy, but I suspect there's some kind of connection between the larger US emissions relative to Canada and the larger US population. Similarly that a problem like climate requiring multiple generations to address could be affected by the relative success of population control over generations. African populations may not have anything like the US per-capita emissions now, but neither did South Korea fifty years ago. I both hope and fear that Africa undergoes a similar change in economics, in which case the number of its capita becomes darn important.

Roger's opposition may be motivated by a general dislike of doing anything societally-changing for reasons of climate (just a guess), which he reverse-projects as other people using climate change to advance their own social goals. (Although that charge against others does sometimes have a grain of truth.)

As for Romm's opposition, it appears to be that population control alone can't solve the problem, so don't bother with it. Only the first part of that argument is correct, and the second part is used against many partial solutions that people find inconvenient, like wind power or (possibly) nuclear power.

As for me, my interest in per-capita emission allocations creates a political reason for paying attention to population. It also means being concerned about international migration. I think some resistance on the left to population issues comes from revulsion against guilt-by-second-hand-association with some vile racists who've seized on population and border control. It's the racists who are the problem, though, not the population and immigration issues themselves.

A final note - recent increases in fertility in Northern Europe will make emissions control more difficult over multiple generations, if the trend continues. I see no reason against the reverse argument for reducing fertility elsewhere.

Bonus blogging: fantastic new pictures of geysers on Enceladus. There could be frozen microbes shooting out on those plumes - we just need to grab some and bring them back.

The Gingrich Effect

I've stolen the headline from Balloon Juice, and I hope the name sticks to this study: overall divorce rates for couples where one partner is very sick stays at an average level, but only because healthy women are much less likely to divorce a now-sick spouse while healthy men are much more likely to divorce their sick spouse. A healthy man is seven times more likely to divorce a sick spouse than a healthy woman is.

Some interesting comments at Balloon Juice. Someone points out that women often have financial reasons for staying in a marriage that men often don't. OTOH, that doesn't explain why women decrease their divorce rate - a seriously-sick husband is less of a financial advantage than a healthy one.

Other comments highlight how women are conditioned to be caretakers while men are disproportionately unable to handle being around someone sick (obviously, lots of generalizing here). I think it's interesting because it doesn't come close to eliminating the moral flaw, but suggests that women are challenged in an area where they are most prepared to overcome the betrayal temptation, while men are the least ready. Bottom line though: even if you're so ethically weak that you can't take care of your wife, that doesn't require a divorce.

No one raised the Medicaid issue: a divorce might not be a betrayal, but a way to protect the healthy spouse's assets while the sick spouse gets Medicaid assistance, and the relationship continues in an unmarried state following the "paper divorce". Not clear why this would create a gender differential, though. Maybe men have more assets from prior to the marriage that they can protect through divorce?

There may be some partial explanations, but men don't look too good in all this.

And there's always exceptions. A horrible spouse may be richly deserving of divorce papers and that might not change immediately after a cancer diagnosis. I doubt that describes Newt Gingrich's first wife, though.

Unrelated: just watched an old Coen brothers' film, Miller's Crossing. Very good, and very dark. This excellent, spoiler-filled review describes the conflict between ethics and love in the form of two fighting gangs and within the persona of the male lead. I completely disagree with the review as to which side won in the lead's mind.

And with that, I'm travelling for a bit, so there'll be little or no blogging until December.

The Nimanic carnivore's dilemma

I haven't seen much discussion of the NY Times Op-Ed by Nicolette Niman of former Niman Ranch fame, arguing "that a conscientious meat eater may have a more environmentally friendly diet than your average vegetarian."

Call it highly unproven at this point, even accepting that she's talking about the tiny percent of beef in the US that's grass-fed. Typical grass-fed cattle aren't much better for greenhouse gas emissions than typical factory farmed. Niman has to resort to discussing techniques for reducing methane that are experimental or not widely adopted even among the small percent of cattle that's grass-fed.

She does have an interesting argument that one study shows a 19% increase in soil carbon sequestration from pasturing cattle instead of raising crops. My one-study rule applies though (one study's result isn't proof of anything, it might just show the need for lots of study to confirm the result). And I didn't know that turkeys could be grass-fed.

She left out the issue that most everyone does as well, that ranching provides an alternative land use to sprawl. She also left out the argument that lands that have been pastured for decades/centuries at the current rate of use are carbon neutral for that time period.

Finally, here in California the grass would have been originally grazed by elk and deer, while in the Midwest it would have been grazed by buffalo. It would be interesting to compare emissions on that basis.

Unrelated bonus blogging: Tim "Slob Hunter" Pawlenty may have gut-shot his reputation among the hunting community by abandoning a wounded deer in the field. This may well cause him more trouble in running for the Republican nomination than all the deaths from that bridge collapse in 2007.

Tricked by the Girl Scouts

Coming out of the grocery store today, I saw the Girl Scouts sitting at their table and figured I could violate the diet for once-a-year cookies. Only after I came up and talked to them did I realize it's not cookies they're selling now, it's trail mix.

While I could safely avoid them with only a slight twinge of guilt by keeping my distance, the level of potential guilt in refusing to buy anything is inversely proportional to the distance between us, and it squares if you actually talk to the girls. In this case the potential guilt was reduced by the two girls' being older than the ones that are usually selling, but the reduction wasn't enough.

So I now own a can buttered peanuts, and have to wait for January for Thin Mints and Samoas.

Arguments against per-capita emission limits are arguments that support massive HFC-23 releases by developing countries

I think the takeaway that India and other countries should get, from the reasoning why industrialized countries must be allowed higher per-capita emissions, is that India should pump up its own emissions.

The reason why people think we Americans and Europeans should have higher per-capita emissions, as far as I know, are that we can do it, we make money doing it, and we've been doing it. As far as being able to do it, India might not be able to create an industrial economy overnight, but they could easily start creating and venting HFC-23 to the atmosphere, with 11,000 times the greenhouse gas effect of CO2.

Venting HFC-23 might not make money for India immediately, but if future emission reductions are based on each nation's baseline emissions, then it could make economic sense to pump up that baseline so reductions are less difficult.

The last argument by industrialized nations, that we've been polluting the atmosphere for a while and therefore should be allowed to continue at a higher rate than those who haven't been polluting, doesn't work quite as well as an argument for this thought experiment. However, it does mean that potential polluters should hurry up and start polluting as much as possible and as early as possible. It still says to India to get in line right away with high emissions to make as long a claim as possible the right to continue polluting.

Obviously it would be a disaster for India or any other developing country to carry out this idea, but it's no worse a disaster than what is already happening in the US and other developed nations who are already causing a high rate of per-capita emissions.

The alternative, I think, is to acknowledge that some form of per-capita emission limits are appropriate, that high-emission countries don't want low-emission countries to act as we do, and that we're willing to make it worth their while not to increase their emissions.

Bonus unrelated blogging: since I've disagreed with Joe Romm elsewhere in this blog, I'll just also note here that he's done a lot of good work, particularly on American climate policy issues. I'm adding Climate Progress to my blogroll.

More unrelated blogging: from TPM, Sarah Palin "rembers being a voracious reader [in her youth], favorites including John Steinbeck's 'The Pearl' and George Orwell's 'Animal Farm.'" I'd be more impressed with her voracity if it included books over 100 pages long.

Mike Pence not as stupid as claimed

Congressman Mike Pence is one of the leaders of the Republican Party in the House and widely understood to be a moron.

This speech might show something different though:

(If the video doesn't work, try http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrp_kZ9ZL_8.)

He says his cousin 1. has cancer, 2. opposes health care reform, and 3. is awaiting approval for experimental treatment. Pence is serving the insurance industry and wingnut ideological vanity to deny health care to everyone else, while at the same time having the effect of pleading for special treatment for his cousin. Nice hat trick. Unless it's unintentional, in which case he's as stupid as believed.

In this era of performance-based outcomes, it's unclear whether Pence has successfully scored special treatment for his cousin. He failed to stop House passage, but will have another chance after a House-Senate conference committee produces a joint bill. Even if that passes though, I think he's still got a good chance of getting something for his cousin, something more like a fee-for-service model. Not that any of this would be spelled out, though, maybe not even spelled out in their own little minds.

Unrelated bonus blogging from Yglesias: "The world would be a better place if people looking for cheap thrills would stick to the black metal scene or maybe take up extreme sports rather than foreign policy punditry. "

In lieu of an actual climate change post, I'll just quote myself

I win for lazy AND egotistical by quoting a comment I submitted to the Breakthrough Institute/Ted Norhaus attack piece on Joe Romm that doubled as a lame semi-defense of Superfreakonomics (hasn't been approved yet, so we'll see when it shows up).

TN writes, "I can find no evidence that you or any of the other prominent bloggers and columnists we cited have ever publicly rebuked Romm for his behavior, which is toxic to civil and healthy democratic discourse."

Nice addition of the "we cited" escape clause. If you look a little more broadly you get William Connolley at Stoat who went after Romm quite harshly long before your post here:

http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2009/06/foaming_at_the_mouth_with_joe.php

Now the funny thing about that is what Connolley had to say about the Superfreaks and how it contrasted with your approach:

"Joe Romm has a fairly characteristic attack; and just for a change I'll agree with him; though he chooses odd bits to assault."

http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2009/10/superfreakonomics_global_cooli.php

Personally I think Connolley is over-harsh with Romm, while I also think Romm is insufficiently cautious about his interpretations of what he's learned.

It's more than clear, however, that Superfreaks wrote a horribly-flawed chapter. While I'm no one of consequence, I was able to write three posts critiquing Levitt and Dubner without once referencing Romm, and I doubt I'm the only one.

I think the most telling part of TN's post was citing favorably to Jon Stewart's puff-piece interview of Levitt, the shoddiest work I've ever seen from Stewart. It was a content-free response that ignored the many substantive criticisms to the chapter, and here we see it repeated again, beyond a few cursory acknowledgments of errors.

I've been meaning to write some kind of open letter to Joe Romm saying "don't blow it with your increased visibility, and be more cautious about your interpretations of facts". Maybe this will have to do. He can keep the vitriol if he wants, but he needs to be more careful on the factual interpretation.

UPDATE: Two more thoughts: first, the quote-feeding attack on Romm is a red herring. I've been asked by journalists after they've gotten a feel for my viewpoint, "Is it your position that (attempts to describe in a sentence what I've been saying)." Romm knew Caldeira, and he was doing the same thing I've experienced, even if he did it a little clumsily.

Second, Romm needs to be more accurate. I'm particularly concerned that low-IQ/high visibility types who don't check sources use Romm as a crutch. For example, I defended Romm from William's critique as not providing worthwhile information when I pointed to Romm raising the possibility that no-till farming might not store carbon. But then Romm blows it by significantly exaggerating the report (read the comments at the link). This is the kind of thing he needs to fix.

UPDATE 2:  post edited to lower the tone, remove unnecessary wisecracks on my part.

TigerHawk's right - Obama should apologize to conservatives about the state secrets privilege

TigherHawk and Glenn Greenwald both call out Obama Administration's decision to assert that state secrets require dismissal of the Shubert case brought against the government for secret wiretapping. TigherHawk from the right says Obama should apologize to conservatives for criticizing the same behavior by the Bush Administration, while Greenwald does his usual thing.

I agree with TH, although I think Obama owes at least as much of an apology to us who supported him.

The state secret privilege should rarely be used, if used it should even be more rare to outright remove court consideration of a piece of evidence, and it should almost never be used to outright dismiss a case. And even in that one-in-a-million last category, there should be an administrative procedure established so the plaintiff has a chance at justice in a protected setting. I'll just refer back to Greenwald's outrage on this one.

Also Kevin Drum on a related case:

The CIA had invoked the state secrets privilege, insisting that the case against one of its agents be dropped because he was working covertly and his identity couldn't be revealed. And they keptinsisting that even after his cover had been lifted. When Lamberth found out, he was not a happy judge.

More here. This is yet another data point that restates the obvious: just because the government invokes the state secrets privilege doesn't mean there really are state secrets involved. Congress and the courts, who know this perfectly well, would be wise to demand a wee bit more judicial oversight in these cases instead of allowing the executive absolute discretion. Pat Leahy's State Secrets Protection Act would be a good place to start.

First response to Williams and Zabel's anti-cap-and-trade legislation

So these two EPA lawyers are making a splash, and maybe rightfully so since they oppose cap-and-trade despite being intimately involved in the existing acid-rain cap-and-trade. They propose a "fee and refund", basically a carbon tax with 100% remittance on a per-capita basis. Their op-ed is here, and the paper they've produced is here. I'm reacting to the paper.

Initial comments:

1. Our choice for this year and next year is cap-and-trade or nothing - their proposal isn't going to happen before 2011, if then. I think the right goalpost to judge their position is whether it convinces people that current proposals are worse than doing nothing, or alternatively that their proposal is so superior that doing nothing for two years with the possibility of eventually trying their idea is better than cap-and-trade.

2. They are comparing their own proposal's pre-sausage ideal with cap-and-trade legislation's mostly post-sausage reality. Waxman-Markey has passed the House, and Kerry-Boxer is designed to have a chance of getting three-fifth's vote in the Senate. (This reminds me of talking to a Swedish convert to Buddhism who compared the theoretical ethics of Buddhism taught to her by her instructors with the sordid reality of two thousand years of Christian society. We were in Thailand at the time, and I suggested that the sordid reality in Buddhist Thailand wasn't so great either.) What the WZ proposal would look like after getting through the sausage-making might not seem so much better as it does right now.

This objection has limits - we can hardly ask them to deliberately make their proposal worse. OTOH, they could show what they would do to make it more politically viable. Making it more viable without reducing the incentives to cut down emissions and without costing more would be a pretty good trick that I'd like to see.

More specifics:

Page 2 and 3: they discuss Obama's support for cap-and-trade. His original proposal would have been 100% auction and remitted 80% of revenue. Post-sausage, that's gone down a hell of a lot. One could expect something similar for their proposal.

p. 3: urgency requires a stronger approach, their own. Well, we're losing two years minimum by dropping the current approach, so this cuts both ways. (My own tangent: I've been wondering to what extent carbon-negative approaches like biochar and biomass-plus-sequestration could be used to compensate for overshooting dangerous CO2 levels. Could we hit 570 ppm by the year 2070 and then rapidly pull it down to way below 350 ppm, without relying on Pielkian dreams and armwaving? Would that be good enough to avoid disaster?)

p. 4: acid rain controls are a lot easier. Yes, but that's well known.

p. 5: "sequestration of greenhouse gas emissions has not been demonstrated to be safe or permanent and is expected to be costly." That's pretty dismissive when they say later that renewables cost three times as much as fossil fuels and they want to make renewables cheaper through carbon fees. The claims I've seen for sequestration is that it adds only 20-40% to the cost of coal, so depending on how much weight you give to those claims, it's a cheaper option. Permanence is an issue, but we have some real problems in the next two centuries that might need priority.

p. 5: standard argument against offsets, another Victor/Wara reference.

p. 7: "In addition, setting up a capand-trade system will be very complex and time consuming. Once begun, a cap-and-trade program would have a great deal of inertia. It would be difficult to dismantle and would create a variety of interest groups with investments in maintaining the program, however ineffective it proved to be for addressing climate change." Yep. And it's disconcerting because we can't possibly rely on initial legislation to solve this problem - we're going to have to make it better every 5-10 years as we get a better handle on the problem and as denialists get further marginalized. Not an easy issue, but that's the problem with sausage.

p. 10: this is the most-flawed part, I think. They want to triple the price of fossil fuels with carbon fees in ten years, and expect renewables to drop to nearly one-third the current prices. I don't see the political will to absorb the dislocation of fossil fuel increases, and the expectation that renewables would become this cheap is wrong, I think. Economies of scale work in the long run, but a gigantic push to replace all fossil fuels would increase the cost of renewables, not decrease them in the short to medium term.

That's all I've got for now, maybe I'll come back and finish later.

UPDATE: Ezra Klein:

Barack Obama wasn't on the ballot yesterday, and he won't be on the ballot in 2010. If his voters stayed home last night, many politicians will take that as proof that they'll stay home in 2010, too. That doesn't just make the map harder for Democrats. It also moves Democrats to the right, as their consultants will explain that a winning coalition requires more voters from relatively conservative blocs, like seniors and downscale independents, and thus a more centrist campaign strategy.

More reason not to expect vast political improvements. If I could wave a magic wand, there's no question I'd take the WZ proposal over the House and Senate bills, but that's not the situation we've got. Sadly.

Marginalized Republicans versus reformed Republicans

Yet another interesting post by Nate Silver where he argues that Democrats should hope for a hard-right conservative candidate to win against the Democratic candidate in the heavily Republican New York congressional district. Nate argues that this small-scale victory would fool the wingnuts into believing that being really wingnutty is a good strategy in the forthcoming 2010 and 2012 elections.

I think he's right, but it's not the best case scenario. We need the Republicans to follow the evolution of the British Conservatives into becoming a responsible opposition, and that's not going to happen until the Republicans get beat up multiple times in an election. Putting that off means the Democrats get a free ride without any useful alternative.

Anyway, we'll find out tomorrow.

First draft attempt at Argumentum ad Galileus

Let's try it:

Argumentum ad Galileus:

Risum procul Galileus

Rideo procul mihi

Ergo sum tunc Galileus

What I'm trying to say:

The Galileo Fallacy:

They laughed at Galileo

They're laughing at me

Therefore I am the next Galileo

It's not easy trying to write something in a language you don't know, and Spanish isn't as much help as I thought it might be. Corrections greatly welcomed.

Inspired by yet another the-consensus-was-the-Earth-is-flat reference, this time by the Superfreakonomics guys that I'm not writing about anymore (and who are refuted here).

Of course as I finish writing this I find someone's come up with a similar description for something called the Galileo Gambit. They didn't try writing it in really bad Latin, though, so I win.

UPDATE: got the first correction from Steve Bloom, so I've changed the Latin above. I'll keep changing it as corrections come in.

My last, somewhat contrarian, Superfreaks post

I've got one more post about contrarianism in general, but I'll wrap up on Superfreakonomics.

My contrarian points:

1. They're not picking on the left. Many bloggers speculate that contrarians like picking on the left but not on the right. I don't know about other contrarian authors, but Levitt and Dubner's first book talked a lot about how legalizing abortion reduced crime. Even the current book sympathizes with legalizing prostitution, something that's mostly libertarian/glibertarian, but still probably supported more by the left.

2. Geoengineering with sulfate aerosols is cheap. I've seen a number of assertions that they've left out costs of the stratospheric shield and exaggerated the costs of mitigation. It doesn't matter. As long as you simply examine the cost to cool a certain amount globally, without regard to distribution of heat reduction, or any other side effect, then the shield has to be cheaper than 80-95% greenhouse gas reductions.

3. A limited stratospheric shield for the Arctic might be worth the risks. I believe RealClimate wrote about this idea in a very tentative but not-completely-dismissive tone, but I can't find the link. (Superfreakonomics also mentions it, but they seem not extremely interested.) The Arctic is experiencing so much warming and the atmosphere is somewhat isolated there, so it might be possible, maybe, to counteract the enhanced warming there without the repercussions elsewhere, if the aerosol particles actually stay in that region. It couldn't be done for a few decades until the ozone-depleting chemicals are gone from the stratosphere, but it shouldn't be done anytime soon anyway - this is an act of desperation. (UPDATE: John Mashey points to high-albedo, artificial rafts as a potentially useful "band-aid" approach for the loss of polar ice, and possibly ice elsewhere.)

4. Somewhat less contrarian: geoengineering on a global scale needs to be researched and kept in mind as a last resort for the worst-case scenarios. If 50 years from now we find ourselves on a trajectory to a Lovelock-type scenario involving deaths of billions, or even a somewhat less-bad outcome, then smogging up the earth's stratosphere and hoping for the best might be worth rolling the dice. I think this position isn't all that unusual, even if Al Gore might disagree with it. By contrast, people like James Annan and William Connolley probably shouldn't be interested in geoengineering because they don't think the worst-case scenarios are plausible.

-----------

Okay, so much for being generous to Superfreakonomics. I'll just add two points that haven't been discussed too much. First, the authors have occasionally defended the stratospheric shield approach as a complement and not a substitute for carbon mitigation. But if that's the case, why do they keep talking about how much cheaper it is? And the failure as far as I can tell to admit in the book that we need to drastically cut emissions means they're trying to have it both ways - show a radical solution to those not paying close attention, and then running it backwards when caught.

Second, they seem to think it would be easy to determine that that shield isn't worth its side effects and turn it off if appropriate. I'm not so sure. If a powerful country or number of countries reached the point where they felt it was in their interest to smog the stratosphere, I expect they'd be very resistant to arguments that an ongoing drought in Africa means they should cut it out and drastically reduce carbon emissions instead. Just as we see massive foot-dragging today to the idea that we're causing warming, I expect a lot of self-interested denial would occur as to whether it's necessary to gut the shield.

One other point that has been mentioned but is still worth highlighting is this excellent Michael Tobis piece on removing carbon versus interfering with sunlight - two radically different approaches.

Unrelated bonus blogging: soldier fly composting. I get flies in my worm bin anyway, so this might be the solution.

UPDATE: forgot to mention that a critical comment I submitted to the Freakonomics blog was never published. Maybe it just fell through the Internet cracks.

Pro-peace, pro-Israel, pro-other-countries, anti-one-state-solution

Matt Yglesias writes about some confusion over the J-Street identity. Some visitors to this alternative to the hard-conservative, militaristic, and uncompromising approach to Arab-Israeli peace had trouble with the label "Pro-Peace, Pro-Israel."

I can't believe and don't believe that they had trouble with the idea of millions of Jews living in this part of the Middle East. While I wouldn't have supported this stupid idea 70 years ago, the ship has sailed and it would be no more just to kick out the modern Jewish citizens than it would be to kick out all the non-Native Americans from North America.

I assume the people having trouble with the "Pro-Israel" phrase don't want to remove the Jews, but rather would merge the Jewish and Palestinian populations in Israel and the occupied territories (plus the Palestinian Diaspora) into a single country, the so-called "one-state-solution". This might be showing my personal opinion somewhat to say that my first reaction on hearing this solution several years ago was, "that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard." I haven't changed my opinion. Take two peoples who hate each other and leave it unclear who's going to be politically dominant. Just brilliant.

So I don't support that idea and don't think J-Street needs to either. I could call myself pro-Israel, in the same sense that I'm pro-Jordan and pro-Bhutan, and pro-world-in-general. That attitude probably puts me on the far left of the extremely narrow range of political discourse in the US over Israel. It might take me out of the target group for J-Street, which is looking for people who are especially pro-Israel. I think it's fine to be especially pro-Israel so long as that doesn't translate into harming other countries and peoples, and people with Matt Yglesias' attitude can help improve the discourse in the US, to help peace and to help Israel.

Superfreaks latest defense: they weren't answering the most important question about climate change

So they're trying yet again to defend the indefensible at the Freakonomics: now they're saying the 'geoengineering rocks!' chapter is not meant to answer "the most important question" about climate change.

Instead, it's about the best (defined as cheapest, without taking into account side effects) way to cool the earth in a hurry, without considering the long-term effect of your choice of action. They don't quite spell it out to this degree, but that appears to be their question.

They also never spell out why they think this is an interesting question. I think an interesting question is what should we do about climate change. They've instead phrased a question whose answer has no policy implications on this question. There's also many reasons to think they haven't answered their own question correctly, but on top of running away from their contrarian arguments to say they were only looking at this tiny topic, they've come up with an argument that's completely unimportant.

Talking Points Memo readers demand more stenography, less journalism

There's a disheartening comments section attached to a Talking Points Memo story. The story summary: a reporter for the conservative Weekly Standard is trying to nail down whether a moderate Republican running in a special election might switch parties if in the next subsequent election, she loses the Republican primary. The candidate's spokesman fails to answer the question, and instead just keeps repeating that she "is a vote" for the Republicans.

The reporter writes a story about the evasiveness and potential implications of a future switch. Suddenly the spokesman calls in a clarification stating she won't switch.

All this sounds like good journalism to me - not taking an evasive answer on face value, but the TPM comment section is full of attacks on the journalist for not being "objective" and simply reporting the answer. There are a few who defend the journalist, but it generally reads just like something you'd see on a rightwing website (maybe better grammar though).

The left can have as much trouble as the right with seeing past their own biases.

Don't mind me (deleted off-topic post)

Superfreaking lame response on global cooling issue

The Superfreakonomics publishers are scurrying around and shutting down online access to the horrible chapter on climate change that says "don't worry, but if you do, spew sulfates instead."

Much great stuff tearing it apart has been written elsewhere (DeLong's as good as any here). I'm just going to focus on this accusation:

The chapter opens with the “global cooling” story — the claim that 30 years ago there was a scientific consensus that the planet was cooling, comparable to the current consensus that it’s warming.

Um, no. Real Climate has the takedown. What you had in the 70s was a few scientists advancing the cooling hypothesis, and a few popular media stories hyping their suggestions. To the extent that there was a consensus, it was that there wasn’t much evidence for anything, and more research was needed.

Dubner's response to this accusation regarding how they hyped the global cooling "controversy" of the 1970s:

The real purpose of the chapter is figuring out how to cool the Earth if indeed it becomes catastrophically warmer. (That is the “global cooling” in our subtitle. If someone interprets our brief mention of the global-cooling scare of the 1970’s as an assertion of “a scientific consensus that the planet was cooling,” that feels like a willful misreading.)

Okay, let's read what they said in the chapter. Unhelpfully, their publisher has been shutting down online access to what they actually said. You can currently get the entire relevant chapter here, but in case they shut that down, I'm retyping the relevant part below (but before that - Dear Superfreakonomics publisher: I assume you won't even notice my tiny blog, but if you do, I strongly discourage filing a DMCA notice against me. I will most definitely file a counter-notice. Any groundless DMCA notice such as one filed against what your authors describe as a "brief mention" in their book could be construed as fraudulent. I urge you to consult your lawyers instead. Hugs, Brian):

The headlines have been harrowing, to say the least.

"Some experts believe mankind is on the threshold of a new pattern of adverse global climate for which it is ill-prepared," one New York Times article declared. It quoted climate researchers who argued that "this climatic change poses a threat to the people of the world."

A Newsweek article citing a National Academy of Sciences report, warned that climatic change "would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale." Worse yet, "climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for climatic change or even to allay its effects."

Who in his or her right mind wouldn't be scared of global warming?

But that's not what these scientists were talking about. These articles, published in the mid-1970s, were predicting the effects of global cooling.

Alarm bells had rung because the average ground temperature in the Northern Hemisphere had fallen by .5 degrees Fahrenheit (.28 degrees Celsius) from 1945 to 1968. Furthermore, there had been a large increase in snow cover, and between 1964 and 1972, a decrease of 1.3 percent in the amount of sunshine hitting the United States. Newsweek reported that the temperature decline, while relatively small in absolute terms, "has taken the planet about a sixth of the way towards the Ice Age average."

The big fear was a collapse of the agricultural system. In Britain, cooling had already shortened the growing season by two weeks. "[T]he resulting famines could be catastrophic," warned the Newsweek article. Some scientists proposed radical warming solutions such as "melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot."

These days, of course, the threat is the opposite. The earth is no longer thought to be too cool but rather too warm.

So. Standard denialist argument to the effect that scientists were wrong in the 1970s so they're no more likely to be right today. The rest of the chapter then goes on to point the oh-so-easy solution if it turns out that global warming is true.

Going back to Krugman's critique that Dubner calls a "willful misreading," I don't see that at all. Dubner and Levitt portray the media misunderstanding of the state of science in the 1970s as the actual state of science then, and for no other purpose than to downplay current knowledge.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, even in the 1970s the science leaned towards a prediction of warming. Try wiki articles global cooling and history of climate change science for more.

Too bad the Superfreakonomics authors and editors didn't spend a half-hour on wikipedia before writing up their results, and denying the reality of what they wrote now isn't helping.

Rush wuz robbed

While I'm not crying tears over Rush Limbaugh getting kicked out of a bid for a football team, I agree with Nate Silver at 538 that he's been unjustly accused of things he never said. I think he's a bad actor who has said many other racially-biased things, (as well as countless other stupid lies, including climate denialism), but I also think shouldn't have been booted out of the bidding group as a non-managing, minority partner.

It's probably worth acknowledging that as a white male, I don't walk in the shoes of people who have been maligned by Rush. On the other hand, he would only be an investor in a business without the power to hire or fire people. I guess it's all a matter of where you draw the line. I personally would never work with him or be part of a business team that includes him, but that's a little different from broader social groups driving him out of a business deal where he wasn't in a position to hurt employees with his biased attitude.

I'm not sure if I completely agree with Conor Friedersdorf's article on the whole issue - while I would only accuse someone of "being a racist" where their behavior is far worse than the societal norm, I think doing or saying something racist is far more common. We've come a long way but have a long way to go on bias in our society. Rather than viewing the statement "what you just said was racist" as equivalent to an accusation of pedophilia, it would be better to examine the situation calmly, decide if it's true, rectify the situation if needed and move on.

Would you compromise your purity to stop climate change?

This is my belated contribution to Blog Action Day, to suggest that in addition to one more effort of will that I and everyone else could take to reduce our footprint, we consider supporting things that we might not have otherwise in order protect climate.

My inspiration is a semi-denialist/semi-skeptic website that I comment on called TigerHawk, whose author keeps saying "I'll consider global warming an emergency when the people who tell me it is, act like it's an emergency." Mostly he gets it wrong through attacks on the irrelevant hypocrisies and failings of climate leaders wasting energy in their personal lives (if the charges are even true). A little closer to the mark is when he focuses on policy issues like opposition to nuclear power or to offshore wind farms at Cape Cod.

A persistent claim of denialists is that enviros only believe in climate change to the extent it supports the political beliefs enviros already have, which is about as clear a case of projection regarding their own rejection of science that I can imagine. Still, within a mountain of nonsense there can be a tiny kernel of truth, that a cursory rejection of climate solutions that are politically inconvenient for our side might need some real reconsideration. Maybe carbon sequestration, corporate-owned solar and wind installations on open space, natural gas use, and maybe even nuclear power should be considered more carefully. But that's not what I want to write about....

Beyond the issue of whether solutions we reject actually make sense is whether we can achieve a worthwhile compromise solution that includes components that don't make sense. I doubt nuclear power makes sense in the long run, especially economic sense. I don't see much value in new offshore oil drilling, either. But agreeing to this might be the only way to make actual progress on much more effective solutions to climate change.

So my challenge for Blog Action Day is to suggest it might be okay to be a little bit impure on these issues for something this important. We can then throw the denialist's challenge back in their face: "if we give you some god-awful, massive subsidies for nuclear power, would you finally condescend to stop overheating the planet?"

Deep thought: fiscal lies versus environmental lies

My day job requires me to critique self-serving environmental analyses that often attempt to obscure the environmental impacts they are legally required to disclose. Sometimes, I also review fiscal analyses of the same proposals (unfortunately not with the same level of personal knowledge).

My impression from that experience and from the national level is that fiscal analyses are even more skewed than environmental analyses.

YouTube on the Chamber's problems over climate change

Via ThinkProgress:

Reintroducing the Atlantic Gray Whale

One of the disadvantages of the Internet is it destroys any pretensions I have to originality. I've thought for a while that it would be an amazing feat to reintroduce the Atlantic gray whale to the wild. Of course, one complication arises from the Atlantic whale's extinction. The easy solution is to take some of the closely related and now-abundant Pacific gray whales and bring them over.

Turns out that my original idea has been developed much more extensively by other people. Still it would be interesting. I've followed the reintroductions of condors and wolves closely here in the US, and beavers were just reintroduced to Scotland after a longer absence than gray whales from the Atlantic. Sometimes reintroductions don't work well (Mexican wolf, lynx in Colorado), but if you don't try....

There's also the issue that these would still be Pacific grays, and so not exactly the natural species for the habitat. On the other hand, that niche in the Atlantic Ocean isn't being occupied right now, which also isn't natural. Bringing in the Pacific grays seems closer to natural than the present situation. And it would be cool.

Bonus unrelated blogging: Obama reiterates his promise to repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell. My prediction from months ago that I thought I blogged about but can't find anywhere, is that he'd put off the repeal until 2010 and then use it to run against Congressional Republicans as bigoted and soft on defense. I'll bet he'll put off repealing the more popular Defense of Marriage Act until 2011.

Pressure's on the Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce

The San Jose Mercury News published this editorial:

U.S. Chamber is a dinosaur on climate change

Silicon Valley's future, and the nation's, is clean technology....But the U.S. National Chamber of Commerce, which purports to be the voice of the nation's businesses, has turned into a dinosaur when it comes to clean energy. The chamber's strong opposition to climate change legislation makes clear its allegiance to the destructive oil- and coal-based industries of yesteryear.

PG&E took the extraordinary step of quitting the chamber earlier this month because of its "extreme rhetoric and obstructionist tactics." Valley companies and venture capital firms that have been proclaiming green credentials should follow suit. And the San Jose Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce, along with other Bay Area branches, should make it clear that unlike their national umbrella, they look to the future.

....

The San Jose Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce expects to take a position on this by the end of the year, according to Pat Dando, president and CEO. It has had discussions with the U.S. Chamber and the California Chamber as well as PG&E and several other members.

But on Friday, Dando clearly separated herself from the national chamber, saying that "there isn't anyone who doesn't realize that climate change is a man-made phenomenon and something we need to address and address quickly."

She says the position taken by business, legislators and community members on this issue may be the most important legacy this generation will leave for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

She's right.

We hope her organization agrees, and that individual valley companies make their voices heard in Washington — whether through the national chamber or despite it.

I know Pat from my day job, mostly from being on opposite sides on various bad development projects that have been proposed here. Unlike some others, however, she is nobody's fool and is not unreasonable. It will be interesting to see where they go with this - I understand the US Chamber does not like dissent within the ranks.

Another complication is that here, unlike some other cities, there's competition to represent business interests. The Silicon Valley Leadership Group and Sustainable Silicon Valley both have strong business representation and take a pro-environment position. The regional Chamber risks losing influence to these organizations if it doesn't keep up, although the Chamber might also be less influenced by businesses that work primarily through these alternate groups.

Unrelated bonus blogging: Richard Dawkins was in the area last night, promoting his latest book on evolution to an absolutely packed crowd at Keplers in Menlo Park. A very good speaker, but unlike what I've read elsewhere, he seemed fairly combative regarding his assertion that evolution makes God an unnecessary hypothesis.

Richard Freeman, 1935-2009

My wife's favorite uncle, Richard Freeman, died last month. I only knew him for a few years, but he was a very nice guy. His online memorial is here.

One of the great things about relatives is exposure to people and viewpoints you wouldn't normally come across in your regular social life. It's too easy for me to think that a political viewpoint, often shared with a vast majority of friends, echoes an ethical viewpoint. One thing I really appreciated about Richard was how his very conservative politics, so different from me and almost all my friends, came matched with a gentleness that I don't normally consider part of a conservative perspective.

At the memorial website, the family suggests a "random act of kindness" in lieu of flowers. I attempted my random act yesterday: my wife, her sister, and a friend are doing a 3-day breast cancer walk, and I brought a few home-made cookies for them and a bunch more to share with other walkers. The cookies seemed to be appreciated.*

*I would've brought even more but made the rookie mistake of trying to bake some on the bottom rung of the oven. Doesn't matter how closely you watch them, they still burn, and I thought it would be pretty lame for me to hand out burnt-over cookies to people who are walking 60 miles....

Still more companies drop the Chamber of Commerce

So Nike quit the US Chamber Board of Directors on Wednesday in protest of the do-nothing position on climate (although Nike didn't drop its membership entirely). Along with PG&E quitting, two other large utilities, Exelon and PNM Resources, are dropping the Chamber.

This seems to be moving fast, and it will be interesting to see if it keeps happening. I'm sure the corporate interests in the Chamber that support inaction on climate aren't persuaded by any of this, but other corporations that hadn't cared much before might want to start thinking about their own self interest, as the Chamber starts losing significant political and financial capital.

The Chamber's response is a smokescreen statement pretending they'd support a treaty that would somehow get 60 votes in the Senate and that would also force "each nation" in the developing world, no matter how poor and how tiny its per-capita greenhouse gas emission is, into binding reductions. What would be much more interesting than this nonsense is to know what the internal discussions are saying. Time for business journalists to get on it.

As for environmental strategy, I think in the short term at least this incipient crisis for the Chamber supports a quitting strategy over the "stay and fight" strategy I've advocated. Maybe a merger of the two strategies would be for environmentally-oriented businesses to start turning around local and state chapters, though. Another would be for BICEP or a similar group to organize more broadly as a business alternative to the US Chamber, something that might truly scare it.

UPDATE: completely unrelated bonus blogging - Ardipithecus! The link has some good stuff and should have more. I'm sure Afarensis will too. I've seen a few experts question the bipedality claims, so the fur will be flying on that issue.

David Grinspoon still thinks there might be life on Venus

My wife and I attended a lecture by astronomer David Grinspoon, "Evolution of Planetary Exploration," a survey of the solar system, exoplanet discoveries, and a comparison to Darwin's five-year trip on the Beagle. I thought it was fine, although necessarily abbreviated. My wife with less exposure to astronomy thought it was great.

Grinspoon wrote Venus Revealed, a 1998 book sizing up the scientific understanding of Venus prior to European space mission that went there several years ago. (I'm not aware of a similar book today that incorporates the newest findings, and the European space agencies are doing their usual terrible job of releasing scientific information, so it might be a while to get a good new book.) At the end of the book, Grinspoon speculates that life might have survived the boiling off of venusian oceans and live today in the higher parts of the cloud deck.

I got a chance to ask him whether he still thinks it's possible and he said yes as an outside chance, although it would require atmospheric probes to figure it out. So neither the current European mission nor the upcoming Japanese one will answer the question, and we'll have to wait for a more spectacular mission.

Greening the Chamber: the current Board of Directors is a challenge

John Mashey suggests reviewing the US Chamber's Board of Directors for likely willingness to change their do-nothing approach to climate change.* Some of the members are below:

• President and CEO Thomas Donahue: as the guy in charge, I assume he's personally responsible for the know-nothing approach, a Lee Raymond type who won't change except under threat to his career, if then. Also, former president of the trucking industry association.

• Chair Robert Milligan: runs an "animal and meat protein processing company" in the Midwest. Not likely receptive to the problems of climate change to meat use and the fertilizer intensive agriculture that supports it.

• Vice-Chair Thomas Bell: a mystery on the Chamber's page. According to Forbes, he's working for property owners, a theater chain, and a natural gas distributor. Could be a prospect, I suppose.

• Donald Shepard: an insurance guy - a possible realist? Unfortunately his background is life and pension insurance, but maybe he's been infected with some understanding of what property insurers think of reality.

• Steve Van Andel: from Amway, which isn't a problem, but also very Michigan-oriented, which could be.

• Those are the above-the-fold directors, then a huge list of others here. I don't have the hours of time to go through them all here, except to notice the first guy is from the Black Chamber of Commerce, who embarassed himself while insulting Barbara Boxer some months back.

So, not very encouraging from the first glance. Not too surprising either - there had to be institutional reasons for taking such an awful stance. In addition, I know personally that real estate agent associations are very active at local chambers and often take great exception to land use controls, so I could see the same attitude reaching the national level.

On the other hand, we do have industries that have good reason to support addressing climate change, as well as normal industries that want a planet they can continue to do business on, so I think there are still prospects for change.

*I previously labelled the Chamber's approach as denialist, but instead of actually denying human-caused warming, the US Chamber just doesn't want to take serious steps to address it, either under the Clean Air Act or through current proposed legislation.

Chamber of Commerce - leave it or fix it?

A major California utility, PG&E, has left the US Chamber of Commerce due to frustration with the Chamber's denialism. I've argued for "Greening the Chamber" by getting green businesses to change its policies, but there's something of a contradiction between quitting it and fixing it.

I'd still go for fixing it. The link describes a conversation with Microsoft about its continued role in the Chamber, despite Microsoft's opposition to the Chamber's policy. Corporations like Microsoft might be willing to work for change, but I don't think they'd be willing to quit. Also, green businesses could change local and state level Chambers even before they affect the national level, so it's not an all-or-nothing quest.

Other interesting news: Warming Law discusses the nuisance case against greenhouse gas polluters that has just passed an important hurdle of being accepted at the appellate level. It's possible that the Supreme Court will kill it, but I wouldn't count on it. Good news, and one more bargaining chip to help push the polluters in the right direction.

7-11 equals "small business"?

At my day job we played a role in San Jose passing the best takeout bag ban in the country for a major city - banning plastic and requiring highest recycled content that's currently feasible for paper bags.

I went to a number of meetings before yesterday's City Council showdown. The 7-11 retail chain mobilized against us, getting their franchisees to come to meetings and forecast economic ruin (also, claiming bans would make it easier for people to bring guns into the stores). At the Council meeting though, these people never identified themselves as part of 7-11, only "small business" managers and owners. Unfortunately I had already spoken so I couldn't call them on their little astroturf trick, but it didn't matter. They weren't convincing.

Adding geologic weathering cycles to a wiki climate article

The wiki climate article Long-term effects of global warming has been criticized from reputable sources (not the usual scruffy crew) as being alarmist. To fix that and because it seemed like a good place anyway, I've added a short section on how the oceanic absorption and geologic weathering over many thousands of years will eventually take care of the CO2. It's here, but could use some additional info.

Why I just gave a donation to ACORN

ACORN is probably significantly to the left of my politics in a lot of ways, but the heart of my reason for donating to it is that critics are taking advantage of the fact that ACORN recruits its employees from the low-income, poorly-educated, socially-disadvantaged communities that it's trying to serve. In that situation, some of its hundreds of employees will make stupid mistakes - that's no reason to condemn the whole organization.

An analogy that's probably offensive to those communities but might be the only way to get the point across to some people, is to employees working at alcohol and drug rehab clinics, many of whom are themselves recovering addicts. To expect a no-screwup rate at ACORN is like expecting a no-relapse rate among hundreds of recovering addicts given jobs at clinics.

Anyway, for more info, see this surprisingly balanced article by conservative columnist Debra Saunders (pointing out that the Philly ACORN office kicked out the posers), and broader context by Michael Tomasky. Or click on the ACORN link at the beginning of this post for their take.

Quenching CO2 saturation but not CO2 litigation

Two climate miniposts:

First, Rabett discusses the "quenching" phenomenon that explains why CO2 infrared absorption isn't quickly saturated here, with much more in the comments. I had never understood the idea that the energy from CO2-absorbed radiation is transferred by direct physical contact with other molecules instead of being re-emitted. The part I still don't understand then is whether saturation could ever limit IR absorption so long as there's plenty of non-greenhouse gas molecules in the atmosphere to do the quenching.

Second, the lawsuit against the California waiver that allows California (and many other states following California's lead) to set greenhouse gas emissions for vehicles is back on again, despite the automaker commitment not to sue. The auto dealers are suing instead, in a typical trick. I agree with Warming Law that this isn't a moot issue, despite the fact that the feds have now adopted California's standards. It's a backstop against something going wrong with a federal effort (or, gods help us, a denialist Republican elected president in 2012). It also reinforces the legitimacy of the Clean Air Act waiver process which has been granted in virtually all cases before it became politically inconvenient for the fossil fuel industry and their political minions. California may need to do this again in the future, so we need to keep the option open.

Hiking the West Coast Trail on Vancouver Island

My wife and I just returned from an 8-day backpacking trip on Vancouver Island's West Coast Trail, sometimes considered as one of the best backpacking trails in the world. That may be true, but whether it's the most enjoyable depends on weather, tides, and your physical fitness. Don't count on ordinary good fitness to get you through this trail with no problems. The first half of our trip rained crazily, and going up steep, mud covered hillsides was incredible slow going.

We would have quit at the half-way point where you can escape, but the weather then turned great. If you can go when tides are extra low during the time of day you're hiking, then a flat sandstone shelf emerges from the water and provides easy hiking after a few hours drying (we got only a taste of that).

Still, the rain forest life was amazing. Every tree covered in moss, and often with ferns and huckleberries growing out of any tiny crook. It rivals (or according to wiki, exceeds) the amount of life I've seen in tropical rain forests.

If you go, get the tides right and go in July or August, probably. Or be in incredible shape. And bring one or preferably two hiking poles, and a backpack cover to protect your pack.

I'm happy to talk to anyone who's interested in more info.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention our visit to a British Columbia parliament session in Victoria, which was memorable. Same left-right issues, but in a different and more raucous context.

Indigenous environmental damage and environmentalism

NY Times had an interesting article a week or two ago about marine ecosystems being damaged by ancient humans in many different areas of the world due to overexploitation.

I've been interested for a while now in variations of the idea of prehistoric environmental damage and environmental management. There's no debate that island-hopping humans killed off many flightless bird species long before European sailors started doing the same thing. The evidence that humans killed off ice-age mammals in North America and that Mayan overuse of the environment caused their collapse also seems pretty strong to me.

The general concept would be that ancient humans exploited and damaged their environments to the full extent that their technology and population levels would allow - in other words, just like us. The main difference from moderns is their technology stabilized or changed slowly, limiting human populations, and a new equilibrium was reached until European peoples and technologies were introduced.

The few exceptions to this rule, where indigenous peoples could have damaged their environment but didn't, are even more interesting. The Polynesian concepts of taboos, tapu, and rahui all protected resources.

Another potential exception that I haven't seen discussed is salmon fishing. While native cultures couldn't wipe out salmon runs on rivers, they could do so on small creeks. The fact that they didn't is pretty interesting, and something I'd like to know more about. Maybe some other examples are out there, too.


And with that, I'll be traveling for a while, so no posting for ten days or so.

Nice to see Watts Up taken down a peg

As has been noted elsewhere, Peter Sinclair's video that had been removed from YouTube because of Anthony Watts inappropriate DMCA takedown notice is now back.

To be completely accurate, YouTube presumably hasn't reviewed the copyright issue, instead they're just following DMCA procedures that allow them to restore content automatically without them being held liable. Watts theoretically could still bring a copyright claim against Sinclair, but the fact that he hasn't in the time period since Sinclair's counternotice went up suggests that Watts knows he has no case.

Apparently Watts hasn't said anything more on his site, which also suggests he's figured out the score.

What "torture doesn't work" actually means

Possible meaning:

1. "No accurate and useful information has ever been given by detainees while being tortured." No one, except for the shallowest, self-satisfied strawman builder would give the statement this possible meaning.

2. "The value of useful information given during torture is hidden and overwhelmed by the false information and false leads given during the detainees' attempt to stop the torture." Some people believe this; I don't know whether it's true.

3. Variation on number 2 above, adding "the torture prevents opportunities for rapport-building techniques that get better-quality information with fewer false leads." I think this is what expert interrogators actually believe. I suspect they're right except for the never-happened hypothetical ticking nuclear bomb situation (one other possible exception: during actual combat, where capturing an enemy soldier in the middle of a firefight could give very useful information).

4. Variation on number 2 above, adding "the interrogators are are also likely to believe the false information given by the detainee because the detainee is seeking to give the response that the interrogator wants to hear." I think this is what happened with a number of detainees who were willing to say Al Qaeda was tied to Saddam, and the interrogators actually believed it.

5. "The value of any good intel from torture is far outweighed by the harm done to the effort to win hearts and minds and separate the terrorists from public support." This is an independent reason that complements numbers 2 through 4 above and is the one that settles it, in my opinion. Of course, right wingers and the faux moderates who position themselves on interrogations could care less about what is the actual road to victory.

---
A tangent about additional rightwing nonsense: in discussing the National Review's current semi-defense of its 1964 opposition to civil rights, WF Buckley's alleged renunciation of prior racist views came up in the comments. I wrote a follow-up comment saying that I find much mention of his renunciation, but no actual quotes. If anyone's seen where Buckley comes clean, I'd like to know.