Another good idea that will go nowhere - term limits for Supreme Court and appellate court judges

I support the idea that Matt Yglesias and others have talked about a lot: a Constitutional amendment that sets term limits for Supreme Court and appellate court judges. Among other things, this would reduce the practice of nominating people for positions five or ten years earlier in their career than they should be nominated, as a mechanism to block future appointments by the opposing party.

More broadly, it can reduce somewhat the politicization of judicial appointments by reducing the stakes. I don't believe the judiciary can be depoliticized as long as judicial philosophical splits have political implications, but we can move back to a less divisive process by making the individuals less important. The forty-year appointments made by Bush and Obama will influence American policy in the middle of the 21st Century. No wonder they're so contentious. It's too much power both for the appointing presidents, and for the judges themselves.

I like the proposal for Supreme Court justices to have 18 year terms, appointed in odd-numbered (non-election) years, which would mean two appointments per presidential terms. To handle surprise vacancies, appointments in even-numbered years could be for 19 years - you wouldn't guarantee two appointments per presidential term, but it would average out close to that. For appellate judges, pick a number - I say 25 years. Guaranteed retirement and no reappointment allowed, to increase judicial independence.

Two other thoughts: first, retired judges and justices can do a lot of good, so this a way to increase the supply. Second, life extension technology becomes a serious issue when we're talking about appointments that can last forty years into the future. Who can insure that by 2050, the capability won't exist to add another 30 years to Chief Justice Roberts' lifespan? Similar nightmares apply to Republicans thinking about Obama appointments.

Limits make total sense to me, but will go nowhere. I dislike the false equivalence often made between the Republican Party leadership and the sane world, but in this case it's not so false - Democrats are only slightly more open to term limits than Republicans, AFAICT.

I'm supporting Kerry-Lieberman

The good parts seem good. The bad parts (nuking state regulations and EPA regulations) are unfortunate, particularly EPA, but the EPA regs would be subject to litigation and budgetary defunding by a simple majority vote of either house. Take the bird in the hand.

Joe Romm's summary is here. Seems good to me.

Eric de Place has a good summary of the price collar:

A price collar consists of two parts: a price floor (or reserve price) and a price ceiling. In this bill, the price floor will be set at $12 per ton of carbon dioxide in 2013. (The price floor rises at the rate of inflation plus 3 percent annually until 2050.) That means that authorities will not sell any permits for less than $12. This implies that not all of the permits available for sale under the cap will necessarily be used—good news for the climate and clean-energy jobs.

On the other hand, the price ceiling will be set at $25 per ton of carbon-dioxide in 2013. (The price ceiling rises at the rate of inflation plus 5 percent annually until 2050.) That means that authorities will sell as many permits for $25 as anyone wants to buy. This means that permits may be sold in excess of the cap’s limits, which is bad for the atmosphere. Fortunately, any permits sold in excess of the cap in any one auction are not actually in excess of the cap in aggregate. That’s because the bill provides for a “strategic reserve” of carbon permits. This stockpile of permits is assembled with a percentage of permits shaved off the annual cap in each year; and then replenished by unsold permits (in the event that the auction hits the price floor), by international offsets (at a discount of 5 offsets per 4 carbon permits added to the reserve), and then by domestic offsets, in that order.

I'm still getting a handle on offsets, but it appears from the above description that control and access to offsets are tightly restricted. More about offsets here. I'm increasingly accepting offsets as being viable. Enviros need to adjust. I'd also guess that something might go wrong with the offsets and need correcting legislation later. So much for perfection, but we weren't going to get perfection anyway.

As for actually adding something to the discussion, I have two original comments: first, there's no abrogation of EPA authority to regulate emissions under the Clean Water Act, as opposed to the Clean Air Act. Don't tell the bad guys about this, but there's AFAIK ongoing consideration of ocean acidification under the CWA.

Second, I have an idea that would "weaken" the legislation: include a provision that sets a floor for US emissions so they don't fall under Indian or Chinese emissions per capita. That should handle the complaints that we're letting those countries get away with murder. Yes, I'm serious.

Science news, my large skull, prominent eyebrows, and hairy arms

We non-Africans seem to be between 1 and 4 percent Neandertal, sez the news (folks with my physical characteristics might have a bit more). Cliff Notes version at the link, but more interesting commentary by John Hawks especially, and by Razib Khan.

Usual cautions apply about a brand new study possibly being completely wrong.

Razib notes the study somewhat weakens the Out-of-Africa thesis, that a new strain of humanity evolved in Africa 50-100k years ago and swept away every hominid in its path with almost no interbreeding. We now have some interbreeding. What the study doesn't eliminate is that the Out-of-Africa theory could still be mostly correct, and especially that a genetic change could've driven it. My opinion, which doesn't amount to much, is that the multiple, independent emergences of civilization (agriculture and pastoralism) only in the last 12k years doesn't make statistical sense if hominids had all the mental tools to pull it off for hundreds of thousands of years. Some genetic change must have happened recently, and likely drove the Out-of-Africa movement.

Hawks notes that if we continue to insist that Neandertals were separate species from humans, then that makes non-Africans a hybrid group, and not pure human either. I expect we'll see broader classifications, pronto.

Hawks also notes that we can't yet exclude Neandertal genes in Africans, but just that the amount may be smaller.

I expect it will only take idiot racists a few years to reverse the characterization of Neandertals as dummies we mostly outcompeted, and instead claim them as having giving a frisson of superior genetic value exclusively to non-Africans. Gag me.

And speaking of gagging me, there's the whole reaction of people claiming to demonstrate an open mind as to whether African genetic factors makes Africans intellectually equal or less-than-equal to whites. I find it potentially revealing that the two possibilities they're open to are that Africans are intellectually equal to non-Africans, or that they're somewhat less intelligent, but they never discuss the possibility that Africans could be intellectually superior. I expect that if confronted, these open-minded types would protest muchly, "yes, yes I am ready to consider Africans as having potentially superior intellectual genes on average." What their hearts say in the matter is likely different.

Especially relevant is if we're talking about high achievers at one end of distribution curve of talents, then the greater genetic diversity among Africans might actually give them an edge. As I said in an earlier post, the fact that academia is not being dominated by malnourished African villagers suggests that genes take second fiddle to socioeconomic factors.

Garlic ice cream and Sean Casten's anti-cap-and-dividend rant

I experienced both yesterday. They're both pretty confusing, but I'd have to give the preferential nod to the garlic ice cream - the cream really takes the edge off of the garlic. I'm not saying I'd get it again, but it wasn't that bad.

By contrast, here's Casten's post at Grist, and I have no idea how to make sense of it. He appears to believe that the dividend part of cap-and-dividend would somehow allow people to purchase their way above the cap, and that the price penalty given to high carbon sources wouldn't help renewable energy producers. And in the comments, he "clarifies" that the same arguments don't apply to cap-and-trade.

I don't get it. Even more confusingly, he's apparently worked in renewable energy, so he's not some random guy spouting nonsense.

Matt Yglesias critiques him here. As I wrote in the comments, the uncertainty over the extent of reductions applies to a carbon tax, but not to any cap proposal. David Roberts appears in several places to defend Casten, but never tries to explain what Casten is actually saying.

And in case it needs clarifying, I still think the 100% cap-and-dividend proposals are politically unrealistic, that the Waxman-Markey bill is very good, and that I'm waiting to see what's in Kerry-Lieberman.

Weekend climbing in Yosemite

I can't let William have all the climbing fun, although he did beat me by taking climbing pictures with actual climbers in it. Anyway, centered here against the skyline is the big, old-time climb we did last weekend in Yosemite, called Arrowhead Arete. It begins in the shadows above the green band of trees and more or less rises on what looks like near-white rock from this distance, going all the way up to where the white rock disappears into a shady pinnacle. Six rope-length pitches no harder than 5.8, according to one guide book, but what the old-timers thought was only 5.8 and what I consider 5.8 are very different things.

I don't know how the heck they did it in 1956 with hemp ropes and thick hiking boots that wouldn't fit into the thin cracks that ran the route. OTOH, the guys that first did it were incredibly strong and incredibly good, and there we diverge.

My partner is a much better climber and led the hardest parts, but I did lead two 5.6 pitches on the route, including the seventh pitch of 5.6 traversing that our book neglected to mention. It was easy stuff, but on a knife edge ridge less than two feet wide in a few places. We also exceeded expectations by taking longer to hike there and to climb than the book anticipated, which meant descending mostly in the dark, including four rappels in darkness and two of them under a waterfall from a small stream (not as nice as it sounds).

Great climb though! Other climbers I don't know took good pics. Here's one of the knife edge, and another of the downward looking view (including Arrowhead Spire that we didn't climb).

We did some other, easier climbs as well. Nutcracker, which I climbed once before and took my only significant lead fall three years ago. No lead fall this time, although I did have to rest on my protection gear and also had to whine about a few parts that were wet. (Pics by various peoples here.) And another called Doggie Deviations that was very nice.

Nicest of all - no climbing crowds! That's a weird thing for Yosemite.

Even skeptics see the VA Atty General as another McCarthy

(I was going to write about rock-climbing in Yosemite, but I guess that'll have to wait.)

Today a few people who might otherwise get the term denialists have earned the skeptic moniker for a day, for opposing the Virginia Attorney General fishing expedition that seeks virtually all records held by the University of Virginia regarding a former researcher Michael Mann who believes in climate change, while AG Cuccinelli doesn't.

More info at Deltoid, including a list of some skeptics who've done the right thing. I'd add, with reservations, the climate action diversionist Roger Pielke Jr. Reservations stem from the fact that Roger can't resist stabbing Mann in the face a few times during the blog post condemning Cuccinelli and offering his "support" for Mann.

The fishing expedition request is here. Timpanogos has a good link roundup. Regarding his thought that the statute of limitations has been exceeded, I don't think so - the section he quotes only applies to actions by private parties, not the AG. There's this section of the law, though:

§ 8.01-216.12. Civil investigative demands; protected material or information.

A civil investigative demand issued under this article shall not require the production of any documentary material, the submission of any answers to written interrogatories, or the giving of any oral testimony if such material, answers, or testimony would be protected from disclosure under (i) the standards applicable to subpoenas or subpoenas duces tecum issued by a court of this Commonwealth to aid in a grand jury investigation or (ii) the standards applicable to discovery requests under the Rules of the Supreme Court of Virginia, to the extent that the application of such standards to any such demand is appropriate and consistent with the provisions and purposes of this article.

I'm thinking this could provide a reason for UVa to stand up to the AG, if they wanted to, just like they could fight any unreasonable subpoena. The AG isn't going after anyone else though, not Mann directly (Roger missed this part) so only the university has a choice. I think.

Would be useful to have lawyers who practice in these fields to weigh in on this stuff.

UPDATE: Ed Darrell of Timpanogos found a better link showing the statute of lims section does apply to the Attorney General. OTOH, my not-super-informed opinion is that the reference for those "responsible to act" means the Attorney General, not the officials supervising Mann, so either that provision applies, or the end of Mann's work in 2004-2005 comes under the six-year limit.

Chimp death, unpredictability of smart critters, and relative intelligence

Ed Yong has another fascinating post with videos showing how different chimps react very differently to death in their groups. Among other things, chimp mothers refuse to abandon dead babies, sometimes carrying them for days or weeks. Very difficult to guess what's going on in the mind of another species, but there's a clear recognition that something's happened, and somewhat flawed ways of handling it. Kind of like us.

Five years ago I wrote a post about chimp infanticide and added "Another interesting aspect is that chimp infanticide appears somewhat harder to explain with simple evolutionary principles than is the case with monkeys. That fits my own little theory that behaviour of smart animals is hard to predict...."

With my usual, blisteringly fast analytical skill, I've come up with another theory after five years. Chimp behavior isn't necessarily harder to predict than mouse behavior, it's just that it's harder for humans to predict chimps because the relative difference in our intelligence is much smaller. By analogy, a chess grand master (human) can easily predict the outcome of a chess move by a low-ranked player (mouse) but not so easily playing against a slightly less proficient chess master (chimp). They're a lot closer to our league.

All the more reason why we shouldn't treat chimps, other great apes, and maybe a few other animals as belonging in the same ethical category as mice.

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Unsettling video of a young chimp playing with the mummified body of an infant below. An adult is clearly disturbed and wants no contact with the corpse, and the mother eventually scares off the juvenile and takes back the corpse. If you ignore that macabre aspect, though, you'll notice the chimps using stone hammers and anvils to crack open nuts, one of the prime examples of chimp tool use and one of the few that many of us have done as well.

Adding to the Lindzen pile-on, but for an older Wall Street Journal Op-Ed

Richard Lindzen's got a stinky Earth Day Op-Ed at the Wall Street Journal, where Op-Eds go to stink. (A good trick from Coby Beck to get around the paywall and smell the Op-Ed yourself - Google search here, and click the first link.)

The cleanup work's been done at Deltoid and by Arthur Smith, but while snooping around I came across this paragraph that Lindzen dropped four years ago at the WSJ:

....there has been no question whatever that carbon dioxide is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas--albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed, assuming that the small observed increase was in fact due to increasing carbon dioxide rather than a natural fluctuation in the climate system.

A little misleading combination there: it's kind of true to say that CO2's direct effect, absent feedbacks, is relatively minor. What's not true is to say we should've seen more warming than observed, if all you're talking about is the direct effect of CO2. When the Op-Ed was written (2006), the increase was toward the low end of what might be expected, but only when the strongly warming net feedbacks were included. Lindzen has switched from talking about an apple (no feedbacks) to an orange (results expected from feedbacks) without telling his readers. No wonder that denialists, who take Lindzen's non-peer-reviewed ravings seriously, get confused.

And at this point in 2010, with the warmest 12 month period ever recorded happening right now, even Lindzen's exaggeration doesn't make sense.

Anyway, misleading info from Lindzen eventually translates into nonsense in the lower denialist depths, like this from Andy McCarthy:

...On the other hand, the skeptics (I am one) too often deny the [AGW] premise — not because it's false but because it may be frivolous. That is, relatively speaking, it may be nothing more than a drop in the ocean. I suppose it is undeniable, in absolute terms, that the drop increases the ocean's volume. The increase, though, appears so de minimis that denying it makes sense in the greater scheme of things.

Save us from these people and those they choose to be misled by.

It ain't easy being green (green climate legislation in the Senate, that is)

Mostly a link collection:

We're in trouble when the Dem front runner for a Senate seat advertises how he'll do nothing to stop climate change, but his opponent will take action:

Keep that in mind when you decide how pure your climate bill has to be in order to win your support.

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Duncan Black:

Reading this post and some of the comments leaves me a bit bewildered. One way to get Republicans on board is to enable them to be divas, flatter them, let them bask in the media spotlight as they play Hamlet for 6 months, and keep offering compromise after compromise while getting nothing in return, on the off chance that maybe, just maybe, Lindsey or President Snowe or whoever will get on board. Another way to do things is to propose popular pieces of legislation and then make the Republicans eat shit every day they fail to pass it, go send out your charismatic leader to give speeches and hold rallies in their states, mobilize your massive community of supporters to take various actions in support of the legislation, etc. I could be wrong that the latter is the better strategy, both politically and in terms of actually getting s**t done, but it just isn't the case that the options are kissing up to Lindsey Graham or nothing.

Actually, in terms of "getting s**t done," as in getting climate legislation through the Senate, I think it's pretty clear that the choices really are kissing up to Lindsey Graham or nothing. I welcome the explanation as to how we're going to get 60 votes for a better climate bill without him, though. Or an explanation of how our charismatic leader is going to turn a likely loss of several Senate seats into a gain of several seats - otherwise the 60 vote hurdle gets even worse for at least 2 more years.

The only question in my mind is whether the cost of Republican support is worth it, in terms of restricting the ability of the EPA and the states to act independently. We won't know until we see the legislation.

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As for seeing the legislation at all, John Kerry says it ain't over. It's worth mentioning than Graham had said before that health care legislation was killing the climate bill, and then returned to the negotiating table.

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Larry Shapiro's smart view on why immigration is replacing climate as a legislative priority, and its effect:

Finally, with no movement capable of forcing a robust response to the climate crisis, the only way Sens. Graham, John Kerry (D-Mass.), and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) could have gotten the Senate to pass a bill would have been to appease the special interests at the root of the problem.

Not sure I agree with his assessment that the legislation is dead, or that it's not worth the price paid to special interests, though. And personally I support a no-net-immigration policy, probably my most pseudo-rightwing political view (except that I'm also pro-amnesty, but whatever....).

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Something unrelated - peak phosphorus? A new one to me, no idea whether it's a real concern.

Scientist versus denialist defamers, part 2

(Part 1 here., all about a defamation lawsuit by a climatologist filed against denialists.)

Continuing through the writ:

Writ page 20: the National Post said Weaver's calling for replacement of the IPCC leadership, when he says he specifically told the reporter he's not. Again, a question of interview tapes or credibility. Here's a sidenote: I think the question of the National Post's accuracy as editors or as reporters can be brought into question as a general matter if they're going to defend themselves by asserting that they're accurate and Weaver's lying. Totally unrelated claims by people that the National Post had a pattern of misrepresenting them after being interviewed could be introduced as evidence. I think. Could make for some fun impeachment of witness credibility at open trial, and even more fun depositions, discovery of internal email/documents, etc.

Pp 20-21: Weaver says he's been consistently cautious about linking current weather events to global warming. This will be an interesting/potentially important. Defendants will say any description of a potential link, no matter how cautious, is sensationalizing, while a court that's had enough of the defendants might decide otherwise. For some reason, the public seems to listen to judges, so a court decision on this issue could be good PR. Also, the 'screams global warming' fake quote is a pretty good claim in that it seems tied to specific weather events and not the long term increase in temps.

I'm skipping some defamatory claims that were the same as above but repeated in later publications.

So that's the most interesting and important stuff, IMHO. One other thing I'll add is that Weaver's lawyer, Roger McConchie, appears to specialize in this field, so he's likely to get good representation. This could be very interesting.

Scientist versus denialist defamers, part 1

I'm celebrating Earth Day here by going through the defamation case filed in Canada by a climatologist against some misleading defamers that was made in the Canadian tabloid press.

The 48 page writ and other docs are here, I've only got time to look at part of it, but I will pull out the best claims and the most important claims for comments.

Standard disclaimer: not exactly my legal field, not my country.

I'm seeing contrary info on whether Canada/British Columbia applies the same higher bar that England apparently has for a public figure to establish defamation. Whether the plaintiff Andrew Weaver qualifies as a public figure under BC law is yet another question. Those two issues are likely the most important ones in the success of the case, and I have no idea how they'll play out. Let's ignore them!

Moving on, the good stuff begins on pages 10-12 of the pdf (pages 5-7 of the writ): two defamatory claims - that Weaver claimed the fossil fuel industry was behind two break-ins in his office, and that he doesn't understand "solar climate theory". The first one is a really good claim depending on evidence, while the second is the important claim.

Weaver denies he ever linked fossil industry to the breakins, so it's a simple factual dispute. The question is what does the evidence show - if there's a tape of the interview and he doesn't make the link, he's won the case (or this part, anyway). If there's no tape but his interviewer alleges he did make the connection, then it's a matter of who seems more credible.

Worth noting here that Canada has a "responsible communication" defense - even if the interviewer lied or negligently screwed up, no other co-defendant (besides that defendant's employer) is also liable unless they also practiced negligent journalism. Knowingly employing someone who's a bad journalist probably isn't responsible journalism though.

The interesting and important second claim major claim is that Weaver was defamed by the assertion that he doesn't understand "solar climate theory," something that a climatologist who studies climate change would be expected to understand if he were at a basic level of competence. This could go beyond fair comment/expression of opinion, something where the defendant better have some evidence on his side. The other interesting thing is I'll bet there's well-defined case law on to what extent you can allege a professional is incompetent, and when the false allegation gets specific enough to be defamatory. Obviously there's no precedent for climatologists, but that doesn't matter - similar cases made by doctors, could provide guidance.

On writ page 8, the claim that "models are all falling apart" when they're not, is also important. Mainly because it could get a judge to weigh in on computer models. The issue might get tossed as simple opinion, though.

The anonymous posters on page 11 and 12 may have defamed Weaver, especially the second one, but it's harder to see whether anyone would take them seriously, meaning their defamation wasn't capable of causing much reputational damage because they're obviously just two boneheads.

Page 14 "Doc Weaver was publicly blaming the oil industry" for the break-ins. Someone made a very big mistake by putting that word "publicly" in the article, because it doesn't matter then whether the interviewer claims Weaver blamed the oil industry. If they don't have a public expression somewhere to cite to, they're in trouble. Best claim I've seen so far. (UPDATE: thought about it some more - if the the interviewer will claim that Weaver made the connection speaking to her, then the defendants will say that counts as public. Kind of a thin reed.)

Kind of fun, on the same page, is the claim that McIntyre "broke Mr. Weaver's hockey stick". Weaver says (p. 15) that he had nothing to do with the Hockey Stick temperature record, and that puts the defendants in a bind: if a court says the hockey stick isn't broken, then they've defamed him, and even if the court somehow says it was broken, they've defamed him by blaming him for something he didn't screw up. Some wiggle room though with defendants claim that Weaver supports the Hockey Stick, and it's all just opinion, anyway.

That's enough for now, I'll have to come back later for more fun.

(One addition - the Deltoid link at the very top has a discussion of a case where Fox News was legally allowed to lie (allegedly). It's not a defamation case though, so it's not relevant to this discussion.)

UPDATE: second half here.

Would Poizner, Whitman, and the other anti-AB 32 people want the rest of the world to act like them?

I'm pretty certain that governor candidates Steve Poizner and Meg Whitman accept climate change even while they propose suspending California's premier law to address the issue, AB 32.

I would love to see someone corner them with this question: should the rest of the world act just as they would, and suspend action to address climate change for the same one or more years that they suggest? Do they really want China to keep building coal plants at the same rate? If they think that China shouldn't increase its emissions, when China's emission are one-third the per-capita emissions of the US? I'm pretty certain that even if AB 32 is implemented without delays, China's per-capita emission in 2020, the law's final year, will be less than California's.

I just can't see how they could give a satisfactory answer to this question. A child could see through a response that says we should "temporarily" quit trying but the rest of the world must keep trying, and saying everyone should quit trying for years is unacceptable. I expect they'd try to avoid answering it, but at this stage of the game, an extended interview could force them into uncomfortable positions.

Somewhat related: I was reading the nonsense put out by the Orwellian AB 32 Implementation Group, which included a claim that the law would cost $60/ton and cost "a winery" $2.6 million annually. First, $60 sounds pretty high for a law with modest aims, and the figures in the same document from the California government seem to show it as the high end of plausible figures. Also, dividing 60 into 2.6 million gives 43,000 tons of CO2, which also sounds like a lot. Is it? The Climate Registry claims to create public reporting of GHG emissions, and it has at least one winery (Sokol) as a member. The only thing I can't find on their incredibly extensive website is this public registry of emissions, not just for Sokol but for anyone. So much for this one effort to fact-check the forces of evil, and meanwhile I'm wondering what the heck is public about the Climate Registry.

All your astrophotography are belong to us

Here begins my career as an astrophotographer - I took this picture of Saturn by awkwardly jamming my cell phone alongside my telescope eyepiece. I'm sure I'll be beating out the Hubble in picture quality in no time.

Ira Flatow correctly equates climate and evolution denialism

Public Radio's Science Friday program knows how to deal with science denialism -Ira correctly discusses climate denialism in the same way as evolution denialism. A while back I heard him say that he doesn't discuss whether creationism is right, because that's not a science question. Instead he discusses why people believe in it. Congrats to Ira for handling science denialism over climate change in the same way.

The one thing Ira didn't do was to explicitly make the comparison, but that's okay.

I had no idea about the extent of slavery in Eastern Europe in the 19th Century

I'm not sure I even realized that Eastern Europe had slavery that was distinguishable from serfdom, with people that could be bought and sold. Right now I'm reading the book Bury Me Standing, about the modern Roma (Gypsy) people in Eastern Europe after the Cold War. The parallels between the Roma underclass in Europe and African-American underclass in the US were striking to me even before the book started discussing the extent of slavery in Romania and how it lasted until the mid-1850s.

I had to go to wiki to confirm it, and it's all true. At least in America, the vast majority of people with IQs above the plant life level acknowledge slavery as one of our two Original Sins, while Europeans seem pretty happy to sweep their version under a rug.

Not that we don't still have plenty of recent wishful ignorance about the cause of the Civil War - the one upside of that is learning how clearly the Southern Secessionists told the world that they seceded because of slavery. Some good history learning is possible.

One-way evolutionary arms race solves invasive species problems, but it's slow

An interesting post by biology blogger Biotunes about predation of native species on problematic, invasive species raised some ideas in my mind as to how the invasive species eventually come under control. Obviously the current levels of predation isn't an efficient control, or the invasive species wouldn't be problematic - it would be extinct or just occupy a small niche in the ecosystem.

Over time, however, there should be evolutionary pressure on predators to prey more efficiently on invasives, while the invasives will not adapt in response. So long as the predators are inefficient, the evolutionary pressure on invasives should be to outcompete within its own species, by reproducing more and reproducing more quickly. A mutation that adapts to predators is unlikely to spread because it will likely impose a cost on reproduction (spend more time hiding and less time feeding, say) that exceeds the benefits of escaping not-very-efficient predation. The effect is a one-way evolutionary arms race.

Only when the predators become efficient at controlling the invasive population, will the invasive start adapting in response, and at that point the invasives won't be that much of an environmental problem.

So, great. Next question is how long does this all take? We've had invasive plants in the Americas for hundreds of years, and invasive animals for a century or more. I'm no expert on these things, but I do read about them and I've not heard of any invasive gradually receding to become a background species. The few that have disappeared or become minor have done so when we've imported biological controls or have adopted scorched-earth campaigns to get rid of the species.

If on a scale of a century or more, very few or no invasives have been brought to heel by the one-way evolutionary arms race, then the time-scale for this to work on most invasives has to be much longer, maybe many thousands of years. This long-term solution helps us understand how nature handles the rare, natural introduction of a new, invasive species. Considering everything else we're doing to screw up our ecology right now, however, the natural solution isn't something we can rely on as a substitute for our own action to deal with the problem we've created.

We have a record - hottest 12 months since modern record-keeping began in 1880

Via David Appell and this commenter, NASA records show the last 12 months, April 2009 to March 2010, to be the warmest 12 months since global records began, 130 years ago.

What is important about this record is how it fits a trend. It would be interesting but unimportant (kind of like the occasional record cold or snow we see in some locations are interesting but unimportant) except that it further confirms the long-running trend for warmth, and contradicts the denialist claims that temperatures have been cooling in recent years. I'm not sure if we need further confirmation of something like gravity, but it's been checked and it's still there. With Kerry and Graham set to unveil their new climate bill next week, I think it would be appropriate to make a big deal out of this.

The satellite sets don't yet show a record, but they measure slightly different things, and they're going up too. I wonder how long it will take people like Roy Spencer to continue reporting warming before they finally break down and admit what's happening. It would also be interesting to see what other surface record compilations give for their results on a running 12 month period.

Joe Romm has more about March temperatures at ClimateProgress.

UPDATE: Brad DeLong understands the value of emphasizing this record.

Actually, a criminal inquiry by a powerful Senator is kind of a big deal

Ages ago by blog reckoning, but I thought I'd pull up some stuff by good ol' Roger Pielke Jr., wherein he blames Rick Piltz for indiscreetly saying that climate denialist Senator Inhofe is investigating climatologists for alleged legal violations, including one criminal law violation.

Well, I share Roger's outrage at Piltz for saying Inhofe is claiming one potential criminal law violation. Inhofe is claiming three potential criminal law violations, at least (see pp. 29-31: False Statements Act, False Claims Act, and obstruction of justice, with some weird statement about an "OSTP Policy Directive" that is poorly written but probably doesn't assert criminal violations). A Roger Reader wouldn't know that Inhofe had said boo about crimes, where Roger only quotes Piltz and not Inhofe talking about such things, and Roger cheerily dismisses Inhofe's legal threats of any kind as inconsequential.

Not so fast, though. I'm not worried too much about the False Claims Act, which would only apply if climatologists got paid for work and didn't do it. False Statements and obstruction of justice, however, could come down to whether the climatologists misleadingly answered or deliberately failed to meet legal mandates to answer certain questions or information requests. Denialists are probably ready to call anything misleading and any omission deliberate. In a normal world this is almost never applied to responding to Congressional inquiries (when the tobacco execs said cigarettes aren't addictive, nothing happened to them), but the denialists are trying to shape a different world.

One would think that a political scientist like Roger would know that Inhofe will regain subpoena power as the EPW Committee Chairman if the Republicans get the Senate back, allowing him to cause endless trouble and to assert new legal violations if subpoena responses are deemed inadequate. If Roger knows this, he fails to mention it.

As for actual prosecution, it's highly unlikely so long as Democrats run the Department of Justice. Again though, I'd think that a political scientist would remember that the Bushies placed quite a few arch-conservatives at DOJ in the civil service, and those folks are still there and capable of making trouble. They'd most likely get shut down long before doing anything too serious, but those people could also make life difficult for scientists. And a still more serious issue, IMHO, is Inhofe's repeated mention of "debarment," which could make the climatologists and possibly their institutions ineligible for federal funding. No scientific institution wants even a whiff of that idea near them. The 2012 election isn't far off, and while President Sarah Palin is unlikely, she's not impossible. It's not over the top to worry some about this.

As Eli pointed out, there is a new McCarthyism, and it's from the denialists. Roger sees nothing to worry about though, so YMMV.

Perception and reality of counterinsurgency war

This is what a chickenhawk perceives counterinsurgency warfare to be (first three minutes is all you need):



Counterinsurgency war:

As Glenn Greenwald said, the issue here isn't the soldiers who did the shooting, it's about running a counterinsurgency war in a foreign country.

I wonder if I could work out a bet with James Hansen over cap and trade

In the very small category of people who have done a lot to help on climate change but have also damaged the cause, number one on the list has to go to James Hansen.  The help far outweighs the harm in his case (in contrast to the number two person, James Lovelock), but he's really being problematic with his opposition to even the squeaky-clean, cap-and-dividend bill in Congress, the one that I think has little chance of passing.  Check the link for Joe Romm's critique, which I think is accurate.  Hansen supports alternative legislation, a revenue-neutral carbon tax where the money is redistributed back on a per-capita basis except with limits to families with too many children, which I think is just great and that maybe 5 percent of the country at most would also agree that it's great.  Thanks for that practical suggestion.

So I don't have a specific bet in mind, I'm just thinking that if Hansen believes Cantwell-Collins will have "only a small impact on emissions" then the European Union's cap-and-trade must have a near-zero effect.  I think the EU scheme should do most of what it intended.  Maybe that's sufficient daylight between positions to set up a bet.

There's the issue of offsets that would complicate the bet.  If I buy solar panels on my roof to reduce emissions, that's great.  If my roof doesn't work and instead I buy solar panels for your roof, that's an evil evil offset (yes, I'm exaggerating, but I'm not sure it's by much).  I think though that even if we disallow offsets for wrong reasons, there's still a net reduction in cap-and-trade, so maybe some more research could give room for a bet.

Much better news about Hansen is this piece of info I didn't know - that he called present-day warming as happening as early as 1981 (not just a prediction of future warming).  Impressive.

Not your typical SETI conspiracy

Nature has a recent "Podcast Extra," an extended interview with physicist Paul Davies that I listened to while injuring my foot on a trail run.  He's got an interesting book, The Eerie Silence, about the failure so far of SETI to detect alien intelligence and what the next steps might be.

Davies talked about his position as chair of the SETI post-detection task group, which is where the not-very-secret conspiracy issue arises and where he said some things that contradicted statements I've heard from SETI guy, Seth Shostak.  He said that if they receive a signal demonstrating alien intelligence that has no policy implications beyond the demonstration of its existence, then the world should be told.  If, however, the communication has implications like instructions for how to transform our technology, the potential disruptive impact means we shouldn't immediately disclose the news.  He also said we should be very careful and controlling of what information humanity should send in response.

I'm just going off of memory, but I think Shostak has said the exact opposite - that all information should be disclosed, and that a cacophony of signals sent to the aliens might actually give them a better idea about us than careful control would.  I think Shostak's right.

As a practical matter, I don't think SETI scientists are capable of keeping secret something this important, and I'm not sure they and anyone they recruit in the decision-making has the right to keep the information secret.  And as I'm certain I heard Shostak say, it's not possible from stopping anyone with a two-bit radio antennae from making their own broadcasts in response.

Otherwise, Davies had some interesting stuff to say, and his book might be worth picking up.

Scott Armstrong losing the skewed bet his side set up at Intrade

(Greetings, Andrew Bolt readers!  Please let Andrew know that I'd love to bet him personally over global warming, and my bet offers are here.  I'd also happily bet him even odds over the Armstrong bet offer discussed below.  You might also be interested in a 2006 post I wrote on how to cook Andrew Bolt, as he now seems to be using the same excuse, arguing the current warming isn't part of a long term trend.)


The last we heard from climate denialist Scott Armstrong was several years ago when RealClimate took apart his convoluted offer to "bet" in some form against Al Gore over whether climate models were accurate, where the offer was only against certain fixed locations and while not allowing the climate models to operate properly.

Unfortunately for Armstrong, someone on his side of the fence took the denialism seriously and tried to apply it in a clear format.  Crandles alerted me to some climate- and weather-related predictions at the Intrade betting market (you have click on "Markets" and then click through the left-side menu), and one of them is somewhat inappropriately titled "Climate Change Prediction: Al Gore v Scott Armstrong. Armstrong to Win"


Details are at the "Contract Specific Rules".  Instead of the convoluted original bet, they simply want to compare 2007 to 2010.  A period that short throws a lot of random noise into the analysis, but that only slightly benefits someone who's making a bad prediction.  They've also selected UAH satellite data out of all the half-dozen possible surface and satellite datasets, the one that has shown the least amount of increase, another way to slightly skew the odds.

Most ridiculous though is how they make the comparative predictions for purposes of settling the bet, which is worth quoting:

• Armstrong forecasts no change in global mean temperature over the next ten years. He predicts the 2010 annual global mean temperature will be 0.284, the same as 2007.
• Gore has not made an official forecast. He did, however, imply that the global mean temperature would increase at a rapid rate - presumably at least as great as the IPCC's 1992 projection of 0.03°C-per-year. Therefore the IPCC's 1992 projection will to be taken as Gore's forecast. This forecast predicts the 2010 annual global mean temperature anomaly to be 0.374 (0.284+[3*0.03])

Really, Gore implied that?  A citation would be useful, especially one with a date attached.  Actually, two citations are needed since I don't think the IPCC made short-term predictions in 1992 or otherwise indicated the temperature rise would be stable over the next century.  In 2001, the IPCC predicted .15 to .2C rise in the first few decades, and in 2007 it predicted .2C in the first decades.  Armstrong supporters were either unaware of the subsequent 15 years of climatology, or they were purposefully trying to skew the bet - take your pick.

But the irony stems from 2010 shaping up to be a hot year so far even according to UAH, with both January and February over .6C above the the mean.  Armstrong fans lose if 2010 is above .328C.  Unsurprisingly, the bet last traded at 30, or more than 3:1 against Armstrong.  Funny how there are no updates at the denialist website since January data came online.

What would be far more interesting is an accurate Armstrong v. Gore bet, or maybe more appropriately titled Armstrong v. the IPCC.  Make it a ten year bet instead of the tiny, three-year period, and center it halfway between no warming and the IPCC prediction of .2C per decade.  With Armstrong in bad shape in the current unfair bet, his side should do even worse in a fair bet.  Might be worth suggesting to Intrade, though, as something that could accomplish the prediction that James Annan called for several years ago.

UPDATE:  March has come in even warmer, at .65C.  Armstrong's side is looking very embarrassed now.

UPDATE 2:  Intrade now bidding at 20, or 5:1 against Armstrong's side (UPDATE UPDATED:  per the comments, I screwed up the ratio which is actually 4:1 against at price of 20).  I think a more interesting prediction would be when the denialist website that focuses on this bet, quietly folds up shop.

Deep thought on opinion poll democracy

If Republicans think it's illegitimate for Democrats to have passed health care reform over contrary poll numbers, will they agree that Bush was an illegitimate president when 500,000 more voters chose Gore instead?

(My opinion:  the Bushian illegitimacy comes from the shenanigans to keep black voters, including non-felons, off voter rolls in Florida, and not from losing the popular vote.  Our nation's electoral college system is the one we've chosen, just like our system of representative government that's not decided on polling survey numbers.)

Obama's offshore drilling not completely crazy, but....

My first reaction to Obama's unilateral concession to allow offshore drilling was the same as all the other envirobloggers:  "Wait, what?"  Maybe do it as part of a broader deal to protect the climate, but why give away a bargaining chip?

Due to my patience and prudence (aka, not getting around to blogging about it), I can now write something slightly different.  The second wave of analysis was that it's part of an executive branch group of activities that otherwise are beneficial, and more importantly that its intent is to reinvigorate climate/energy legislation, especially to bring oil-patch Democratic senators on board:

"The President has put forward his plans on offshore drilling after hearing from key Senators that it's a necessary step to succeed in passing climate and energy legislation in the Senate," reads a reluctantly supportive statement from the Environmental Defense Fund, which tends to take less of a hardline than other leading environmental groups.

This view was echoed to TPMDC by several Senate Democratic aides and environmental movement sources, both supportive and unsupportive of the move. But the Senators in question aren't by and large Republicans, whose votes will be needed to overcome an expected climate and energy filibuster. They're Democrats -- Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Mark Warner (D-VA), Jim Webb (D-VA) -- who seek assurances that a comprehensive bill won't harm their state interests, and hope that new drilling will result in revenue for their states.

A Landrieu staffer tells TPMDC that while Landrieu's vote for a climate and energy bill will depend on its substance -- and its impact on Louisiana -- she views this as the removal of a major obstacle. "She's got a little more fire in her belly right now for energy and climate issues," the aide said. "What the President did -- he took a major stumbling block off the table ... without that I don't think it would've had any legs."

Yeah, okay, but why not "invigorate" the legislation by putting the decision to open up for drilling in the legislation itself?  One reason may be that the forces of inertia and stupid are so vast that they can demand this unilateral concession as the price of even thinking about doing something sane.  Or it could be a matter of control - who knows what craziness would result in the final legislation once you opened the potential for increased drilling, while Obama's decision at least has some geographic limits.  Or maybe it's just a mistake.  I don't know, but I don't think Obama's stupid, and I know that Environmental Defense Fund knows very well what the prospects are for a climate bill to get 60 votes in the Senate.

And on my third hand is the concern that the resulting legislation will overrule more-stringent legislation that is already happening in some states.  That's often the price you pay - industry gets a uniform national standard more stringent than they'd like, while the most-stringent state standards are relaxed - but you have to make sure the price is worth it.

Meanwhile, Senators Cantwell and Collins have a nice, clean, uncompromising cap-and-dividend bill that I support 100% unless it can't get 60 votes, in which (very likely) case we need to also be preparing to get into the mud.

UPDATE:  Fran has a good point in the comments that it's only exploratory drilling, so the store hasn't been given away yet.  Still, discoveries will create a lot of pressure for follow-on drilling, and it's still giving something away with nothing definite in return.  It'll be interesting to read the memoirs in a few years to find out what the inside story was for all this.


Unrelated note:  turning off comment moderation for recent posts, and we'll see how much of a spam problem we get.

Randy Olson on Marc Morano

Olson summarizes his thoughts on interviewing climate denialist Marc Morano (who won't bet over his position, more evidence that Morano is smart).

I mostly agree with Olson - I think Morano is an effective, dishonest debater, and should be debated only with extreme caution and preparation.

I still think it would be at least a useful exercise for someone to go for the all-out attack, on Morano personally, for his dishonesty in the course of a debate.  To that extent I disagree with Olson's comments.  I also disagree with Olson on likeability - however likeable Morano may be in person, I think Morano is charisma-challenged.  I'd contrast Morano to Bill Gray or Michael Crichton in terms of the latter two being much more likeable.  Morano speaks fast, as he has to in order to practice Gish Gallop lying, but it doesn't help him on likeability.  Another contrast would be Bill Nye's calm takedown of a denialist.  It's the advantage that we have with science on our side, that we don't have to spew a fountain of nonsense in hopes of confusing people.

Finally, since I stumbled on Roger Pielke Jr.'s blogging on the same subject - I thought Roger might give a token slap on the wrist to the denialists, but he skips that step and instead buys Morano's claim to not be a GOP operative.  First, you can't trust anything Morano says that's not verifiable.  But even if it's true that he's only voted for two GOP presidential candidates since 1988, if those two candidates were named Bush, then that's four of six elections (with Morano presumably sitting out or throwing away his vote in the other two).

At least, I don't recall seeing Morano hanging out with us fellow Kerry volunteers in '04 or Obama volunteers in '08, but maybe I overlooked him.

Google and China

Not the usual stuff I write about, but I've been following it.  Hard to avoid when their headquarters are two miles from me.

One possible outcome of Google's rebuff to Chinese censorship is that Google would actively join efforts to defeat the Great Firewall.  It's already possible for determined Chinese citizens to beat the Firewall, but a massive and innovative corporation joining those efforts could make it a lot easier.  I suspect that this is one piece of leverage Google retains while China figures out how hard to push against the company.  OTOH, no one else is talking about it, so maybe it's not that important or likely.

James Fallows posted an interesting reader email.  The reader argues that China can't let Google dominate the search market, because China needs the information about domestic society that it can only get from closely monitoring searches.  What's interesting is that it isn't solely a "need" in the typical evil dictatorship way (although it's that too), but a need to understand its own people that it can't get because of the lack of free speech and free elections.

The mostly-negative business community commentary about Google says more about the commenters than Google.  I think they're showing a combination of ressentiment and wanna-be schadenfreude against a successful corporation that they'd like to see taken off its high horse.  Also mixed in is apprehension over anyone taking corporate social responsibility beyond the minimum common denonimator.

I have no idea how it'll play out.  From the sidelines it would be far more interesting to me to see Google really take on Chinese censorship, but I'm not the one who's already walked away from a third of the share of the Chinese search market and still wants to rescue the rest of its business.  Anyone who says Google is just leaving to say face, doesn't have much business sense in my opinion.  I think Google has shown a willingness to take a hit in order to keep some reality in its business motto.

More Uganda

Felt like writing a little more about Uganda:

Gorillas are almost entirely herbivorous (they eat some insects, apparently).  We were watching the silverback try to eat a small green vine going up a 25-foot tree, but it snapped when he tried to pull it down.  No problem, though - he stood up and wrenched the whole tree down, putting the entire vine in easy reach.  Gorillas are like small elephants, changing the balance between trees and ground cover in the forest.

A lot of the gorillas spend a significant amount of time foraging in neighboring farms and not just the forest.  Understandable when Bwindi Impenetrable National Park is so small (about 20 by 15 kilometers) and the farmland used to be habitat, but you can also sympathize with subsistence farmers living on less than $2 a day when their tiny plots are torn up by gorillas.  The average woman has 7 to 9 children in her lifetime - they say they need to keep some children home from school to chase wildlife away from their fields.  The organization we volunteered with, Conservation Through Public Health, has a family planning program that attempts to persuade people that smaller families are better.  I've also thought that programs elsewhere to compensate people for damage to their farms, or to pay them to create buffer areas, could be good models to apply at Bwindi.

We did a river wildlife cruise at Queen Elizabeth National Park that was fantastic.  The birdlife in particular was amazing - I'm an indifferent birder overseas where I have no hope of absorbing much understanding, but these were great.

Congo seems to be improving somewhat - we were right on the border and there's lots of traffic.  Rwanda is already open for tourists.  North Uganda, previously dangerous, is now settling down some.  Some good signs in this.  OTOH, we heard that Rwanda wasn't as careful as Uganda in controlling the level of exposure that gorillas, susceptible to human diseases, have to tourists.

Everyone in Uganda and Dubai seemed happy to see Obama as president, although many didn't expect great things either, just less war.

Friends of Earth UK's questionable support for chemical open air carbon capture

Maybe I'm biased because of Roger Pielke Jr.'s misrepresentations in favor of chemical air capture, but I was a little surprised at the partial thumb's up given by FOE UK to chemical capture.  Because they're sane they give priority to reducing emissions over geoengineering fantasies ("Mitigation has to be the priority for action, action far in excess of currently being considered by politicians is needed.").  Still, they give chemical capture some props, including favoring it over biomass power plus sequestration:

The use of large-scale afforestation, bio-char production and biomass carbon capture and storage have some limited carbon reduction potential but there are very significant land use issues associated with these. These geoengineering techniques could seriously compete with land needed to produce food (the quantity of land required varies hugely dependent on diet) and land for the protection of ecosystems. Until these land-use issues are better understood Friends of the Earth cannot support the use of large-scale afforestation, bio-char production and biomass carbon capture and storage.

Chemical air capture of carbon is the most promising carbon reduction option, although some research is still needed into safe storage sites. This is a very expensive option which is far more costly than mitigation. However rich countries have already far exceeded their fair share of “environmental space” through releasing far more than their fair share of carbon emissions over the last 200 years. If safe storage sites can be identified rich countries should carry out significant air capture of carbon, in additional to very significant cuts in emissions.

The problem with this analysis is the apples and oranges comparisons of costs.  Chemical capture can only be done at great cost per unit of carbon reduction, so FOE assumes that large costs are allowable for chemical capture but not for the biological techniques.  OTOH, if you assume you're allowed to spend the same amount on biomass or biochar, you can solve at least some of the problems that FOE identified with them.  At least you could provide incentives to use non-agricultural land for biomass production.  This might still produce pressure on natural habitat, but if we're assuming lots of money, there's ways to deal with that too, like paying for increased productivity on farmland instead.

Of course I'm just waving my hands at cost figures instead of crunching them, but that still puts me one step ahead of FOE.  Somebody needs to do the numbers.  Roger claimed to have done the numbers, but 1. his work generally raises doubts in my mind and I'm not going to spend time checking every citation to determine whether it says what he claims it says; 2. he only examines capture costs, not sequestration costs, transport, monitoring, technology development etc ("In this paper I explore some of the economic considerations associated with air capture of carbon dioxide, and do not address issues of storage, which are explored in depth elsewhere"); and 3. he does his own apples to oranges thing of comparing the partial costs of capture to full costs of mitigation in the Stern Report and IPCC (in part 4.1:  "If air capture technology could be implemented at [lowest rate cited by Roger], then the cost to stabilize emissions over the 21st century would be less than the Stern median estimate....The IPCC median value of 1.3% [of global GDP] is less than the costs air capture [sic] at $360 cost per ton of carbon, but almost three times the cost at $100 per ton.")

I hope FOE reconsiders its analysis sometime on an apples to apples basis.  I wouldn't rule out chemical capture, but it needs to considered realistically.

Uganda and Dubai

My wife and I took a long vacation to Uganda with a short side trip to Dubai.  In addition to the standard tourist things, we did some volunteer work with Conservation Through Public Health, a Ugandan/US non-profit that protects mountain gorillas and other wildlife by resolving conflicts with humans, particularly disease transmission and family planning issues.

CTPH is exploring a new kind of volunteer vacation experience where it utilizes the professional skills of short-term volunteers, rather than have them do the unskilled work that other volunteer vacations offer.  I highly recommend the experience to anyone who's interested.  We were the guinea pigs, so they're still working it out, and I'd be happy to talk to anyone who's interested.

As for seeing Uganda and the gorillas, I'll steal from Richard Dawkins who said of our California redwoods, "see them before you die."  Same is true with the gorillas.  It's right up there with the chance I had to see orangutans in Borneo in terms of seeing something of ourselves.  We also saw chimps in Uganda, but it's not the incredibly up-close experience that we had with the gorillas.

I've occasionally written about the Great Ape Project and how I distinguish that concept from animal-rights arguments for chickens and other unintelligent animals that I mostly disagree with.  These gorillas we saw were mountain gorillas, only 700 left in the wild, a breeding population much smaller than that, and no reproductive success in captivity.  It would be a tragedy to lose this relative, so I'm hoping for the best for the efforts of CTPH and others.

As for the rest of the tourist experience, Uganda was a great place to visit, people were extremely nice, and it doesn't have the unsafe feel of rampant crime of some other places, like the big cities in Kenya.

Dubai was a strange place, but worth a short visit.  I wonder if human mobility will mean that much of the world will be like it a century, where 90% of the residents in the country are non-citizen expatriates.  I tend to think of a country as being "for" its citizens, while expats on work visas are just in a commercial relationship with the country.  But when the expats are 90% of the people, have been there for decades, and have done at least 90% of the work of building the country, the question of who the country belongs to is a little muddled.  Anyway, if you go, check out the Sheik Mohammed Center for Cultural Understanding and their "cultural breakfasts," where you can eat excellent food, hear a little about the culture, and ask the women who run the program any questions you want about life and religion in Dubai.

Fun and games with Roger Pielke Jr. at the NY Times

(UPDATE:  as I mentioned in a previous post, I'll be mostly offline for the next few weeks, and will have to see if anything interesting develops.)

Here's my original post about Roger's disturbing vagueness in describing Hansen's support for sequestration from biomass power, used in order to validate Roger's support for open air chemical capture.

Roger accuses me of lying about his definition of open air capture, which he claims to have clearly mentioned as including biological means.  His proof is something written ten months after my critique.

It's there in the comments to that post, and may get played out in a Dot Earth post and comments.  Here's what I wrote to Dot Earth:

Roger Pielke Jr. (#32) is disturbed when I mention (#29) how he misinformed people about Hansen's position on open air carbon capture (supporting sequestration from biomass plants), in relation to Roger's support for chemical versions of open air carbon capture. I think I gave a pretty decent summary in the comment, and at the quotes of Roger's own work at the link. 

As for his defense that he has expressly defined open air capture to include biological means, he defends by linking to something he wrote in December 2009. My critique was written in February 2009 about a paper Roger published in the same month, where Roger describes air capture as that "which refers to the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the ambient air. Air capture has received remarkably little attention in debates on policy responses to climate change, but this seems to be changing (e.g., Jones, 2008). By contrast, the capture and storage of carbon dioxide from power plants has received considerable attention (e.g., IPCC,2005)".

http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu...

He does indeed once mention Hansen's specific idea that Roger somewhat disjointedly ties to his own definition (although Roger fails to understand Hansen's proposal for sequestration), and I disclosed that in my February 2009 documentation. Two other uses of Hansen by Roger in that paper and a linked FAQ kept Hansen's support as a vague generalization not linked to biomass power plants, and even this one more specific mention fails to indicate that it is all that the reference supports, not the chemical capture idea that is Roger's interest.

So is Roger misinforming his readers in the actual paper that I critiqued? The question is whether someone who failed to go and read the Hansen reference would have the idea that the reference is supportive of chemical capture. That's how Roger's work appears to me to be read. If Hansen is supportive, it's not shown by the reference Roger provided in the paper I critiqued, and Roger's time travel to a definition that he wrote ten months later (or to any other external source) does not rescue that paper from misinforming people.

Similarly, someone who read Roger's comment #32 above and didn't carefully compare references would likely think that Roger had pointed to something that I had concealed in Roger's paper that I was critiquing, rather than Roger quoting a totally different paper written long after my critique. These nested levels of misinformation indicate the challenge involved in dealing with his work. I confess that I can rarely keep up with him.

Maybe I'm the one who's losing perspective.  I welcome that advice in a comment or an email if so.


UPDATE:  The comment above hasn't been posted yet to Dot Earth, but I hope it will be (UPDATED UPDATE:  it's up, as is Eli's comment).  And I shouldn't throw out the baby with the Pielkeian bathwater - sequestration may prove too expensive to use even concentrated sources like power plants, but maybe not.  Hansen's idea is intriguing.  Roger's idea is much less so but like geoengineering, something we may have to consider.  The main problem I have with Roger's paper is the misleading way it describes Hansen's position.

Housekeeping - no posting for a few weeks, comment moderation turned on

I will be off and not blogging for a few weeks, and the blog's getting attacked by comment spammers.  I've turned on comment moderation.  Friday might be the last day I can put up new posts or check for comments until after mid-March, so comments you submit might take a while, but they will eventually show up.  Sorry for the inconvenience, I'm beginning to regret the shift away from Haloscan.

Two climate shorts - Phil Jones joins Tautology Club, and a new blog debuts

1.  Refer to this XKCD comic on Tautology Club.  Climatologist Phil Jones got a little sloppy and joined the Club when he said this to the BBC:

Of course, if the MWP [Medieval Warm Period] was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented.

Tautologies like that are a waste of space, but that's a minor sin.   BBC should've pressed him on it, but they were halfway into Tautology Club themselves through the preceding question asking if the MWP was global then does it become the precedent.  The geographic reach of the MWP is one of the major unresolved questions about that period.

Of course, the mortal sin is from lying rightwing journalists whose lines are parroted elsewhere, and twist the tautology into an admission that the MWP "may have been" warmer than today.


2.  A new enviro blog from some friends, particularly relevant to Californians and Bay Area folks, called Green/the New IPO.  Good stuff about climate change evasion by the California GOP, among other issues.  Also on the same target is how California's AB32 law to fight climate change, the one now being targeted by the bad guys, is crucial in the fight against California's significant air pollution problems.

Yoo and Bybee escape from justice isn't entirely complete

I've been reading various reactions to the overruling by the Department of Justice of the recommendation to refer pro-torture Professor John Yoo and Appellate Judge Jay Bybee to bar association disciplinary committees (the hundreds of pages of info can be found here, and the first two links at that cite are the most important).  Basically the argument is that the failure to provide objective and reasonable advice is insufficient grounds for sanctions.  DOJ concludes that the legal arguments for torture are nonsense, but Yoo actually believed it, and Bybee didn't bother to look at it very closely and some other folks told him it was okay.  Balkin explains that reasoning in all its glory.

Three points:

1.  I've only skimmed the DOJ memo, but what I've seen fails to focus on the duty to respond to arguments contrary to the attorney's conclusion.  This is the key issue in my opinion.  It doesn't matter whether Yoo thinks he's right - he failed to discuss precedent that limits the power of the president, even in wartime.  Even if he thinks that precedent isn't controlling, any lawyer worthy of practicing has to respond to the best contrary arguments.  As for Bybee, he's either in charge or he isn't.  A lawyer of all people has to know the consequences of signing something.

2.  As for the "you're all forgetting the atmosphere of 9-11" issue, you can forget that argument.  The memos were from August 2002, eleven months later.  There's enough time for people to think clearly again after a year, plenty of reasons by then to know that America hadn't been brought to its knees, and to know that we clearly weren't facing a threat as significant as we had several times before in conventional wars against great industrial powers.

3.  It's not over, entirely. Jonathan Zasloff points out that the Pennsylvania and Utah bar associations don't need a referral from DOJ - they can act independently, and they should given the information in front of them.  Similarly, UC Berkeley can independently use the information to determine whether someone acting this incompetently, crazily, or dishonestly meets the standard of a law professor.  I can't say I'm extremely hopeful of this happening, but the option exists.


UPDATE:  Kudos to Mike Potemra for fighting torture in the web pages of the National Review, of all places.  Posts like that help me believe that there's still hope.

Nuclear power is a bargaining chip. You don't just give away your bargaining chip.

There are only two things that Republican congressmembers actually want that also could play a part of an effort to fight climate change.  One of them - capturing and sequestering CO2 and other pollutants from coal - isn't an optional bargaining chip.  We don't know if it will work adequately and cost effectively, and we do need to know exactly that, so funding research and pilot projects has to happen.

The other Republican desire is for nuclear power.  While I think nuclear power could play an expanded role in countries that already have it, it's at most a limited solution and not one with such expansion potential that a year or two of delay is a problem.

Given that most Republicans have been incredibly irresponsible on climate change, it's clear that they should not be rewarded with help for their nuclear power corporations.  Thanks primarily to Republicans and secondarily to those on the left who won't support cap-and-trade, the chances for comprehensive climate legislation are dimming, and they will only get worse from fall elections through January 2013 (unless the EPA steps in and saves us all).  If we can't get a comprehensive bill, then an energy bill is possible, and this is where the Republicans shouldn't be rewarded.  I could see giving them a taste with modest support and additional research, but that's all.

These $54 billion loan guarantees to nuclear industry that Obama is pushing are more than a taste.  They're not the long-term deals that Republicans want either, but they're more than Republicans deserve.

Some interesting discussion at the link above on this issue, but I have some questions about loan guarantees in general - they seem to be a classic Republican Party idea that corporate profits belong to stockholders while corporate losses should be paid off by taxpayers.  Given that half of previous nuclear power plant proposals were started but never finished, there seems to be a large chance of defaults.  I also think it would be possible to structure the parent company/subsidiary relationship so the parent company makes money even if the project collapses by charging interim expenses to the subsidiary.  So the parent company profits, subsidiary goes poof in a paper bankruptcy, banks gets their money back plus interest, and taxpayers pay everyone for no result.  Just guessing on that one worry.  And loan guarantees should have include some upside for government, maybe a profit participation.

Maybe I just need to learn more about this financing stuff.