A distraction from disaster

I don't have anything good to say about Katrina and New Orleans - I could say some bad things about how Bush has made things worse, and will make things worse, but I don't have the energy to go there.

So all I can offer you is a distraction - a video showing fifteen years of Hubble images in 3 minutes, and with a nice soundtrack. The universe is a horrible and beautiful place.

Glaciers, here I come!

Vacation plans are set, I leave on Friday for Glacier National Park. The fine folks at the Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center are letting me help out on some of their glacier research in the park, where global warming is expected to melt the remaining glaciers in a few decades.

I can say that nineteen years of expensive education have given me no useful skills to help a glaciologist, or any scientist for that matter. That environmental law degree isn't very applicable. Fortunately, in between the times I was getting educated, my six summers as a bum in Alaska gave me some glacier travel experience, so hopefully I won't be completely useless.

I expect to get one or two more posts in, and then it'll be quiet here for a while.


key: science, global warming

The Republican War on Science

The title of this post is the title of a new book by one of my favorite bloggers, Chris Mooney. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, and unfortunately I'll miss Chris when he goes through the area on tour, but the reviews so far look very good. Check it out!

A beautiful court transcript

Maybe you have to be a lawyer for this to make you laugh out loud too, but this was excellent: a Big Evil Corporation tries to push around an unrepresented defendant in court, and gets its head handed to it by the judge. I actually have some sympathy for their copyright claims in general, but the strategy and tactics are abusive.

Of course, now I have to look up the judge: a Clinton nominee. Not a big surprise.

(Via BoingBoing.)

Volokh Corrections 9 and 10

Todd Zywicki says of the Cindy Sheehan camp-out in Crawford, "My impression is that the overwhelming number of those down there are primarily professional activists rather than grieving family members suggested by the media." A typical false dichotomy - anyone who didn't have a family member die in Iraq is a paid (professional) activist, ignoring what other types of people could be there.

I think one of the Volokhs had said earlier that environmental activists were in it for the money. I don't know where the right wing gets the idea that we're dripping with money - I only wish it were correct.

Meanwhile, the usually-better Jim Lindgren talks about how standard market theory predicts bad results from caps for wholesale gas prices in Hawaii. He fails to consider whether a standard market exists for wholesale gas, just noting without comment that there are 2 refineries and 6 wholesalers, which is nothing like a standard market. Standard monopoly theory, on the other hands, says the wholesalers could be price-gouging retailers, and caps that limit the gouging will not limit the overall gas supply.

Overall, though, this country needs a windfall profits tax, which could fund a decent energy policy without strongly affecting economic incentives (if set at a reasonable level). Yet another way in which Carter reacted much better than Bush to the problems we're facing, and another example of how badly Reagan messed up our country.


key: Volokh correction

Specifics on women's rights infringement in the Iraqi Constitution

I've seen a lot of news reports about how women's rights may be threatened by incorporating Islamic law into the Iraqi Constitution, with no specifics on why that's the case. Bad journalism - what else is new.

Juan Cole has published some specifics. Unfortunately, I can't find the link for his discussion of child custody under Shiite sharia law, but hopefully my memory is accurate. Upon divorce, the husband's family automatically gets custody of the couple's children. So the only way a woman could get rid of an abusive or otherwise awful husband is by losing her children, who will then be unprotected from the tender mercies of that husband, his family, and his other wives. I call that a recipe for enslavement of women, or disaster for their children. Ironically, this somewhat parallels Saddam Hussein's biography as a child - he was semi-abandoned by his mother, mistreated and generally unloved.

I did find another Cole posting with some other specifics:

"Jaafari's system will give girls half the amount of inheritance that their brothers receive, and may well make women's testimony worth half that of a man in court. If strict gender segregation is enforced, and coeducation ended, Iraqi women may find it difficult to get post-BA training, since they won't be allowed in the professional schools (now coded as "male"), and mostly won't have professional schools for women, or in any case many fewer than for men."

Lovely.


key: Iraq

Viruses and planets

Carl Zimmer points to news indicating that viruses are more lifelike than previously imagined - some viruses are physically active when they leave cells, instead of just waiting to bump into their next victim. More grist for the debate as to whether viruses are living organisms or just degenerate parts of living organisms.

The debate reminds me a little bit about the debate over what constitutes a planet: whether something should be considered alive, or is big enough to be labelled a planet, is not scientifically interesting. Understanding planets/planetoids, and understanding the behavior of things that reproduce, regardless of whether you consider them alive, are much more interesting questions. Zimmer is right that we're blurring distinctions, and that's just fine.


key: science

Beaten to the punch again

Well, someone else also arranged a global warming bet before me. James Annan has the details. There may be a little money still left on the table by the denialists, so I'm trying to see if they're still interested.

I would like to point out to anyone contemplating a bet against me that I predicted Howard Dean would win the Democratic nomination, and I appeared to do no better in predicting the latest Harry Potter book. If you're looking for an easy mark, I'm your man.

UPDATE: I'm negotiating. Closest I've been to getting a bet...

UPDATE 2: Looks like no bet - one denialist started negotiating but has been gone for quite a while, and the other already made a bet and decided he wasn't interested in more.


key: science, global warming, bet

Mark Kleiman on a roll

Mark Kleiman had two interesting posts today: first, he says he wants to create a wedge in the creationism/Intelligent Design debate between the "true believers" who think the Bible is literally true, and those who support a religiously inspired origin for humanity as the basis for teaching morals to their children. Kleiman thinks the latter group can be brought around, partly by making clear that biological "Darwinism" and repugnant social Darwinism aren't the same. It's an interesting wedge - I still think there's another wedge that splits the educated conservative leadership from the Biblical Literalists, and the teaching of evolution will eventually force the literalists to find a different and more tolerant basis for morality.

Second, Kleiman riffs on the Reverend Pat Robertson calling for the assasination of the elected Venezuelan leader, Hugo Chavez. As Kleiman says,

"turnabout is fair play. If Robertson is trying to arrange to have Chavez rubbed out, maybe Chavez ought to move first. Better to be tried by twelve than carried by six, and all that."

If Robertson thinks it would be, say, "wrong" for someone to assassinate him, he might think about taking a consistent position on the murder issue.


key: evolution, politics

Juan Cole's latest suggestions for Iraq - replace ground ops with air support

Juan Cole has a bunch of suggestions, and the most important are removing US troops from cities, a phased withdrawal of ground operations, and maintaining a US military air presence so that air support can shut down the bad guys (whoever they are) and prevent a full-scale civil war from breaking out.

I'll have to think about it - I'm not sure if this will work as well in urbanized Iraq as it did in mostly-rural Afghanistan, and it also contradicts my sense that part of Afghanistan's continuing problems is the insufficient military support on the ground to stabilize the central government. On the other hand, the geniuses currently running our Iraq policy aren't doing such a hot job, so maybe this is the best of a group of terrible options.


key: Iraq

Flooding part 2: Global warming has already caused damaging floods

In an earlier post I said that I wasn't quite so interested in Roger Pielke Jr.'s argument that the science is indefinite as to whether climate change has caused an increase in flooding damage up to the present. I thought what mattered is the solid science that it will occur in the future. Now I'm more interested because I think he's likely wrong in making such a categorical statement.

Earlier this week, after doing a little research I added this comment to Roger's post:

I'm starting to wonder if it is also clearly a good use of science to allege an existing, present-day connection between greenhouse gases and damaging, precipitation-induced, river flooding in and near coastal areas. From the site:

http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/409.htm

"The estimated rate of sea level rise from anthropogenic climate change from 1910 to 1990 (from modelling studies of thermal expansion, glaciers and ice sheets) ranges from 0.3 to 0.8 mm/yr.

It is very likely that 20th century warming has contributed significantly to the observed sea level rise, through thermal expansion of sea water and widespread loss of land ice."

Projecting from 1990 to today gives an anthropogenic sea level rise of just under 3 cm to just under 8 cm, and near sea-level, precipitation induced, river floods should rise a similar amount. It might not sound like a lot, but every inch counts. It also might be more than that in some areas, especially depending on how high tides move that extra water volume into bays. I understand that near sea level river flooding is at its worst in high tides.

(ADVISORY: Apparently, the rest of this post is stupid. Read it only if you want to waste your time or feel like piling on some more in the comments.)

No response from Roger just yet, but maybe that will happen later. Since posting that comment, I noodled around some more on the issue of how local topography can amplify the high tide effect of a rise in mean sea level. Wikipedia says that the local topography of two bays in Canada transforms an average one-meter ocean tide into 16 and 17 meter local tides. In those cases, a 5 cm mean sea level rise results in approximately one meter rise in sea level at high tide. Obviously, those are extreme examples, but I would expect that 2-times or 3-times amplification of local tides would be common enough. Those areas should have already experienced 6 to 24 cm increase in local high tides from global warming. When the high tides coincides with river flooding, the precipitation-induced flooding damage that Roger is talking about should have already become significantly worse that would otherwise have been the case.

Interestingly, the International Panel on Climate Change's chapter on sea level rise doesn't appear to discuss how future increases in mean sea level could be amplified by local topography to produce much higher sea levels at high tide. I'm guessing that means either that I've missed something and the effect isn't real, or that the next IPCC revision needs to take on this issue.

UPDATE: some knowledgeable commentators are distinctly unimpressed with my tidal amplification argument (I hate it when that happens). I'll have to think about whether anything can be salvaged from that idea, but there probably is a valid reason why this isn't analyzed by the IPCC. I'm sticking with the 3-8 cm mean sea level rise translating into actual flooding damage, though.

key: science, global warming

Atrios is part right and part wrong on Iraq

Atrios is completely right that the main political pressure should be on Administration idiots who brought us to this disaster in Iraq. We can slightly reduce the disaster by getting a declaration that we will leave, entirely, some day from Iraq, and we will not have permanent bases there.

Where Atrios is wrong is in saying the reason some of us reject "getting out now" is that we're in favor of "getting out as soon as we can subject to things being better in some undefined way." I'm not at all convinced that things will get better in Iraq if we stay for an extended period. Rather, I currently think that things might get much worse if we leave within a short period, especially because I don't see a UN peacekeeping force materializing and taking charge in our absence. And unfortunately, the idea that things can't get much worse in Iraq is wrong. As bad as it is there, it can get worse, and until it's clear that the Iraqis want us out, we have to deal with this disaster created by the Bush Administration.

So back to Atrios' main point - part of limiting the disaster is promising to leave sometime, and that needs to be the emphasis.


key: politics, Iraq

Bet's on

Climatologist James Annan finally locates two global warming denialists who are willing to put some real money where there mouths are: they're betting $10,000 over whether temperatures will drop in the next decade.

This is some good news for James' finances. I think it also highlights Richard Lindzen's refusal to take a bet on even better odds. I hope the publicity will help shake out which denialists actually stand by their statements, and which ones don't. If there are any more in the first category, I'd love to get a piece of the action.


key: science, global warming, bet

Corn-based ethanol not looking good, from a science perspective

Pharyngula has good repost on the issue of whether corn-based ethanol can solve our oil-dependence woes. Short answer: no. Slightly-longer answer: peer reviewed studies suggest it takes more energy to produce ethanol than the energy that ethanol itself produces - in other words, the amount of oil needed to produce ethanol exceeds the energy value of the ethanol produced. Even if that's too pessimistic, the amount of plausible surplus energy is way too low to be a substantial fix for oil-dependence.

Instead the whole ethanol issue is being driven by powerful farm-state politicians and the Iowa presidential primary for both political parties. This might be one of the few examples of Democrats matching Republicans in a war on science.

Science says: global warming will cause damaging floods

Roger Pielke Jr. writes that it has not yet been proven or disproven that any part of the increase in flooding damage in recent decades up to the present is due to climate change up to the present. It took me a little while to figure that out from his post, but I'm pretty sure I've got it right.

I'm somewhat less interested in that proposition and more interested in what will happen in the future, as in the title I've written to this post. Now, the title to this post would be misleading if all that science told us was that only very small percentages of the global population will suffer from increased damaging floods. Similarly, it would be misleading if someone attacked the title's accuracy only because the science was unclear as to what will happen in some small areas.

The reason why global warming will clearly cause flooding is that sea level rise will exacerbate damaging, precipitation-induced, river flooding in and near coastal areas. That's a reasonable, general statement about flooding giving how much of the world population lives near sea level.

This site gives a range for the predicted sea level rise, but it centers around a half-meter rise. That may not sound like much, but it will result in significantly greater damage for areas that would have already been flooded, and a larger total area that is flooded. Even areas substantially upstream could suffer worse floods. Flood control structures might choose to not release enough water to prevent upstream floods, because of the impact it would have on severe flooding downstream near sea level.

This ignores the additional possibility that warmer temperatures will result in more intense storm events - I have no idea how good the science is for that proposition, but that sea level will rise from global warming is a very strong conclusion.

Long story shortened: global warming will cause flooding. If one has time to say more, the flooding will clearly happen in and near coastal areas where the world's population lives, and may happen further inland as well.

(BTW, I self-plagiarized some of this post from comments I wrote to Roger's post.)


key: science, global warming

Deep Impact a big dud?

Kind of old reference now, but I'm putting it in anyway: an interesting exchange between two of my favorite space science writers, Bruce Moomaw and Oliver Morton. They discuss the spectacular comet impact probe, Deep Impact, that got lots of news coverage over July 4th, but may turn out to be disappointing in terms of science results.

Besides just being interesting, I think this issue points to a problem with space journalism being much less critical than it should be of its subject. Deep Impact received front page coverage everywhere, but try and find discussion of whether it worked as a science mission.

It's understandable that journalists don't want to skewer scientists that are just trying to do something good, but the taxpayers spent over $300 million on that probe and deserve to know if NASA administrators used politics instead of science when selecting space missions. Both Morton and Moomaw (especially Moomaw) are capable of making criticisms, so that makes their work especially worthwhile compared to the normal space journalism.


key: science, space

A bill to stop interstate traffic of primates

Via Mark Kleiman, I found Hilzoy promoting a bill to stop the interstate traffic of primates as pets (but still allowing it for some other reasons). Read Hilzoy for the details, she's very convincing.

The point I would add is that I am very concerned about the morality of treating highly intelligent animals like apes as things to be used solely for our benefit. I'm not sure where monkeys fit on the moral spectrum, but we can also make a societal decision that it's to our benefit not to mistreat animals, and monkeys are likely to be mistreated.

And some monkeys seem to even recognize themselves in mirrors, implying some level of self-consciousness. If we know an animal can recognize its own existence, I'm concerned about treating it as a piece of meat.


key: science, ape, politics

A (mostly) bad argument against the Iraq War

I keep hearing an argument against the Iraq War that I really dislike, most recently this morning on Air America radio. The argument is that this is not a war bringing freedom and liberation to Iraq because we have not liberated other countries with equally awful dictators.

What they are saying is that you should not do a good thing in one place at one time unless you're willing to do the good thing in all places and all times. My attitude is that I'll take what I can get - if people are willing to do a good thing in a single place for selfish reasons, I'll be glad for that.

The argument is much more valid for questioning the motives of the American leadership that dragged us into this mess. I don't think freedom ranked very high in the motives of the war leaders or they would be more consistent in their approach towards freedom elsewhere.

The real reason for why the decision to begin the war in Iraq was wrong is because of its effects on the US, the world, and Iraq, not because of an unrealistic demand for consistency before taking steps that (theoretically) could make things better.


key: Iraq, ethics

Tangled Bank is up

Tangled Bank #34, a summarized collection of science blog postings, is now online. It includes a link to my petri dish/evolution post, with a better description than I had: a classroom experiment in macroevolution.

Lots of good stuff at the Tangled Bank - I especially liked the posts on invasive species and infectious diseases.


key: science

The Shuttle's back and the astronauts are safe

Now, via Brad DeLong, here's a great idea to improve NASA's manned program:

To the uneducated mind, it would seem we could accomplish our current manned space flight objectives more easily by not launching any astronauts into space at all -- leaving the Shuttle and ISS on the ground would result in massive savings without the slighest impact on basic science, while also increasing mission safety by many orders of magnitude.

The astronauts could even do "spacewalks" outside to repair the Shuttle and ISS wearing spacesuits, like some people have been doing recently in Utah and Canada as part of a not-very-convincing simulation of living on Mars.

Very long post at the link but it's very good and well-written, and includes things that I, a space geek, didn't know. Here's another nice quote: "You know you're in trouble when the Russians are adding safety features to your design."

By the way, some people argue that the manned program provides political support for the unmanned, actually-useful, space science program. I don't buy that - NASA's manned program hasn't been exciting in 33 years, but the unmanned program does well when its budget isn't being stolen to finance the manned missions.

Hopefully, someday we'll cancel this stupid, astronaut-killing boondoggle program.


key: science, space, politics