Carbon offsets for temperate forestry projects can be fine, just fine

I don't know why there's so much freaking out by some Gristmill authors (and others) over carbon offsets in general and forestry offsets in particular. I think they may just not be used to the concept. In my field, environmental law, it's not a weird idea. If someone really really needs to screw up a wetland, they might be allowed to do it if they offset the damage by paying for the legally-protected rehabilitation of a former wetland.

Semi-valid reason #1 for the hostility might be that it's hard to do correctly. The same's true for wetlands - they could be screwed up by incompetence, bad luck, or corruption. The key is to put in safeguards, though, not to throw out the concept.

Semi-valid reason #2 is that reducing other people's emissions should be secondary to reducing one's own. No kidding. The problem with making this into a club to strike down programs you don't like, though, is it's forgetting that we're just at the beginning of the process of controlling carbon, and baby steps need to be rewarded, not stifled for being anything short of Fred Astaire.

Case in point - Pacific Gas & Electric's Climate Smart program that allows forestry offsets. Read Gristmill's critique by Joseph Romm here, and then PG&E's response here. The additionality problem is solved and the albedo problem is solved. What else have the critics got? At the end, it seems like PG&E has taken Romm apart.

Of course, that's not totally true. The forestry protocols here assume the level of offsets based on comparing emissions to a maximum legal logging rate and maximum development intensity for converting land from forests to residences in California. Both of those protocols involve areas where I have professional expertise, and the assumptions of maximum harm in the absence of an offset will often be wrong. Logging and land development for legal, political, and economic reasons will occur at a much slower rate. In other words, the offset level is exaggerated.

Despite that, it's worth supporting. This is a baby step. Future developments will tighten down the estimate. Most importantly, it does result in reduced emission, just not as much as the protocols say they will. There's no reason to throw this baby out.

UPDATE: I messed up - the albedo discussion is in a later comment, here:

Contrary to what is stated in [Romm's post], the Registry is not oblivious or indifferent to the potential albedo effects of forestry projects, (which are still being understood by the scientific community). The Registry's California Forest Protocols and reduction projects associated with them, however, do not decrease the albedo for the following reasons:

1.) The Conservation Management Protocol relies on implementing sustainable management practices that maximize the sequestration of carbon on land already covered by forests.

2.) The Reforestation Project Protocol relies on reforesting land that has historically been under cover by forest in the first place.

3.) The Conservation Project Protocol relies on maintaining existing forest cover, in other words, protecting forests from conversion.

The worst argument used by the left against tightening border security

I've heard both Arianna Huffington and Bob Scheer make this argument at Left Right and Center: there's no reason to worry about terrorists slipping over the US border with illegal immigrants some time in the near future, because there's no record that they've ever done it before.

I don't understand why they're so strongly defending the Bush Administration's inaction during the nine months prior to 9-11. Sure, Condi Rice can say that no terrorists had smashed buildings with planes before, but it's not a hard threat to anticipate, people did in fact anticipate it, and the Bushies still did nothing. That's inexcusable, and I don't see why the left is defending his performance.

Health08 kicks HeatIsOn's butt

Health08 is an all-singing, all-dancing website created by the Kaiser Family Foundation to analyze presidential candidate positions on health care policy. For climate change, by contrast, the best I've seen is this Heat Is On comparison chart provided by the League of Conservation Voters. Time for LCV to step up to the competition.

Meanwhile, I've put in a link to my post comparing presidential candidates on climate change in the list of links near the top left of the Backseat Driving website, titled "Pres. candidates and climate change." I'll try to update it when possible.

From Panama to Iraq, via Dick C. and Mike O'H.

A missing piece of understanding why we screwed up in Iraq is because the people planning it compared it to the Panama invasion. I could probably prove it and end this post right now by pointing out a certain Dick C. was Secretary of Defense during the Panama invasion, but there's more to it.

Start with Grenada: 7,000 US troops attack a small island nation of 100,000 people with 2,000 regular and foreign (Cuban) soldiers. The US wins with 19 US soldiers killed, we take over the island, and it's hard to argue the place isn't better because of it.

Repeat with Panama: 28,000 troops invade a country of 2 million defended by 16,000 soldiers. The US wins with 24 dead, installs a new leader, and again it's hard to argue the country isn't better off.

Then, enter the establishment's favorite defense liberal, Michael O'Hanlon, with this gem:

Counting Casualties: How many people would die in an Iraqi War?
By Michael O'Hanlon
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2002, at 5:37 PM ET

A central question about the war in Iraq is the likely cost in terms of casualties. Many Americans who would support an invasion on the assumption of 250 dead might feel very differently if our losses numbered 10 times as many. Unfortunately, such predictions have proven notoriously inaccurate in the past....

Is it possible to make better predictions this time around? It may be, but not with a single number or narrow range....

What do past cases tell us about how a future war conducted largely in the streets of Baghdad might play out....

Simply scaling the results of Panama for the size of the Iraqi military leads to an estimate of about 2,000 Americans killed, more than 10,000 dead Iraqi military personnel, and tens of thousands of dead Iraqi citizens. If, however, the only forces that fight hard are the elite—somewhat more than 100,000 Republican Guard, Special Republican Guard, and palace guard forces—extrapolation from the Panama case suggests that losses on all sides might be only one-fourth as great. Such an outcome is plausible. Indeed, U.S. war plans appear to envision targeting only these elite forces, at least at first, and trying to convince the regular conscript army to change sides or sit out the war....

One major wild card remains: the likely consequences of any Iraqi use of weapons of mass destruction....Iraq could also increase casualty levels of U.S. or coalition forces by using WMD against them, particularly its thousands of chemical-filled artillery shells and rockets. But doing so would probably increase casualties by no more than 10 to 20 percent, given historical precedent in conflicts such as the Iran-Iraq war....

The United States and coalition partners would win any future war to overthrow Saddam Hussein in a rapid and decisive fashion. This will not be another Vietnam or another Korea. But casualties could be significantly greater on all sides than in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The best analogy for what such combat is likely to involve is not Desert Storm, but the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama—and on a much larger scale. There is a very real possibility that American deaths could exceed 1,000 in number, and several thousand deaths cannot be ruled out. To count on easy victory, as many American proponents of war seem to do, is not only unsupported by the available evidence and by the methodologies of combat prediction. It's also an irresponsible basis on which to plan military strategy in any future war against Saddam Hussein.

(Emphasis added.)

O'Hanlon appears to put the 50% probability level as significantly less than 1000 US dead, and I think we've passed on to a casualty level O'Hanlon thought could be ruled out.

I'll leave a full analysis of why Panama wasn't a good analogy for Iraq to someone else - the minor issues of say, the lack of a religious conflict or that Panama had an elected president and authentic political leadership ready to step in and take power suggest themselves as potential distinctions.

The point is that the range and quality of expertise went from Dick Cheney on the right to this "liberal" military expert whose influence is still felt. I doubt the Cheney people missed the same lesson they also thought they learned in Panama. Can we get some new experts, finally?

As for the anti-war left, though, they're probably not all that interested in this lesson either, as it does point to some uncomfortable examples where invasion by Republican presidents seemed to work okay, whatever the true motivations involved.

Hoisting myself up from the comments - Slagle versus the WMO and IPCC

Maybe I'm a little less polite when I'm just posting comments at other blogs. I'm reposting this from a comment I left at the very good denialism blog (with some improved politeness). Denialism is taking down Mr. Slagle's misguided view about climate change.

Slagle's a fibber.

1. WMO doesn't dispute the general conclusions of the IPCC report. I"m not aware of WMO confirming them, either, but it may well have.

2. WMO doesn't say there's "no science" behind the suggested warming-hurricane link.

3. The IPCC doesn't say warming "will" cause more hurricanes.

3. WMO DOES say the science behind the warming-hurricane link is inconclusive, very much not the same as "no science."

4. The IPCC says more likely than not that warming will cause hurricanes, which is not a statement anywhere near certain nor conclusive.

5. The IPCC and WMO reports don't conflict.

6. I suspect Slagle knows this, assuming he actually read the reports he links to.

Therefore, Slagle's a fibber.

Because nothing's more exciting than diet blogging

I've been doing the South Beach diet for about 3 months now, which is one variation on the one million low-carb diets out there. I've lost between 14-18 pounds, and have never been down less than 10 pounds since the first two weeks of the diet.

I think I'm kind of an unusual case because prior to the diet I exercised a lot but had a very poor diet with a lot of junk food. The junk food went away just as I increased my exercise during summer time, and the pounds rolled off. My fiance's participation together with our joining a Community Supported Agriculture food delivery program also helped a great deal (the program is Eat With the Seasons and I highly recommend it to anyone living in San Francisco or the South Bay).

My sport activity is rock-climbing, and I run for exercise. The diet's made a huge difference in my indoor rock-climbing at the gym. It doesn't feel like it's made that much of a difference outdoors, where my mediocre climbing is limited more by technique and psychology than by strength. The diet at first made almost no difference in my running during the initial, no-carb period. Once I started adding some carbs back, I started improving, and ran my first half-marathon yesterday.

An accurate description I've heard is that you don't feel hungry on the diet, but you do feel deprived. It's interesting that I don't crave light carbs, but the heavy, whole grain stuff.

The down side is that I eat a lot of eggs and a lot of meat. I'm curious as to how it's affected my cholesterol level but haven't been tested.

All in all, I'd recommend it, at least for someone who has a bad diet to begin with.

The ignored asexual?

An interesting, if older, sexual preference survey is summarized at the Volokhs. Nearly 3% of people report no sexual partners since puberty, almost half of the number reporting same-sex partners since puberty. Another question asks about sexual attraction, but doesn't give an option of no attraction or limited attraction.

Once in a great while I read about people claiming no sexual interest and being quite happy about it. Seems like this could use more public discussion, although some discussion's already happening and of course there's a dedicated website.

Contrasting worst case scenarios for Iraq and climate change

(Following up on a previous post about worst case scenarios...)

The people who find the worst case scenarios to be persuasive reasons for action on climate change are likely the opposite ones who would use the same reasoning to argue for a continued military presence in Iraq.

Despite thinking we should get out of Iraq, I also agree that potentially, things could get much worse there after we leave. So why leave?

One argument would be that we're just putting off the inevitable - we're going to leave sooner or later, and even if the worst case scenario occurs, all we do by staying is add a lot of death and destruction in the meantime. Not a bad argument, but the counter is that staying can buy time to find a solution.

Another argument is that things can get worse with our troops there. I wouldn't disagree, but I don't expect it would get as bad as in some full-out genocide/civil war.

A better argument to me is that for the US and the rest of the world - basically for everyone except the Iraqis - right now is the worst case scenario. I don't think an Al Qaeda takeover of Iraq is a credible scenario, and even if it was, the current cost of 1,000 dead Americans and $120 billion annually exceeds the damage rate that Al Qaeda could do to us. As for the rest of the world, having the US in Iraq only creates problem. Only for the Iraqis could the situation get much worse.

The best argument though is that you shouldn't just look at the worst case scenario. I think Iraqis have a shot at things not getting worse but rather staying at the same awful level they're at right now, and after a decade or so, slowly improve and follow Lebanon's trajectory. I don't see any other path for improvement. For the rest of us, we're clearly better off if the US gets out. And the Iraqis want us out. It's time to leave.

I lost the climate change thread here, but I think a similar reasoning applies - making a decision solely based on worst case scenarios is a bad idea. The medium case scenario for climate change still describes a crisis, though, providing plenty of reasons to take action.

John Edwards interviewed at Scienceblogs

The interview is here, and blorg commentary here. Some random thoughts:

On who actually answered the questions - it was an email interview, so was it actually Edwards who responded? I'd ask this question if it were Bush, so it's fair to ask here. You decide your own trust level, I guess, but the language style sure sounds like Edwards when he talks. FWIW, I ran some text through Gender Genie, and it scored the author as male.

On politicized science - Edwards says "As president, I will ensure that government professionals charged with the collection and analysis of scientific data--from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to the EPA--are insulated from political influence. Period."

He's trying to make a clear and simple distinction between himself and Bush. That's fine, but he needs to go on and advocate some of the solutions that have been proposed by the scientific community. Even saying something like "no political litmus test for scientific appointments" would be helpful.

Corporate farms and ethanol - he says "We need a farm bill that supports family farmers, but eliminates the massive subsidies that flow to corporate farms with high incomes. Corporate farms making more than $250,000 a year should not get our tax dollars."

That also needs details - it could be dramatically good, or it could be loopholed ($250k net revenue on a per parcel basis?).

"Millions of ethanol-ready cars are on the roads, but only about 600 of the 169,000 gas stations have pumps for E85, a blend of ethanol and gasoline. We will require oil companies to install ethanol pumps at 25 percent of their gas stations and require all new cars sold after 2010 to be "flex fuel" cars running on either gasoline or biofuel."

I'm not convinced yet that corn ethanol is the pure evil that many enviros think it to be, but it's no great thing either. I guess I'm undecided whether this is a useful bridge to cellulosic ethanol.

On manned space exploration versus real science - "We need a balanced space and aeronautics program. We need to support solar system exploration as an important goal for our human and robotic programs, but only as one goal among several. And we need to invite other countries to share in a meaningful way in both the adventure and the cost of space exploration."

Oh well. I think Dems will be only marginally better that Republicans on this, mainly by keeping the stupid Bush-to-Mars budget from intruding any further on the NASA science budget.

On climate change - he wants a 20% carbon reduction by 2020. That's very good to have a short term plan, which I think is more important than the 80% reduction by 2050. The baseline year though is 2010, so the 20% reduction probably takes us back only to mid-1990s levels. The other stuff about selling cabon credits to fund renewables research is great.

(Cross-posted at JohnEdwards.com.)

Don Easterbrook won't bet over global warming

A geology professor at Western Washington University presented a paper at a Geological Society meeting claiming that past and present warming periods were solar-caused and that we should be entering a cooling period quite soon. I don't know what level of outside review is needed in order to be able to present a paper there - hopefully it's not a journal-level peer review, or else his presentation doesn't speak well of the Geological Society.

Anyway, I sent him a betting offer weeks ago. He's acting like the smarter denialists - failing to respond at all works much better than some lame argument for refusing to bet in support of their lame arguments denying human-caused warming.

Dear Professor Easterbrook,

I read with interest your paper in the Geological
Society of America October 2006 meeting, predicting
"Global cooling should begin soon and last until about
2040...."

For two years I've been contacting people who have
made similar predictions of falling temperatures or
something short of the IPCC predicted rise, and asked
them if they would bet with me over the issue.  The
vast majority have refused to even respond, but about
a month ago an Australian mathematician, David Evans,
agreed to a bet.  Basic information about the bet is
here:

http://backseatdriving.blogspot.com/2007/04/new-global-warming-bet-for-7-10.html

I would be happy to send further details, but I'm
contacting you to ask if you would agree to a similar
bet.  The terms that Evans and I agreed upon should be
very advantageous to you, based on the predictions in
your paper.  I am also happy to bet with earnings
going to charity, such as through the longbets.org
website.

Please let me know your response when it is
convenient.

Sincerely,
Brian Schmidt

Emily Yoffe won't bet over global warming

Emily Yoffe had an Op-Ed in the Washington Post about global warming that earned her much derision for writing it and the Post for publishing it. I'm not clear what the point of it was, but as it acknowledged some warming while denying we needed to worry about it, I placed her in the category of "the warming's natural, people!" and asked her to bet over it. No response so far, so I'm guessing the bet won't happen.

My email (with a fixed typo) below:

Dear Ms. Yoffe;

I read your global warming Op-Ed and found it very
similar to Senator Brownback's Op-Ed.  He wrote an
Op-Ed criticizing evolution without ever clarifying
whether he believed humans and other organisms have a
common ancestor.  You write one on global warming
without ever clarifying whether humans are causing and
will likely cause future warming.  Brownback
acknowledged microevolution, and you acknowledged
warming up till now without clarifying if it's natural
or artificial.  Very meta, both of you, but not very
helpful.

I suspect in your case that your real opinion about
human-caused warming, something you didn't have time
to disclose in your Op-Ed, is that it's not happening.
In my opinion, people who suggest inaction is
warranted are betting other people's lives, something
implicit in your suggestion that hurricanes won't
become worse.

Are you also interested in betting your own money?  I
don't know if the Washington Post pays for Op-Eds, but
regardless, the stakes you're dealing with are placed
at such a high level with other people's lives, that
betting some of your own money earned through
this or other work shouldn't be that dramatic an
issue.

I've negotiated one bet with a global warming skeptic.
Details are here:

http://backseatdriving.blogspot.com/2007/04/new-global-warming-bet-for-7-10.html

I'm also willing to make a similar bet with winnings
going to charity, at longbets.org.

Please let me know if you're interested.

Sincerely,
Brian Schmidt

Libby commutation may be about incentives, not polls

From Digby:

I'm not a lawyer, but I have to assume that this means he can still appeal --- which means he can still take the fifth if the congress calls him to to testify. Very convenient.

...

Update: Marcy Wheeler agrees about the fifth ... and says Bush is obstructing justice:

Well, George did it. Made sure that Scooter wouldn't flip rather than do jail time. He commuted Libby's sentence, guaranteeing not only that Libby wouldn't talk, but retaining Libby's right to invoke the Fifth.

This amounts to nothing less than obstruction of justice.

I hope nobody's expecting the DC press corps to see it that way.

Sounds plausible to me, both legally and politically. Here's my conspiratorial addition: commuting but not pardoning means that Bush can hold out the incentive of a potential pardon to Libby for the next 18 months, regardless of whether he gives one in the end. You lose control of an underling by giving him nothing, or by giving him everything he wants - the commutation means you keep control.

The Democratic presidential candidates should say they would never issue commutations or pardons outside of the established process, or at least they won't do it for anyone connected to top people in their administration.

(Cross-posted at the John Edwards website.)

June 2007 Iraq casualties

Avg. daily Coalition fatality rate during the last month: 3.6 (nearly all Americans, and excluding Iraqis)

Previous averages
May 2007: 4.26
April 2007: 3.9
Last year, June 2006: 2.55.

Overall daily average to date is 2.47. Total US dead as of today: 3580.
-----

Iraqi monthly military and police fatalities: 196.

Previous military/police fatality rates

May 2007: 198
April 2007: 300
Last year, June 2006: 132.
Total Iraqi military dead: 7086.

Note that I've seen media reports suggesting the Iraqi military casualty figures are signficant undercounts.

--------

Iraqi monthly civilian fatalities: 1146

Previous
May 2007: 1782
April 2007: 1521
Last year, June 2006: 738.
To-date civilian subtotal, (stats begin only in March 2005): 34,030.

Note that the civilian numbers are far less accurate than others (most likely to be greatly underestimated, or even ridiculously underestimated), but could still be useful in determining trends.

Comments: Now ten months in a row with American casualties above average, no prior bad stretch lasted longer than three months. The overall average American/foreign rate continues to move up, from a low of 2.29 deaths daily.

As before, civilian casualties remain terrible. The rate seems to hover around a level that is nearly twice as bad as a year ago, and three times worse than in 2005. Neither we nor the Iraqis realized how good we had it back in 2005.

Five months have passed since the troop escalation began, with no indication in these statistics that it has accomplished anything, except possibly as a contributor to higher US military casualties, with no trend yet for Iraqi military and police.

Edwards on coal and nukes

I originally posted this on the Edwards website as a diary post. I attended an Edwards fundraiser early last week, and he said he wanted no more new coal plants and that (unlike Hillary and Obama) he doesn't support nuclear power.

My diary post attracted some comments and eventually this video - Edwards probably meant to say last week that he would fight to stop any new coal plants that didn't have the potential to sequester carbon, which is much less drastic than no new coal plants and not even as far as Senator Dodd's proposal that new coal plants must sequester carbon. I haven't found any elaboration on his stance over nuclear - I suspect he meant no subsidies for nuclear power, but not a ban on new nuclear power plants. I've no problem with cutting subsidies for nukes, but I'd oppose a ban on new ones.

So his position on coal is better than anything from Obama or Hillary, but not as good as Dodd. My guess is that he reasons that he supports an overall carbon cap and rather than force sequestration on new plants, he'll give them a choice of doing it or buying credits. Understandable, but it would just be safer to require sequestration.

It's interesting that Edwards has one of the most fleshed out position on issues of any presidential candidate, and it still hard to know exactly what he wants to do. The other candidates really are blank slates then in terms of figuring out what they want.

Blogging = bad; finishing work by deadline=good

No blogging for me until the end of the week.

The awesome power of Backseat Driving presidential endorsements goes to Edwards and Richardson

Yep, stop the presses. I'm pushing for one first-tier candidate and one second-tier. I think the second tier group has a very difficult row to hoe, so I'm compromising by both supporting one of them and supporting one of the candidates with a better chance of winning.

I think all six of the Democrats would do a good job (with the possible exception of Biden, and maybe I'm not being fair to him), and all of them are definitely better than Bush or the top eight Republicans. The question to me, though, is which candidates would do the most to fix the wrong direction we've taken, and which ones are the most likely to beat the Republican candidate.

Hillary would be good, but she'll move us the least in the right direction of the top tier candidates on Iraq and health care, and in the general sense I have of how she'll operate. And she'll attract the strongest opposition from nutcases and even from some normal humans that just don't like her, fairly or unfairly. As for Obama, he'd be good but needs more experience, and he won't push things as far as Edwards would.

Edwards is the candidate I know the best, and he was the first candidate I supported in 2003. His health care and environmental programs are excellent, his Iraq and poverty stances are good, and on all major issues he's as good or better than the other two in the top tier, while having as good or better chance of getting elected if nominated. I wish Edwards had more government experience, but no one's perfect, and he's the best in the top tier for 2008.

I don't know the second tier candidates as well, but I've been impressed with Richardson's resume and his debate performance, especially on foreign policy. He said that he would shift troops and emphasis from Iraq to Afghanistan, which I think is the correct policy and a winning political strategy. He emphasized pressuring China to fix the Darfur genocide in the Sudan. He'd get all the troops out of Iraq, and he doesn't talk up the idea that Biden and Dodd have, that an international conference is somehow going to fix things at this late date in Iraq. I like his forthrightness, and although his "Latino" style of touching women needs to be fixed immediately, he's also a diplomat so I think that can happen.

I don't see any reason right now to choose between Edwards and Richardson, although I'll give more attention and financial support to Edwards as the first tier candidate. His campaign website has a blog with diaries, and I plan to start cross-posting there.

Should be an interesting campaign!

Edwards' site is here, and Richardson's here.

Worst-case scenarios and betting over climate change

At least some casual skeptics have come around to a reasonable position based on this climate-change video. If you don't feel like watching it, the summary is that the worst case scenario resulting from inaction over climate change, if climate change proves to be true, is far worse than the worst case scenario resulting from taking action over climate change if climate change turns out to be a false theory. Therefore, we're better off taking action.

Whatever convinces people to be reasonable is fine with me. This argument's strength depends on the probabilities you assign to climate change being true or false (I'm disagreeing with Inel here on her claim that the probability of it being true is 100%, but I agree it's very high).

My guess would be that anyone who thinks climate change has at least a 20% chance of being true should find this argument at least partially convincing, and the greater likelihood you give it above 20%, the more it should be convincing.

Conversely, if someone thinks the probability of anthropogenic climate change is less than 20%, the argument wouldn't be convincing. But then, my bet offers should be very attractive, especially the ones about natural warming.

It's back to the usual situation in my opinion - a person should either support action to fight climate change, or the person should bet me.

General Petraeus' record of being nonpolitical and accurate

Dick Polman has the goods, quoting what Petraeus wrote in the Washington Post six weeks before the 2004 presidential election:


I see tangible progress. Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt from the ground up. The institutions that oversee them are being reestablished from the top down. And Iraqi leaders are stepping forward, leading their country and their security forces courageously…There are reasons for optimism…Training is on track and increasing in capacity. Infrastructure is being repaired…Progress has also been made in police training…Considerable progress is also being made in the reconstruction and refurbishing of infrastructure for Iraq’s security forces…Iraq’s security forces are developing steadily and they are in the fight. Momentum has gathered in recent months. With strong Iraqi leaders out front and with continued coalition – and now NATO – support, this trend will continue.


That'll give us an idea of how much we can trust what we hear from him this September.

-----

Think Progress also discovered this issue.

A lone genius or a quack - what are the odds?

Inel has a dispiriting report on Lindzen managing to confuse non-experts over climate change, even with an actual scientist there to correct him. I wonder if it's an artifact of the "debate" in that nonprofessionals see two experts debate and therefore conclude there's something real to debate.

Still, I'd wish that when people hear someone proclaim that virtually everyone else involved in the scientific field is wrong, then either he's a lone genius or a quack. And he'd have to be quite a genius, because you'd expect the genius would be able to persuade the brighter of the non-geniuses in his field to believe him. So he's either so far above everyone else in his field that they can't comprehend him (note that didn't happen with Einstein), or he's a quack. If you're a non-expert trying to make a policy decision that depends on science, I'd say the odds are in your favor if you put him in the quack category.

Also, I'd at least expect a genius to explain his theories rather than mislead people about it.

For other ideas on how non-experts can judge experts, here's an previous attempt I had on the subject.

Making mandatory national service a choice

My idea for national service is to give young people a choice:

Alternative #1. Before they turn 25, begin serving for a shorter period of time than Alternative 2 would require. I don't know how long; it would depend on the need and could be somewhere between 12 to 24 months.

or

Alternative #2. Do no mandatory service before 25, but if the national need arises at any age before their retirement, based on a proclaimed national emergency like Bush's War on Terror, those who did not serve earlier and are chosen by lottery will be required to serve twice as long a time period as Alternative 1. Almost no one who failed to serve earlier would be exempt from the lottery.

That's the basic idea, although improvements are possible - you can adjust the incentives so that right number of people sign up for military versus nonmilitary national service, or sign up right away versus taking a chance on the lottery. I recognize that you probably can't make a worthwhile modern soldier out of someone for a useful period out of a total period of 12 months, but special support roles that require less training could be developed.

The key issue is that almost no one who skips the initial service gets out of the lottery. No, a sedentary 55 year-old won't be fighting door to door under this system, but he could very well help with paperwork in Baghdad or Kabul and take his chances along with everyone else. And no exemptions at all based on the person being more valuable doing whatever she happens to be doing currently when her number's called. This is a new social compact we're talking about, and economic efficiency arguments get trumped.

The economic efficiency of not fighting Bush's Iraq War, or ending it much sooner than will otherwise happen, is pretty obvious and a likely benefit if the general and older population had a much closer connection to people being sent involuntarily to Iraq.

Richard Lindzen edging off the denialist bandwagon?

I thought I'd give this reference at Stoat a little more exposure: under questioning, Richard Lindzen apparently acknowledged that doubling CO2 would cause a temperature increase of 0.5 - 2 degrees Celsius. The top of his range overlaps with the bottom of the IPCC consensus position, and shifts significantly from his statement almost exactly two years ago that the odds of warming were 50-50.

Right now this is somewhat poorly sourced, but if Lindzen comes clean and verifies, the thin field of true, humans-ain't-doing-nuthin' denialists just got a lot more emaciated. Now who's their hero? Singer? Bolt? Some crazy English viscount?

Even more important, the no-big-deal denialists might have some trouble claiming Lindzen's new view as supportive. Lindzen's upper range is hitting the point where we would want to do something to control emissions, especially since if we don't, CO2 levels will do much more than double.

Review: "Deliver Us From Evil," both the banal and the blithe

The pedophile-priest documentary, Deliver Us From Evil, deserves its Oscar nomination based on how well and how gut-wrenchingly it does its job. It takes the abstract reality in the newspapers - pedophile priests, anguished victims, and a Catholic hierarchy that facilitated their crimes through coverups and parish transfers - and turns all of them into real people. I don't know how practicing Catholics can watch this, I found some parts of it truly horrible.

Banality of evil is cliched, but you see it up close in the videotaped depositions of Bishop (later Cardinal) Mahoney and other Catholic higher-ups. At least twice they lied to police and to families, saying the particular priest in this documentary would be transferred away from contact with children, when he was just shuffled to an unsuspecting new parish. They weren't initially worried because the first molestation reports was with little girls, which wasn't all that deviant to them.

The pedophile, Oliver O'Grady, was blithe instead of banal in his evil. Intelligent but with no self-understanding and completely selfish, he agreed to participate in the documentary and admitted wrongdoing, but not its importance. He first wrote a letter to his victims suggesting a reconciliation meeting and is taped speculating on how well it would go, but later decided it wasn't convenient. He claims two random acts of priests molesting him as a child along with a lot of sexual involvement with siblings, but appears to think it wasn't that harmful, which may be the basis for his being blithe. I don't know whether to believe him. Some people might be able to move past molestation more easily than others, although he did far more than two acts to many of the children.

So it's hard to watch but very worth watching. Another reason why the American legal system isn't all that bad, as it's the civil trials that finally have started shaking up the Catholic hierarchy.

Yet another reason to watch is this negative member review at Netflix: "This piece of film is inflamatory and disgusting. Documentaries such as this fuel religious hatred throughout the non-Catholic community. Whether or not this particular story is true has little to do with the image that it creates, depicting the Catholic Church as something it is certainly not." (My emphasis). Make that reviewer unhappy, and watch it.

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Also worth watching: The Woodsman, a fictional movie about a pedophile who's evolved partially, but only partially beyond O'Grady's level.

The idea of increasing albedo never really went away

Mark Kleiman follows Jane Galt in asking what happened to the idea of increasing surface albedo in urban areas. Mark shouldn't have followed Galt so closely - the fact that she didn't put a link to her statement that "doing that (worldwide) could change the albedo of the earth enough to make a significant dent in global warming" is the first clue that she got the idea wrong.

The main point isn't to increase global albedo, it's to decrease the urban heat island effect that otherwise pumps up air conditioning usage and local smog. Some info here, and more than you could want is on Google. Green roofs, for example, also combat UHI and not incidentally have a higher albedo than blacktop. The idea is still being explored and developed.

Basically, the idea of increasing albedo never went away.

The Italian trials are Bush's future

I predict that after Bush leaves office, neither he nor Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft or Gonzalez will visit Western Europe except if sent there as part of a diplomatic mission. The trials being conducted in Italy right now over the CIA kidnappings there a sign of the future on the international level. I might be wrong about this for the first few years, but after a while, they'll remember what happened to Pinochet and stay away.

It's small recompense to the rest of us, but the number of countries these people can't visit will grow over time. And Bush is younger than most of them - 30 years from now, he'll still be around. I wouldn't rule out America being a place where he ultimately gets tried at that point, just as it happened to Pinochet in Chile itself. That'll be worth waiting around for.

Presidential candidate positions on climate change

UPDATE: The now-best chart I've seen so far is at the NY Times.

Nice resource on the main candidates' positions put together by the Council on Foreign Relations, of all the groups to have first thought of doing it. It's not bad, although they should've linked directly to the candidate's sites also for updates, rather than specific articles scattered around the internet. Someone should take it to the next step with a more comprehensive evaluation.

Looking around some more...

Okay, an article in the Christian Science Monitor. More anecdotal than comprehensive though. The statement, "All the major candidates say global warming is real, that it's caused to some extent by human activity" won't hold true if the dumber-and-lazier version of George Bush, Fred Thompson, enters the race. UPDATE: Thompson may be backing off a little.

This is the best I've found so far, a comparison chart from the League of Conservation Voters website. Some of it is hard to believe, frankly. Richardson wants 90% emission reductions by 2050? Besides the fact that it won't happen, I don't even think that's necessary. Chris Dodd says new coal plants must sequester emissions - that translates into "no new coal plants for a decade or two" which is fine I guess, but he might as well acknowledge it. Looking at the chart emphasizes the need to know what concrete, short-term steps each candidate would take as President, as opposed to lofty goals for the future. UPDATE: Chart incorrectly says Edwards would require sequestration from coal, when he would only require the capability to sequester.

More League info on the candidates and warming here, although the chart is the most useful part.

Brookings Institution set up a program to discuss ideas for the next president called "Opportunity 08" that discusses climate change. Earth Day Network blogged about an Opportunity 08 forum by the policy people for several candidates on climate change here (Brookings can't be bothered with reporting about it though, apparently).

That's the best stuff I found so far - I'd love to hear about other resources.

UPDATE: NPR has a chart, although not as good as the League/Heat is On chart above. I expect the two best climate positions are Edwards and Richardson (although Richardson is skimpy on details), so if you're interested in how other candidates stand up, these are the ones they should be compared to.

Man, "The Sword of Shannara" sure is terrible

I think I was warned about this, but I have no idea why The Sword of Shannara was so popular when it came out or is on anyone's top sci-fi/fantasy list. Hopefully his later stuff was better, but this just reads like he tore out pages of the Lords of the Rings, threw them up in the air, and tried to figure out a plot line based on the randomly-reassembled scenes. To be fair, he does add a lot of detail to the scenery, but the writing style is dreck.

Oh well, back to re-reading Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Understanding an Adler: Volokh Correction #21

I think the completely amoral climate denialists are easier to understand and deal with than the others. Steve Milloy, for example, can be understood as simply a person who gets off by serving the worst of all possible corporate interests, with no interest in telling the truth or doing something of benefit to anyone. It might be possible to go deeper in his psyche - maybe it's not really the money for him, it's the pathetic wisps of power that waft in his direction that gets him off - but it doesn't really matter. He's predictable.

I wouldn't quite put Richard Lindzen or Benny Peiser in that category, although both of them are clearly willing to deceive people and deserve little respect. The other shame for them is that unlike Milloy, they aren't complete disgraces in other aspects of their careers. It's too bad about what they've done to themselves, although they've done something worse to the rest of us.

Roger Pielke Jr. has his adaptation-is-more-important-and-everyone-except-me-is-screwing-up-the-science-with-politics viewpoint. I think he's guilty of cramming far too many square pegs into that round hole, but I expect the deception there is self-deception more than anything else.

And then there's my fellow lawyer, Jonathan Adler of the Volokh Conspiracy. He wrote an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to reject the states' request that EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions, using legal theories the court eventually dismissed. Adler follows that up with a presentation the US Senate claiming that a completely separate provision in the Clean Air Act allowing California to regulate air emissions in the state should, coincidentally, be interpreted not to apply to climate change, forbidding California from developing regulations that could also be used by other states under the typical federal concept of a "laboratory for democracy."

Warming Law takes apart his legal arguments handily, here. I'll add that his argument saying California imposes costs on other states by increasing the market share of energy efficient vehicles relative to gas guzzlers is ridiculous. First, changing the market share fits the classic definition of a pecuniary externality, recognized not to result in a misallocation of resources. Second, his attempt to make me feel guilty for buying a Prius because his friends will now have to spend more on the per-unit costs of spare parts for their Hummers somehow falls flat. I don't know, I just don't feel guilty. I suggest the real external damage is in the opposite direction from the Orwellian world that Adler lives in.

This despite the fact that Adler, as far as I know, acknowledges climate change is a problem that needs to be addressed. He's just doing everything he can to keep the federal system from trying out two solutions - something real at the California level, and his preferred dithering at the national level, and determining which works better. Fighting a competitive test of solutions is not a record to be proud of.

Suggesting the "Leave No Child Inside" Legal Defense Fund

I've been reading and hearing about Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods and promoter of the Children and Nature Network, an organization that attempts to restore the lost connection between children and the outdoors.

One factor in this lost connection is the fear of liability should something go wrong. Part of that fear is overblown, but regardless, it's there.

I don't know if Louv has a solution to this problem, but I've got an idea that I think would help - set up a legal foundation that pays the legal defense costs of institutions and individuals who brought children outdoors and then were hit with frivolous lawsuits.

Obviously, regardless of how successful this idea could become, it will never cover all the costs of defending against all the frivolous lawsuits. Still it could help, and just the fact that a defendant knew it was possible to recover costs might make the defendant less likely to settle.

When it first starts functioning, it picks the cream of the crop - those who defended against the most frivolous of claims, and against the claims that would have established the worst precedents or had the worst potential impact. It could also assist only defendants who have already won their case, so the foundation doesn't have to do any legal work itself - it just pays all or part of defendant's legal costs afterwards. It only assists defendants who didn't settle the case. I also expect that businesses that support the outdoors would be interested in funding the foundation.

I'll just toss this idea out into the Googleable universe, with the additional mention that I'd be willing to put in some of my own money or time as a lawyer if the idea goes anywhere.

NASA is a bad place to be anti-science

NASA Administrator Mike Griffin claims to "think" it's arrogant for humanity to reject causing dangerous climate change to future generations. Kevin Vranes takes him apart, as do others noting that Griffin is even worse than Shrub on the issue, and the Shrub Administration had to disavow his remarks.

Griffin was the alleged saviour of NASA several years ago, by the way, and I even had some slight sympathy for the idea of replacing the 100 percent useless Shuttle and Space Station with 98 percent useless NASA manned moon base (plus vague talk of going to Mars that couldn't be taken seriously). Griffin promised "not one thin dime" of science funding would be lost to the new program. Guess what happened to that. The truly amazing Terrestrial Planet Finder telescope has been effectively cancelled, as well as the Mars Sample Return. And now the ability to study climate change via satellite is also being cancelled.

Thanks a lot. Can we have a new administration, please?

May 2007 Iraq casualties

Avg. daily Coalition fatality rate during the last month: 4.26 (nearly all Americans, and excluding Iraqis)

Previous averages
April 2007: 3.9
March 2007: 2.65
Last year, May 2006: 2.55.

Overall daily average to date is 2.46. Total US dead as of today: 3495.
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Iraqi monthly military and police fatalities: 198.

Previous military/police fatality rates

April 2006: 300
March 2007: 215
Last year, May 2006: 150.
Total Iraqi military dead: 6903.

Note that I've seen media reports suggesting the Iraqi military casualty figures are signficant undercounts.

--------
Iraqi monthly civilian fatalities: 1782

Previous
April 2006: 1521
March 2007: 1674
Last year, April 2006: 969.
To-date civilian total, begining in March 2005: 33,034.

Note that the civilian numbers are far less accurate than others (most likely to be greatly underestimated, or even ridiculously underestimated), but could still be useful in determining trends.

Comments: Now nine months in a row with American casualties above average, no prior bad stretch lasted longer than three months. The overall average rate continues to move up, from a low of 2.29 deaths daily.

As before, civilian casualties remain terrible. The rate seems to hover around a level that is nearly twice as bad as a year ago, and three times worse than in 2005. Neither we nor the Iraqis realized how good we had it back in 2005.

Four months have passed since the troop escalation began, with no indication in these statistics that it has accomplished anything, except possibly to show higher US military and Iraqi civilian casualties, with no trend yet for Iraqi military and police.

What the Democrats should have done about Iraq war funding

I think the Democratic Congress made a mistake in mostly giving in to Bush on Iraq war funding. I also think John Edwards is wrong, although less so, in saying the Democrats should've kept sending Bush still more bills with timetables in them for him to veto.

Instead, the Democrats should've done what they had suggested earlier, sending bills with short-term funding of two or three months, and take Bush on in the constitutional crisis he threatened. I think this is similar to what Edwards would've done, except that it would leave the Democrats in a stronger position.

Bush said if he got a short-term funding bill he would veto that, too. Fine. The Democrats can say "we want a timetable to get out, but Bush won't allow it and we don't have the votes to override, so instead we're willing to fund the effort for a short time period and see what happens afterwards. We're simply not going to fund an open-ended war." Bush can try and argue that Democrats aren't funding the troops, but each time the Democrats can just send him a new short-term funding bill. I expect he'll veto it each time, and the military will come closer to a point, some time in mid-summer, when it won't have funding for the war.

Then Bush has a choice, and the Democrats a response to either choice he takes. Bush can obey the law, and begin a precipitous withdrawal, blaming Democrats for the inevitable chaos that he says will follow. Immediately, the Democrats respond by passing a new funding bill dedicating money only to an orderly withdrawal from Iraq over the next four to six months, while allowing to stay (and fund) behind whatever non-combat forces that the Democrats choose to allow. I have trouble believing that Bush would veto this bill as well, leaving M1 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles in Iraq - and if he did, it's the one veto that would get overridden.

Or Bush will take the unitary executive theory to its extreme, saying as long as Congress has not rescinded the 2002 Iraq military force authorizations, he doesn't need Congressional approval and can spend money without it. While there is some US Civil War legal authority for very limited spending in this situation for a limited time, no precedent would justify an open-ended war.

So then Bush provokes a constitutional crisis. Democrats respond by suing to force him to stop, and the courts either refuse to rule on the issue as a political question or fail to resolve the issue before January 2009. This isn't a Bush victory, unless you call unmasking a dictatorship a victory for the dictator. Instead the war will be seen as all that much more illegal, Bush will be that much more isolated, and Republican congressmen and Republican presidential candidates would have to announce whether they support the interpretation of the president as a dictator.

I think it would have brought us closer to ending the war without having to wait for a Democratic president, without the Democrats getting blamed.

I'll acknowledge that the actual Democratic approach has created benchmarks. Failing to meet these benchmarks will have no real repercussions, but the Democrats will use the failure to call again for a withdrawal. Still, that's not enough to give Bush another year of authorization for catastrophic failure.

"I came from nothing to being able to afford this $400 haircut."

So I went to the Small Change for Big Change rally for John Edwards yesterday in San Jose ($15 donation). A decent size crowd at San Jose State University, maybe several hundred people. About 90-95% white, which is unfortunate but I think not all that unusual at this stage in the political process. Maybe half were students and half were others like myself.

Edwards was good, I thought a little better than on television. He led off with Third World issues, talking about how children are born HIV-positive in Africa because no one will give their mothers $4 worth of medicine. He said he would close Guantanamo the day he arrives in office. He repeated his statement that Congress should've kept sending a funding bill with a deadline to Bush despite the veto (I don't necessarily agree with this, but he just said "a" deadline not the same deadline).

The only environmental issue he talked about was climate change, which he repeated is a crisis. He wants 80% reductions by 2050 (!), have a carbon cap leading to that goal, and 30-40% of the carbon cap would be auction-allocated and the resulting funds used for renewable fuels etc.

He talked about fighting poverty at home (can't remember the specifics) and said people needed to have the same chance to rise up that he had, then giving the quote I headlined this post with.

A pretty good job.

An apex predator in our worm composting bin

Not sure how well the picture shows the salamander, but now I know why we don't have many worms in our worm composting bin. Aside from the question of how it got in there, I can't figure out where it came from. We live in an urban/dense suburban area, and the nearest water body is a concrete channel for a stream about a quarter mile away.

I also don't know what the heck it is. It's bigger than the California newts I see in the woods around here, and has a big head. Instead of the newt's orange underbelly, it has yellow spots along the side and scattered on the tail.

Finally, I don't know what to do about it. We're near the beginning of the summer dry season. I expect if I dumped it out of the bin, it wouldn't last very long. I suppose I could make the effort to carry it to the concrete stream. For now, I'm doing nothing. Maybe the compost bin ecosystem is big enough to support it and some worms.

Scientists overselling or underselling climate change risks?

Kevin Vranes wrote a while back that he felt that scientists may feel like they've almost accidentally oversold their certainty about climate change and associated risks, particularly their confidence in climate model results.

On the other side, James Hansen says this about the risk of a 5 meter sea level rise in a century:

a 'scientific reticence' is inhibiting the communication of a threat of a
potentially large sea level rise. Delay is dangerous because of system inertias
that could create a situation with future sea level changes out of our control.
I argue for calling together a panel of scientific leaders to hear evidence and
issue a prompt plain-written report on current understanding of the sea level
change issue.

So who's right? Wish I knew. But, both of them could be right - scientists could be overselling 85% certainty as 95% certainty, while refusing to discuss a 10% risk of catastrophe. Or maybe just one is, or neither.

Hansen does add, "scientists preaching caution and downplaying the dangers of climate change fared better in receipt of research funding." Pointing out that something could be considered a risk at the current state of science, when it is likely (but far from certain) that the improved science will eliminate the risk, isn't going to make the scientist look all that prescient. Hansen's argument makes some intuitive sense to me, and we'll just have to see if Kevin Vranes is right or not.

Rachel Carson should get an "American Nobel" award for public health

Tim Lambert continues to fight the endless war against right-wing lies about Rachel Carson that argue the "ban" of DDT has killed and is killing millions of children infected by malaria. I think a systematic way to fight this garbage would be to go on the offensive, and try to get some important public recognition for the millions of people she saved by limiting DDT use and subsequent mosquito resistance to it.

The Lasker Awards are the "American Nobels" in medical science. They give out awards for public service too, not just medical research, and unlike the Nobels, the awards have been given out posthumously (although it appears to be a rare practice).

Unfortunately they've stopped accepting nominations for the 2007 awards, the centennial of Carson's birth. Maybe someone was quicker than me in thinking of this idea. Regardless, there's next year for Lasker, other medical awards should also consider Carson, and when we've got a non-liar in the White House, I can hardly think of a better recipient of posthumous Medal of Freedom for her actions reducing DDT resistance.

The Reasonable Libertarian and Girls Gone Wild

At first glance, the proposal by Garance Franke-Ruta to raise the age of consent for someone to be viewed or filmed nude coincides well with the Reasonable Libertarian concept of transitional adulthood. Her idea, primarily, is to protect 18-20 year-old women from future humiliation for drunkenly consenting to being filmed naked by predators like the Girls Gone Wild video makers.

I'm unconvinced though on both practical and libertarian grounds. She hasn't been very specific about what she herself proposes, although she later supported the idea of a required waiting period for consent to be effective. This alternative removes some objections, except that it would be impractical unless applied only to people filmed in private locations, and not applying it to public locations virtually eliminates its usefulness.


Then there's the libertarian issue. I like the transitional adulthood idea, but not applied blindly to protect people from all self-imposed harm. The transition is a period for people to handle whatever bad upbringing or economic suffering in their childhood that drove the person to do something dangerous. Prostitution and professional boxing strike me as dangerous and things that 18 year olds are likely to fall into because something was screwed up in their upbringing. Being viewed naked, for pay or for no reason, doesn't fall into that category. Some people might not regret it (Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Madonna) and others who consider it a mistake might learn from it with relatively little harm.


A strong feminist might disagree about upbringing affecting a young woman's willingness to disrobe at the urging of the men around her. I understand that point, but people should be allowed to learn from mistakes (if that's how they see them). And anyway, the proposal is impractical from the perspective of getting video cameras off the spring break beaches and Mardi Gras streets.


A final note - I really dislike Garance's language choice, that this isn't a restriction on consent, it's "a greater right to control their own erotic images until age 21." Give me a break and just call it what it is. This framing stuff can go too far, like her implicit argument that the freedom (to consent) is (a form of) slavery.


(Despite writing all this, btw, I think Garance is a valuable blogger.)

Latest Tangled Bank

The science blog carnival, Tangled Bank, is up, and includes a link to my post about exoplanet Gliese 581c.

Understanding boreholes

The Open Mind blog has an excellent explanation of how underground boreholes work in recording temperature changes over time (very differently from ice boreholes) (UPDATE: William says ice boreholes aren't different - see comments). They're very good at detecting whether past temperatures were above or below average, but are less specific as to when the variation occurred, and get still more less specific the further back you go in time.

I'll just repeat here a comment that I left there, that boreholes seem like something that could resolve whether the Little Ice Age, and possibly the Medieval Warm Period, were regional phenomenon or were more widespread. Since those issues are still unresolved, I assume there are complications to the technique.

Jerry Falwell and the Hitchenizing lefty blogs

I really enjoy the snarky blogs on the left, even while I vacillate between being snarky myself over climate change versus trying to persuade the other side. Sadly No is a great example of one of the best blogs using attack humor to ridicule the powerful people who very much deserve it.

But ridiculing someone who's just died and expressing joy at his death seems a little different. These blogs are following the Christopher Hitchens path of taking the occasion of a famous person's death to launch the most vitriolic attacks possible. Hitchens did it with Mother Theresa and many other people, and of course he's got something out on Falwell right now.

I can't condemn the lefty blogs as being completely wrong. Falwell admittedly did a lot of damage, and it's easy for me to react like this when I'm not part of the demographic he often attacked. My friend Junichi acknowledges the problem, and bloggers who simply quote Falwell to respond to one-sided accolades also have a point.

Still. There are some people out there who mourn Falwell as a grandfather or friend, not just a political ally, and while ridiculing the powerful is fine, a dead man isn't powerful and can't even respond. I'd let it go, at least right now.

Also missing from both the Falwell hero-worship and the attack post responses is that Falwell sometimes apologized for the worst things he said. And then, sometimes, repeated them.

There's an interesting science fiction book called Speaker for the Dead, featuring a type of eulogy where the "speech is not an apology, but rather a way to understand the person as a whole, including any flaws or misdeeds." Seems to me like a better way to go about it.

Will Marc Morano or Senator Inhofe bet over climate change?

Below is an email I just sent to Senator Inhofe's communications director, Marc Morano. I'll be sure to let you all know if there's a response.

Marc Morano
Communications Director
Senator James Inhofe

5/16/2007

Dear Marc:

This email follows a voice mail I left you two days
ago, saying I wanted to follow up about the bet
between myself and David Evans over global warming
that you've been highlighting.  I see that it's just
been put up at your Senate Committee website:

(Website link here)

I have three brief points.

First, I want to thank you for directing a lot of
traffic to my website, although I find it confusing
that some skeptics think this bet at all vindicates
their position.  Maybe they should wait and see who
wins the bets, and in just three years we'll start to
see who's in the process of winning.  It's also worth
noting that it took me nearly two years to find a
skeptic willing to put his money where his mouth is.
The more prominent skeptics who you've highlighted,
people like Dick Lindzen and Bill Gray, have refused
to bet.

Second, you may not be aware that the category of
prominent skeptics who refuse so far to bet include
your supervisor, Senator James Inhofe.  I emailed and
faxed him last summer offering to bet over global
warming, and wrote about it here:

(blog post link here)

I'm willing to bet Senator Inhofe for profit or, as
the link above says, for charity, and I'd be happy to
use the same terms as in the bet that you are now
circulating widely.  I encourage you to ask him to
reconsider.

Third and finally, Marc, your personal dedication to
the climate skeptic issue seems to go beyond the "just
doing your job" level, something that's quite
admirable in a political staffer.  Accordingly, I
would be honored if you personally would be willing to
bet me over climate change.  Same terms as the bet
post you've been circulating, for profit or for
charity.  The charity site in the link above solves
the problem of ensuring bets are paid.  If a
for-profit is your preference, I'm sure we can find
someone we both trust to hold my money, and I trust
your word that you will pay.

I hope to hear from you soon.

Sincerely,
Brian Schmidt

UPDATE:  After Marc Morano linked to Backseat Driving for the guest post by my betting opponent,
I asked him again to bet, and heard nothing.

Skeptical about policy versus skeptical about climate

I've been corresponding with one of the bloggers I invited to bet me over climate change, Craig Newmark. He gives his reasons for skepticism and for not betting me here.

Among the not-unusual reasons that I find unpersuasive, Craig includes a kludge factor that I've often seen in various places, along the lines of "I'm not betting over global warming because I think Kyoto Protocol is a bad idea from those watermelon socialists."

This is a kludge because the question of what do about a problem is separate from whether the problem actually exists. I'm trying to advance the policy discussion by eliminating areas of disagreement, and I think there's less actual disagreement about climate change than the denialists claim, as shown by their general refusal to bet. Getting rid of that non-controversy can help us move on to determining the best solution.

Craig defends the kludge as a persuasive strategy akin to what lawyers use. It may be persuasive to some, and some desperate lawyers use it, but it's not good legal reasoning. Legal analysis (in theory) dissects issues into their component parts, answers each part, and then comes up with the overall answer. Craig didn't do that.

I'll add to his lawyer story with another my law professor joked about, concerning what to do when arguing in front of a judge: "If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. And if you don't have the facts or the law on your side, pound the table."

Being skeptical about the science, based on the allegation that Kyoto is bad, is just pounding the table.

The "Goldilocks Planet" might really be a too-hot, gas giant

Exoplanet Gliese 581c is referred to as the "Goldilocks Planet" for extraterrestrial life. It appears to be small enough to be rocky planet, not a gas giant like almost all the other planet discoveries, and it's at the right distance from its star so that the surface temperature might be between water's freezing and boiling point, if greenhouse gases in its atmosphere doesn't make it too hot.

Typical reporting about the size of the planet, from CNN: "new planet is about five times heavier than Earth...." From MSNBC: "it has a radius just 50 percent larger than Earth's, a mass five times greater...." Even from the European astronomers who discovered it: "Astronomers have discovered the most Earth-like planet outside our Solar System to date, an exoplanet with a radius only 50% larger than the Earth and capable of having liquid water. Using the ESO 3.6-m telescope, a team of Swiss, French and Portuguese scientists discovered a super-Earth about 5 times the mass of the Earth that orbits a red dwarf...."

The problem with all these reports is that the planet is very likely to have a significantly higher mass than five earths. The planet was discovered with the radial velocity method, which only determines the minimum mass. The radial velocity mass determination is based on the equation msini, where m, the actual mass, is multiplied by the trignometric sine of i, the inclination of the planet's orbit with respect to earth. The only situation with current technology where we know what i is, though, is if the planet transits directly in front of the star with respect to earth, partially occulting its light, and that doesn't appear to be the case for Gliese.

To be fair to the European astronomers, they do add a footnote saying, "Using the radial velocity method, astronomers can only obtain a minimum mass (as it is multiplied by the sine of the inclination of the orbital plane to the line of sight, which is unknown). From a statistical point of view, this is however often close to the real mass of the system." I don't know the basis for that second sentence, though, unless they define "close" very loosely.*

Gliese 581c has five earth masses only if the inclination is edge on, i=90, and sini=1. There is no reason why the inclination shouldn't be random, so 45 degrees is the 50th percentile likelihood, where the real inclination and therefore real mass is equally likely to be greater or lesser than that figure. The sin of 45 is .707, and five divided by .707 is seven earth masses. The planet has a 50% chance of massing between five and seven earth masses, and 50% chance of being more than that. If the planet has 10-12 earth masses, then it's a Uranus-to-Neptune size gas giant (sometimes called ice giants), and nothing like the earth. At an inclination of 30 degrees or less (33% chance), the mass will be at least five divided by .5, or 10 earth masses.

So unless I've messed up, the Goldilocks planet has a 33% chance of being a gas giant. And even before that level, there's a problems with temperature. The larger the planet, the more likely it will trap enough greenhouse gases to experience a runaway greenhouse effect that in some distant future will make the Earth resemble Venus.

So it's certainly possible that the planet's mass is close to five earth masses, and maybe the smaller mass levels might allow it to escape the runaway greenhouse, but I wouldn't count on it being habitable.**

*I see even wikipedia says "One of the main disadvantages of the radial-velocity method is that it can only estimate a planet's minimum mass. Usually the true mass will be within 20% of this minimum value, but if the planet's orbit is almost perpendicular to the line of sight, then the true mass will be much higher." Again, I don't know the basis for the 20% statement - am I missing something?

**Some good comments at Bad Astronomy, especially this one: "Definitely I am aware that this is a minimum mass, however I think the small scale of the system suggests the masses cannot be too much greater, or planets b and c would very likely be unstable." That argues against my inclination argument, but raises other reasons for the planet not being habitable.

UPDATE: Lab Lemming has some good ideas in the comments. I still think even with LL's ideas, it should be considered substantially more than 5 masses.

Please sign the petition to junk Junk Science

Via Deltoid, we have Desmogblog's online petition to Rupert Murdoch and Fox News asking them to can the denialist Steve Milloy. In addition to Desmogblog's points about denialism, and Deltoid's point about Milloy taking undisclosed money from cigarette companies while saying cigarette smoke is safe, I'll add pages 112-113 of The Republican War on Science, where Milloy attacked research on modern, environmentally-damaging pesticides as fraudulent, with no evidence to back up the charge.

It's more than just sushi journalism

I don't get the implicit ridicule that Howard Kurtz shows for a newspaper investigation into a widespread restaurant practice of selling sushi labelled as expensive snapper when it's actually tilapia (UPDATE: originally I wrote "snapper" at the end of the sentence; I meant to write "tilapia").

First, even if it had no broader implications, this is the kind of gumshoe work that journalism ought to do. If writing restaurant reviews is legitimate journalism, why can't they write about whether the food is what it's claimed to be?

Second, an economic point: "And most sushi fish in the United States comes from just a handful of suppliers." The absence of real competition promotes fraud.

Third, a religious point: much of the sushi fish distribution in the US is controlled by the Unification Church, a controversial religion with questionable tactics on conversion and political strategies. Their involvement takes the controversy to a whole new level.

Finally, an environmental point: snapper is overfished, while tilapia is a far more environmental choice. While it's appropriate to substitute for snapper, it's more appropriate to openly show that tilapia is an adequate substitute.

No reason for ridicule here that I can see.

Yet another market signal about climate change, but it'll take work to get the answer

Yesterday was about the commodities market and a global warming index, today is about equities. KLD, an investment research firm heavily involved with socially responsible investment, has had a "climate solutions" stock index and last month, it partnered with a financial management firm to allow people to invest in the index.

The GC100 is based on the concept of the climate solutions value chain. Companies in the climate solutions value chain are positioned to benefit from increasing constraints on carbon, high fossil-fuel prices, rising energy demand and a growing acknowledgement of climate risk. The index is constructed to form a basket of companies that provides exposure to companies providing climate solutions.

Their methodology:

The Global Climate 100 Index includes a mix of 100 global companies that will provide near-term solutions to global warming....Constituents are selected from the global universe of companies for their involvement in the following themes: Renewable Energies, Future Fuels, and Clean Technology and Efficiency.....The leading companies in each category are included on the Index....The Index seeks companies representing a range of corporate responses to climate change, including a group of large-, mid-, and small-cap companies representing sectors ranging from energy and utilities to industrials and consumer products. As a result, the Index is more broadly diversified than a traditional energy sector index.

Neither the current price of this index nor its change over time will show a market signal about climate change directly. But there's more - the price-to-earnings ratio, relative to P/E ratios for comparable businesses not investing in climate solutions, should partially reflect whether the market believes climate change will force business changes. Companies can have high stock prices relative to their annual earnings if the market believes the companies will grow rapidly. If the market believes in climate change, the P/E for these companies should exceed the industry average. The companies are here, starting on page 4. All someone has to do is compare the companies to the appropriate sector of the market (which might be a little tricky, but seems doable). Pretty good business school student project, I would think.

Of course there are confounding factors and noise in the signal - people might invest in these companies in anticipation of peak oil or energy security needs; the market will be influenced by government underreaction or overreaction to climate change; and the index depends partly on the skill and P/E preference of the index selectors.

Still, it would be interesting to see what the result is of a P/E comparison. I bet the index managers actually know that, although I don't know if they'd give that information out.

Promising start for a "Global" Warming Index

James and William have more info on UBS-GWI, a composite index of 15 American weather futures markets. It will certainly have to expand geographically to be "global", but it seems like a good start.

I do have two concerns: first, it's unclear to me whether the index will be weighted by the level of trading in the particular submarkets. While that could well make sense to an energy trader, it biases the information from a straight-science perspective. Second, it will necessarily be an Urban Heat Island index, I think. That doesn't validate the worn-out skeptic argument of cool rural temperature stations transforming into warmer urban heat islands, but it does mean, for once, that land use will be an important factor for purposes of the index. For example, the highly laudable movement towards green rooftops and higher-albedo building and paving materials will affect the index without affecting global temps.

Regardless, a very promising start. I've sent some questions off to UBS, and we'll see if they respond.

Yesterday I saw an ant pick up an aphid and fly away with it

Okay, maybe this isn't earth-shaking news, but when I think of E. O. Wilson I still think of The Ants before his other books, and I've never seen this happen before. Wandering on a trail in San Mateo County, I came across a goldenrod-ish plant with brown aphids clustered everywhere. On the very top was a single, winged ant grasping a green aphid in its mouth. After a minute or two, the ant flew away with the aphid.

Ants eat other insects but are also known to tend aphids and collect a type of "honeydew" from them. Worker ants are wingless, but dispersing, reproductive males and females can fly. The only thing that males care about is finding females, so the ant I saw was a dispersing queen. Also, aphids can reproduce asexually, and like Tribbles, the females are born pregnant.

Hypotheses:

1. The new queen has already mated and was taking an aphid to found another aphid-tending colony. She'll settle down at a host plant with no aphids, which therefore has no existing ant colony that would quickly terminate her command.

2. The ant queen has already mated and is acting somewhat like her relative the wasp - she's carrying a one-time food source for herself as she founds a new colony somewhere.

While I think #1 is cooler, I suspect #2 is more likely. I think I would have heard of ants transporting aphids before. While only one of the hypotheses is correct for the ant I saw, both could be true as a general matter. But more ants species are likely to hunt insects than herd them, so my guess is the aphid is now lunch.

IMPORTANT UPDATE TO THIS IMPORTANT ISSUE: I talked to a butterfly biologist about this. He said he had no knowledge about it, but "when it comes to insects, anything is possible."

Volokh Correction #20 outsourced to Warminglaw blog

Warminglaw says:

Todd Zywicki, a bankruptcy professor at George Mason Law and blogger at the libertarian “The Volokh Conspiracy,” recently informed the world that while he has “no special knowledge” of whether global warming is occurring, if it is occurring he wonders why people aren't "buying up all the land 300 yards or so from the current beach, or wherever they expect the sea level to rise to in the future?” Todd goes on to ask: “Shouldn't Al Gore be cornering the market on coastal land twenty feet above today's sea level?”

Warminglaw then takes him apart. As I think one of the Volokh commenters notes (besides the issue of a 20 foot rise being exceedingly long term), near-beachfront property is still very expensive right now, while turning it into under-the-ocean property isn't so valuable. Guessing wrong on sea-level rise would have bad economic consequences.

Warminglaw finishes with this:

Why pick on Todd here at Warming Law? At the risk of ruining your day, dear readers, we feel compelled to note that Todd has lectured our federal judges on the economics of climate change at libertarian judicial seminars hosted by the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (for the agenda, go here and scroll down). One can just imagine the rigorous, balanced, and thought-provoking economic analysis he presents to our federal judiciary.

Zywicki has made many, many appearances here at Volokh Corrections.

April 2007 Iraq casualties

Avg. daily Coalition fatality rate during the last month: 3.9 (nearly all Americans, and excluding Iraqis)

Previous averages
March 2007: 2.65
February 2007: 3.0

Last year, April 2006: 2.73.

Overall daily average to date is 2.41. Total US dead as of today: 3355.


Iraqi monthly military and police fatalities: 158.

Previous military/police fatality rates
March 2007: 215
February 2007: 150

Last year, April 2006: 201.
Total Iraqi military dead: 6551.

Note that I've seen media reports suggesting the Iraqi military casualty figures are signficant undercounts.


Iraqi monthly civilian fatalities: 1521

Previous
March 2007: 1674
February 2007: 1381

Last year, April 2006: 808.

To-date civilian total, begining in March 2005: 28,583. Note that the civilian numbers are far less accurate than others (most likely to be greatly underestimated, or even ridiculously underestimated), but could still be useful in determining trends.

Comments: Now eight months in a row with American casualties above average, no prior bad stretch lasted longer than three months. The overall average rate continues to move up, from a low of 2.29 deaths daily.

As before, civilian casualties remain terrible. The rate seems to hover around a level that is nearly twice as bad as a year ago, and three times worse than in 2005. Neither we nor the Iraqis realized how good we had it back in 2005.

Three months have passed since the troop escalation began, with no indication in these statistics that it has accomplished anything.

Annan refutes Evans' skeptic arguments

James Annan, who's done more than anyone to promote the idea of betting over global warming, refutes David Evans' arguments here. Sounds pretty good to me (other than the Bayesian statistics stuff, which is beyond me). Money quote:

Are we really supposed to believe that the planet is highly sensitive to some speculative and unquantified mechanism such as cosmic rays, and simultaneously insensitive to an effect that's been reasonably well understood for over 100 years? Why?

UPDATE: Evans responds in the comments, and here.

Wow, the denialists really like me! Wait, it's David they like...

Yesterday's guest blog post by my betting opponent David Evans has generated more hits on my blog than I've had in the last two months. It's amazing how differently people will view the same event - the denialist blogs are linking to it, and see this as some kind of vindication in that David used to support the consensus, and in that he's willing to bet.

I should start as my mother taught me though and say something nice, which is that the comments in the post, mostly by skeptics/denialists, are very complimentary to both David and myself for keeping our debate civil. It's good for me to get that reminder about the decent people that are on the other side of the fence. And I think I've already made my respect for David clear.

Okay, enough being nice. The irony is that most of the referrals are coming from Tim Blair and Planet Gore. Blair's site labelled me a troll and de-facto banned me for repeatedly offering to bet Blair and others at his site. I emailed Planet Gore just 3 weeks ago offering to bet them, and never heard a word. So now if they think David's action is commendable, why don't they show it by betting me themselves?

It would also help if they were accurate - both short posts on Planet Gore got essential things wrong - first, David isn't a climate modeller-turned-skeptic and never claimed to be. Second, he isn't betting that temperatures will cool (a claim repeated by other denialists who fail to read the post); instead he's betting that temperatures will increase at a slower rate than predicted by the consensus.

Finally, they fail to note that it took nearly two years for me to find someone to bet against the consensus position, I'm still open to more bets, as are other people, and we can't find betting opponents. From a free-market perspective, this seems a pretty clear indication that the consensus position is nearly universally-held, and people like David whose disbelief in it is strong enough to be backed up with their wallets are quite rare.

Summing it up, the effect's unclear so far. Stoat thought my bet was a good one but entails a PR risk, and he might be right earlier than he thought. On the other hand, in three years we'll start to see whether I'm on the path toward winning or losing the bets, and we'll see what PR effect that has too.