Evolutionary psychology wars aren't helpful to climate denialists

Climate denialist/skeptics face a problem in trying to argue that 97% of the practitioners in the field are fundamentally wrong in accepting climate change: how likely is it that a field of science could get that screwed up? Generally, denialists don't care about whether the unlikelihood of their claim and whether it suggests they themselves are in the wrong. Instead they just say that climatologists don't understand climatology.

My question is whether this has happened before in modern science. If it hasn't, then denialists have to get us to assume pretty heroically that the scientific process has failed in a way that it's not failed before, and I think it might make us consider whether in fact, the denialists are wrong and the 97% of climatologists are right.

I should note that this isn't about science getting something wrong - that happens all the time. This is about the claim that the field of climatology is fundamentally unsound, which is the basic claim of denialists. And even if it did happen elsewhere, that doesn't mean it's happening now in climatology, but the precedent would make the claim a tiny bit less implausible.

I looked once before at whether modern science engages in conspiracy, in the far smaller group of scientists examining Jupiter's moon Europa and its ice cover, and I didn't think it was helpful to denialists.

So how about another potential example, in the field of evolutionary psychology. This area attracts a lot of controversy, possibly because amateurs try to use it to as a pop-scientific justification of whatever moral belief they advocate, possibly because its supporters sometimes overstate some of their conclusions, and possibly because biologists don't like psychologists encroaching on their turf. But is the field discredited?

The short answer is no, at least not the way that climate denialists think that 97% of climatologists are wrong. Even critics of many papers published on evolutionary psychology think the field can reach and has reached appropriate conclusions, like Jerry Coyne:

Now I don’t oppose evolutionary psychology on principle. The evolutionary source of our behavior is a fascinating topic, and I’m convinced that the genetic influences are far stronger than, say, posited by anti-determinists like Dick Lewontin, Steve Rose, and Steve Gould. Evolved adaptations are particularly likely to be found in sexual behavior, which is intimately connected with the real object of selection: the currency of reproduction. I’m far closer in my views on this topic to Steve Pinker than to Steve Gould. And there are many good studies in the field, so I don’t mean to tar the whole endeavor.

It's also worth noting that compared to climatology, evolutionary psychology is a "soft" scientific field with ethical barriers to experimentation that climatology doesn't experience. Even so, aside from the view of possibly a tiny number of critics, it's not gone as far off the rails as denialists claim has happened for climatology. The denialists are going to have to look somewhere else for a precedent.

Personally, I think evolutionary psychology is fascinating and likely to have significant insights. I think it's facetious to believe that in our psychology, which is crucial to our survival, we'd have escaped the evolutionary influences that affect every other species on the planet. Great apes are clearly smart enough to have differing individual psychologies that must have affected their survival rates over time. Getting deep and subtle insights about human evolutionary psychology will be difficult, but denying that field's validity is as about as smart as climate denialism.

Gaddafi out by the end of next week

(UPDATE: guess I'm back to my pre-2008 predictive ability. I still think Gaddafi's toast, though.)

We'll see if this prediction is as bad as my political predictions usually are, although I've improved a bit in recent years. My prediction is based on Gaddafi's attempt to retake eastern Libya with military force, an attempt that's apparently failed. If the opposition could stand up to him miltarily with one week of organizing, then they're only going to get stronger.

I don't know what the long term holds for Libya - the strong tribal structure seems worrying for national unity. I was very mistaken in the case of Iraq to think in early 2003 that chaos would be preferable to the rule of an incompetent tyrant. I won't assume chaos is preferable in Libya either, but I'm hoping the wave of people power in the Arab world might also lead to a different result.

One other note: conservative blowhards condemn Obama for not taking stronger action in Libya, while failing to notice that hundreds of Americans and other foreigners were still in Tripoli. Now that they're gone, Obama is taking stronger action. Adults are moving things forward.

UPDATE: See here for the American version of why it's important to remove the bad guys from power - that clears the way to punish them for their crimes. We didn't do that with the financial leaders of Wall Street, and now they're getting away.

Offsets and cap-and-trade: coming soon to the Clean Water Act

I'm attending a water law conference in San Diego this week. Today's presentation included a discussion of attempts to limit pollution in the Chesapeake Bay. The presenter said that nitrogen and phosphorus pollution is likely to be set at certain maximum levels pretty soon, and following that, anyone who wants to do something that adds pollutants will have to find offsetting reductions. He speculated that a cap-and-trade market might even emerge.

I think this is still more evidence that there's nothing innately wrong with offsets and trades in greenhouse gases, and that the only real question is whether the programs are done well or done poorly.

One other piece of info that was climate related: another presenter discussed cost-benefit analyses in federal environmental regulations. I asked whether international effects were considered. He said not as a usual matter, but climate change is forcing them to think about it. They now give two different prices for the cost effect of increased greenhouse gases: one price is if they assume the US is all that counts, and another if they assume that we live on planet Earth. We'll see which one ultimately wins out.

Climate betting update for 2010

I had my annual friendly email exchange with betting partner/opponent, David Evans, several weeks back. Our bet:

We have three bet periods -10, 15, and 20 years - and two bets for each period - an even-odds bet and a 2:1 bet in David's favor. The even-odds bet centers around a temperature increase rate of 0.15C/decade with a 0.02 void margin on either side (bet voids if temps increase between .13 and .17C/decade). The 2:1 bet centers on 0.1C/decade with a .01 void margin. Even-odds bets are for $1,000 each, and the 2:1 bets increase over time, with me betting $1,000, $2,000 and $3,000, and David betting half that. My exposure is $9,000; his is $6,000.

We use the NASA GISS dataset, and the baseline is the five-year average for 2007 (.55C above the long-term average), compared to five year averages of each of the three bet periods. Years 2010 through 2014 won't "count" in the sense of not being measured in the five year averages, but they will give a sense of who's winning.

So who's winning? Interestingly, David and I both focused on the news that was bad for our own side. In 2010, the global average temp was a record .63C above the long-term, an increase of .08C in just three years from 2007's multi-year average, and a pace that far exceeds what I need to win all of the bets. That's the perspective David took.

By contrast, I compared five-year averages: we're now able to calculate the five-year average centered on 2008, and it's only .01C above 2007's multi-year average. The reason for the small change is that the only difference between the averages is that 2007's average included the record year 2005, while 2008's average dropped the record year 2005 and replaced it with the record year 2010. At a .01C annual increase rate, I will lose half of my bets and void the other half.

Looking forward to this time next year, our perspectives might shift again, assuming 2011 plays out as another warm year but La Nina-cooled from 2010. The five year average for 2009 will eliminate 2006, which was only typical and cooler than 2005, and replace it with 2011. Any 2011 temperature above .58C should put me in good shape for the five-year average, even if it's not as blistering as 2010. So we'll see.

Meanwhile, James Annan continues his too-easy path to climate betting riches with Russian skeptics. I've been meaning to reach his betting opponents to see if they agree that their goose is cooked, and if not, whether they'd like to double down.

UPDATE: The skewed prediction-market bet that exaggerated the short-term warming anticipated by the IPCC turned out to be insufficiently skewed, and the "Al Gore side" won the bet. The website promoting the bet on behalf of denialist Scott Armstrong has been mysteriously silent about this development, talking only about a longer, proposed bet that's still artificially skewed by lying about the predicted short-term warming. And just in case that bet disappears down the memory hole, here's how Theclimatebet.com describes it:

“Now, assume that Armstrong and Gore made a gentleman‟s bet (no money) and that the ten years of the bet started on January 1, 2008. Armstrong‟s forecast was that there would be no change in global mean temperature over the next ten years. Gore did not specify a method or a forecast. Nor did searches of his book or the Internet reveal any quantitative forecasts or any methodology that he relied on. He did, however, imply that the global mean temperature would increase at a rapid rate – presumably at least as great as the IPCC‟s 1992 projection of 0.03°C-per-year (NOTE: untrue statement, no short term IPCC prediction was made in 1992, and later reviews made lower decadal predictions - ed). Thus, the IPCC‟s 1992 projection is used as Gore‟s forecast.”

Finally, the small bet I've got with Joe Romm on whether 90% of Arctic sea ice will disappear by 2020 (with me taking the cold side) chugs along. Joe does have a chart here showing that recent decline rates, projected linearly, would have him winning. I'm not so sure, although I'm also less sure of my side than I was when I took the bet.

All according their plan that we've ignored

I got tired last year of enviros saying that EPA regulation of climate change was unlikely to be overruled by Congressional legislation. People thought that amending the Clean Air Act to stop action on climate change would be defeated by a Senate filibuster and a presidential veto. I said it would be attempted through budget resolutions and budget reconciliation bills. So now the Republicans have passed budget legislation in the House that will cut "EPA funds for curbing greenhouse gas emissions". They're also trying to defund the IPCC, a wrinkle I hadn't thought of, and generally trying to destroy the environment.

So fighting on the budget is what we should have been focused on all along. It's obvious that this Republican wish list isn't going to get through the Senate and past the president, but that's also not the end of the story. I wrote in my link above from last November:

Complicating this is the Republican threat to de-fund health care reform. I could easily seeing the Republican controlled House passing a budget that both de-funds health care and prohibits spending money to enforce the Clean Air Act. They will then attempt horse-trading, and I fear the concession that they'll ask for.

And yes, the Republican House did de-fund health care in the continuing resolution from this last week. We'll see who blinks on a potential shutdown versus a compromise and what gets sacrificed in a compromise.

Modding what Gavin Schmidt said about the science-policy interface, slightly (UPDATED)

Eli's post refers to the non-scientific controversies over climate change. Gavin Schmidt (no relation) doesn't want to participate in a "science" discussion with denialists that ignores the politics that the denialists are using. Gavin says:

The fundamental conflict is of what (if anything) we should do about greenhouse gas emissions (and other assorted pollutants), not what the weather was like 1000 years ago. Your proposed restriction against policy discussion removes the whole point. None of the seemingly important ‘conflicts’ that are *perceived* in the science are ‘conflicts’ in any real sense within the scientific community, rather they are proxy arguments for political positions. No ‘conflict resolution’ is possible between the science community who are focussed on increasing understanding, and people who are picking through the scientific evidence for cherries they can pick to support a pre-defined policy position.

I agree with all of that except the bolded section. Leaving the denialists behind us, there are important real-world scientific disagreements with policy implications. For example, in my position at the Santa Clara Valley Water District, we build flood control projects and levees that are supposed to last for 50 years, built to contain San Francisco Bay and many low elevation, potentially-flooding creeks. The height of what I'd guess to be over 100 miles of rebuilt levees should be designed to be sufficient to compensate for sea level rise for the next 50 years. It would sure help if we knew what that rise would be under realistic emission scenarios, and might even save us money by not having to overbuild. With budget cuts, we're also thinking of postponing these rebuilds - we need to know how long we can postpone. Getting the science nailed down on this is important.

Getting regional and smaller levels of climate change predictions would also help on policy. That's not exactly a scientific disagreement - the science is barely touching on this level yet - but it's a crucial component for planning water supply and flood control. It's not enough to know that there will be less water when we need it, more water when we want it to not flood, and more water demand created by a warmer climate. We need quantitative predictions where the science will ultimately help us a lot in determining policy, so the sooner we can get those scientific results, the better.

UPDATE: to rephrase a little, the denialist perception of a conflict in the science over whether sea levels are rising is not a real conflict in the scientific community, and I agree with Gavin there. The conflict over how much sea levels will rise in 50 years is a truly open question, and one with immediate policy ramifications.

Weird realist morality on the Egyptian revolution

I should probably get back to climate blogging at some point, but just to finish up thinking about all the good news from Egypt:

1. Key turning point no one seems to be talking about:

....unable to break the protesters’ discipline or determination, the Mubarak forces resorted to guns, shooting 45 and killing 2, according to witnesses and doctors interviewed early that morning. The soldiers — perhaps following orders to prevent excessive bloodshed, perhaps acting on their own — finally intervened. They fired their machine guns into the ground and into the air, several witnesses said, scattering the Mubarak forces and leaving the protesters in unmolested control of the square, and by extension, the streets.

Mubarak's thugs were giving the demonstrators a hard time even without using guns. Say whatever you want about people power, but it's not going to work in the short term when only the bad guys have guns. The military intervention was crucial.

2. Whether Obama did a good job or bad job depends on whether you grade on a curve or as an absolute measure of what's right. See the article linked above for where the pressure was coming from - compared to most of his top advisors, the Israeli and Arab leaders, and some European leaders, Obama leaned in the correct direction. OTOH, it's not hard to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys here, despite the blindness of a number of American conservatives. Decide for yourself how you grade, I guess. I usually lean toward the curve, with the understanding that that diminishes my estimate of the person. Anyway, interesting assessment of Obama here in Foreign Policy.

3. I find the strange morality of the foreign policy realists to be truly weird. They seem to think we're morally obligated to back evil dictators because that's what we've been doing all along. I sillyly thought that the point of realism is to chuck morality, that of course you throw someone under the bus when they no longer serve, and that the First Rule of Realist Club is you always back the winning horse.

Israeli leaders have their own version of this - they seem to think that moralistic analysis requires foreign support of the Israeli state, the "shining light" of democracy in the Middle East, but also that morality must be chucked out the window when one consider the realist analysis of pro-democracy revolution in Egypt and its possible effect on Israeli security. I'm not buying this yoga position, and I don't think that either a realist analysis or a moralist analysis gives the US much reason to support Israel's occupation of West Bank and Gaza.

USA (heart) Tahrir

About twice a decade, I actually get off my duff, pick up a sign, and exercise my right to peacefully assemble for redress of grievances. It seems to take young people dying in foreign countries, but in the case of Burma last time and Egypt now, I finally made a tiny effort and joined the demonstration in San Francisco last Saturday. People loved the sign, btw, and a dozen strangers took photographs of my wife and myself holding it. Maybe it will help in some little way to make up for the fact that the US government hasn't exactly come out swinging to demand Mubarak get the heck out.

My Egyptian neighbor pointed out that only if Mubarak is out of power can they have a chance of following Tunisia's example and dissolve the corrupt ruling party and chase down the billions of stolen funds. This transition period we're working on will instead give the bad guys lots of time to hide their money and make sure it benefits the economies of Switzerland and the Cayman Islands instead of Egypt.

Let's just hope it works out.

(And an interesting factoid: Egypt has had the most news coverage of any international news story since tracking began four years ago, and the fourth highest of any news story at all in that period. Maybe people are paying attention. While the role of Twitter and Facebook may be overplayed within Egypt, the new social media might be helping with international attention.)

UPDATE: and following the good news today (Feb 11), the Swiss have frozen Mubarak's assets. My neighbor was right.

Conservative incoherence on Egypt

I don't have anything innovative to say about Egypt, except wishing Obama would push a little harder. I've found the conservative incoherence about Egypt pretty interesting though - the movement can't make up its mind. They would call it vigorous debate, I suppose, but since no one denies the possibility for an anti-American future polity, what it really comes down to is whether that possibility outweighs a present and possible future democracy. I don't consider that a particularly hard one to call. Some conservatives, even particularly unimpressive ones, agree with me, but others are letting their nationalistic and anti-Islamic bias triumph over everything else.

One thing the US can do is get ahead of the curve for other Arab countries. Things in Jordan and Yemen are heating up, so maybe some external influence on those governments could have a modest impact.

UPDATE: I don't know enough about international human rights violations to decide if this legal argument works, but if the US and Europe made the argument ASAP that thugs attacking demonstrators will be subject to arrest worldwide, that might have a slight deterrent effect.

Spotted: the elusive alarmist equivalent to denialists

RealClimate has a good writeup on a small NGO whose analysis is that temperatures will rise 2.4C by 2020, an increase that's not far from the low end of what mainstream analyses think can happen by 2100.

I think this example helps explain the process that a denialist goes through with the denialist's own ridiculous analysis. In the NGO's case, they took a relatively simple equation used to calculate the equilibrium result for climate change based on increased CO2, and applied it themselves, without seeming to care that all the established climatologists had totally different result. Unsurprisingly, they did it wrong.

It seems like a combination of incredible hubris, thinking they could do a simple thing right that everyone else had done wrong for some reason, and further thought, according to journalist Stephen Leahy, something like "well at least it will get a conversation going about this important issue." In other words, accuracy is less important than getting attention in the direction they want to see it go.

Straight denialist-like/skeptic-like motivations, with the exception of a few denialists who may be completely lying or utterly uninterested in the accuracy of their claims.

UPDATE: And of course, I personally would never take a simple argument, like tidal amplification, and claim to find a new effect that no one's ever noticed.

Random comments I've posted elsewhere

On whether the Singularity's a problem:

Those who deny the Singularity also have to assume a near-future end to Moore’s Law and virtually no improvement thereafter. I think the contrary assumption is more probable, that Moore’s Law will continue to operate and may even accelerate in the 21st Century (and beyond, but that’s not essential).

I think it takes little imagination, that someone, somewhere, will use AI to make our lives better. I don’t expect AI to instantly turn our smart toasters into killing machines, and maybe they never will, but 10-20 Moore’s Law generations after the point of AI sapience, we’ll have little choice over the outcome.

We also might merge with the machines, but again, the biological part won’t be able to keep up with the non-biological part for very long.

On whether the biologists critiquing evolutionary psychology go on to condemn the entire field (I'm going to come back to this, it's relevant to climate denialism):

Carl, I think Coyne would disagree with your statement that he thinks evo psych can’t be done at all. This is from your link to him:

“Now I don’t oppose evolutionary psychology on principle. The evolutionary source of our behavior is a fascinating topic, and I’m convinced that the genetic influences are far stronger than, say, posited by anti-determinists like Dick Lewontin, Steve Rose, and Steve Gould. Evolved adaptations are particularly likely to be found in sexual behavior, which is intimately connected with the real object of selection: the currency of reproduction. I’m far closer in my views on this topic to Steve Pinker than to Steve Gould. And there are many good studies in the field, so I don’t mean to tar the whole endeavor.”

An older one on why the Obama administration took so long to partially fix the Republican War on Science:

One potential reason for delay is that there was an internal battle between this okay document versus pure drivel, this okay document versus something with more heft, or a combination of both. Just speculating.

And on a denialist claim that you can construct a climate model to say anything:

I’m not aware of any climate models that fail to show warming. I think Mr. Calhoun is talking out of his hat. And it’s not like the coal and oil industry is too poor to create a model. My guess is that they’ve fooled around with it privately, but the mangling they have to do to get the outcome they want is so bad that they’ve never trotted it out. Yet more evidence against the denialists, as if more was needed.

The Obama responsibility period began this week

With exactly two years since Obama's inauguration having passed, I'm somewhat arbitrarily picking this as the time where his administration bears greater responsibility for anything done well or poorly by the executive branch than any previous administration. Credit and blame can be adjusted on a case by case basis - for example, Bush bears more responsibility for 9/11 than Clinton because he downgraded counter-terrorism efforts - but as a general matter this makes some sense to me.

A different question is when the current administration bears more responsibility than all previous administrations combined. I'd give about four years for that one.

I realize these are somewhat unfair and rushed periods, saying that a president has the responsibility to fix the mistakes of previous 200 years in four, but it's not supposed to be an easy job.

Global coolers not fessing up, and a SECOND not-wrong (?) Roger Pielke Jr. post

Green Grok catches a few denialists saying in 2008 that we're about to cool off, and asks them to fess up (Watts Up, of course is one of them). Good luck with the fessing up, though.

Deltoid had something similar with Andrew Bolt, who's equally unlikely to fess up.

I seem to see Don Easterbrook showing up more often in various places for who knows why. He predicts cooling, but won't bet on it.

In other news, 2011 is off to a good start. The year's barely begun and yet there's a post by Roger Pielke Jr. that's not obviously wrong, claiming the media does a decent job of portraying scientific understanding of sea level rise. While I didn't exactly RTFR as Eli Rabett demands, I did skim TFR that the post is based on and it still looks okay, and both the post and FR are free of hippie-punching. Progress! RP Jr also had a not-wrong post in 2010, and quite likely more that I've simply missed.

BTW, I swear I was going to skip the snarking, but on my way to recover Roger's post, I found this regarding climate change and tropical storms:

It is simply logical that a signal that cannot be seen for decades is not immediately relevant to judgments of near-term risk.

No, it's not logical to say that when we can derive damage from climate change, even if we can't distinguish it from the huge amounts of noise.

What I've been up to at the Water District

Thought I'd cross reference some posts I've done for my Water District blog. I'll have to decide whether they're really relevant here or not for future posts. As I've said before, the work is turning out to be more about good government than straight environmentalism, but the two concepts certainly overlap when you're talking about watershed restoration, flood control, and water supply.

New chair and vice chair, and thoughts about the Gold Street project

Second board meeting: environmental review issues, ag water, and water rates

First day on the job, and questions about being the Chair in 2011

And here's a nice editorial from the San Jose Mercury News:

Mercury News editorial: At last, new leadership for Santa Clara Valley Water District

"There was a concern in the past that the (Santa Clara Valley Water District) board was somewhat dysfunctional," observed its new chairman, former county Supervisor Don Gage, as he accepted the gavel Tuesday.

Somewhat? That's putting it mildly.

What a relief to have Gage and Vice Chairwoman Linda LeZotte at the district's helm. Along with Brian Schmidt, they were elected in November as reformers. Having them head the board for the next two years -- the vice chairman generally ascends to chairman -- should reset the district's course.

....

The district for years has been distracted by board and management blunders. Now it can concentrate on the critical work of protecting our water supply, including shoring up dams that are vulnerable to earthquakes.

At the risk of repetition: What a relief.

Steps toward burning biomass in coal plants

Science Daily reports on progress towards making it feasible to burn biomass in coal power plants, using the "torrefaction" process to reduce plants to a burnable powder. I read Joe Romm a year or two ago talking about using biomass at coal plants, and this is another step in that direction.

The importance isn't just in a new potential carbon-neutral power source - it means potentially co-opting the coal power industry away from denialism and opposition to action. The coal mining industry would obviously have a different view, but this could strip them of an ally.

It's important politically as much as in any other way.

The housecleaning:global climatic disruption analogy

I've been giving this analogy a lot of thought.

Current housecleaning situation: not bad. Everything I own is scattered on the floor, where it's easily seen and retrieved. I just release whatever I'm currently holding and no longer want, and pick up the thing I do want.

The problem is this isn't sustainable into the future. I know to a near certainty that if I don't do something to mitigate the floorhouse covering, then Global Housecleaning will occur, and I'll be forced to adapt. Adaptation is definitely suboptimal, because things will be Put Away where I can Never Find Them Again.

The analogy to climate mitigation also works, because I can avoid Global Housecleaning through the mitigation step of putting things away myself, which results in a slightly better chance of being able to find them. However, I don't like doing this, and I still have trouble finding things that are put away, so even though I know it's better for all concerned to lead with mitigation, what I end up with is often adaptation.

I suppose I could be mitigating right now, instead of blogging. Or maybe I can do that tomorrow.

Let the voters decide the California budget, through a pendulum-arbitration-style vote

Jonathan Zasloff has a great idea for addressing California's budget crisis: each of the two main political parties presents a budget to the voters, with an honest description by the Legislative Analyst's office, and the voters get to choose one. There's some hand-wringing in the comments about how this could be established, but a constitutional amendment voter initiative seems like the way to do it to me.

This sounds much like pendulum arbitration, which tends to force each side to be reasonable - if it's not reasonable, then the other side wins. Voters have enacted so many limits on legislative budgeting (and I'm guilty of voting for some of them) that we might as well force voters to take responsibility for this.

My one hesitation is that the passage of Proposition 25 means only a majority and not two-thirds of the legislature is needed to pass a budget. Maybe that will start fixing things. OTOH, this is a way to put taxes and budgets on the same level, instead of requiring a two-thirds vote.

More generally, I think progressives need to get over the fact that conservatives sometimes win voter initiatives, and just get out there and fight for good ones, like Proposition 25 and medical marijuana have proven to be.

Happy Holidays!

Will be out of touch for a while, maybe sometime early January. Meanwhile, those who missed it should read Brad Johnson's piece from a few weeks back explaining the need to give solutions to people in order to convince them the problem is real.

Volokh Corrections #28 and #29: Adler should study environmental groups, Lindgren should review abstracts more carefully

Several weeks ago I was listening to Environmental Defense Fund's Insider Podcast where they described how their advocacy of "catch-shares" for commercial fisheries (allocating a percentage of fish caught to individual fishermen, instead of a quota) has created an ownership interest among fishermen that supports sustainable fishing. It was also a short time after the election where the California electorate preserved our premier climate change law, ratifying the way for the second-largest cap-and-trade market in the world to begin functioning in 2012.

About the same time, Jonathan Adler is writing about the "decline of the environmental movement" as it supposedly veers off course. Personally, I'm not surprised that environmental concerns played a lesser role than economic ones in the worst economy since the 1930s. Even then, climate legislation got further at the national level than it previously had in 10 years, California and other states move forward, the EPA will take its own actions on climate, and environmental groups continue to innovate. Adler could benefit from undertaking some research on these issues.

And more recently, Jim Lindgren complains about the pernicious effect of long-term unemployment benefits, quoting a study as finding "a 0.4% increase in the unemployment rate because of extending benefits for up to a total of 99 weeks." What he missed in the study is its main conclusion, that:

Analysis of unemployment data suggests that extended unemployment insurance benefits have not been important factors in the increase in the duration of unemployment or in the elevated unemployment rate.

Yes, it also found a 0.4% increase in unemployment from extending benefits, but that is minor in comparison to the real factors driving long-term unemployment. This makes clear the level of hardship Lindgren and friends would impose on people who are jobless and are sincerely looking.

There's also a bias in the study that suggests the 0.4% figure doesn't represent slackers. The study authors can think of two reasons why extending benefit durations could increase unemployment:

First, the extension of UI benefits, which represents an increase in their value, may reduce the intensity with which UI-eligible unemployed individuals search for work. This could occur because the additional UI benefits reduce the net gains from finding a job and also serve as an income cushion that helps households maintain acceptable consumption levels in the face of unemployment shocks (Chetty 2008). Alternatively, the measured unemployment rate may be artificially inflated because some individuals who are not actively searching for work or who are unwilling to take available jobs are identifying themselves as active searchers in order to receive UI benefits.

A third possibility is the rate is artificially inflated because people who would've given up in the absence of UI benefits accept the condition placed on receiving benefits, that they seek actively seek work and would accept jobs. They're not liars, and no one is being harmed by extending their benefits.

So just like Adler, Lindgren might benefit from studying the subject he's writing about more closely.

First day on the job

My first water district board meeting was on Tuesday the 14th, and I've yet to rescue the world from all that's terrible. Actually, we did okay. If you feel like watching nearly six hours of scintillating and occasionally confused dialog, you can see it here.

Not sure if I did anything myself that directly helped the environment. I did speak in support of a project that helps endangered fish by keeping invasive species out of our streams, but it was really a budgetary comment (the program to help endangered species had spent a lot of money to date on planning and design, so I wanted to express my support for seeing some money starting to be spent on actions that help the fish).

I think a lot of our environmental work is going to be like this, where the environmental benefit results from getting good government efforts through first.

And today, I spoke on behalf of the Water District at the ceremonial ground-breaking for a new pedestrian overpass crossing Highway 101 here in Mountain View (it extends a creekside trail, thus the Water District connection and funding). That was fun, definitely environmental, and I got the chance to blather on despite having no personal responsibility for the decisions that all happened long before me. Life of a politician....

Ice911.org presentation

Last week, on a tip from John Mashey, I went to a presentation in Portola Valley about the Ice911 organization. They have an intriguing if still-a-little vague approach to the loss of ice by using floating, retrievable, high albedo material in water that would either facilitate freezing or slow melting by making water cooler than it would otherwise be.

I had found their website a little frustrating in that it never showed or even described their product. I think one reason for that is what they really have is a concept and don't want to focus on any particular product - the version of their concept that actually works may end up being very different. The lawyer in me also suspects an intellectual property reason - while they're a non-profit, they can leverage investments by selling or leasing exclusive rights, and that means they can't publish a description of their work too early.

Anyway, I wish them luck. They're operating on a shoestring budget financed by what I'm guessing are wealthy local individuals (helpful for them to be located in one of wealthiest towns in the US). They call what they're doing "eco-engineering" to distinguish it from the more blase attitude found with some geoengineering schemes.

The albedo cooling concept might also be relevant to other areas. We lose a lot of water in reservoirs to evaporation. Maybe their ideas would have application here in California, and any water saved is water we don't have to pump from hundreds of miles away - a big energy savings as well as a reduction in net demand for water.

Judging the experts on the arsenic-bacteria pushback

Here's an angry pushback contradicting the implications of the recent Science article finding Mono Lake bacteria that could use arsenic instead of phosphorus. It's interesting from my perspective because I know virtually nothing about the field and am completely incompetent to judge its validity, but it feels like the pushback you see from the 3% of climatologists who have some doubts about climate disruption. It does sound "sciencey", which must be what climate skeptics think when they read something from Lindzen or Michaels telling them what they want to hear.

In this case, my worth-little gut reaction is that she might have a point. A big difference from people like Pielke Sr. and Judith Curry is that Redfield seems to be attracting support from experts (see the comments), instead of incredulous looks. And she's pushing back on a single paper at the cutting edge of new research, instead of trying to overturn decades of established knowledge. Finally, while her certainty in the post is offputting (as is her attacks on the Mars meteorite researchers, one of whom was a housemate of mine), she's much more reasonable in response to comments that criticize her post.

Should be interesting to see where this goes.

UPDATE: As Eli comments below, the problem may be pushing a cool discovery far beyond where it belongs. I posted something relevant to Rosie Redfield's blog:

This part of the OP interested me, re that either P or As had to be added for the bacteria to grow:

"(21) Agreed, with the proviso that the media be tested and shown to be identical except for the phosphate and arsenate. But this wouldn't mean that arsenic replaced phosphorus in any biological molecules in GFAJ cells, just that the cells needed arsenate for something."

That cells needed arsenate for something would be an interesting finding, I'd guess. And cells need As for something that P does is also implied by this finding.

Is this an area of potential agreement between the original article authors and critics?

(IANAS, BTW, so YMMV)

Someone finally mentions the attack on the EPA will come through budget resolutions

I've babbled for months now that the Congressional Republican attack on environmental protection will be through the budget process, not through Clean Air Act revisionist legislation that would be subject to a Senate filibuster and an Obama veto.

Someone finally acknowledges that, in an Environmental Defense podcast (starting around minute 35). There they call it a potential "rider" or an add-on to an appropriations bill that would be very difficult for the Senate to kill or for Obama to veto. That's very close to what I'm concerned about, but an even more insidious and hard-to-kill action would be to zero out the budget for anything EPA could do to enforce application of the Clean Air Act to climate change issues. So I'm glad it's finally noticed, and the question is how to respond.

Complicating this is the Republican threat to de-fund health care reform. I could easily seeing the Republican controlled House passing a budget that both de-funds health care and prohibits spending money to enforce the Clean Air Act. They will then attempt horse-trading, and I fear the concession that they'll ask for.

I think it's to the Democrats' advantage to say these are established laws that aren't to be part of any games that Republicans will use instead of trying for revocation, and make sure the Republicans are set to take the blame if the Republicans cause a government shutdown over the budget.

Lomborg misunderstands city subsidence and sea level rise

Maybe I should ignore this Bjorn Lomborg Op-Ed like everyone else has, but one part got a rise out of me. He compares subsidence that's happened in certain cities due to groundwater depletion to the long-term, multi-century sea level rise of 15 feet (actually it could be more than that), and says that we've handled "large relative sea-level rises without much difficulty." In other words, adaptation is no big deal.

I don't know the cities he's talking about, but I do know about subsidence in San Jose along San Francisco Bay. Contrary to Lomborg's statement, it's a big deal and a serious problem, especially when combined with other potential flooding problems that usually exist because cities are normally located near rivers.

The other point Lomborg misses is that city subsidence is geographically limited. The only area that needs to be protected from relative sea level rise is a small stretch of shoreline. And cities are the most economically valuable land on the planet, so the cost of protecting them relative to their value constitutes the best possible scenario.

Sea level rise, even minor sea level rise, is a much bigger deal. Here in Santa Clara County, we're going to have to deal with it, and it's already costing taxpayers money. Flood projects for near-sea-level creeks are right now being designed to handle sea level rise, which is the only intelligent way to construct these long-term structures. Adaptation is already here, it's a significant problem, and the question is who should pay for the costs. Seems like greenhouse gas emissions would be a good place to look for a tax to pay for greenhouse gas costs.

Christy lays down an (unclear, skewed) marker

From a good and unsettling news article on accelerated glacier flow and melting in Greenland:

John R. Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who is often critical of mainstream climate science, said he suspected that the changes in Greenland were linked to this natural variability, and added that he doubted that the pace would accelerate as much as his colleagues feared.

For high predictions of sea-level rise to be correct, “some big chunks of the Greenland ice sheet are going to have to melt, and they’re just not melting that way right now,” Dr. Christy said.

It's not clear exactly what Christy is saying is wrong - no numbers are attached. However, Christy generally thinks the IPCC overstates climate change. If the currently-observed rates cited in the article continue (no need for the pace to accelerate) then the IPCC has understated an impact from climate change. So Christy's bet should be that the current melting will decrease. Wonder if he'd put money on that.

Teaching appropriate technology to wild chimpanzees

I wrote several years ago about the idea that we could facilitate cultural transmission between chimpanzee groups. Another reason for doing that came to light earlier this fall - some chimps in Guinea have learned how to destroy wildlife snares set by poachers. These wire-loop snares set under tension can accidentally catch chimps by the hands and feet, leading to partial amputations, and some male chimps have learned to break the branch that's used to create the tension.

So the idea would be to teach other chimps hundreds of miles away the same technique. Exactly how to teach them is a little tricky. Maybe the handful of groups that are used to people can be shown a model snare and how to break it, or possibly even shown a video similar to the one at the link, showing other chimps breaking snares. The other trick is getting juvenile female chimps to learn the technique, because males stay with the group they grow up with, while females disperse to new areas and can take their knowledge with them.

I don't know, maybe it's not feasible. But just the fact that we can consider teaching chimps appropriate technology in a manner resembling the way we think human societies can be taught appropriate technology suggests that highly intelligent animals should be considered as having some kind of intrinsic moral value.

UPDATE (slightly related): a psychologist finds that human males are much less aggressive if shown pictures of meat. Chimps are somewhat similar - Jane Goodall wrote that the dominance structure breaks down in the aftermath of a successful kill by chimps that were hunting monkeys, and an otherwise-dominant male will beg for meat from a subordinate but won't attempt to take it away.

Iron Law versus BOSO

Thought I'd just spell out the timeline I reference in the previous post.

• 2006 (a gubernatorial election year): Democrats in the California Assembly pass AB 32, mandating greenhouse gas reductions. The Democratic candidate for governor immediately supports the bill. After some equivocating, Republican incumbent Arnold Schwarzenegger signs the legislation instead of vetoing it.

• 2006-2010: Cap-and-trade consistently discussed as an important part of implementing AB 32.

• October 28, 2010: California Air Resources Board announces cap-and-trade will be part of implementing AB 32.

• November 2, 2010: Voters reject Proposition 23, which would have suspended AB 32, on a 60-40 vote.

• November 5, 2010: Roger Pielke Jr. announces on National Public Radio that "the iron law of climate policy simply says that while people are willing to bear some cost for environmental objectives, that willingness has its limits. And cap and trade ran up against those limits time and again, and it's not surprising that it failed."

I think RPJ's Iron Law has some hindcasting problems. He could say it's just a reference to national politics, but his Iron Law doesn't seem phrased that way.

In lieu of the RPJ Iron Law, I'd like to propose BOSO, or Brian's Obvious Statement of the Obvious, which is that getting 60 votes in the Senate is hard. While BOSO may not sound quite as profound, I think it has better explanatory power and does better with hindcasting.

UPDATE: A nice write-up on California's proposed cap-and-trade by Michael Wara is here.

UPDATE 2: Matt Yglesias had a near-identical point here that I just stumbled upon. I like the term BOSO more than YOSO, though.

UPDATE 3: I was happy to find a RPJ post I agreed with on the value of testing carbon sequestration for a coal plant operation. Maybe it's not too surprising as a post, in that it gives him a chance to go hippie-punching against the Sierra Club, but in this case I think he's right and Sierra Club is wrong.

How to be a climate hawk and a polite elected official

One of an important number of problems I saw with the elected leadership where I ran for office was insufficient politeness to members of the public, to the staff, and to each other. So now I'm an elected official wondering how to deal with things here on my personal blog, where I don't feel very politely inclined toward some people on climate issues.

I'll try to handle it mainly by the fact that this isn't where I intend to discuss Water District issues primarily, something I'll do at my campaign blog. There, I'll be Mr. Polite. No climate denialists being labelled there, just misguided skeptics. And it's helpful to remember that the position is with a special district without even the police power of local government.

As for here, I'll continue to point out problems, like the ones with (non-denialist) Roger Pielke Jr.'s alleged Iron Law that economic policies will always outweigh climate policies. Roger claims that his book is much more subtle and one shouldn't criticize his Iron Law without first reading (buying) his book. I'm going to have to pass on that suggestion - buying the book is probably creating a bad incentive given his past work on these issues.

The point I tried to make is that I'm certain that had Prop. 23 won in California, then Roger would've claimed it as vindication of his Iron Law. Instead it got roundly thumped and California moves ahead on its cap-and-trade provisions, right before Roger explains on national radio that moving ahead on cap-and-trade will be stopped at the ballot box. Roger could try to make the argument made against me, that it was unfair to focus on ancillary benefits from fighting climate change, and that defenseless Texas oil companies and coal billionaires had no ability to respond, but the question is whether you can get climate change policies passed. We can, and Roger's Iron Law seems pretty squishy.

But he is polite though, so I'll give him credit for that. Thanks!

Looks like your humble climate blogger is going to be an elected official

Results are here. It's not over, but I can't see them changing, and I'm going to bed.

Life will be interesting....

(Thanks for the help, support, and links!)

Last pre-election update for my campaign

Last one here, anyway, I'll be busy at the campaign blog until Election Day. Previous post was here.

I feel reasonably optimistic about the race, but it's impossible to tell for sure in an open seat election with two serious candidates in a local race - I certainly can't afford a poll. I hope my opponent spends his money on one but he doesn't seem likely to make such a big mistake, and the results would be useless anyway in a race that many voters won't think about until they pick up their voter guides.

I feel pretty good in having done far better in endorsements and having an active ground campaign. With 133,000 voters, we can't reach them all, but we've done a reasonable amount of precinct walking with the help of volunteers, as well as going to farmers markets, train stations, and a few special events with a lot of people. As far as I can tell, my opponent doesn't have that ground campaign.

His one advantage is money. This election has no contribution limits. I set my own, at $250/person, $500/organization, and invited my opponent to do the same but he declined. His advantage is from big donations that range four to ten to twenty times the maximum donation I'll accept. All perfectly legal, of course, and I have no reason to suspect improper deals, but it is an issue regardless. He has virtually no small contributions, though, and I have tons, and that helps build support. I still have one more printing going out, so if anyone wants to help out with a small donation, you can donate here (must be US citizen or permanent resident).

There are many other worthy issues and candidates, of course. I am deeply concerned about national politics. Voters will punish Democrats for failing to completely fix the mess created by Republican leadership, and do so by electing Republicans. In the long run, this will actually help Democrats, because the Republicans need to have some kind of ideas other than keeping government out of Medicare. The Tea Party types may someday morph into a libertarian concept that's useful, but they're nowhere near that now, and winning now will stop that transformation. Demographics will also kill the Republican prospects with non-whites and young people who accept homosexuals and science. All we can do is support good people on the national stage - I just gave some money to Congressman Jerry McNerney, and others could do something similar.

More locally, I support my fellow Water District candidate and excellent environmentalist Linda Lezotte in her race (we're in different electoral districts). I also support Water District Measure C, imposing okay-but-not-great term limits.

Mountain View Council Member Margaret Abe-Koga has done a great job. The other two incumbents, Ronit Bryant and Jac Siegel, should also be re-elected, but I know that Margaret in particular has stuck her neck out to take on some regional challenges. Jim Zito running for Evergreen School District in San Jose has also taken some strong environmental stances, and many school districts have been more than ready to throw the environment out the window if it saves them some money, so Jim's presence is needed.

Other than that, we'll see what happens next Tuesday!

(And one good thing I remembered - we've sent thousands of postcards out reminding voters of the problem of sea level rise and San Francisco Bay, something the Water District will have to deal with, so we're keeping climate disruption in the minds of voters.)

Salvaging climate action in one-eighth of the US, and other stuff

I've felt a little guilty about not doing more to fight Prop 23, the Texas oil company initiative to kill California's fight against climate change. I've been busy, although I have been talking about climate change in my campaign. The one thing I did do was send some money their way, and it would be great if anyone reading this would do the same. California is one-eighth of the US economy, so what it does is important. Tesoro, Valero, and Koch brothers are attacking California for a reason, so fighting back is important.

Related stuff - a great interview by Rachel Maddow with climate denialist/(apparently former) HIV denialist/radiation enthusiast Art Robinson. How she keeps her sense of humor is beyond me. At the same link is the video debunking of Robinson's Oregon Petition that fraudulently claimed 32,000 scientists dispute climate change.

And yesterday, I was precinct walking for my campaign and a nice old man in slippers invited me into his living room. He was an arch-conservative, couldn't stand Obama, and convinced that climate change is only natural. Then he said that based on his gut reaction to me, he liked me and would give his vote to me. My reaction: I'll take it!

I don't usually join the media-bashing, but this Chamber stuff qualifies

Yet another report from Think Progress on how the US Chamber of Commerce is accepting foreign funds and putting them in the same accounts it uses for political lobbying.

I read this particularly shameful New York Times article that simply accepts the Chamber's claim that it keeps the money separate without providing an accounting, accepts the Chamber's claim that it's a small amount, and worst of all, refused to interview Think Progress to give them a chance to respond (see the first link above - "Most reporters (from the New York Times, McClatchy, the Associated Press, etc.) never contacted ThinkProgress, instead opting to only interview Chamber officials.")

I know some of our local Chambers here in Santa Clara County, and some of them do good work. But the US Chamber is doing some terrible work, and the media is making it even worse.

Republican Party denialism and Roger Pielke Jr.'s analysis

The National Journal finds that no major party in any democracy is as thoroughly in denial about climate science as the Republican Party. Roger Pielke Jr. writes "it didn't have to be this way....I have no idea as to how that circumstance may have evolved differently." That seems incoherent to me, especially as he acknowledges a strong and widespread anti-environment shift among Republican political candidates. He does his best to blame climatologists for provoking this shift instead of reacting to the shift.

What I really had been looking for in Roger's work is this piece from 2007 saying that climate science was so widely accepted that the "issue of science is no longer relevant to debate in Congress." Even in 2007, the massive level of Republican denialism meant only 57 Senators accepted the consensus position. Not enough to overcome a filibuster, and Roger felt that denialism didn't matter.

I think the level of denialism at the highest level of the Republican Party has an obvious connection to the inaction we've had in the US, and it should be a pretty obvious connection.

Unfortunately, it took me a while to find that 2007 post of Roger's. While looking for it, I also came across this one from 2009 saying cap-and-trade is likely to get Congressional support sufficient to pass in the next few years; another one making the (incomprehensible to me) argument that improved mitigation of potential weather-related damages doesn't affect the damage signal from climate change; and another from 2007 saying the public has accepted climate change science (with the implication being there's no point in battling denialists).

I'm not finding any of these five blog posts particularly persuasive.

And the voting starts

So here's my video campaign statement, courtesy of the free services provided by the Midpeninsula Community Media Center, which will be showing candidate videos on their channels:

I should've talked a little faster I think, but it wasn't too bad for a 20 minute session and my first use of a Teleprompter. My opponent apparently decided to skip doing it.

Nothing about climate change in there, but I've said quite a bit elsewhere.

In answer to the most common question - how's the campaign going? - I can't really tell for sure. The people I talk to are enthusiastic supporters but there's an obvious selection effect. I've done very well with endorsements. We've got people walking precincts too (no sign of my opponent doing the same), and this is a Democratic Party-favoring area. On the other hand, my opponent's got decent name recognition as a Council member of one of the four biggest towns in the district.

So we'll just keep pushing, and we'll get the answer in less than a month.

What Captain Kirk would do with the Texas oil companies and Proposition 23

Proposition 23 would use its weasel language to kill California's premier law to fight climate change, AB 32 (requiring rosy economic conditions that rarely happen before AB 32 could come into effect). It's a tool of Texas oil companies to delay inevitable action to address climate change.

The oil companies could have vigorously expanded into alternative energy, but they chose this approach instead - trying to slow down their demise by taking California and the rest of the planet with them.

I agree with Captain Kirk:

You can start after minute 1, or at minute 2:30. I need to learn how to edit these things.

Attention literalists: I don't advocate doing this to real humans (or real Klingons), but for the fossil fuel corporations that are trying to take us down with them, I've had enough.

The No on Prop 23 Campaign is here.

The small, non-zero set where Laughlin is right and Hansen is wrong

Michael Tobis dismantles the "thought" involved in a piece by physicist Robert Laughlin that mostly repeats the climate consensus science. With the scientific depth that anyone could get from Wikipedia, Laughlins says that on the time scale of centuries, after we're done adding CO2 emissions to the atmosphere, most of it will be absorbed by oceans but some will remain in the atmosphere, heating the climate for more centuries/millenia until geologic processes finally capture it.

The alleged insight by Laughlin is his argument that we're going to consume all fossil fuels so all the handwringing and attempts to escape the future won't work. This is a political judgment that we're incapable of making a decision to refrain from burning everything. I don't see why a physicist has any great claim to insight on that question. (It also ignores the possibility of sequestering carbon and keeping it sequestered, but that's just yet another flaw.) Due to Laughlin's poor writing, where he says things like the climate is "beyond our power to control" he confuses people with potential denialism, but I think he's basically talking about his political willpower claim.

To a tiny extent, though, Laughlin has a decent argument. People like Jim Hansen opposed the cap-and-trade legislation this summer because it wasn't perfect and instead reflected political compromises. I think Laughlin is right that our political will isn't infinite, and Hansen is wrong to reject a solution that reflects political constraints. Laughlin just goes way too far in the other direction of assuming zero political willpower.

My own little electoral campaign reflects this. My Republican opponent has never mentioned climate change, so I don't know how he feels about it. I've talked about how our Water District has to deal with it, and is dealing with it. I could theoretically argue that we should also immediately cut our water consumption in half, which would reduce a lot of energy demand by eliminating the need to pump water from the Sacramento Delta all the way to here in Santa Clara County. But I think that's unrealistic, and instead we just need to focus on conservation that's possible. We can't do everything, but we can do something, and I think both Laughlin and Hansen need to get that right.

One other note. To be fair to Laughlin, he gets this right: "humans can unquestionably do damage persisting for geologic time if you count their contribution to biodiversity loss. A considerable amount of evidence shows that humans are causing what biologists call the “sixth mass extinction,” an allusion to the five previous cases in the fossil record where huge numbers of species died out mysteriously in a flash of geologic time. "

I've thought for a while that the mass extinction we're causing, probably dating back to the extinction of ice age mammals, and definitely dating back to numerous island extinctions, could be seen as our biggest effect on the environment, one that will take millions of years for nature to fix. Climate change accelerates the problem because species have to move in response, but we've destroyed the connecting habitat that could make migration possible.

My Water District campaign update - so far, so good

I wrote a while back that I was running for office for a Director's position at the Santa Clara Valley Water District, and my low output here lately has a lot to do with the work in the election. It's a lot of work.

So far, so good though - here's the campaign website endorsement list, and it's pretty good. I've got one opponent whose campaign says they're going to raise a boatload of money, so that's the challenge to deal with.

I've tried to tie some of my work with climate change, but it's not the first thing that voters focus on. Still, flooding of San Francisco Bay is a concern among folks, and I've tried to pick up on that. I'm also hoping to help mobilize people against Proposition 23 (the Texas oil funded proposal to kill California climate change efforts) at the same time through the campaign.

It'll be even more interesting if I get elected. I'm not sure how many bloggers focused on climate change went on to get into office. We'll see what I can do if elected. Eli Rabett has rightly focused on the fact that the problem is with the political system, not the scientists, but I'll do what I can on my level. Of course, if anyone wants to pitch in a hand by telling their friends in north Santa Clara County to help out, or even by sending a contribution, that's fantastic too.

Hopefully the posting will pick up a little after the election, and even better, discuss what the heck to do because I've been elected.

Denialist Attorney General shot down in Round 1

Virginia's Attorney General Cuccinelli attempted to investigate Michael Mann for fraud because Cuccinelli (let's call him Cooch) didn't like Mann's views on climate change, but that's hit a road block. A judge thinks the investigatory demand should spell out what the fraud was before Cooch can legally require the University of Virginia to open all of Mann's computer files to Cooch investigators. From the opinion (p. 3-4):

In order for the Attorney General to have "reason to believe" [that fraud may have occurred], he has to have some objective basis to issue a civil investigative demand, which the Court has power to review.

....

What the Attorney General suspects that Dr. Mann did that was false or fraudulent in obtaining funds from the Commonwealth [of Virginia] is simply not stated....

Cooch really has two problems here: first, he couldn't figure out how to say "I think Mann may have intentionally misrepresented data in order to show compliance with grant funding that he had received." That's the first-year law student mistake which has received deserved ridicule.

Second and more important IMHO is that Cooch needs an "objective basis" for suspecting fraud: a little thing called "evidence." Absent that, Cooch is just doing a little thing called "witch hunting." Restating the demand to actually suspect a fraud also requires a reason to suspect fraud, and the judge could decide if the reason is ridiculous.

There's more to the opinion, mostly against Cooch, a little in support of him. The University's lawyers went for the approach of "try any argument that could potentially win" instead of limiting to a few arguments that show Cooch was making frivolous claims, so Cooch did win a few of the subsidiary battles while losing this round. My guess then is that this judge wouldn't sanction the Attorney General for making a frivolous demand, unfortunately.

Unless he's foolhardy, Cooch won't revise his demand or appeal. OTOH, maybe he thinks there are more judges in Virginia whose understanding of the law matches his own.