Did anyone else pick up this Pielke prediction?

From November 11, 2011, RPJr says:

The Obama Administration has put off a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline until immediately after the 2012 election. At that point a newly elected Republican president will be able to quickly approve it or President Obama can do the same without concern for an upcoming election.

Responding to enviro claims that rejecting the original Keystone application was a victory, RPJr continues:

Let's return to this February, 2013 and see if "victory" still smells as sweet -- when plans re-emerge for crude oil flowing south, regardless of who wins the election.

Well, so much for the timing of Pielke's prediction. I think it's quite possible that Obama will approve Keystone, but unlike Romney, he'll counterbalance any approval with something to help the climate. And the more he delays, the more he'll have to counterbalance with something meaningful rather than refer to past actions. Each year the tar sands stay in the ground increases the chance that at least some of it will stay there, so delay has a value in addition to making victory possible.

Happy to link to anyone who pointed this out before.

Snowden helped and harmed the US, so cut him a deal

(Could've sworn I blogged in the past that the Obama Admin had gone too far on the government surveillance, but can't find it. Oh well. (UPDATE:  stumbled on it here, from June last year.))

Not too much original to say here other than if a whistleblower reveals information that causes what passes for a consensus these days in Washington that the government's overreached on surveillance, that's clearly a great benefit to American society and others who've been snooped on.

Snowden also revealed info on how we've snooped on non-allies, which was unnecessary and harmful. Revealing our snooping on allies led to huge hypocrisy from said allies, although it might also help with reduced Orwellianness towards Jane Six-Pack Foreigner. Also worth noting that he apparently lied to a dozen or two fellow employees to persuade them to break protocol and give him their passwords, and they're now as unemployed as he is but minus the celebrity status.

I guess he'd have been more heroic had he stayed to take his punishment, but I don't see it as a requirement that one maximizes the price one pays for doing the right thing (given that a lot of what he did was right).

Assuming the claim he's a Russian spy are just bull, then cut him a deal:  he cooperates to limit any future damage, tells all he knows about where he's hid the information still out there, he forfeits all future book/movie royalties, and in return he comes home and gets probation for a few years.

Sen. Inhofe, got any coastal vacation properties where you want to sell options?

From a comment of mine at Same Facts about coastal properties and sea level rise:

One other option for climate denialist landowners – sell 99-year options to obtain ownership of their land for token value should it become uninhabitable. Denialists will be willing to [sell] this cheaply. Science believers will be willing to buy in order to get whatever residual value the land has other than residential use (harvest, recreation etc.).

A denialist with a large expensive coastal property should be willing sell for a small amount of money an option to buy it for a nominal amount if sea level makes it uninhabitable. The obvious problem is once the land's uninhabitable then it loses a lot of value, but maybe there are other uses that give some benefit to owning it.

I had an earlier version of this idea several years back thinking about the end-of-the-world types and how to bet with them (aren't we due another outbreak?). Climate change isn't the end of the world, but it's going to be curtains for a lot of residences.


UPDATE:  just thought I'd add a personal note - yours truly is now the Vice-Chair of our Water District, a feat I achieved by "waiting my turn." It doesn't mean a whole lot, one or two extra committee assignments. If I'm re-elected then I'll be Chair next year and have the honor of chucking aside any goals I have for the District for that year, to work instead on the goals of the rest of the Board and on everything else the Chair's got to get done. Should be fun.

Two climate politics predictions

My political predictions are somewhat better than my civil war predictions, so with that faint praise, here's one:  if Obama doesn't approve Keystone before November, then he won't approve it at all. It's good politics but bad policy to approve Keystone. The political reward diminishes after the lower-turnout, more conservative, off-presidential election year, while the policy and international reasons for not approving Keystone get stronger with more delay. And not to get too wildly hopeful, stringing along the idiotic Canadian government before cutting them off might make it harder for PM Harper to figure out alternative ways to harm the planet with tar sands.

I only put a little emphasis on the recent addition of climate hawks and Keystone opponents to the Obama admin - he's the one they work for. It might be a hint of how the wind's blowing, though.

OTOH, there's still 10 months to make a decision. And just to caveat it a bit, I could imagine Obama locking himself so close to a promise before the election without getting to the final signoff that he does approve it soon afterwards. So far though this reinforces the obvious point I made almost two years ago that delay is a victory (albeit not THE victory) when you're trying stop somebody else from doing something. Just like it is in Iran.

The other prediction came from reading in Stoat of the welcome retirement for Richard Lindzen, leaving the ranks of non-retired, denialist climatologists even thinner than before. John Mashey noted in the comments that the 2009 "mass" petition to the American Physical Society to deny climate science from 0.45% of its membership was skewed much older than the general membership. My second prediction is this petition will not be repeated because it will be even less successful in the future than it was in 2009, as demographic destiny wins out. This might explain why Singer and friends kept switching from one meritless type of mass document to another - recycling an old one some years later will just highlight increasing consensus.

The climate news hook about record cold is that it doesn't happen much. Also, betting opportunities.

So, it looks like record-breaking cold in parts of the US. That's a great hook for newsmakers to remind us that record-breaking cold doesn't happen nearly as often as record-breaking warmth. It's not hard - all they have to do is show this:

If the blue matched the red, then that might indicate a problem with our understanding of climate change. Occasional deviations, like what we're seeing now, doesn't change that.

The years since 2010 have generally followed this pattern, although 2013 didn't. For one year out of the last 20, record cold exceeded record warmth, but this decade is running at a ratio of 3:1 overall between record highs and record lows. If someone thinks 2014 is likely to have more record cold than warm, let's do a bet.

Speaking of which, via Chris Mooney, I see Fox News' Stuart Varney says we have more of a problem with global cooling than warming. So I sent him this:

We'll see what happens.

Meanwhile, data for the other 98% of the earth's surface would be nice. I probably just haven't looked hard enough. I did find this paywalled Coumou/Robinson/Rahmstorf abstract saying in our warming world record heat is happening five times as often as you'd expect in a non-warming world, so it seems likely there's at least a similar large disparity in heat to cold record ratios worldwide.  

UPDATE:  thanks to Steve Bloom in the comments (and Eli) for finding unpaywalled versions of the Coumou et al. piece. The full article doesn't address cold records, but it clearly shows the ratio of heat records is off the hook because of global warming. And per Daniel Wirt in the comments, the climate change effect of a warming Arctic could be shifting the location of the cold, causing our current cold records.

They keep talking carbon treaties, and I'll keep talking carbon trade agreements

More speculation on a carbon treaty in the news lately, so I'll once again point out that treaties require 67 votes in the Senate while trade agreements require majorities in both houses. Which do you want?

The best-while-feasible outcome may be a treaty without teeth describing goals that maybe could get 67 votes, and then put the real dealmaking in a trade agreement. Or as per the discussion below, blur the distinction between treaties and executive/legislative agreements, and just submit it for majority vote in both houses.

Next-best would be the model the Bushies used with strategic nuclear weapons - reduce our own arsenal but only on the condition that we don't obtain a mutual promise from Russia to do the same. Yes, unilateral concessions are preferable to Republicans over mutual agreements. Maybe simultaneous global unilateral concessions to reduce emissions can happen.

Anyway, a repost from wayback in 2009:

The climate treaty won't be the international agreement with teeth 

Jonathan Zasloff, a friend/law prof/Same Facts blogger, is publishing a proposal in the Northwestern University Law Review suggesting that the US Trade Representative rather than the State Department should take the lead in negotiation a new international climate agreement. (Abstract here, you should also be able to download the full text.) His argument that USTR is better suited than State to coordinate positions of many US governmental agencies makes sense to me. He also argues that the climate agreement could include trade concessions. 

This argument reminds me of one I've made for several years, that trade agreements instead of treaties should provide the real teeth for international climate agreements. The main reason is that treaties need 67 votes in the Senate while trade agreements only need 60 to overcome an initial filibuster. 

I've thought I've been making a lonely argument, but maybe not. I corresponded with Jonathan, and he goes even further. Relevant parts of his email, with his permission to blog them:

I suppose that I disagree with your position because it's not clear to me why climate change agreements need to be submitted as treaties. The Third Restatement of US Foreign Relations Law endorses a pretty broad interchangeability argument.

To be sure, there are those scholars who argue against interchangeability, but it may prove too much. Laurence Tribe has at least suggested quite strongly that all agreements must be submitted as treaties, and so I think he rejects the trade/climate distinction. That could throw out more than 90% of America's international agreements! John Yoo says that something must be submitted as a treaty if it is outside Congress' Article I power, which makes sense, but then he lists a whole lot of things outside that power, which doesn't...

The most recent scholarly statement on the matter is Oona Hathaway's piece in Yale, where she basically says that outside very narrow limitations (not relevant to climate), everything can and should be submitted as an executive-legislative agreement. Her argument is basically policy-based, saying that it makes more sense to do agreements through executive-legislative agreements, and saves the treaty clause from superfluity by these very narrow limitations. 

My very tentative approach is what might be called the Meat Loaf principle, i.e. two out of three ain't bad. The Treaty Clause makes sense because it essentially says that if you're going to ignore the House, you've got to get 2/3 of the Senate; if you're going to override a Presidential veto of a law implementing an international agreement, then you've got to get 2/3 of both Houses. (Interesting and subtle questions of whether an "executive-legislative agreement" can be passed over a Presidential veto, i.e. what's the difference between an executive-legislative agreement and a normal law?). It's a political issue--the way in which an agreement should be submitted depends upon the political context, i.e. whether you can get it through the House or not. 

I think Jonathan is disagreeing with my exclusive reference to trade agreements, and I think he's right that any executive-legislative climate agreement would be constitutional. Doing it as a trade agreement makes political sense, though. 

The other argument for why treaties shouldn't and don't need to be used was in yesterday's New York Times. Johns Yoo and Bolton argue that treaties must be used for a next climate agreement. Anything written by those two johns, particularly by them together, is guaranteed to be both wrong and evil. In particular I don't seen a logical reason why trade agreements under their own argument shouldn't be subject to two-thirds vote. I'm sure Yoo has his nonsensical reason for excluding them, but meshing a climate agreement into a trade agreement would help tie their arguments even further up in knots. 

Here's hoping that Obama listens to the johns and does the opposite. 

(One additional note - this isn't to say there should be no treaty at all. A treaty in addition to some other agreement would be fine, but the teeth should be elsewhere.) 

UPDATE: Just checked, and Jonathan wrote about this issue yesterday.

And if that's not an old-enough post, here's another on the same from my blog toddlerhood in 2005.

Welcome to the 2014 elections

The Hill anticipates a climate change focus in the elections this year where both sides attempt to use it to their advantage. Their argument is anecdotal rather than data driven, but it seems logical enough. Per their anecdote, the first attack ad on a politician for being a climate denier happened last year, and maybe we'll see some more this time around.

Which side will benefit overall is another question, but it's all local. Yours truly will also be up for re-election this year, and if I drew an opponent who denied climate change then that would make things much easier for me. In the Alaska and Kentucky Senate races, climate reality has to overcome some people's self interest and world view.

There's a parallel between the demographic issues the old-guard Republican leadership faces and the climate issue. Young people accept climate science more than the older ones, and demographic replacement marches on. Economic issues may also be getting more complex. The old guard's right that coal jobs are disappearing although they ignore the long-term causes, while renewable energy jobs are growing everywhere and give people reasons to embrace reality. In contrast to that hope, non-presidential elections tend to be more conservative and older. This year will also see many more Democrats than Republicans up for election in the Senate, although the ratio reverses strongly in 2016.

Fun times ahead.

I am the object of people power at Change.org (all four of them)

The parallels between climate denial and fluoride opposition continue to intrigue, especially their mutual rejection of the importance of scientific consensus and their occasionally-sophisticated amateur understanding of the field.

Change.org put up a petition announcing I was personally legally responsible (news to me) for the damages and death caused by our decision to fluoridate our water. My response to the masses of four people* who've signed so far:

Thank you for caring about the quality of the public's water. This water is monitored and tested to a far greater extent than, for instance, bottled water, and is much safer as a result.

I have spent a great deal of time examining the health issues regarding fluoride. My conclusion is that I should not make my own conclusion, as there is too much conflicting information for me as a non-expert to make an adequate conclusion. Instead I look to see if there is a scientific consensus on this issue (and not just this issue but also climate change, evolution, or engineering issues). I think the scientific consensus is that water fluoridation does help prevent caries, and the prevention of caries can also prevent serious health complications from tooth decay. It also seems especially helpful for economically disadvantaged children. I do not think there is a scientific consensus that fluoride is harmless. At the present time, the risk from fluoride is only a potential risk, while the harm from not fluoridating is proven. In my opinion, that justifies fluoridation.

If you think the consensus is wrong, I suggest that you work to change the consensus.

I have written extensively on this at the links below:

http://rabett.blogspot.com/search?q=fluoride&max-results=20&by-date=true

http://backseatdriving.blogspot.com/2011/04/dupont-and-ozone-exxon-and-climate.html 

http://backseatdriving.blogspot.com/2011/03/fluoridating-water-or-funny-thing.html 

Finally, the petition severely overstates its arguments in several respects. Let's choose just one section:

"According to the National Research Council (NRC) and the 2012 Harvard University comprehensive review of the studies, fluoride in drinking water, even at low levels, damages the brain and significantly reduces intelligence. Animal studies conducted in the 1990s by EPA scientists found dementia-like effects at the same concentration (1 ppm) used to “fluoridate” water...."

That "Harvard" study, which I've read, was a study by several researchers affiliated with Harvard. I've no doubt you'll find other "Harvard" studies that support fluoridation. It also neglects the 2010 Health Canada analysis (a true consensus document, unlike the Harvard researchers) that found that most of the same Chinese studies used by the Harvard study were too unreliable and too poor quality to rely upon. The 2006 NRC report, which I've also read, reached the same conclusion that more research was needed. The petition's overstatement doesn't assist its goal.

I'm sorry I'm not in agreement with you. I do think certain issues like vulnerable individuals (guardians of infants reliant on milk formula, maybe others) could use separate education about the issues they face and possible advice to use other water sources. Meanwhile I will rely upon the consensus position, if one exists and as it changes over time. I urge you to go change it if you think that is that is the right approach.

*Not denigrating them at all, I'm glad they're involved, and I'm just recognizing that I swim in a small pond.

Dissent blowback, or two cheers for Justice Scalia

I guess it's lawblogging day, so here's an idea I've been thinking about for years but haven't seen in the legal literature (maybe it's there somewhere):  when the dissent says the majority opinion could have massive legal implications, the dissent is helping making those implications happen.

Let's count down in reverse chronicological order, cheering for Justice Scalia and the anti-gay marriage lawyers:

Hooray!:  Judges in Utah and Ohio say Scalia in dissent was right in saying the Windsor decision requiring federal recognition of gay marriage requires those two states to give some recognition of gay marriage. 

Hip!:  Court majority refuses to respond to dissent's draft argument in a way that limits the potential legal implications of their conclusion. 

Hip!:  Dissent, following the initial vote that shows its opinion will be the dissent and not the majority, argues in a draft response to the draft majority opinion that it will have far-reaching (and by the dissent's perspective, negative) implications. 

Hooray!:  Lawyers/advocates opposing same-sex marriage, not yet knowing the outcome, argue that striking down DOMA could eventually strike down state laws prohibiting same sex marriage. 

Hip!:  Lawyers supporting same-sex marriage dance around implications of striking down DOMA 

Hip!:  Legal action against DOMA begins, but what are the broader legal implications of victory for either side?

I put in bold the two decision points where actors should have known that they were creating a risk of making things worse from their own perspective, but they went ahead and did it anyway. For a dissenting judge, I think the issue is that the judge has his own policy perspective, but he's also interested in being right. I bet Scalia may consider himself vindicated right now, even as he's also horrified at the prospect of loving gay couples being treated like real human beings.

The advocates OTOH might not want to be right about the broad negative implications of losing, but at the time they make their argument, they don't know they're going to lose, so they make the broad argument in hopes that it helps them win.

And while I think Scalia et al. are on the wrong side of history, the dissent blowback problem is value-neutral. If you're arguing for the good guys, you also have to consider what will happen when you say the other side's viewpoint will have huge implications, and the court goes with the other side anyway.

A carbon-reduction tax credit is a carbon tax, and that's a good thing

Stoats of the world can take pleasure in this proposal by outgoing senator Max Baucus to simplify the approximately one billion Amercian clean energy tax incentives and to provide instead a tax credit based on how much carbon reduction (above a threshold) is produced per unit of electricity or unit of transportation fuel.

There's no economic difference between providing a tax credit that reduces from a higher baseline, versus imposing a tax that increases from a lower baseline, so long as they're equally comprehensive. That is a problem with Baucus' proposal in that it's not comprehensive (e.g., no incentive for conservation and no incentive for carbon savings below the threshold) but I expect a similar problem would result from an overt carbon tax that went through political processing. So I disagree with the article's distinction between this credit and a tax. What the credit also does is make it easier poltically to do a trade at some point - we'll give up this carbon reduction tax credit in return for (hopefully) a more comprehensive carbon tax.

There's also a problem in the failure to reward technological development that's too distant to be commercially rewarding, but that could be handled differently.

Just a proposal, but a good one.

Karl Doenitz on Adolf Hitler

From the Nuremberg Interviews:

[Hitler] always seemed reasonable and his demands seemed for the good of Germany. Now I see that he had too little consideration for the other peoples, such as the Jews....

Well, that's one way to put it.

Maybe he did deserve a ten-year sentence.

Quantifying some of the deaths from sea level rise

The Gort comment thread produced this at one point:

No one can seem to point to any real harm [from climate change], certainly not currently.

So that's silly, as well as completely missing the point that you can attribute events to climate change if you conduct the thought experiment of removing all the increased greenhouse gases and ocean heat. It also shows the real motivation for lukewarmers tricking themselves on the issue of attributing severe events - they think that if you can't attribute any one injury with certainty to climate change, then no one anywhere has been injured by climate change.

A general solution to this is to educate people about statistics and probability, but a more specific response might be to look at the 6000-plus deaths from Typhoon Haiyan. Wiki says most of the damage and loss of life was from a storm surge of up to 19 feet. In that part of the world, sea level rise to date is even worse than normal. Let's say it's one foot, although you could plug in another number.

Now depending on how good the original data was or how well it could be reconstructed, you could figure out the death rate in an area at a certain level above sea level that was hit by a surge, compare it to death rates a foot higher and a foot lower in sea level and figure out the incremental mortality from sea level rise. For example an area 16 feet above sea level with a 19 foot surge might experiences one death while a similarly-dense bordering area 15 feet above sea level experiences 10 deaths, 14 feet elevation 30 deaths, and 13 feet with 60 deaths. Sea level rise is responsible for 9 deaths at 15 feet, 20 deaths at 14 feet, and 30 deaths at 13 feet. You could do the same calculation with property damage. My guess is the numbers keep going up until you reach areas where everything was flattened.

For people, an additional complication is that many evacuated, so the actual population density when the storm hit probably wasn't what a survey showed in normal times. Maybe you can account for this. I'd guess though that the lowest areas were the most likely to evacuate, so not accounting for evacuations would underestimate the effect of sea level rise.

And Haiyan was just one event.

Yosemite

Then:

From National Geographic, via Buzzfeed. I wanted to see if that foreground tree is still there.



Now:

From Google Street View. Same stones (with a few patch jobs). The tree's scrawnier but definitely the same one 50+ years later. I wonder how long it's been there.


UPDATE:  I think I agree with the comments, the Street View should be a car length to the left. Still the right tree, though.

Please take 30 seconds to sign the Consensus For Action

Statement here and at the California Governor's office. IIRC, it originally just had scientist signers but is now open to the rest of us. While it leads with climate change, it includes biodiversity, loss of natural lands, pollution, and (brave for a politician) overpopulation.

I could see some quibbling with the one-page summary describing quality of life to suffer "substantial degradation by 2050" if problems aren't fixed, but not enough to avoid signing. For certain aspects of quality of life it's definitely true (four of those five challenges, mixed result for pollution) and the quality of life will be much worse than it would be if we don't address the challenges. A large number of people will die as a result of the failure to solve those challenges. Whether economic outcomes will be worse than present seems hard to justify, but that's not the only way to determine quality of life. The important thing is to do something about these challenges, and taking 30 seconds to endorse it seems reasonable.

Gort upgrades the Climate Changeometer with Ocean Dethermalization

When Gort first visited in 1951, it spent little effort on climate change issues, focusing on other aspects of our planet instead:




Gort returned in 2012 to answer puny human climatologist questions about whether climate change caused particular weather phenomena by making an obvious point:  rather than struggle with theoretical analysis, you can simply use your Climate Changeometer to remove all the excess greenhouse gases and aerosols above natural levels and then measure the outcome. Comments at the link suggested temps on land would respond to Gort quickly, within a week or so, while temps above the oceans could take months and years.

Gort now brings us an upgrade.

The Climate Changeometer now comes with Ocean Dethermalization. The point is to think how current weather patterns are affected by anthropogenic climate change, so it's necessary to consider the vast majority of that heat accumulating in the oceans. Gort instantly removes that heat at the same time as it put the atmosphere back to 1860 levels. The Dethermalizer also depuffenates the oceans from the sea level rise caused by thermal expansion. I'm not sure how quickly the oceans would drop - if it's instantaneous, let's assume Gort will buffer any tsunami type effect.

I'd guess is that if you apply this experiment to a tropical storm a few days away from landfall, it would have a significant effect on that storm. I think this is a helpful way to communicate how we've changed our climate. It's probably more scientifically meaningful on a global and longer term level than about immediate weather phenomena, which might be why there's actual scholarship about it (thanks MMM). On the level of immediate weather, this combats the delayist/denialist dodge that attribution for individual weather events is impossible (allegedly), so there's no point in discussing climate change when we face weather tragedies that are made more likely by climate change.

One other point - I do like the argument that we're living in the Anthropocene such that but for climate change, the individual weather events we see wouldn't have happened. I made the argument a while back, glad to see it more prevalent now.

(And btw, credit to Aaron in the 2012 post for also thinking about ocean heat.)

Lewandowsky helps Kahan look a little better

A newish Inquiring Minds podcast by Mooney and Viskontas features a good dialogue between Stephan Lewandowsky and Dan Kahan. Eli and yours truly haven't been all that persuaded with Kahan's interpretation of his own work, which is very critical of climate hawks and pretty silent about the denialists, but in Lewandowsky's presence he moderates it and comes off much more persuasively.

Kahan says he supports trying all approaches (not quite what he said earlier). He acknowledges communicating information can actually persuade people in the lab, which is good, but suggests it hasn't worked in the wild, somewhat contradicting his claimed preference for science over impression-based analysis. 

I think the framing analysis and group identitity analysis has a lot of value to it, and that's why communicating the 97% agreement among climatologists is so useful. The people who doubt climate science don't perceive themselves as 97% out of the mainstream (disregarding all the Galileos). When they understand where the consensus exists, that's their mental framework of where they belong and where the scientists who share their group identity also are found.

And that's ignoring the fence-sitters and those who are open to the science but don't know how strong it is, and by knowing that can give it a higher priority in their politics.

UPDATE:  thought I'd add that Kahan and later Viskontas assumed some unproven facts so I thought I'd do the same - if the climate hawks hadn't been out there all these years arguing the facts against the liars and misleaders, then we'd have an even worse public understanding than the present.

And just to be contrarian, I'll agree with Kahan on something and partially disagree with Lewandowsky. Kahan said we should watch for and attempt to prevent partisan group identity development where it has not yet occurred, like on GMOs and vaccinations. Sounds fine to me. Lewandowsky said politicians have not been pushing hard enough on climate - that sounds a bit like the bully pulpit argument that has not fared well among political scientists. I'm not sure the bully pulpit is so completely ineffective in the long term though, and Lewandowsky may have just been arguing that it's time to try out all their new techniques for science communication.

My immature reaction to the allegedly-controversial use of the Hiroshima heat widget

Eli's post below refers.

I'll just add one response to this statement by Tom:  "if you consider yourself a skeptic of climate change science, think the risks have been overblown, and oppose intervention in the economy to mitigate climate change, you probably find the comparison outrageous, and maybe even offensive." My response is to ask Tom or anyone to point to a statement by denialists about the science that is both true and outrageous. If they can find something, then maybe they have a point. Otherwise, not so much.

Giving and maintaining emergency kits for the holiday gift season

My kind-of annual post below, with a few changes. I've found that emergency kits make highly-appreciated gifts for friends and relatives, one of those things that are on everyone's to-do list but often don't get done. If the entire kit's too expensive, you can just give a car kit, or get a part (I suggest water and water purification) and upgrade over time.

If people have had kits for a few years then it's also time to consider replacing out the food. If you or someone you know uses camping food, you might switch out the old with the new a year or two before expiration, so you can use the food before it expires.

Easy-but-not-cheap 72-hour emergency kits for home, with purchase links

There are nine members of my wife's family in the Bay Area, and when I found out no one had the 72-hour emergency kits we're supposed to have, I put them together as presents (in-laws loved the kits, too). My emphases were making them easy for me to put together, easy for people with no camping experience to use, and ones that would last as many years as possible without needing replacement or maintenance. In return I was willing to pay more, be more bulky than the minimum possible, and have limited control over food selection.

72-Hour Home kits:

• Water in plastic jugs, 3 gallons/person
• Chlorine dioxide water-purification pills (purifies 7 gallons) in case water goes bad (after 6 months, assume the water's bad), in case it's leaked away, or in case you need more water.
• Mountain House 72-Hour Emergency Meal Kit, 1 per person
• Mountain Oven Flameless Heating Kit: each kit can be used 5 times and can prepare 2 meals at a time. So 2 kits per two people in a household, but also 2 kits in a single-person household.
• Plastic silverware
• Emergency phone numbers/contact list

The above is the absolute minimum. Meals can be eaten in their pouches, so no dishes are needed. Flameless heating kits eliminate the need for cooking stoves (water has to be purified, though). Emergency meals also can be eaten with cold (purified) water although they taste bad. The food and flameless kits should be good for at least 3 or 4 years, and probably more than twice that long.

In earthquake country, your kit should be stored outside your home in case you can't get inside. So in your yard, your car, or somewhere else. The only maintenance this requires is to simply look every six months to see if the water's leaked through the seams of the plastic jugs - it happens fairly often.

Additional useful items:

• Cheap flashlight/headlamp
• Spare batteries in clear plastic bag so you can see if they've become corroded over time
• Plastic tarp and cord as a rain shelter
• Swiss Army knife
• Emergency shelter, 1 per adult
• Cheap or expensive first aid kit (I went with cheap kits from the local drugstore)
• Cheap rain gear, spare shoes and clothes
• Hand-crank radio/flashlight combination

Don't let the extras delay you from putting together the minimum.

I also made better-than-nothing emergency kits for everyone's car, in case you're stuck on the road:

Car kits:

• Liter water bottle per person (enough to keep you hydrated for a few hours until you can find a water source)
• Water purification tablets (can disinfect murky water from ditches, and you might need to) 
• Emergency shelter
• Small amount of long-lasting food (I found tins of honey-roasted peanuts that were good for four years)
• Cheap rain poncho
• Emergency contact list
• Shoes you can walk many miles in, if that's not what you normally wear
• Cheap, tiny flashlight
• wool blanket (additional warmth, or traction under a spinning wheel in the mud or snow)

You can do much better than this car kit, but it's something in case destroyed roads/bridges keep you from getting home for 12-24 hours.

Additional tricks for both kits: put the contact lists in their own ziplock plastic bags to reduce the chance that they'll mold/get wet over the years.

Hopefully this is all unnecessary.

Lots of great comments here, and a resource link at Making Light. UPDATE:  and see the comments below.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone in the US and everywhere else. Seems like a good time to note we've found a way to step back from yet another war, a good thing to be thankful about. Political stuff below - please skip it if you don't want to deal with that on this holiday.

Moving away from war seems good, except to the Republican leadership, who see no success with the interim deal. They've forgotten that if somebody's trying to get something you don't want them to get, then delaying them is generally a victory for your side. And this is more than a delay - the highly-enriched uranium will be processed into an oxide form that is at least an additional step further away from being useful for a nuclear bomb. So six months from now, Iran will be (slightly) further away from a bomb than they are now, and with much more extensive verification. Seems preferable to me over an ongoing program of blowing up large chunks of Iran now and repeating every two or three years as a politically-united Iran rebuilds its nuclear program.

So not much learning on that side of the fence, but I'm not sure the left is much better. Juan Cole's been my go-to expert on the area (I suppose I should like his recent emphasis on climate but I don't think he brings nearly the value added to that as to the Middle East). He strongly supports the deal, but has also strongly opposed the sanctions that made the deal possible. His opposition stemmed partly from the valid argument that they impose real hardship on Iranians, but also from the very dubious claim that they make war more likely, and from the legally ridiculous assertion that western use of financial tools to block oil sales "is a financial blockade, and blockades are acts of war." Nothing in his recent posts indicate a reassessment of that position.

So everyone's prior assessment was right, and the new information about the success of the approach they had opposed doesn't change anything.

And then there's yours truly. I fell to somewhat to the left of Obama, repeatedly buying Seymour Hersh's statements over the years that the US was just a few months away from starting an air war in Iran. I considered it crazy to attack Iran, and contra Obama, that living with a nuclear Iran was better than a bombing campaign. I still think that's true, but the question is whether the threat of a potential attack added to the pressure created by sanctions to get Iran to this agreement.

It seems likely to me that the military threat helped more than harmed the process to agreement. Iranian hardliners may have welcomed an attack as a way to weaken internal opposition but they don't seem ascendant now. So maybe Obama was right about making the threat. Actually carrying through on the threat is a different matter - you are allowed to bluff in this game, although you need to do it carefully.

Anyway, as with the case with the narrow issue of chemical weapons in Syria, we're in something close to a best-case scenario. Thankfully.

Dueling policy tips: selected tips for policy-makers dealing with science

Interesting article in Nature on 20 weird tips "to improve policy-makers' understanding of the imperfect nature of science" and reduce belly fat. It's good although even better IMNSHO would be directions on how to choose between dueling experts. I'd guess they'd say just discount the experts that run afoul of the most tips.

First few tips are straightforward in theory if not always so in practice, and need no comment. Moving on, regression to the mean and extrapolating beyond a data range strike me as things that smart people don't always understand. Replication versus pseudoreplication is also good - a replication that repeats the same errors in the original study, e.g. not accounting for confounding factors, will just give the same bad results.

Separating no effect from nonsignifance can be huge, and appears to be what drove the stupidity over whether the Oregon Medicaid study showed insurance resulting or not resulting  in improvements in health outcomes. I would also add to the tip "significance is significant", the coda "except when it's not."  Just do enough studies and you'll eventually trip over the 5% threshold due to repeated dice-rolling. That's what gets us cancer clusters (or many of them, anyway), and over multiple decades may even result in global temperatures temporarily going below or above the 95% confidence levels.

Cherrypicking and risk perception also are pretty obvious, but such a huge problem that we really need tattoos.

Scientists are human and become biased, yes. The one trick I'd add from the legal profession is the declaration against interest - if one of the expert's statements goes against what the expert would like to conclude, it's more likely to be true.

$200 million hydrogen highway probably won't work and is a good idea

Delayed blogging here, but thought I'd call out an initiative to fund $20 million annually for a decade to create hydrogen fueling stations in California. This should create 100 new fueling stations - currently the state has nine that are open to the public.

Maybe I'm being too skeptical, but electric vehicles have a huge leg up on hydrogen and still confront an enormous challenge getting an adequate infrastructure in place, so I have strong doubts about whether this will work. Still, they should try it. Maybe the range advantages of hydrogen will help it catch up with or complement electric vehicles. A price of $20 million annually for something that has enough of a chance to be beneficial is worth it.

Absent the potential fraud issue, Solyndra represented a similar, reasonable investment. It didn't work because the technology costs didn't work as expected. You need to spread your bets when you're dealing with a difficult investment. Other bets, like with Tesla, seem to be going well.

Don't trust civil war predictions. Including mine.

Last week I listened to a Commonwealth Club podcast about Syria from early September, where I heard their invited speakers make retrospective fools of themselves as they poked fun at how the Obama Administration "boxed itself in" on chemical weapons in Syria.

Hearing their predictions of a fiasco on that issue prompted me to write about my own predictions on the outcome of civil wars, which don't seem that great. I can give myself some slight credit in the summer of 2011 when the mainstream said the Libyan war was at a stalemate, I thought that temporary victories by the government obscured a long term advance by rebels. That's pretty much it in terms of good predictions (written down somewhat late) - I could see an existing trend but not a change in trend. Seven months before that I said Qaddafi would be out within a week. My Libya wrap-up concluded that Assad would win in Syria. By July 2012 I acknowledged my pessimism about Assad was wrong but then thought it looked like the rebels were slowly winning. That too was wrong, as we see in the screwed up stalemate today.

My only defense is that I don't think my predictions are worse than what you'll find in the MSM. I welcome links to someone who got predictions consistently right, and made them early. Meanwhile I think it's still useful to make predictions - the people who make policy recommendations without predicting what results will come from those recommendations aren't adding any value.

Keeping track of those predictions and eating some crow as appropriate is still required, though.

UPDATE:  more Commonwealth Club, more foolishness about Syria and chemical weapons. This time from the moderator, Janine Zacharia, former Wash Post Bureau Chief. Even more depressing was the Israeli consul, who outright refuses to believe that the Arab Spring could be remotely about a drive for democracy as opposed to basic instincts of an honor-driven society.

Pics and video from last week

First anti-CO2 graffiti I've seen. Apparently they're anti Peets Coffee as well. I don't know, I think Peets is fine. 

I attended a student rally on Monday at Stanford to promote climate divestment, about 40-50 students there. Not too bad. Their Facebook page is here.

Video from the rally.

Republican politicians are soft on crime

1. Opposing attempts to get innocent people out of jail means letting the guilty run free. Eschaton and LGM covered this recently (the Texas Monthly story is incredible).

2. The Bush Administration decreased enforcement of environmental and white collar crimes, and you can expect similar results at state levels.

3. Republican elites hide behind pretenses of defending individuals from overzealous prosecution while serving the worst corporate excesses. Read this Redstate article on Criminalizing America - not once is protecting lawbreaking corporations mentioned. I stopped and read while skimming Redstate because of the name of the author, alecstates. Anything from ALEC deserves special attention and admiration. Read the actual model legislation and its slightly clearer that requiring intentional breaking of the law, and not just intention to commit the act, is meant to make it incredibly difficult to prosecute a corporate entity. That particular proposal apparently traces back to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, part of the Kochtopus.

I'm sure there's more.

(And it goes without saying that Obama should have pushed much harder on financial crimes related to the Great Recession, although it looks like some things are finally happening.)

Three words missing from the Caldeira/Emanuel/Hansen/Wigley letter supporting safer nuclear power

The letter's here, with the operative sentence "As climate and energy scientists concerned with global climate change, we are writing to urge you to advocate the development and deployment of safer nuclear energy systems." I would change the ending of that sentence to safer nuclear energy systems if fiscally prudent.

I personally couldn't support the letter as written just as I couldn't support the reverse, a letter urging unqualified opposition to nuclear energy. The reverse may be somewhat worse in the real world, because I think much of the opposition to nuclear energy isn't empirically based but tiered off of Cold War era ideological battles. Still, I don't see a whole lot of empiricism going on here. Why not urge advocacy and deployment of carbon capture and sequestration? CCS certainly has economic issues but adding 40% to the cost of coal might still keep it cheaper than nuclear, and CCS of biomass power is a carbon negative solution, one of the very few available. I'm not saying we must do CCS - maybe it doesn't pencil out - but then the same flexibility should apply to nuclear.

Just adding those three magic words may not be enough. We might need to finish the sentence  as safer nuclear energy systems if fiscally prudent and if nuclear proliferation issues are addressed. Nuclear power won't be a large solution to the climate change problem unless it spreads to many countries where it doesn't currently exist, maybe virtually all medium-sized and larger countries. Al Gore used to be a national security guy before he went green, and I think proliferation is one of the reasons for his nuclear skepticism.

Finally the sentence might need to read if fiscally prudent and if nuclear proliferation and terrorism issues are addressed. Terrorists causing catastrophic radioactive releases or getting their scheming hands on some radioactive material from these thousands of new nuclear plants around the world could be problematic. I'd concede this one isn't as important as the other two, but it's there.

The letter writers are right that accidents and nuclear waste, the issues most opponents emphasize, are way overblown, but they take a big step from that point to saying nuclear is therefore a good idea.

I'll stay a nuclear waffler for now.

The case for climate divestment in one sentence

Investors in fossil fuel companies make profits by imposing climate change on the world's most vulnerable, and on everyone else.

To the Editors: Victor Davis Hanson doesn't understand income taxes

My LTE published by the Mercury News:

Hanson fails to understand tax rates

Victor Davis Hanson (Opinion, Oct. 25) strips more from the credibility of his arguments than anything else when he writes of the quiet desperation of the 1 percent in Silicon Valley, beginning with his assertion that they pay well above 50 percent in aggregate income tax rates. Hanson is unaware that a marginal rate applies only to income above the rate cutoff -- the amount a person earns below a rate cutoff is taxed at lower rates. A California couple has to earn more than a half-million dollars annually to begin paying slightly over 50 percent income tax on the additional money they make. They would have to earn many millions of dollars annually before their aggregate rate exceeds 50 percent. We're discussing far fewer than 1 percent at this point, people who can afford to give back to the California economy that helped them build that wealth. The rest of his argument is no better.

Hanson's Op-Ed read "Beneath veneers of high-end living, there are lives of quiet 1-percent desperation. With new federal and California tax hikes, aggregate income-tax rates on dot.commers can easily exceed 50 percent of their gross income." And it went south from there.

I expect a couple would have to make over $4 million annually to have a chance at 50% aggregate income tax rates, but that's making the ludicrous assumption that $4m includes no capital gains and ignores deductions. If you define income the way people usually do, as salary plus commission plus all investment income, I think few people below $10m annually pay over 50% in aggregate income tax. And while Romney's 14% rate was probably an outlier, the vast majority of people making over $10m have lots of investment income and pay very little. This doesn't include payroll taxes but those become a rounding error when your annual income exceeds $4m, and other taxes are also unimportant unless you've chosen a bonfire of vanities lifestyle.

Buffett said he paid a lower tax rate than his secretary, and he seems more accurate about the wealthiest than Hanson.

In other financial news, the US budget deficit is the lowest since the 2007-2008 fiscal year, at $680 billion. Interest on the debt is $415b, so the US is effectively spending only $265b above revenues and the rest is debt turnover. We're very close to having an operating/primary surplus in the near future, probably not a good idea with a still-limping economy.

Should be standard feature in high-rise neighborhoods

From SFGate:

Residents of the small Norwegian town of Rjukan have finally seen the light.

Tucked in between steep mountains, the town is normally shrouded in shadow for almost six months a year, with residents having to catch a cable car to the top of a nearby precipice to get a fix of midday vitamin D.

But on Wednesday faint rays from the winter sun for the first time reached the town's market square, thanks to three 183-square-foot (17-square-meter) mirrors placed on a mountain.

Cheering families, some on sun loungers, drinking cocktails and waving Norwegian flags, donned shades as the sun crept from behind a cloud to hit the mirrors and reflect down onto the faces of delighted children below.

People who live on the north side of high-rises could get sunlight the same way, with remote-controlled mirrors on the south side of adjacent buildings directing reflected sunlight.

Little quality of life amenities like this can reduce the downside of high-density living and increase the number of people who choose that option.

Krugman part 2: you can get pretty far just by regulating coal

Eli's excerpted Krugman's book review of Nordhaus below, but there was one other part of the review that especially interested me:

[Nordhaus] more or less ridicules claims that climate change isn’t happening or that it isn’t the result of human activity. And he calls for strong action: his best estimate of what we should be doing involves placing a substantial immediate tax on carbon.... 

Why is putting a price on carbon better than direct regulation of emissions? Every economist knows the arguments: efforts to reduce emissions can take place along many “margins,” and we should give people an incentive to exploit all of those margins.... The answer is, all of the above. And putting a price on carbon does, in fact, give people an incentive to do all of the above....

And yet there is a slightly odd dissonance in this book’s emphasis on carbon pricing. As I’ve just suggested, the standard economic argument for emissions pricing comes from the observation that there are many margins on which we should operate. Yet as Nordhaus himself points out, studies attempting to analyze how we might most efficiently reduce carbon emissions strongly suggest that just one of these margins should account for the bulk of any improvement—namely, we have to sharply reduce emissions from coal-fired electricity generation. Certainly it would be good to operate on other margins, especially because these studies might be wrong—maybe, for example, it would be easier than we think for consumers to shift to a radically lower-energy lifestyle, or there might be radical new ideas for scrubbing carbon from the atmosphere. Nonetheless, the message I took from this book was that direct action to regulate emissions from electricity generation would be a surprisingly good substitute for carbon pricing—not as good, but not bad.

And this conclusion becomes especially interesting given the current legal and political situation in the United States, where nothing like a carbon-pricing scheme has a chance of getting through Congress at least until or unless Democrats regain control of both houses, whereas the Environmental Protection Agency has asserted its right and duty to regulate power plant emissions, and has already introduced rules that will probably prevent the construction of any new coal-fired plants. Taking on the existing plants is going to be much tougher and more controversial, but looks for the moment like a more feasible path than carbon pricing.

(Emphasis added.)

The Republican Party has consistently opposed market mechanisms to help the environment, forcing us to use regulations instead or let the environment go to pot. Some times regulations work better than others, but it would be helpful if the Republicans just gave the market a chance.

Nearby (and especially distant) mountains don't prevent sea level rise/saltwater intrusion problems

Per Eli's post below, Judith Curry's put up a silly guest post by Rud Istvan saying that climate change poses no water supply problems to Caribbean islands. There are too many fish to shoot as Istvan gishgallops them in the barrel, so let's talk first about where he's right:  if nobody lived on these islands, then there'd be no water supply problems on those islands for those people who don't live there. In fact, a few people could live on those islands and if they always used far less water than the islands provided with a comfortable margin to spare, then again the problems from climate change would likely be minimal. His lamentation that humans are flawed is correct, while his claim that it doesn't count when climate change makes existing problems worse, not so much.

A brief aside:  I've heard a similar claim from far more credible people that climate change's effects on biodiversity is overemphasized because it only adds to other stresses, most notably habitat destruction that keeps species from being able to migrate to new areas. I'm not buying it.

So the main issue is Istvan's claim that if you can draw a line of any length on the earth's surface from A to B without going below sea level and where A is high up, then B cannot have a saltwater intrusion problem. He only references Caribbean islands, but I don't see why the argument doesn't apply everywhere. So his first example was Pico Duarte in the Dominican Republic, at over 3000m elevation:

Pico Duarte's also over 100 km from Santo Domingo, and still further away from many other DR cities. Some of the other peaks he mentions are closer to those island's biggest cities, except for Pico Turquina in Cuba, which is closer to Port-au-Prince in Haiti than to Havana. Moving water a significant distance isn't easy, and contra Istvan, it's made harder when the landscape is mountainous.

Examining his claim, you would think California with a top elevation of 4400m wouldn't have a problem with saltwater intrusion, but we do. Los Angeles has been battling saltwater intrusion since 1915, and now spends millions of dollars injecting freshwater and treated wastewater to keep saltwater out.  LA, btw, has significant mountains in the same county over 3000m tall, and still has the problem. LA probably has an advantage over many Caribbean islands in that its complex geology limits where saltwater can intrude.

Freshwater tends to float on top of salt water, which is good when you've got saltwater intrusion deep below ground but problematic if you live at sea level near the coast when sea level is rising. Coastal cities on continents tend to have saltwater oceans in one direction and freshwater-providing land in the other three. On islands that starts to get problematic, especially the smaller islands. Most contamination also occurs in the upper ground, so drawing from your uppermost freshwater because that's all you got raises another set of issues.

Finally, higher temperatures will mean greater water demand, for farming, landscaping, and for native vegetation that limit how much water gets past their roots and into the water table. My water district sees large changes in water demand depending on whether we have a warm or cool summer. In the next few years we plan to calculate how climate change is going to increase future demand, but it's safe to say that Caribbean islands will need more water for human activities while getting less of it in the water table.

So all that's pretty silly, but the most striking part for me is Rud Istvan's assertion that human mistakes harming the Caribbean societies count when they're committed by the people there, but not when they're committed by Rud Istvan and others who don't want to face the reality of climate change.


UPDATE:  my attempt to comment at Curry's got bounced back. I'll store the comment here for now, pretty much the same as above:

As a director of the Santa Clara Valley Water District in northern California, I would like to inform Rud Istvan that the existence of mountains in a general area does not prevent saltwater intrusion. In Los Angeles, for example, the 3000m San Gabriel Mountains are physically adjacent to the city in the same county, and still they have to spend millions of dollars annually fighting saltwater intrusion. Contrast that to Cuba's highest peak, which is closer to Port-au-Prince Haiti than it is to Havana.

It's also important to note that warmer temperatures increase water demand from both artificial and natural landscapes, which will further depress freshwater tables and increase saltwater intrusion.

Istvan might consider doing further research on these issues before he reaches for what appears to be simplistic conclusions. Climate change makes water supply problems worse as a general matter. Islanders (and for what it's worth, everyone else) may not have handled their other water supply issues perfectly, but that's no excuse to keep greenhouse gas emissions high.

Sympathy for those lost in the shuffle

Interesting editorial in the Mercury News over the "resource reshuffling" issue and California's effort to control climate change. And attention, carbon tax fans, you're not safe from this issue either.

It's a variation on the leakage problem, that reducing carbon emissions in one jurisdiction might result in more emissions elsewhere. The argument in this case is that coal and gas plants outside of California that previously supplied the California and other state markets would just reshuffle who gets supplied with what, with California achieving "reduced" emissions only because other states are being credited with the "increased" emissions.

I'm not sure what to think of the argument. To be fair, it reminds me a lot of my Burma boycott days from the 1990s, when a retail buyer of clothing from a manufacturer would promise not to take any of their Burma imports. We said that's unacceptable, the manufacture will just reshuffle the Burma stuff to another retailer who doesn't even pretend to care about ethics.

But there's always another hand. The resource reshuffling mentioned here shrinks the market for the worst fuels - gas can sell anywhere, while coal can't. And doesn't that reshuffling happen all the time anyway - if I buy an electric car and a bunch of solar panels, wouldn't just a tiny decrease in gas price result in more purchases that (almost) make up for my removal of my vehicle from the market? What's the real solution - is California supposed to go to other states, buy and shut down their coal plants, and then buy and shut down any new coal plants proposed to take the old plants' place? As for the editorial, it suggests continued responsibility for the reshuffled emissions - but for how long? Forever?

I think I could agree with some transitional responsibility for reshuffled emissions for one or a few years, but after a while I'd say the emissions belong to whoever's creating them, not whoever used to create them in the past.

Notes from the Seattle Divestment Forum today and yesterday

I got my five minutes at the press conference, starting about 10 minutes into the video below:


(Link here for Oct. 17 video - no idea why the freeze frame is on my blathering mug instead the mayor's....)


The main takeaway from the conference - two thirds of fossil fuel reserves represented on world capital stock exchanges have to stay in the ground to stay within the 2C temp rise goal. The valuation of the rest is a carbon bubble.
     My note - I suppose it could be that the carbon returns to the ground instead of the fossil fuel stays, although CCS hasn't done well.

Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn:  we're the first generation to experience climate change, and the last to be able to stop it.
     My note - a bit of an overstatement and understatement - we can't stop it, and even a business as usual scenario for X years in the future would be disastrous but not a reason to do nothing starting X years in the future.

A contract-and-grow strategy works for fossil fuel companies - e.g., an oil company that stops throwing away profits on finding new fossil reserves and increases dividends instead will be worth more and serve its owners better than a typical oil company that spends money finding reserves it will never burn.

Lots of discussion on fiduciary duty, something used as an excuse to not divest. Bob Massie calls it a Harry Potter spell - "Fiduciarydutyparalyis!" Given the risks from companies that say they don't care about the future, the fiduciary duty could actually support divestment - what does that say about the quality of the management?

One speaker presented two portfolios, one with fossil fuel companies and one without. The one without had a larger carbon footprint. Climate divestment can get tricky.
       My note - I expect that most of the time, this would not be the usual outcome. Perfect v good issue.

Talking to financial people, it sounds like the recognition of financial exposure that you see in the insurance sector is starting to happen in the financial sector.

A number of professionals showed backcast simulations of divested portfolios v. typical portfolios. Overall it seemed to not diverge all that much.

One person asked a question I had - would recognizing the carbon bubble create a race by companies to get the fuel burnt first, before we hit the ceiling? Response said no, projects are currently being cancelled. YMMV.

Investor engagement/shareholder activism - speakers acknowledged this can be a viable alternative in some circumstances, but argued that if a problem with a business is its core business strategy, then shareholder activism won't work. One speaker made a slightly contrary argument - they're going to engage directly with fossil fuel companies to get them to drop the $100b most expensive new fossil fuel projects in planning stages, setting the stage for shareholder lawsuits if they don't drop them and then the projects crash and burn metaphorically.

Someone raised the slippery slope issue that climate divestment is only one issue and that it opens the door to still other ways to reduce the investment universe. I can understand the reasoning - I think a reasonable response might be that you can consider multiple causes, up to whatever line you choose to draw on restricting your investment universe. Then cage match the causes against each other. The speaker said you also have to look at the investor's mission and the cost of a screen - e.g., divesting from Russia-investing companies would be much more difficult than divesting from top 200 fossil fuels.

On a personal note, I ran into a guy who I used to work with on Burma human-rights issues 18 years ago, and saw him today for the first time since then. Small world.

Eye-opening for those of us who don't have to deal with this ourselves

Sexual harassment from Bora Zivkovic, who's done so much good for science blogging and then used it to harass women. What a shame. Comments worth reading too, one woman after another talking about dealing with the same damn thing.

More context here.

Supreme Court's latest nonsense - it takes four to tango but five to win

The Supremes have decided to accept an industry/US Chamber appeal of a lower court decision saying the EPA was "unambiguously correct" when it used regulating greenhouse gases for motor vehicles as a trigger to begin regulating emissions by power plants. They refused to consider broader questions, including reconsideration of their 2007 decision that effectively mandated the beginning of EPA regulation. The EPA also interpreted legal requirements of the Clean Air Act to allow them to focus only on major polluters - the forces of darkness tried to make a poison pill of the law by forcing them to regulate everybody, and AFAICT that's been shut down.

This issue involves arcana of the CAA, much of it beyond my area. I can just say that it takes only four of the nine supremes to accept an appeal but it takes five to win. The original 2007 vote was 5-4. Granting cert to consider the appeal doesn't necessarily indicate a change in the vote count, but it does indicate that at least four think they've got a chance to ruin the global environment.

While it's legal arcana, the environmental implications are huge. That the US Chamber is again choosing the fossil fuel industry interests over the green business interests shows its dysfunction in failing to represent American businesses.

LA Times chooses not to publish nonsense Letters to the Editor

Specifically, if a letter asserts that there's no sign humans have caused climate change, then they don't publish it, instead hoping that some other letter may contain factual information.

This strikes me as reasonable enough; the usual comparison to creationism applies. I would limit it somewhat - if a LTE quoted one of the very few peer-reviewed, skeptical abstracts, then that's not complete nonsense. Whether an outlier opinion deserves such a prominent placement is the next question and probably depends on the letter and context.

My anecdotal sense is that the false equivalence of ten and even five years ago in the mainstream media over climate science has changed, and the LA Times is one example.

Government disappearances

A little personal tale from the government shutdown - I came back yesterday from vacation at Baxter State Park visiting three moose, two beaver, one insolent racoon, and a million colored leaves, with the plan of leaving next week for our water district's fall trip to Washington DC. We go to lobby the Feds on funding for our various flood control projects and San Francisco Bay restoration program. So much for that trip - our staff tell us that government officials we'd been planning to meet are basically disappearing - they're not even legally allowed to answer calls we make to them on their government-issue phones. The story's that it will get even worse after Friday - the Office of Management and Budget has allowed a few agencies to teeter forward on rollover funding, but that's done with after this week. So we'll be going in November on the hope that things will work out then.

Here's my thought experiment:  why shouldn't the Democrats demand that the Republican House pass climate change legislation or a fiscal stimulus as a condition of funding the government and raising the debt limit? If the tactic of taking the national and global economy hostage is legitimate, why shouldn't Democrats use it?

This isn't even a case where Republicans can argue the ends justify the means, a utilitarian argument they usually avoid. The ends they seek are the opposite of the ends that Democrats would seek so there's no utility-maximizing outcome, just a government shutdown and potential default. The only way to win the game is not to play - except of course for trying to win elections, a legitimate way to change the law.

One good thing about the strange fact of the Army Corps of Engineers running America's domestic flood control program is they're more likely to operate during a government shutdown, so we were able to do a little negotiation at yesterday's district board meeting. Not sure if it'll be interesting, but I'm attaching below a clip where I tried unsuccessfully to pin down one of their experts on an environmental issue. For decades we've allowed trees and bushy vegetation to grow on our levees along streams, incorporating them into our riparian system and providing important benefits to endangered fish. Recently the Corps has been changing that.

I think he's truly trying to be helpful, but I'm not sure if I failed to ask the right question or if it's just that it's not possible to be more specific.

(Video here, October 8, Item 2.1)

In a good news item, a request I made over the summer to increase the rebate we give people to tear out their lawns and put in low-water use landscaping is being supported by staff. Some of our local cities match our rebate and will increase their matching, so in some places we're rebating $2 per square foot of removed lawn, which will pick up a significant fraction of the cost.

Fifteen years later, Patrick Michaels finally makes a bet on climate change

Via Tamino, I learned of a not particularly large, $250 bet with Scott Supak over whether there will be statistically significant warming in 25 years starting in 1997 (details posted at Roy Spencer's blog).

This is an update to a bet offer that Michaels' newsletter made in 1998 for a 10 year period. James Annan learned of that offer in 2005 and tried to accept, but the new editor Chip Knappenberger pulled a Lindzen (defined here) and declined to keep that bet. Seems like a pretty good bet for Scott despite starting in the 1997-1998 El Nino, some uncertainty about defining statistical signficance, and despite using HADCRUT which as I understand it leaves out the rapidly-warming high Arctic.

I btw have my own series of bets with up to $9,000 on the line, starting with 2007 five-year average and ending with 2017, 2022, and 2027 five-year averages. So far it's not going well for me, but it's early days. Best case scenario is at the end of 2029, I've lost my shirt. Worst case scenario is I've won every bet. Almost-worst case scenario is that statistical or a real temporary lull cost me on the 10-year bet (which will slow down efforts to address the problem) while I win on the 20.

Dexter deteriorated because breaking good isn't very interesting

(Spoilers for Dexter, Breaking Bad, and Deadwood)

Guess my loss of interest in Dexter was justified as that series limps to its finale. I stopped watching in the third season because Dexter became less interesting as he evolved into someone less creepy and more normal, and according to the link that problem has only continued. The link contrasts Dexter to Breaking Bad, whose lead character has become worse as the show has become even better.

For another great show with a similar problem in the character arc, look at Deadwood. One of my favorite shows ever, but I didn't like Al Swearengen's improved moral character. They fixed that in the finale, though. We'll see what happens with Dexter.

Any other good ambiguous shows out there?