A Play

Nothing Shared, Nothing Violated

(phone rings)

Senator Bill Frist: Hello?

Thomas Frist Jr.: Hi, it’s your brother Tom. Called to catch up.

Sen. Frist: Great! What's going on at home?

Tom Frist: Not much, Bill, just mentioning that the executives are SELLING STOCK IN THE MASSIVE FAMILY BUSINESS THAT I HELP MANAGE. Just SELLING, SELLING, SELLING. That’s all publicly-available knowledge, by the way, that the executives are SELLING OUR COMPANY’S STOCK. Certainly not sharing any inside information here amongst family, because that would be wrong. So, what are you doing?

Sen. Frist: Oh, bankrupting the country, hiring investigators to find skeletons in Jeb Bush’s closet, the usual. Selling stock, you say?

Tom Frist: Yes, SELLING STOCK IN OUR FAMILY BUSINESS THAT I'VE HELPED DAD MANAGE. For some purely random reason, while all this SELLING is happening, I thought I’d call you and catch up. And it is publicly available information about who's SELLING THE STOCK. In fact, it’s so public, I’ll send you the disclosure information that shows how much that executives are SELLING. Just for kicks. What are you up to this weekend?

Sen. Frist: Uh, I forget. Look, I’ve got to go and give orders to the guy managing my blind trust that I don’t control and tell him to sell the family stocks, even though as far as I know, I don’t own any such stock.

Tom Frist: That’s interesting – it’s amazing, the number of coincidences in this crazy, crazy world.

THE END

What do you think? First play I've written since college. The concealed ending (making it high art) is that on the above facts, Senator Frist committed no crime. Check out the conservative-but-reliable Baseball Crank for confirmation - as long as Frist only had public information, his sales were legal. Think the emphasis from his brother constituted inside information? Have fun proving that in court. Where I differ from Baseball Crank is whether the above scenario vindicates Frist. He could get off while still being as sleazy as any de jure inside trader.

Two short additional notes: First, Baseball Crank notes that even if inside information is given away, the tipper has to receive something from the tippee in order for it to constitute a crime. If Sen. Frist got inside information from his brother or a friend, he's not off the hook - strengthening an established relationship is enough of a quid pro quo.

Second, Baseball Crank properly notes elsewhere that "innocent until proven guilty" is a legal concept, nothing more. If you're a judge or a juror, you better follow that concept, but the rest of us are free to think whatever the hell we want. There's no ethical obligation to believe in innocence until a bunch of other people decide otherwise. The only ethical obligation is to use good judgment about judging people to be guilty of terrible things. And we're free to qualify our judgments, so Frist in my opinion is probably guilty. If I were on a jury right now I'd find him innocent unless I were given a lot more evidence, but I'm not on a jury. Tom Delay: almost certainly guilty. OJ Simpson: you've got to be kidding.

Short pieces

There's an internet radio miniseries on global warming, available at radioopensource.org. The next show starts tomorrow, but it looks like you can download old shows at any time.

Juan Cole offers more defense of his idea of withdrawing US ground troops and using US airbases in the area to prevent a catastrophic civil war. I could see how that could work in a balkanized country without people moving between sections, but not if the country had real freedom of movement, and not in Baghdad, where all three groups live in large numbers. But I'm listening. I've also been fairly dismissive of the idea that foreign troops would replace American troops, until it occurred to me that the 80 billion dollars we're now spending might be able to buy in some real help. I'm still doubtful that short-term withdrawal is a good idea, but less doubtful than before.


key: global warming, Iraq

Bet offers to bloggers and others who deny global warming

I've been making offers to bet bloggers who deny global warming, or sound very skeptical of it. The bets I've offered on whether global warming will happen are here. The blogs I've contacted so far (post will be edited/updated over time):

Denialist blogs

Thoughtsonline (contacted July 2005)

IMAO (posted a comment in mid-Sept. 2005)

Commonsensewonder (emailed about 9/23/05)

Powerline (emailed 9/26/05)

Captain's Quarters (emailed 10/3/05)

Right Wing News (emailed 10/21/05)

Redstate.org (emailed 11/11/05 - group blog, not all posters are denialists)

Blogs for Bush (emailed 11/20/05 - another group blog, so positions might vary)

Tim Blair (posted comment 12/19/05)

Melanie Phillips (emailed 1/8/06)

Planet Gore (emailed 4/8/07 - group blog with varying positions)

Ecomyths (emailed 1/26/08) (UPDATE: Prof. Smith may be interested in betting, I'll put in a complete link with his response when it gets sorted out.)

The Travis Monitor (posted comment 7/18/08)

Adding a second list: Waffleblogs/Weaselblogs. These blogs link to doubts over the reality of global warming without stating outright what their position is. I'm asking them if they're denialists and offering to bet them if they are.

Waffleblogs/Weaselblogs:

Instapundit (Sept. 05)

Little Green Foothballs (10/7/05)

Outside the Beltway (10/8/05)

Volokh Conspiracy/Dave Kopel (emailed 6/4/06)

Al Fin (1/19/07)

The Corner/Andrew Stuttaford (emailed 1/19/07)

Agoraphilia (commented 3/24/07) (says human-caused warming likely, but leaves room for denial) (response from the blog here, I add comments)

Newmark's Door (commented 4/14/07) (his response here)

Watts Up With That and commenters (commented 1/9/09 and later)

Okay, I have to start a third list-

Hall of Idiots:

Wizbang (willing to bet that "natural" warming will stop - in 100 years. That's a useful prediction.)


UPDATE: removed some of the snarky language in this post - probably not helpful while trying to cajole a bet. These people need to put up or shut up, though, or at least say what they believe instead of hiding it.

And greetings to conservative blog-readers who are checking this out. I think the conservative blogs send up a lot of smoke to confuse the issue, but it's telling that there are scientists who believe in global warming and are willing to bet on it, but are having a hard time finding skeptics who are willing to back up their skepticism. Click here for more information on bets that have been offered by climate scientists. And thanks for keeping an open mind over the issue.

UPDATE 2: I've got another post for searching blogs that deny global warming, here.

UPDATE 3: I should've been keeping a list of non-bloggers I've challenged. I can't count the number but I'll put some here:

Marc Morano and James Inhofe
Tim Ball (my favorite responder!)
Bob Carter
Mark Campbell
Debra Saunders and Cinnamon Stillwell

Do you owe interest on karma?

Yes – or at least, the repaid karma must be inflation-adjusted.

I reached this conclusion recently after finally paying off a long-held hitch-hiking debt. I’d hitched pretty far after graduating from college, and seemed to have little opportunity to repay the debt with rides when I finally bought a car. I still owed 1200 miles at the start of this last vacation. Then, I gave two teenage boys a long ride (that’s double miles), gave a couple of short rides, picked up one ride at night (also double miles for karma points), and then when I found out he was broke, let him share my campground site in Yellowstone. I figure sharing the campsite erased the remaining debt, except for one question – some of the debt is 15 years old – do I owe interest?

My first reaction was no, that repaying kindness transcends the laws of space and time. Then I changed my mind after deciding that the karma debt could be monetized. Instead of waiting years to give rides, I could have given $500 to a Traveler’s Aid society, but giving the same dollar figure now, 15 years later, would be weaseling out of a debt.

My analysis ended there until friends Dan and Bill pointed out that the value of the rides I had recently given had also increased in value. If anything, hitch-hiking may be harder today so I may have more than paid back my debt. How much my riders would have paid probably reflects the inflation-adjusted value of the debt being paid off. As long as you keep that in mind when paying off karma, you’re golden, dude.

Two final thoughts: first, friend Bill says he used to hang around outside convenience stores when he was 14 and give adults money to score him some beer. Does Bill owe a karma debt to score beer to some 14-year olds? He says he wasn’t harmed by it, especially because he was too young to drive. I’ll leave that one for someone else to figure out.

Second, I made one addition to hitch-hiking debt side – I had to hitch-hike back to my car one day after backpacking, in the pouring rain. I guess that means I owe one ride to a sopping wet hitch-hiker. At least I can put it off for a few decades.

Betting on glacier retreat

I've got a new bet offer on global warming, or actually two bets. First, I will give 2:1 odds that any randomly-selected glacier will retreat rather than advance at the end of a ten-year period. Second, I'll give 3:1 odds that the majority of seven or more randomly-selected glaciers will retreat rather than advance at the end of a ten year period.

Why bet on glaciers rather than global temperatures?

• It eliminates the "noise" factor that a single year at the start or finish of the period will be particularly hot or cold for reasons unrelated to climate change. The single-glacier bet introduces a different "noise" factor of local conditions, so my betting opponents just get 2:1 odds. At seven-plus glaciers, the local conditions factor should be less important.
  

• It's more fun - maybe I'll get to go visit the glaciers that my money is (slowly) riding on.
  

I'll also note that the 3:1 offer leaves William Connolley's 7:3 offer far behind, coughing in my glacier dust. Of course, all these offers should be tremendously attractive to global warming denialists who actually believe a word that they say.

My other bet offers are here, and James Annan has a betting update here (also see William's at the link above). I may also be getting some traction on this offer after all - we're doing some emailing. But I'm not holding my breath.

UPDATE: I forgot to include the third reason for betting on glaciers: to needle that idiot, Michael Crichton, who claimed in his stupid book (State of Fear) that we don't know enough about glaciers to determine whether the climate is changing. I'd like him to put his considerable money where his mouth is.


key: global warming, bet

Artificial intelligence in 20 years, godlike intelligence in 40 years

Kevin Drum has an excellent post on AI pioneer Ray Kurzweil's latest book. I read one of Kurzweil's books years ago and found him very persuasive. All my friends think I'm crazy for believing we will be superseded by computer intelligence in a few decades, but I think I'm right. Kevin lays it out very well: current computers have insect-processing ability, in 20 years they'll have human processing ability, and 20 years past that they'll be a million times better than humans at processing information. What's stopping them from becoming the smartest life forms?

"the only serious arguments I've ever heard against the eventual development of genuinely intelligent machines all boil down to a thinly veiled belief that there just has to be something more to human intelligence than mere neurons and biochemistry. Well, no there doesn't. The pope's opinions notwithstanding, the evidence to date suggests that the brain really is just a biological computing device."

I think there will be an interim period where we'll merge human and artificial intelligence together, but the human part will become less and less important over time. Best case scenario is that super-intelligent computers will ignore us and go off to think their godlike thoughts, and those of us who choose to remain all or mostly human can go about our lives.


key: science, artificial intelligence

A Glacier vacation

So I'm back from a very nice, not-at-all relaxed, two-week vacation. I ended up spending a week in Glacier National Park in Montana, helping (or pretending to help) two friends and their co-workers doing field research. As I mentioned in an earlier post, one friend is with the Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center, doing field work and analysis of glacier retreat. The other is a botanist at the park. As a general comment, the right-wingers who say government workers are lazy should try keeping up with these folks; it sure wasn't easy for me.

So: the first day, we did repeat photography of Grinnell Glacier from the summit of neighboring Mt. Gould. This is the same picture posted in Real Climate's first posting on glacier retreat, and a "poster child" of climate change. Of course, to do the picture you have to GET to the summit of Mt. Gould, and you need to do it before the afternoon shadows eliminate the light. We went from 5700' to 9500' in 2.5 hours, much of it off-trail on loose, sliding rock. You can see the contrasts between 1938 and 1981 photos here (scroll to near the bottom), and NRMSC has taken additional photos they also plan to publish. Ours were the first since 2001 - alot of retreat has occurred in just four years.

Next day, the glacier people were in the office, so I went out with my botanist friend and her co-worker, who are building a database of plants found at randomly chosen sites throughout the park. We ended up at two sites where a glacier had recently retreated; the database will be helpful for current research and for future researchers who can return to the locations to see what has changed over time.

Third day was a late start up for three of us up to a ranger cabin near Sperry Glacier. The next day we crossed a pass near Sperry Glacier and one person went off to do more repeat photography. The other two of us took ice axes, put on crampons, roped up and went on to the glacier to find stakes that had been drilled in to the glacier. We found all of them and measured the ice that had melted in just one month. I'm not sure what I should say here because I believe they plan to publish their results, but I can say there was an impressive loss of ice - that glacier is thinning quickly. We could see the "firn" area, the area of remaining winter snow that would become glacier ice. A healthy glacier needs roughly 60% firn coverage to be stable. I'd say that Sperry had less than 20% coverage now, and will have still less in the future with increasing temperatures.

After measuring stakes, we walked the bottom margin of the glacier with GPS units, creating a line that can again be used for comparison in the future as the glacier retreats. I'd guess the bottom margin was a mile in a straight line, and it took us about four hours - the bottom of a retreating glacier is anything but a straight line, and none of it is on a trail. By the end of the day, the weather already started to turn. We got back to the cabin, and the other two decided to do a forced march out in the rain and fading light. I decided to enjoy the cabin and left the next morning, walking through several inches of fresh snow.

The weather was expected to stay bad for a week, cancelling the high-altitude field work. So I changed plans and went south. I had a nice, brief visit with science blogger Kevin V from no/se/nada in Missoula (first blogger contact that I've actually met in person). Then did a few day hikes in Yellowstone, a four-day backpacking trip in Grand Teton National Park and the Jedediah Smith Wilderness, and drove back home to the Bay Area.

I've got more to say but I'll save it for later posts. I had a great time doing a volunteer vacation, and would encourage other people to do the same. Personal connections sure are helpful, but sheer persistence can also make a connection. Virtually every American national park has a Volunteer in Parks program; that's one way to get started.


key: science, global warming

Going dark for a while

I'm off on vacation - I expect to do little or no posting until the week of the 19th.

Meanwhile, I suggest a suggest a comic strip called Unfit. The main character's skepticism is common theme, which is one reason why I like it.

Enjoy the fall!

August 2005 Iraq casualties

Back to the monthly casualty report (this one might miss some data from the end of the month):

Avg. daily military fatality rate (Americans and others): 2.68. July was 1.87, June was 2.77, and August 2004 was 2.42. Overall average to date unchanged at 2.32.

Iraqi monthly military/police fatalities: 281. July was 304, June was 296, no stats for August 2004 (January 2005 is when the stats started: 109).

Comments: the serious injury rate for US troops is about five times the mortality rate. Apply that to Iraqi soldiers, add them to the death figure, add more for soldiers who leave legally or by desertion, and the number of Iraqi soldiers/police lost in a single month is nearly half of the number that are fully trained. Bush's statement that as Iraqi forces stand up, we will stand down is a farce - they aren't making progress in getting Iraqi forces to stand up. I suspect the only way they will make progress is by reducing the Iraqi casualty rate, meaning the American casualty rate would have to increase.


key: Iraq, trend

A distraction from disaster

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

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

Glaciers, here I come!

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

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

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


key: science, global warming

The Republican War on Science

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

A beautiful court transcript

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

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

(Via BoingBoing.)

Volokh Corrections 9 and 10

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

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

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

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


key: Volokh correction

Specifics on women's rights infringement in the Iraqi Constitution

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

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

I did find another Cole posting with some other specifics:

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

Lovely.


key: Iraq

Viruses and planets

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

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


key: science

Beaten to the punch again

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

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

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

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


key: science, global warming, bet

Mark Kleiman on a roll

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

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

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

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


key: evolution, politics

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

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

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


key: Iraq

Flooding part 2: Global warming has already caused damaging floods

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

key: science, global warming