Response to Michael Tobis: everyone knows the climate's gone screwy, so let's use it

Michael wrote a great post on how climate denial has sunk into a significant portion of our populace so much so that simply pointing to facts isn't going to fix a personal bias against the concept.

My response is something I tried to argue several years ago. The right psychological approach is to ask people to call upon their personal experience with climate in past years to help them overcome a prejudice that we've not affected the climate. What might be hardest for science realists is to accept that it's not a bad thing to call upon personal experience, because we're not asking people to be scientists but only to contribute to the overall decision-making.

For example, let's talk about the fascinating subject of my teeth. Here in America we still have debates about whether to fluoridate the water to prevent cavities. I've lived in a bunch of different places in the country, and two of them - Alaska and Portland Oregon - didn't fluoridate. You can guess which two times of my life when I've had the most problems with cavities.

Now it's hardly scientific to draw conclusions based on my experience, but if I made my own decision on whether to vote for fluoridation based on my experience, and aggregated my vote with others doing the same thing, then you'll get something approaching a reasonable scientific judgment as well as the right policy.*

The same thing is true for climate. Anyone over the age of 30 can remember a modestly different climate in the past, and everyone knows older people who can tell them about earlier periods when it was even more different. People can feel it in their bones that the climate's gone screwy. That's what we need to latch on to.

Yes, huge amounts of noise in this type of data, and yes, urban heat island and urban migration can confound perceptions, but people can adjust for urban heat if they want in their personal experience, and millions of human data points are being aggregated to filter the noise. My point is that it's not invalid to call upon these experiences.

The other issue is the claim by denialists that it's just coincidental warming. The way to handle that is to latch on to the fact that people like patterns and don't like coincidences. Point out that the people who are arguing that it's just a coincidence are the same ones who still dispute the scientific record that shows what we feel to be true, that the climate has changed, that it's gotten warmer, that weather patterns are different. It is not a coincidence that the people denying the warming are making that argument - they don't like the implications of it. Again, personal experience of how much the world has changed could help people consider whether our modification of the planet could be responsible for the modification of climate.

So this may not be the scientific ideal approach, but it's not invalid, and it could be a way to make progress.

*I'm ignoring the alleged low-frequency dangers of fluoridation, which isn't really relevant to the analogy I'm making of people drawing on personal experiences to understand whether fluoridation prevents cavities/that climate change is real.

Remembering Stephen Schneider, and voting No on Proposition 23

(This is a repost from the Brian for Water District campaign blog.)

Driving to a meeting of the Water District's Environmental Advisory Committee earlier [last] week, I heard the sad news about the unexpected death of the prominent Stanford climatologist, Stephen Schneider.

While a student at Stanford Law School, I participated in one seminar where he guest-lectured and heard him on other occasions during school and afterwards. I thought he gave the most convincing demonstration of who to trust in the climate debate by showing a survey of the mainstream climatologists and the small number of scientists that doubted climate change. Schneider showed that the mainstream scientists were reasonably confident of their predictions but also admitted a wide margin for error. The few skeptic climatologists admitted nothing, and were absolutely confident that they were right. He had given the best demonstration I could imagine of scientific honesty on one side and over-confident hubris on the other.

Schneider's death comes as California wrestles with Proposition 23's demand to suspend its premier climate change law, AB32, a theoretical suspension that would actually kill it if Proposition 23 passes. I know that Schneider actually had some criticisms of his own of AB32, but I can't imagine he would favor the misguided effort to kill the law and do nothing in return.

I'll be voting No on Proposition 23, an initiative that will harm efforts to fight climate change and efforts to protect our water and watersheds. We will have to learn from Schneider's legacy as the state and country move forward.

-Brian

For a eulogy about Steve Schneider, read RealClimate here.

Human behavioral adaptations accelerating evolutionary changes

What I'm saying is either 1. so obvious noone's bothered to say it, 2. wrong, or 3. somewhat interesting. It's about the evidence of a significant recent natural selection in the human genome, covered in the New York Times.

Our behavioral adaptations have made it possible for our primate body to succeed in new habitats and climates. After the successful introduction into new niches, we started competing against the most dangerous game, each other, and evolution started playing catch-up, adapting our bodies to colder climates, less sunlight, and higher elevations as applicable.

Then instead of just entering new habitats as hunter-gatherers spread around the world, humans also started creating new habitats through agriculture, succeeded there and began competing on evolutionary levels, like when Asians adapted to metabolize alcohol after inventing rice cultivation. In the last few thousand years or less, we created still more new habitats of dense populations in cities, and resistance to diseases that spread at high concentrations like measles began to develop.

I think it's interesting because evolution is working on us in ways or at a speed that's highly unusual, because a species usually succeeds in a particular type of habitat instead of spreading to multiple habitats simultaneously.

I suppose it's similar to adaptive radiation, like where an ancestral finch species reached the Galapagos and eventually became 14 species adapted to different food sources. I just suspect it's happened much faster with us. And of course we won't differentiate into separate species, given the high level of gene flow.

It might be interesting to look at species that have come along for the ride with us - rats, house mice, cockroaches, head lice, gut bacteria - and see if they've undergone similar recent evolution.

Everything going well for climate denialists, except for climate

I've been meaning to link to this excellent, long post at Fivethirtyeight on the fall of Australia's Prime Minister, in large part due to the politically-successful decision by the opposition party to stop supporting legislation to fight climate change. Crucially, the PM "strung out" the issue to damage the opposing party rather than quickly passing a good bill, leading the opposing party to dump its rational leader and choosing the "Party of No" attitude instead.

Being destructive rather than collaborative is a good political strategy, as we're seeing in the US, where formerly realistic Republican senators are inventing excuses to oppose climate legislation. Many enviros did very little to support comprehensive cap-and-trade legislation because they prefer bills with no chance of passage, and the next Senate is guaranteed to be worse. Our best shot this year, and it won't get better again for at least two years, is a cap-and-trade bill on utilities only. It's far better than nothing,* but it's only a possibility at this point.

Those of us who think we should do something about climate change need to work harder. Unfortunately, the actual climate as opposed to the political climate is making that clear, as yet again, recent warmth makes the Jan-June period the warmest recorded, and fits yet again as one more unnecessary piece in the mountain of evidence for climate change.

*I should note that I have to see if this reduced-scope legislation still pre-empts some action by the EPA. I'd guess it would still be a good idea, but I'd also be less certain about that.

What I think about global warming

I've stolen the headline and most of "my" thoughts on the issue from a good post by William that people should read.  But enough with the praise, let's focus on the smaller points where I might disagree.

William writes:

The main points that most would agree on as "the consensus" are:

1. The earth is getting warmer (0.6 +/- 0.2 oC in the past century; 0.1 0.17 oC/decade over the last 30 years (see update)) [ch 2]

2. People are causing this [ch 12] (see update)

3. If GHG emissions continue, the warming will continue and indeed accelerate [ch 9]

4. (This will be a problem and we ought to do something about it)

I've put those four points in rough order of certainty. The last one is in brackets because whilst many would agree, many others (who agree with 1-3) would not, at least without qualification. It's probably not a part of the core consensus in the way 1-3 are.

---

Yep, all of that remains pretty well true, and remains the core....In the years since I wrote that nothing has come along to overturn any of that, and much has come in to buttress it....However, I still think there is room for honest skepticism and disagreement about point 4.... The real argument should be about point 4: that it will be a problem and we should do something about it....I don't know the answer to point 4, and I know that I don't know :-). 

So let's stop there for a moment.  I think it's better to split point 4 into:

4.a.  This will be a problem.

4.b. (We ought do something about it).

I don't think it's reasonable for anyone to acknowledge point 3, especially acceleration, and deny 4.a.  Even in the imaginary world where benefits in some areas outweigh the problems in others, there are still problems.  And virtually no one really believes in that imaginary world - if we could wave a Pielkean magic wand, a technology that cheaply and safely scrubs all GHG emissions from the atmosphere, any reasonable person given a yes or no choice on waving that wand would do it.

As for 4.b., I'll just note that it's not an exclusively scientific question - engineers, economists, and wonderful wonderful lawyers all play a part, not to mention the general public that pays the bill one way or another.  No wonder it's a squishier issue.

Also on 4.b., I think if we drop two unstated assumptions in much of the climate discussion - first, that the universe ends in the year 2100, and second, new GHG emissions will magically cease the moment we hit 2x present CO2 equivalent levels - then we know the answer.  Maybe someone could argue we still have a decade or so of playtime available before doing something about the problem but that would both be unwise and not relevant to 4.b.

Finally, I may not know anything more about ocean acidification than William notes in original post (probably less), but it's really a separate scientific consensus issue that doesn't even depend on climate change being real.  My amateur opinion is that acidification consensus is as solid as the climate consensus through its own version of 4.a., and on policy matters the issue pushes for the same policy solutions as climate change other than some geoengineering and ocean sequestration proposals, and possibly on a slightly longer timeframe.


UPDATE:  I continue to think, without much evidence to back it up, that the biggest human cost from GHGs will be malnutritrion-related deaths in areas of subsistence agriculture and fishing due to precipitation shifts and acidification.  Not necessarily an increase against the present baseline but an increase against a future baseline where the world aggressively reduces GHGs.

I'm all in, and running for the Santa Clara Valley Water District election this November

As I hinted at a while back, I've thrown my hat in the ring to run for the Santa Clara Valley Water District in the November 2010 election, representing the north county cities of Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Los Gatos, and neighboring unincorporated county land extending up the Santa Cruz Mountains to the county line.  My official campaign website is http://brianforwater.org/, and campaign blog at http://brianforwater.blogspot.com/.

The Water District is pretty unique, combining responsibility for water supply, flood control, and watershed protection.  Many water districts have been extremely destructive water-grabbers or dam builders - this one is different, but a lot more can be done to make it even better.  It may not sound immediately important, but it does a lot of work, and I've been involved with it as chair and vice-chair of its Environmental Advisory Committee over the years.  The elected position occupies a somewhat-vague middle ground between the all-volunteer, supposedly-limited time commitment of most city councils, and the full-time, paid positions at the county and state level.

So will I win?  I'll exceed the accuracy level of many campaigners by skipping the false certainty and admit that I don't really know.  It would be hard to lose just right now - it's an open seat and I'm the only one who's filed an official Intent to Run.  On the other hand, other people are interested and have their own very good qualifications, so we'll see.  I do plan to run a serious campaign - I'm very certain of the support of the local environmental community and that I have more experience than any other name I've heard with the District.

Coming back to the relevance to this blog - the Water District is very clued in to climate change, but again it's always possible to do more.  I also want to highlight the foolishness of Proposition 23 on the November ballot that would suspend California's premier climate change law, AB 32, on the false pretense that the law has anything to do with high unemployment.  I'll be able to make some useful trouble there.

With the campaign effort taking time, I probably will be posting a bit less here, and some of the posting here will be cross-posted from the campaign blog and may be of less interest to readers who aren't from here.  I even thought of making Backseat Driving my campaign blog, but many of personal rants are unrelated to the job of the Water District, so I'd rather let people concentrate on the central issues while not hiding the rants that are here.

The $100,000 Indecent Proposal is causing the most problems for conservatives right now

Rightwingers at Breitbart are offering $100,000 for any one of the 400 members of a moderate-to-liberal, journalist email list to betray their confidentiality pledges and to turn over the archives, with Breitbart guaranteeing anonymity to the source.  We're on day three and nearing day four with no-one having taken the leap yet.  Kind of a pleasant surprise that game theorists would find inexplicable.

So all four hundred members of the list have so far maintained their integrity, but some conservatives are having a little more trouble.  Sad-sack cases like Breitbart and Althouse try to gasbag their way into claiming that selling out and encouraging people to sell out are ethical things to do.  Others like Instapundit and Transterrestrial have transmogrified way beyond such petty ethical concerns.

I expect we'll soon see a conservative blog reminding the 400 listmembers that each person probably cares deeply about 10 or more people, any one of whom could be in deep financial or medical trouble and need that money.  Shouldn't you be able to find the people who are most worthy, she'll wheedle, and you'll only keep what you need rather than some other idiot taking it all for alcohol and prostitutes.  These people will be implicitly saying that your soul isn't really worth more than $100,000, because they're selling out their own just for the joy watching someone else go down the drain.

Someday I expect the archives will be made public, but we'll see how many other conservatives first fail the test that they think is being placed just on the Journolist members.

(Kudos btw to The Corner of all places for acknowledging the ethical problem, if somewhat vaguely.)

Applying the Chilean fiscal model to California state budgets

I've been meaning to blog about this idea for a while:  the Chilean counter-cyclical fiscal strategy could be used at the state level here in California and elsewhere.  The very simple idea is to run a governmental surplus in good times and a deficit in bad times, so the governmental spending reduces overheated economic bubbles and helps speed recovery from recessions.  They also used independent panels of experts to make sure the government isn't just skewing forecasts so it can spend as it desired.

As the link mentions, the panels correctly determined that copper exports were driven up by a bubble and saved the money, which came in very handy when the price collapsed.  So much for the excuses by many Bush-era policymakers that you can never tell if you're in a bubble until it collapses - you can tell (like the gold price bubble we're experiencing now), you just can't predict exactly when it will collapse.

I think the idea would work better if it begins implementation during a non-recession time period, but I'm not sure that's absolutely required.  It would also be interesting whether local level governments could apply it.

Roger Pielke Jr. incorrectly ties flawed Inhofe list to a good study of climate researchers

(UPDATE:  Roger Pielke Jr. asserts I've got it all wrong - see his post starting around comment 89.  He did help clarify one minor point about the Inhofe list that I'm inserting below, but other than that I stand by everything I said here, as well as my posts about misinformation he's given on open-air capture and ocean sequestration.)

(Background on the good PNAS study here - it found that only a tiny number of active climate researchers are unconvinced about human caused climate change, and that the unconvinced ones don't produce as much work nor are cited by others as much as the mainstream scientists).

I'll cut RP Jr. more slack than I otherwise would, because it's his father being categorized as on the losing side of scientific history, and I'd have trouble maintaining perspective myself in that situation.  However, he still needs to be factually accurate, and he isn't when says this:

 "What qualifies one to be on the [PNAS study] APHS10 list of skeptics, which I'll just call the "black list"? ....In fact, it turns out that you don't even have to sign an open letter or argue against immediate cuts for emissions. You can simply appear unwillingly on Senator James Inhofe's list."

Actually, no.  Inhofe and Marc Morano compiled a list of climate denialists that's as flawed as everything else that the denialists put out, and it included climate believers with the skeptics.  RP Jr uses the inclusion of the Inhofe list to discredit the PNAS study, but the PNAS study didn't use the Inhofe list.


Three of us tried to get this clarified/corrected in the comments to Roger's post, with little effect.  He says that the study links to one of the co-author's website who relies on the Inhofe list, which provides legitimacy to a flawed (apparently broader) list.  He won't fix his post, so far.


Incidentally, he hasn't shown where the PNAS author Jim Prall relies on the Inhofe list, so the entire critique could be wrong.  (UPDATE:  Roger's additional comments did help with this at least - Prall uses Inhofe's list here, but never used it as the sole source of information on a skeptic, and again it wasn't used in the PNAS study as Roger says it was.)


Moving on from the Inhofe thing, the whole claim that it's "blacklisting" to point out a viewpoint is held by a tiny and mostly undistinguished group means that Pielke Jr. and the other critics object to an attempt to determine the state of scientific opinion.  I could imagine this type of analysis could apply very usefully to wholly unrelated scientific questions, but apparently Pielke Jr wouldn't want that to happen.


Finally, an interesting choice of tactics here - during the whole stolen climate emails thing, some people wanted to focus on the privacy invasion and illegal theft, which I thought would be viewed as an attempt to distract people from the content when the content wasn't that bad.  Here, denialists and unhelpful types like Pielke Jr. are ignoring the PNAS study content and screaming about blacklists.  Maybe it's like the lawyer's saying that if you can't pound any arguments in your favor, pound the table instead.

Saying "genetically modified foods are bad for health" does show epistemic closure

I'll disagree with John Quiggin on this one.  He seems to think the statement, GMO foods are unhealthy, is too broad to be refutable, and therefore people who believe the statement aren't showing epistemic closure.  The problem is that AFAIK there's no evidence to support the statement, so people who are convinced of it in the absence of evidence are showing a certain close-mindedness that's evidence of epistemic closure.  I guess I should hasten to add that I'm no close follower of the field, and I do vaguely recall concerns that gene transfer from allergenic species to non-allergenic species could be dangerous to some people, but there's almost nothing to back up the statement.

There are more valid reasons to be concerned about GMO foods, especially contamination of wild varietals, but the health issue isn't a good one.  Nothing like the level of closure that we see on the right, but it's still there.

UPDATE:  See the comments - John says we may not be in disagreement on the broader allegation over whether GMO foods are unhealthy.

In a world where John Hawkins actually makes sense

Via Sadly No, I came across an intramural battle among rightwingers where the semi-famous Debbie Schlussel accuses many other conservative bloggers of being anti-semitic, none of whom seem to belong to the authentic Pat Buchanan branch of conservative anti-semitism.  One of the accused, climate-denying, bet-dodging, completely ridiculous John Hawkins, posted a response that accurately accuses Schlussel of insanity.

I feel like an anthropologist watching two alien cultures fight it out.  Weird.  There have been plenty of dustups on the left, especially during the Democratic primary battles, but they don't seem to be quite this personal.

The other interesting thing is that it seems pretty clear that one side's correct - the non-Schlussel side.  The right has shown zero capacity to see the truth when it comes to science, so it'll be interesting to see if Schlussel proves the right incapable of detecting truth in any controversy.

Strange to read the genius John Hawkins, whom I've been glad to ignore for a few years, and suddenly start agreeing with what he says for more than a half-sentence in a row.

I'll just finish by noting that Sadly No and the commenters there seem to completely miss that there are right and wrong sides in that particular battle.  They could try being a tiny bit less partisan on the left.

Visual proof that CO2 absorbs infrared radiation

I hate it when I have a good idea and then find out someone's already done a better version of the idea.  This happened with my idea of taking a picture with an infared camera of a fire extinguisher discharging CO2, which I figured should basically look like a black plume.

Jeff S., a friend whose PhD in spectroscopy gives him a knowledge base nearing that of my own derived from watching nature documentaries, clarified that the idea required a heat source and that the CO2 be in between the heat source and the camera.  Various details about camera operation and the frequencies it uses could also affect the outcome.  But the principle should work, and I thought it could be an effective educational tool.

And then, Jeff found that BBC's already done it:



(If the embed doesn't work, you can watch it on Youtube.)

More info here, and a NOVA documentary apparently does something similar (I'll provide an update when I watch it).

What could still be useful is a photo instead of a video, not to mention one that's in the public domain so we could put it up on wikipedia.

More on Intrade and the skewed Climate Bet

(Original post here.  Summary:  people trying to criticize Al Gore set up a skewed bet against him on Intrade, which they are in the process of losing anyway.)

As current global temperatures continue being awful, the Intrade bet between exaggerated warming trends for a ridiculously short 3-year period and no warming clearly supports the high end warming at a 3:1 market ratio right now.  A while after my first post on this subject, I contacted Andreas Grafe, one of the people who set up the bet and who works with climate denialist Scott Armstrong.

To Grafe's credit, he did respond to my first email.  He says he never had an opinion on the climate issue and just wanted to set up a prediction market as part of his academic work on those markets.  He also points out that Armstrong would only expect a slightly greater than 50% chance of winning based on a short time frame, and mentions a longer ten-year time frame on an imaginary-money market (Hubdub) that has now shut down.

However.  No response to my pointing out that the IPCC didn't predict a short term rise of .03C/year in 1990, or the differences with modern IPCC predictions.  He did say that they wanted but couldn't get a ten year period from Intrade, but I think and said that a three year period is so short to be virtually useless.  Never heard back from my second email.

I'd hope that after the Climatebet crowing over "winning" the first 20 months of their bet, that Grafe would distance himself from their nonsense.  Maybe he did a little bit, but if he wants to help with useful prediction markets, he needs something better than this.

Spilling on the BP oil spill

Random comments:

*Many people might not realize that in hazardous businesses, it usually doesn't even matter if the entity causing the accident was negligent - instead, strict liability applies to require responsibility of anyone who chooses to engage in the type of action where safety may be impossible to guarantee.  Oil companies use their political power to mess up the law, however.

*Lifting the $75m liability cap needs to happen ASAP.  While I think lifting the cap will probably avoid restrictions on ex post facto laws, I'm not 100% convinced.  However, I'm pretty close to 100% convinced that any oil damage occurring after the cap is lifted, from either new oil being emitted or from the spread of existing spilled oil, will be subject to the new law and different cap.  (Worth noting the cap only applies to regular negligence, not gross negligence, and I think there's a pretty good argument for gross negligence here.)

*Anyone who thinks there should be a new cap at $10b is saying the public should be held responsible for damage the spiller causes to the environment that exceeds the cap.

*Contrary to William, I think the pressure not to distribute dividends is legit when that money might be needed to fix the environment and compensate the people who've been wronged.  My suggestion - put the money in escrow to be released with a later dividend if it's not needed.  The stock price should then adjust to reflect the probability that BP won't need to dip into the dividend escrow to pay off its liabilities.

*It's a tougher argument, but also contrary to William, I think there's a legitimate claim that BP should pay for some or all of the costs of the drilling moratorium.  The argument is strongest for costs/lost wages at rigs run by the companies involved in causing the current spill.  The current disaster also makes the potential consequences of a similar disaster elsewhere so much worse that there's a decent argument that the current disaster truly caused the need for a moratorium.  Finally, an ethical argument (not really a legal one, though) - the weak regulations are a result of BP's lobbying, in part, so it doesn't have much cause to say it shouldn't have to pay for a moratorium while the weak regulations are fixed.

*Pretty telling that a developing nation like Brazil required safeguards that the US considered optional.  Pretty strong case demonstrating regulatory capture in the US.

*Without any sophisticated analysis to back it up, I think two years in is the point at which a new administration bears more responsibility for institutional failure than the old one does.  So I still award Bush more blame than Obama for the terrible regulation.  I suppose this doesn't quite fit with how I view responsibility for 9-11, but I'm willing to give some blame in that case to Clinton, while awarding special and majority discredit to Bush for not reacting to obvious warning signs.

More record global heat for May, Jan-May, and a new 12-month record. Maybe the ostriches might even feel it on their beaks beneath the sand.

See Climate Progress for the rundown (GISS tied record for May, longer time periods are records, snow and ice covers are terrible etc.).  I'll just add that UAH satellite records are getting very close to their 13 month running average high, and I think they'll beat it in 2-3 months.

Per my posts on previous months, the scientific relevance is how the trends fit into the giant mountain of evidence of human-caused change.  The news peg is important too to get people to pay attention.


Slightly-related new fact for me:  "the tree rings that diverge from the instrumental record are not all tree ring datasets, but rather a subset of tree ring datasets. In particular, the divergence problem applies to the Briffa 2000dataset taken from trees close to the Arctic Circle. Other tree ring datasets don’t show the same divergence issue"


I thought the leading explanation for why tree rings in recent decades didn't match temperature records was that they were affected by the increased CO2.  I'm not sure exactly how that works if not all trees were affected - maybe Briffa's Arctic species were especially sensitive to CO2.


UPDATE:  Skeptical Science lists potential causes for the divergence and doesn't mention CO2.  Hmmm.  I know I've seen it described that way though.

Projecting global trends from small sample sizes

Here are global trends I've detected, based on admittedly small sample sizes:

1. The emergence of househusband-politicians (sample N=3, possibly 4)

2. Older mothers can't emotionally separate from their juvenile/young adult children as readily as younger mothers (sample N=2, one of them a chimp).

This is still more statistically valid than anything the climate denialists post at Watts Up.

With that profundity, little/no posting for the next week or so.

University of Virginia shows how many ways Cuccinelli doesn't have a case

Eli Rabett links to University of Virginia's decision to fight back against the denialist idiot state Attorney General's effort to harass the university and climate researchers (context here, the basic idea is to demand every document produced by researcher Michael Mann to see if they can claim a mistake equals fraud). It's just a petition asking the court to tell Cuccinelli to jump in a lake, and full briefing arguments will have to wait. Several things stand out, though.

As Eli had noticed elsewhere, four of the five grants used as the basis of the document demand weren't from the state but from the feds, so the university says the state fraudulent claim law is inapplicable. The fifth, state-funded grant was awarded in 2001, two years before the state law came into effect. Also, the investigative demand failed to state the nature of the conduct constituting the alleged violations of false claim (fraud) law, as required by the law.

The problems listed above may by themselves be enough to let UVa prevail, and they're certainly proof of embarrassing legal work by an incompetent hack (especially that last one). They may be fixable, though. If the federal grants "passed through" UVa instead of being a direct grant to Mann, then the state might be able claim an ownership interest in those grants. If the unversity-funded grant lasted longer than two years, the state might be able to claim the "fraud" occurred when the state law was in effect. Finally, the AG office could red-facedly reissue the demand that meets the letter of the law by stating what conduct constituted fraud.

I've left out the two best reasons for shutting down Cuccinelli, though. The investigative demand can only be issued if the AG has "reason to believe" that UVa has information relevant to a potential fraud, and the demand cannot be so broad as to be burdensome. Cuccinelli has no basis to believe that fraud has been committed and couldn't articulate a basis for fraud when asked. Demanding virtually every document Mann produced, in addition to being burdensome, is evidence that the AG doesn't have a claim and instead is on a fishing expedition to find something.

Cuccinelli might curl up and quit at this point, or he might fight it out. I don't know Virginia legal procedures, but the petition might already be assigned to a particular judge, so they can try and figure out what that judge is likely to do. Best case scenario is the judge/appellate judges write scathing decisions shutting Cuccinelli down for using his political power to harass scientific and political viewpoints he dislikes. Those opinions would be Exhibit 1 in an ethics complaint filed with the Virgina Bar Association. Get this joker disbarred.

UPDATE: Another potential consequence is for UVa to ask the presiding judge to sanction the AG for the frivolous investigative demand, and to repay UVa's attorney fees. Easier to get than an ethics action and embarrassing to the AG, but quite as consequential (UPDATED UPDATE: meant to write "not quite as consequential").

Bay Area Local: endorsing Teresa Alvardo in Santa Clara County, April Vargas and Dave Pine in San Mateo County

It's interesting to actually know some of the people running for office pretty well.  I've met Teresa Alvarado a number of times over the years in my day job of protecting open space from sprawl, and she's a committed environmentalist running for county supervisor in the biggest and most conservative supervisor district in Santa Clara County.  If she wins in this very tight race, her influence in representing the areas where developers are often pushing for sprawl could be a tremendous influence in protecting all 700,000 acres of Santa Clara County.    If you know anyone who knows anyone in South San Jose/Evergreen, Morgan Hill, San Martin, or Gilroy, please please please send them to her website at the link.  And they can also listen to a debate between Teresa and her fellow candidates.

I've known April Vargas and Dave Pine, both running for separate county supervisor seats in San Mateo County, for years as past and present members of my organization's board of directors.  You won't find a harder worker than April, in many ways the anti-politician due to her lack of egotism.  Dave is also smart and committed, and I think he's running without real opposition.

I'll use this opportunity to get back on my hobbyhorse against candidates loaning money to their campaigns.  I don't object to candidates donating to their campaigns, but loaning money creates a situation where a winning candidate receives a direct financial benefit from contributors whose donations to the campaign then gets paid to the candidate to retire the loans.  Candidates and contributors might not think of it in those terms (although I'm sure some do), but it's a messed up system that should be changed.  A legal prohibition might run into problems from the current Supreme Court that thinks unlimited money is fair because everyone is free to loan millions to their campaigns, but it's worth a shot.  Teresa and April haven't loaned money to their campaigns, but each have opponents who have.

Finally, I might as well disclose that I'm personally thinking about running for local office - haven't made any final decisions yet.  Could be interesting....

Carnival of Space #155: Short, Medium, and Haiku-long

Hi everyone, Backseat Driving is hosting this week's Carnival of Space, a round-up of space-related posts across the blogosphere.  Format is the host's choice, so I'll go with short (blog name and post name); followed by a combined medium length (same plus a sentence summary or excerpt) and haiku-long (a lousy haiku I'm adding at no extra charge for each post).  Check out the main Carnival of Space page for past Carnivals and for info on how to participate.

Short:

Backseat Driving: Not your typical SETI conspiracy
Weird Sciences:  Extreme Tech:  Genetic Engineering and Genetic Programmer [Part-I]
Weird Sciences:  Could There Be Life on Every Planets
Arts Nova:  The 2010 NASA Moon Art Contest
Cheap Astronomy: Cheap Astronomy in Transit podcast
Centauri Dreams:  Burying the Digital Genome
Alice's Astro Info: Ikaros - Japan's Solar Sail
Robot Guy:  administering space
Out of the Cradle:  2010 Metroplex Moonday Machinations
21st Century Waves:  Obama's New Space Policy: an Encore!
Spread Science:  Why Does One Bit Matter to Voyager?
Planetary Blog:  The Most Amazing Image of Enceladus Cassini Has Captured Yet
Astroblog:  Using the Gimp for Astrophotography (Part 2)
Chandra's Blog:  Innovative Exhibit Connects Art and Science Through X-Ray Light
Discovery News:  Can a Black Hole Have an 'Aurora'?
Urban Astronomer:  What is the Face on Mars?
The Spacewriter's Ramblings:  Soaring to the Stars
Next Big Future:  Combining MHD Airbreathing and IEC Fusion Rocket Propulsion for Earth-to-Orbit Flight
Next Big Future:  Mach Effect Propulsion Experiment May Generate 50 Milli-Newtons in 2010

CollectSpace:  STS 132 Atlantis Flight Day Journal

Cosmic Log:  Two faces of a grand galaxy
Cosmic Log:  Spaceships get day in the sun
Cumbrian Sky:  Gazing across the Gulf of Time...


Medium and bad-haiku long, combined together:

Backseat Driving: Not your typical SETI conspiracy Argues that SETI pros Paul Davies and Seth Shostak are contradicting each other on how to handle an alien signal, and that Shostak is right.

No, Davies.  Shestak.

It's beyond what we should stop.

People must know.

Weird Sciences:   Extreme Tech:  Genetic Engineering and Genetic Programmer [Part-I] Other elements besides carbon and other solvents besides water can form the basis of alien life, with examples.

Hey why the long face?

Carbon life spurned you, but then

Fish a solvent sea

Weird Sciences:  Could There Be Life on Every Planets Runs through theories of biogenesis, argues that some experimentation shows it's not so unlikely, but that a discovery of life elsewhere in our solar system could help settle the issue.

Everyone's a winner!

Okay, chance's role's unclear

Mars may tell us soon.

Arts Nova:  The 2010 NASA Moon Art Contest  The experience of judging NASA's moon art contest, and how judging criteria was applied.

In space no one can

Hear you ooh and ahh over

Good art or bad poems.  (Host's note:  please don't judge my haiku!)

Cheap Astronomy: Cheap Astronomy in Transit podcast Snippets on lunar spacecraft explosions being different from scifi, and speculating on how to research problems on a strangely earthlike, planetary civilization. 

On the road again,

Thinking lunar boom's a bust.

Hey, sounds familiar....

Centauri Dreams:  Burying the Digital Genome  An article about the need to preserve not just digital documents and multimedia but the formatting used to display them, describing project in Switzerland is now creating a long-term database of these materials in hopes of preserving knowledge that might otherwise be lost.
Ah, the Rosetta Stone!

Copied it on floppy disk.

Oops.  Help, Genome!

Alice's Astro Info: Ikaros - Japan's Solar Sail How the (now launched) Japanese solar sail works, with video.

Japan's Solar Sail.

Alice's Astro Info?

She wrote the haiku!

Robot Guy:  administering space Detailed ideas for NASA's management in "administering space," with specific comparisons to the Federal Aviation Administration.

Developing space:  fine.

Take it to the next level.

Commercial space, it's time.

Out of the Cradle:  2010 Metroplex Moonday Machinations Summarizing events happening at the very busy Moon Day celebration in Dallas this July 18th.

Zone 1:  glamor show

Zone 2:  time for real learnin'

Zone 3-8: wow.

21st Century Waves:  Obama's New Space Policy: an Encore!  A dialog about NASA's future, Maslow Windows, and potential near term opportunities

History doesn't 

Repeat itself.  But it does

Rhyme ever better.

Spread Science:  Why Does One Bit Matter to Voyager?  How a recent problem with the Voyager probe was traceable to single flipped memory bit.

Now where did I put

My memory? It was here.

Problems, getting old.

Planetary Blog:  The Most Amazing Image of Enceladus Cassini Has Captured Yet  Enceladus geysers, Enceladus, Titan, and Saturn's rings all imaged and composed together.

What Cassini sees

What's never before been seen

What's ours to dream of.

Astroblog:  Using the Gimp for Astrophotography (Part 2) Using software to put your astrophotography together and make animations.

GIMP layers it on

Not so hard after a bit

You're now Walt Disney.

Chandra's Blog:  Innovative Exhibit Connects Art and Science Through X-Ray Light  X-rays as the theme connecting an understanding of art and of science together

Art shows the inside

X rays get inside the art

Chandra shows it all.

Discovery News:  Can a Black Hole Have an 'Aurora'? An accretion disk in a black hole could generate a magnetosphere and aurora.

Spinning your way in

Shocking where you're going now

A flash, then goodbye.

Urban Astronomer:  What is the Face on Mars?  Synopsis of history of the famous "face" on Mars.

Beauty's in the eye

of the beholder.  It's now

a beautiful hill.

The Spacewriter's Ramblings:  Soaring to the Stars  How an interest in space can inspire kids and adults, with the example of space events in Los Angeles.

Captain Adama,

inspired by the stars when young.

Actor inspires us.

Next Big Future:  Combining MHD Airbreathing and IEC Fusion Rocket Propulsion for Earth-to-Orbit Flight

The post title says it all, and the post provides technical information that outlines how it could be done.

Got to be a way

A way that can really work

This might be the one.

Next Big Future:  Mach Effect Propulsion Experiment May Generate 50 Milli-Newtons in 2010 If mass fluctuations are real, then propellantless space drive may be possible.

They tell us, no way

You can't get to there from here.

Mach Effect?  Make it so.

CollectSpace:  STS 132 Atlantis Flight Day Journal  Summary of the shuttle Atlantis' return home.

The final time back.

The shuttle of the future,

Now a memory.

Cosmic Log:  Two faces of a grand galaxy  Very different light wavelengths give very different portraits of the beautiful Pinwheel Galaxy

Shall I compare thee

To a summer's day? Got it.

Warmer is diff'rent.

Cosmic Log:  Spaceships get day in the sun  Amazing photos of the Shuttle and space station, including ones where they transit in front of the sun.

The shuttle's huge

ISS even moreso

Then you see the sun.

Cumbrian Sky:  Gazing across the Gulf of Time... Rock-art images of people 7,000 years ago and images from Cassini today show how far we've come

Someday, a visit

To Enceladus geysers

Will carve memories.

Cutting down protesters and forests in Madagascar

NY Times outlines how the situation in Madagascar has deteriorated:  a shaky government more interested in corrupt personal enrichment than in law enforcement is letting the country's forests be decimated and sent to China.  Meanwhile, my parents tell me that their church, which supports a tree planting-program in Madagascar, has learned that a Malagasy pastor associated with their program was killed when he attended a demonstration in the capital.


I don't have a well-defined opinion about the current government and president.  He unceremoniously deposed the prior president, but the prior president's democratic credentials were shaky at best, and many people joined the protests that drove him out.  So while that's unclear to me, it is clear that the government shouldn't be shooting protesters.  And obviously it should be preserving the last bits of Madagascar's irreplaceable nature instead of taking bribes to destroy it.  I can't forget the incredible lemurs we saw there, and how few Malagasy ever see them.  It would  be tragic to lose them. 


The church members are asking people to contact the State Department and Congress and asking them to pressure the Madagascar government.  I think that's a good idea, and I'll suggest one other:  modify the Kerry-Lieberman bill so that countries facing tariffs for their failure to act on climate will face additional tariffs if they're buying illegal wood and aiding climate-harming deforestation.  Those monies could then be used to help fix the problem