The better question is what should the global average temperature revert to after stabilizing

An argument I've seen more than once from climate inactivists sometimes comes in the form of a question, "what is the ideal average global temperature," as if the question has a deep implication. In mid-gallop from "there's no warming; the warming is all natural; humans have little contribution," this is the step, "the warming gets us to a better temperature anyway," before they move on to "the overall negative effect isn't that bad; it's too soon to take action; it's too late to take action."

The first naive thought would be that places like Alaska should welcome some warmth, and a lot of the world's land mass is polar. What they miss is how melting permafrost results in sinking roads and buildings, forests die because insect pests survive mild winters more easily, and coastlines disappear with the loss of sea-ice protection from waves. If you put Hawaii's climate in Alaska, then Alaska would suffer. Both the biological and human environments are adapted for the climates they have.

So here's my hypothetical alternative:  assume, very optimistically, that in the year 2050, gross CO2 and equivalent emissions have been reduced 95% from present through a variety of technological and behavioral changes, and that carbon-negative technologies like biochar and biomass-plus-sequestration balance out the remaining 5%. What do you do next year and the following years?

Simplest answer is do even better, if you can. The rule that when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging, hasn't yet been satisfied. The oceans will be transferring back latent heat for decades after 2050, so even zeroing out emissions won't be enough to stop further warming. If you can get an increase in carbon-negative activities so that effect, plus annual ocean absorption of CO2, means the reduced atmospheric CO2 warming balances out the latent heat release from oceans, then at that point we'll have stopped digging deeper. And then, what next?

A further increase in carbon-negative actions will mean anthropogenic forcing is slightly net negative compared to the previous year. Continuing that year after year would start to raise the question, when do we stop? What average temperature are we aiming for? I don't think it's the 1850 average - neither we humans nor many ecosystems will function most naturally at that level.

I don't really have the answer; I just think it's an interesting question. Maybe more of a science fiction question, but our children will (hopefully) have to deal with it someday. As a policy question, the most recent, highest temperature will not be the one that people or ecologies are most adapted to, and neither will a temperature from a century or two earlier. People probably adapt faster than ecosystems, so if we choose a human-biased priority then the aimed-for cooling will be less pronounced than one prioritizing ecosystem recovery. Different societies and different ecosystems will have different ideal stabilizing temperatures, but unless they're really good with geo-engineering, then we only get one level of net forcing.

Maybe there won't still be millions of subsistence farmers on the edge of malnutrition 50 years from now, but I wouldn't count on that. Stabilizing their precipitation patterns probably should rank in the highest priority, but we'll have to see how much political pull they'll have to make that happen.


UPDATE:  Good comments, esp from Tom Curtis who says it's not correct to call the heat transfer back from oceans "latent heat". I'm not sure I agree though that the optimal temperature for humans or nature would be a pre-industrial temperature, either the 1850 temp I discuss above or Tom's reference to typical (warmer) Holocene temps. Natural ecosystems will have spent the previous 150 years moving in response to climate change - trying to get them to move again when 9 billion people are in the way could be a recipe for even further losses. Humans will be even more adapted to the existing climate.

A chosen temperature would eventually have to be low enough to stabilize the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, although I assume we've got many additional decades or longer to do that.

I think in the very long term we would want to return to something like Tom's preferred temperature level.

I now get why Europeans are disgusted with the European Parliament

The European Parliament last week rejected a fix to their cap-and-trade system that would have set a bottom floor to the price of carbon, a floor that likely helped keep California's system functioning through a tentative start to a better shape (so far).

Among other things that are annoying is that European fossil fuel-dependent industries say that a floor will put them at a competitive disadvantage to Americans, an ironic repetition of what the same American industries say about Indian and Chinese competitors. In Europe's case it also happens to be a lie as far as California's concerned, and dubious in the case of New England (has an existing-if-low price for carbon, and plans to restrict allocations further).

So you've got a system that can work if you make it work. Demanding that the sausage making of government work as well as one's ideal proposal (like a carbon tax that would supposedly emerge unscathed from a political process) is unrealistic, but then the failure to improve the solution is just stupid. The only good aspect is that it's not over - the Parliament left open the door to reconsider their action.

A bad rep for solar tax credit and LEED

Some news and rumors still seem to spread more by word of mouth than online. One of them for me is the issue of potential misuse of solar tax credits in the US, as opposed to feed-in tariffs done elsewhere. Solar tax credits are transferable and cost-based - the higher the cost of the system, then the greater the tax credit that can be sold to other businesses. That's an obvious disincentive to lowering solar costs, but less obviously it incentivizes leasing companies to inflate their cost estimates. When the IRS starts getting involved, that can really damage the political momentum we want to keep in place just as solar becomes increasingly competitive.

The solution is to play clean, folks, and maybe tighter IRS supervision. And maybe a feed-in tariff instead. Same word of mouth tells me the feed-in that's been tried at local levels in California is too small to get business support - we need a state or federal solution.

Similar issue for LEED, an environmental rating system for building design. Word of mouth that I hear is that it's way too easy to game the point system, especially because it's based on design standards instead of actual performance. Additional complication in California is that our state-mandated building design standards do a lot that LEED does, raising the question of what value LEED adds.

I've heard less about the Green Building Council standards, other than that they're supposed to be somewhat more lenient.

Yglesias discusses the issue here. As for his "price carbon" solution, good luck with that, at least on a national level (we're getting somewhere with California's cap-and-trade). Short of that solution, we need to have some performance standards incorporated into the rating system.

California Democratic state convention and Grover Norquist

My two activities this weekend were to listen to the podcast of Grover Norquist speaking to the Commonwealth Club and attending the annual California Democratic Party convention in Sacramento. Norquist played up the libertarian angle, probably a smart move when a conservative addresses a liberal crowd. He definitely threw the Bushies under the bus on Iraq and claimed to oppose occupying nations (something contrary to his position back when it counted). He also claimed the Democrats drive up the size of government to increase the number of people dependent on government and therefore supportive of Democratic positions, making opposition to government spending a partisan issue on purely partisan grounds. A lot of it was either disingenuous or vague, like supporting tort action as a substitute for environmental regulation, when torts are incredibly inefficient and often limited by the Republican Party.

The best part of the Democratic state convention was a panel on strengthening partnerships to communities of color. The really interesting thing these independent organizations are doing is targeting intermittent, low-frequency voters and get them to turn out on issues (not for specific candidates). I can attest from my own campaign that those voters are not campaign primary targets - when you have limited money, you put your effort into reaching someone who votes 80-100% of the time, not 20%. While California is majority-minority, the stats they showed had a majority of voters being white and disproportionately wealthy, and until the electorate reflects the population, they argued that governmental priorities won't reflect popular needs - quite the opposite of the problem Norquist sees of a too-big government.

For myself, I'm not sure whether growing inequality is caused by unfair governmental processes biased against the poor, or by the nature of our current economy, but either reason to me justifies countervailing action. I'm not buying Norquist's argument that we just need government to leave us alone. That doesn't mean he's always wrong though - finding the areas where government doesn't work well or should be less intrusive could be an area of agreement. A cap-and-trade or carbon tax is a good example, as opposed to typical regulation. Just waiting for the Republicans to pick that one up.

A temporary end to bliss

With a rare exception or two, I've been blissfully ignoring Roger Pielke Jr's recent stuff for the last year or so as he slid into irrelevance. As long as I didn't read his stuff, I could keep open the possibility that he was doing something useful.

Or not, regarding the Marcott paper. The Oglaf comic is great though, but highly inappropriate.

Others have handled it, (Eli shows up in the comments at the link), but I'll just add the parallel I see between this and how James Annan spotted the Pielkean confusion between detection and estimation of climate change effect on disasters, way back when in 2006.* Back then, people were trying to estimate what aspect of disasters were climate change-related, which Pielke denounced as failing to scientifically detect climate change in disasters. They weren't doing detection until more recently, as the science improved and disaster dice started rolling 13s.

IOW:

RPJr: You say X (percent of disaster damages) proves Y (climate change)
Rest of humanity:  No, I said assuming Y, here's our estimate of X.
RPJr.: You're wrong to say X proves Y!

(paraphrasing, not actual quotes)

It's the same issue or even less valid with RPJr and the post-1850 hockey stick/wheelchair component in Marcott. The paper is very clear in that they're not attempting to prove the current rise in temps via proxies. They even warn you not to consider their estimate robust, and they indicate the modern record they add is not theirs.

I agree that the press release could be clearer, but also agree with Stoat that it doesn't matter. It's like a paper examining Mars' orbit around the sun, where a press release might confuse a reader to think it also was about the fact that earth orbits the sun. There's no controversy about whether the earth orbits the sun. And the paper's clear.

So, just more of the same from RPJr.


*I think I spotted it too but could never find where I wrote it, thus reducing my own claim to a bitter, bitter footnote.

Meta-analysis in the middle

My general view both in general and as a policymaker in my small local-office pond is that a widely held (few expert dissenters) and strongly held (high confidence) consensus position might as well be a fact as far as the policymaking is concerned. A contradictory study is just that, a study. If it turns out to be accurate, then the consensus will eventually fracture soon enough and create problems for policymakers, but there's no need or even a rational way for policymaking to jump the gun.

In the gray zone between just one study and a consensus is the meta-analysis, and I'm still trying to figure out what policymakers should do with them. If the meta-analysis reinforces the consensus position - say, Oreskes' review of scientific abstracts on climate change - then it's just a helpful tool in examining the consensus. OTOH, if the meta-analysis seems to point in a different direction - say, Choi et al. on adverse neurological effects of high-fluoride exposure in China and Iran - that presents a bit of a problem.

My assumption, generally, is that the consensus should be handling this. The main Canadian health research arm, Health Canada, looked at a lot of the same studies and reached a different conclusion:

These studies were included in the review conducted by the Expert Panel on fluoride convened by Health Canada in 2007. Despite the consistency in the results from these studies, the panel agreed that the weight of evidence does not support a link between fluoride and IQ deficit. There are significant concerns regarding the available studies, including quality, credibility, and methodological weaknesses, such as the lack of control for confounding factors, the small number of subjects, and the dose of exposure (Health Canada, 2008). Most of these studies performed in China were also included in the reviews conducted by other organizations and/or committees, which also mentioned that the significance of these studies is uncertain (IPCS, 2002; ATSDR, 2003; NRC, 2006).

I think Health Canada is probably closer to showing what the fluoride consensus is than Choi, although I think there's reason to believe the consensus, that therapeutic levels of fluoridated water are generally safe, isn't as solid as the climate consensus. Worth noting one difference between meta-analysis and consensus is the meta-analysis is only as good as the meta-analyst, while consensus hopefully has a broader base.

Maybe the consensus will change, but this is what we've got.

Hoping history rhymes

Before Heartland Institute made real trouble, and maybe taking a more prominent role than the US Chamber in fighting climate action, the Global Climate Coalition once united a wide range of big corporations to fight the legislative bad fight in Washington. Wiki says, wrongly, that it died in 2002 because:

A major scientific report on the severity of global warming by the IPCC in 2001 led to large-scale membership loss.

I don't think that's right - instead of beautiful science, it was a realistic alternative that killed the beast. GCC had been around since 1989, and the 1991 and 1996 IPCC reports had plenty of science sufficient to kill its mission if GCC had been open to science.  What was new and different instead was Pew Foundation's establishment in 1998 of the Business Environmental Leadership Council to engage businesses in real solutions to climate problems. BELC succeeded despite its acronym in providing a forum for climate realist companies to get involved in legislation, and then gradually peeled off members from GCC:

Some of the exiting companies, such as BP Amoco, Shell, and Dupont, joined a progressive new group, the Business Environmental Leadership Council, now an organization of some 21 corporations. This new outfit, founded by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, says, “We accept the views of most scientists that enough is known about the science and environmental impacts of climate change for us to take actions to address its consequences.”

I'm sure that there was a lot more going on behind the scenes that eased companies out of GCC and into BELC. Having something like BELC around meant there were people who did this easing as their job. And now everything is perfect! Okay, it's not, but denialism at the corporate level has to hide itself quite a bit more.

The US Chamber continues to be a problem, but here's hoping that history will rhyme.

Laughing at those who laugh at science

Chris Mooney had one of his usual good Point of Inquiry shows back in November that I just caught, an interview with Michael Gordin, who wrote The Pseudoscience Wars. Gordin considers the idiot Velikovsky to be one of the originators of modern pseudoscience. Astronomers of the time tried denouncing him, tried ignoring him, and then Carl Sagan even tried engaging and refuting his nonsense one step at a time. None of it worked. Instead, just as science advances one funeral at a time, pseudoscience sometimes gets scrubbed away one funeral at a time. Nobody cares about Velikovsky any more.

It's still unclear how to handle idiotic attacks on science. A latest idiotic attack by people who don't understand science and therefore respond by laughing at it, is an attack stating the study of evolution of duck genitalia is so stupid that it's funny. At the link, Carl Zimmer disposes of the idiots, but I think he's using Carl Sagan's technique of engaging and refuting them on the facts. As Sagan found out, that doesn't really work.

Eli's trick has been to engage, refute, and laugh at the science deniers. I think it's worth a shot but I don't know if it'll work, and I've not quite figured out the right tone to take myself. I've also tried engage, don't refute, just bet them, but that hasn't gone all that far. I can't figure out how to bet people who laugh at the scientific value of biology experiments, so maybe just laughing at those people is the best bet right now. The experiment of figuring out how to handle pseudoscience will have to continue.

My carbon or yours?

So our water district staff presented how they thought we could reach carbon neutrality by 2020. Depending on how you do the numbers, we became carbon neutral without even trying.

A lot depends on this:

(Full presentation via scrolling to March 26 2013, Item 4.1)

That's how much energy's used to cradle-to-grave a water drop from the Sierras to the outflow of a wastewater treatment plant. My district is a water wholesaler - we handle the first three steps, and then a water retailer (either a private company or city government) buys the water from us, gets it to the end user, and picks it up from there to a sewage treatment plant. You can see the main energy use is the end user, mainly because they heat it. Our staff argues that end use is by the end user, not our responsibility, and I said I'd have to chew on it. Any thoughts? Possibly relevant is that the vast majority of water we sell them never gets heated, so that end use figure conflates some very high and much lower energy using water together.

This is important not only because it says we're not causing that lion's share of energy use, but because our water conservation programs are focused on end users, so reducing their usage could be counted as an offset. That gets us to carbon neutrality pretty easily if you accept numbers that no one's really going to accept, but still more easily than I expected even with more realistic assumptions.

In other news, the Army Corps of Engineers is drawing a reasonable amount of tax money from our county but not funding many flood control or San Francisco Bay restoration projects. You can hear what passes for a "concerned statement" on my part below:



If the link's bad, click here, go to March 26 2013, and the video segment is from 1:57:50 to  1:59:04.

My "prediction": Tolkien was a wrestler

Off topic, but still a prediction in that I don't know the answer:  I think Tolkien wrestled in his youth. When you read his description of armed combat, it's pretty simple and somewhat vague, but when it becomes unarmed combat, suddenly every single motion gets described and punching takes a distant second place to grappling.

Maybe it's out there somewhere, but I've looked around and not read much about Tolkien's athleticism - some brief mention of tennis and rugby at Oxford, but that's about it.

Anyway, I always thought his description of physical combat demonstrated the saying, write what you know. Maybe sometime I'll find out if my prediction's right.

Have some denial spaghetti

Original, clean, persuasive chart from Skeptical Science:

BTW, as much as Hansen 1988 has been proven right despite fraudulent misrepresentations of what he said, the first consensus view like this one from 1990 is probably the best place to test consensus predictions.

Enter Deltoid:

Ridley doesn't look very good, and his escape attempts don't work.

Anyway, I want to play:

Lindzen is from his 2004 prediction that temps were as likely to go down as up in 20 years, and his offer to bet over that prediction that he ran away from as fast as his denialist legs could take him (by insisting on unscientific odds in his favor). To be fair, he didn't specify exactly what temps would do between 2004 and 2024, but we've eaten a big chunk of that time period already. You could also be more generous to Lindzen than I've been - his bet offer was reported on November 10 2004, I assume it had been his position for at least a little while and picked mid 2004 as the start. If instead, you pushed the start to as close to that 2005 peak as possible, then he might not look that bad to you. If you want to do that, please please let me know that you'd like to bet over it, 3:1 odds in your favor sound great to me.

Don Easterbrook, one of the bad Easterbrooks, said in 2006 that temps would decline "soon" and keep cool until 2040. Who knows what soon means, I assumed 2007. We're over one-sixth of the way through his time period though - a reasonably soon date would've started by now.  I chose a slightly declining slope for his prediction, I'm not aware of him being more specific. And yes, he's also ignored my effort to get him to bet over his prediction.

I'm happy to add others as long as they're at least semi-prominent and claim scientific credentials. Abdusamatov and Sorokhtin both predicted declines starting around 2012, so we can add them soon.

For good stuff on predictions, try the good Easterbrook. I don't consider the Christy/Spencer '95 ref to be a prediction though, it was just wrong stuff about satellites, and strangely for them finds a warming trend (UPDATE:  due to greenhouse effects) of .09C/decade, not all that far off the mark.

For where the models do seem to be getting things wrong, try Stoat's concern about Arctic ice:

even with the junk removed I fear you’d find the obs retreat faster than the models; and I’m beginning to wear thin the idea that this is just a few years anomaly. So, really, we need better models and a better understanding of what is going wrong with the current models.

Yeah.

My unscientific addendum is wondering whether models are getting frequency of La Ninas wrong for whatever reason, pushing more heat into the ocean than expected, and where the heat will get its revenge on us later (when is that, by the way?).

Shameless self-promotion, Part Two

So the contest of Solutions for Planetary Stability continues, and both of the solutions I entered (former blog posts) have made it to the finalist stage. That sounds a little better than it is - they have a lot of company that also made it through as finalists.

The contest organizer, Sustainable Silicon Valley, encourages entrants to go out and drum up support for their solutions in a crowd-sourcing vote contest. If you like my solutions, please hop online and vote!

Solution #1:  Greening the Chambers - this solution works on increasing the green business/clean tech participation in San Francisco Bay Area Chambers of Commerce, with the dual goals of encouraging local environmental action and pressuring the US Chamber of Commerce to stop harming green business through its anti-climate activity. I'm very serious about this one, by the way - I'd consider it a career-topping life accomplishment to end the US Chamber's role in fighting action over climate.

Solution #2:  A first practical step towards a Vehicle-to-Grid system - using Electric Vehicle battery systems as backup power supplement during power outages for organizations that need 24/7 power. This would be a V2G system that would provide practical benefits if your organization owns several dozen EVs, instead of needing many thousands, and simplifies some of the technical and regulatory complexity of transitioning to a smart grid.

So if you like them or want to read up and vote for other solutions, first click here to register, then click here to read and vote for the Greening the Chambers entry, click here to vote for the Vehicle to Grid entry, or here to see all the solutions (all of them including non-finalists can receive votes). The crowdsource contest is officially independent of the expert judgment contest, but I'm sure that getting popular support is going to be helpful.

Shameless self-promotion, Part One

Following Eli's Twitter lead (@EthonRaptor), I'm Brian Schmidt @backseatdriving, where I talk about  some of the same stuff as here and other randomness.  A recent tweet discusses how important operations and maintenance budgets are to public infrastructure funding - subscribe now to get still more riveting/enthralling tweets along the same lines!

And rather than leaving all the shameless self-promotion to me, feel free to post a comment with your Twitter handle and a sentence or two about your tweets.

About as good as I can get

I'm sure other folks can top this

UPDATE:  Eli can try?. (the curve scarily follows the frame)

Rose gets stuck on statistical significance

Too many takedowns to count for David Rose who doesn't realize that short-term fluctuations in temperature tell you little about long term trends.  The latest case is that according to one computer model, the temperature sequence ending in 2012 is close to the bottom edge of the statistical uncertainty range, a point where there's only supposed to be a 5% chance that random variation produces a temperature below the modeled range. Rose thinks this means an end to warming.

The above link shows a broader set of models gives a wider uncertainty range.  And anyway, it's within the uncertainty range for the more sensitive model albeit near the lower edge.

The being near the edge is where our Rose gets stuck. A little over two years ago, Rose declared that global warming had halted since 1995. His proof - while measured temperature had risen since 1995, the amount of rise was only near the edge of being statistically significant:

Phil Jones replies: "The key statement here is 'not statistically significant'. It wasn't for these years at the 95% level, but it would have been at the 90% level. If you add the value of 0.52 in for 2010 and look at 1995 to 2010 then the warming is statistically significant at the 95% level." [What this means is that the warming trend for the past few years previously met a lower test of statistical significance. With addition of the results so far for 2010, it now means the higher test.]

So according to Rose, being near the edge may as well be proof if it's on the cold side, but means nothing at all if it's on the warm side.

Might also be worth noting that given decades of data, random variation will actually push the actual result outside the 5%-95% band at some points.

Are we at the "then they fight you" stage?

I think it's promising that climate denialists in Congress feel a need to actively fight against carbon taxes and a "fee and dividend" proposed legislation. Given that the legislation has zero shot of passing before 2017, I'm glad that the forces of status quo feel the need to fight it.

The article at the first link is good but flawed, with the incorrect and uncited statement, "Economists favor a carbon tax over cap-and-trade as more efficient and transparent". A tax gives greater certainty on costs but less on carbon emissions than cap-and-trade. It's a less efficient and less transparent way to achieve a proposed level of emissions, but more efficient and more transparent way to demonstrate the costs.

This part's good:

most new versions of the tax, including Boxer/Sanders, would include a border tariff on the carbon content of imports that is equivalent to the tax. That would create a big incentive for exporting countries like China to impose their own carbon tax so as to keep the revenue. 

Opponents clearly think the idea is gaining traction and want to stop it before it gets too far.

I'm looking forward to seeing something similar in Europe and Australia, providing the same incentive to us that we'd like to provide to China. I do think though that at least half of the revenue from an import tariff from a developing country should be sent back to exporter to help reduce their emissions.

Trans Canada's Humpty Dumpty wrote Obama's environmental review of Keystone. Nothing unusual about it, sadly.

Brad Johnson writes that the Environmental Impact Statement giving a fairly decent review was written by, wait for it, a consultant hired for that purpose by Trans Canada, the applicant for the permit.

Conflict of interest, you say? Humpty Dumpty says a conflict of interest is what he says it is and no more, and in the best Washington DC scandal sense, my sense is that this is legal.

I should qualify that by saying I don't know federal environmental review (NEPA) law as well as California's equivalent (CEQA) law, but this would pretty much be allowed under California law, and CEQA is usually stronger than NEPA. Here I am banging on about this, nearly 6 years ago:

In most Bay Area cities, when a developer applies for a permit that requires the city to do environmental review, the developer pays a fee and the city then uses the fee money to hire expert consultants to prepare the environmental report. San Jose, by contrast, allows the developer to directly select and hire the environmental consultants who prepare an administrative draft of the environmental report. While San Jose may then modify the administrative draft, the developer-controlled draft is biased to play down the impacts. The direct expertise is in the hands of people loyal to the developers, not to the City or to a neutral evaluation process.

While most Bay Area cities have moved away from this, San Jose still hasn't, and it's still legal.  Almost as embarrassing, my own water district has the same bad policy (it's on my to-do list and we almost never issue complicated permits for private parties anyway, so there). Now under CEQA, an agency can get in theoretical trouble if it can be shown they rubber-stamped the document they received from the developer's consultants, but you know that happens anyway, and the bias will survive regardless. I'm not sure what the standard is under NEPA and whether they've met it, but given the scrutiny, they probably have.

There is another check on the developer bias - an environmental report can be challenged in court, and going too far in one direction will make it legally vulnerable. By express legal design, however, the courts favor agencies over plaintiffs for the more extensive environmental reviews, and many reviews never get challenged by anybody.

There's been some noise in California about "reforming" CEQA, mostly to make it easier to get projects done. I'm not adverse to some deals on it, but the type of reform I'm talking about hasn't seen much discussion.

For a contrary opinion to the idea that Keystone won't have much of a climate effect, read NRDC.

We should admire and learn from them

That is all.*




*Except that I'm breaking my own rule of not posting a hotlink without also giving people some idea of what it's about.  I'm annoyed when bloggers do that.

Add lead-bullet poisoning denialism to the crank magnetism list

This one was new to me:

Fresh off a wave of success in the state Capitol last year, animal welfare groups are taking aim at a new target this year: hunting with lead ammunition.

The Humane Society, Audubon California and Defenders of Wildlife are behind a major push to make California the first state to ban lead ammunition for all types of hunting....

....environmentalists say a statewide ban is needed because overwhelming scientific evidence shows condors, bald eagles and other birds are still dying from lead poisoning when they eat dead deer and other animals shot by hunters.... 

"These people want to ban hunting. Go to their cocktail parties and snuggle up to them, and that's what they'll tell you," said Don Saba, a member of the NRA board of directors.... 

Saba, a Tuscon, Ariz., resident who has a doctorate in toxicology from UC Berkeley, appeared last August at a state Fish and Game Commission meeting to question the science linking condor poisoning to bullets.... 

Scientists say it's clear bullets are to blame for the lead poisoning. They have published studies that match isotope ratios of lead in condors' feathers to isotope ratios in lead bullets.

Saba says that lead paint and other substances, like lead from batteries, also can have the same ratios, and that condors may be eating paint from old fire lookout towers, eating lead in dumps or finding it other ways. But researchers dispute those claims.

"What is lacking is any evidence -- and certainly no published evidence -- to substantiate their claims," said Don Smith, a professor of microbiology and toxicology at UC Santa Cruz.

Biologists track the birds with GPS and observe them closely, Smith noted. "They are not going to lots of fire towers to eat paint. They are not eating wheel weights off wheels," he said. "There isn't one shred of evidence they have to support any of that."

Evidence that they don't like, doesn't exist. One more for crank magnetism.

Ten years since the Iraq invasion, many more years with Iranian threat inflation

James Fallows thinks about the ten year anniversary of the Iraq invasion. He says he'd like to hear from the liberal war hawks and what they've learned.  I don't quite fit that category - not always a liberal for one thing, and was undecided rather than a supporter of the war.  I did believe the WMD stories, and that getting rid of an entrenched dictator could be enormously valuable (I've lived in two dictatorships and had a taste of them).

On the latter issue of overthrowing dictatorship, I think I've learned a distaste for putting American boots on the ground absent clear popular support, which is why I opposed the Afghanistan war expansion but supported doing what we did in Libya, and doing something and not the nothing we've done so far in Syria.

On the former issue of WMDs, Fallows makes an excellent point about "threat inflation", that threats are almost always portrayed as far worse and more imminent than is actually true, and gives some examples.  I've been thinking about Iran's nuclear threat, and it turns out in 2011, Christian Science Monitor had a good description of that over time.  Here's a condensed version:

1992: Israeli parliamentarian Benjamin Netanyahu tells his colleagues that Iran is 3 to 5 years from being able to produce a nuclear weapon – and that the threat had to be "uprooted by an international front headed by the US."

1992: Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres tells French TV that Iran was set to have nuclear warheads by 1999. "Iran is the greatest threat and greatest problem in the Middle East," Peres warned, "because it seeks the nuclear option while holding a highly dangerous stance of extreme religious militancy."

1995: The New York Times conveys the fears of senior US and Israeli officials that "Iran is much closer to producing nuclear weapons than previously thought" – about five years away – and that Iran’s nuclear bomb is “at the top of the list” of dangers in the coming decade.

1998: The same week, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reports to Congress that Iran could build an intercontinental ballistic missile – one that could hit the US – within five years. The CIA gave a timeframe of 12 years.

I think we should forever rename Netanyahu as Bibi "Iran Will Have Nukes in 1997" Netanyahu, and never again take seriously anything he says.  As Kevin Drum says, we're also far better off to discount significantly any claimed threat elsewhere.


UPDATE:  thought I'd add that the new Republican willingness to cut the defense budget may be complicating budget negotiations, but otherwise it's a good thing and might lead to less adventurism.