Fears and Frets

Climate Change expectations getting more realistic

2009-06-30T07:44:00.002-04:00

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I can't tell you how happy this makes me.

The new projections, published this month in the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate, indicate a median probability of surface warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100, with a 90% probability range of 3.5 to 7.4 degrees. This can be compared to a median projected increase in the 2003 study of just 2.4 degrees. The difference is caused by several factors rather than any single big change. Among these are improved economic modeling and newer economic data showing less chance of low emissions than had been projected in the earlier scenarios. Other changes include accounting for the past masking of underlying warming by the cooling induced by 20th century volcanoes, and for emissions of soot, which can add to the warming effect. In addition, measurements of deep ocean temperature rises, which enable estimates of how fast heat and carbon dioxide are removed from the atmosphere and transferred to the ocean depths, imply lower transfer rates than previously estimated.

Yeah. The estimate's more than doubled in 6 years because the model's have all changed. Or is it that scientists who present these inconvenient truths no longer fear getting shot in the face by Richard Bruce Cheney? If it's actually model improvement, and model improvement causes a doubling rate of five years, we're pretty much toast. The mean July high for New York City is 83 °F. Adding 5.2 °C would give us the same mean July high as Miami.

Professor Krugman yesterday pointed out some issues

[T]he House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill... [b]ut if you watched the debate on Friday, you didn’t see people who’ve thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth.... [T]o believe that global warming is a hoax you have to believe in a vast cabal consisting of thousands of scientists — a cabal so powerful that it has managed to create false records on everything from global temperatures to Arctic sea ice.

We can start to have some hope around Climate Change science affecting policy, although I still don't think there's a big chance Congress will meet my goal of ceasing electrical production with greenhose gas emissions by July 17 of 2018.

I'm sort of hoping that if we do start to take our imminent demise seriously, we can still avoid war with China.

We're the reason Iran is not democratic

2009-06-17T09:34:00.002-04:00

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So, people settled Iran a while ago, and a lot's happened since. I'm going to zero in on the last 56 years. As I've mentioned, Iran actually struggled out from underneath a history of autocracy and colonialism to install a democratic government in 1951, and was deposed by us in 1953. I know that sounds like Belgians shooting Lumumba or any number of wacky conspiracy theories that you hear, and that the truth must be more complex. Well, do your own research. You can start in the New York Times.

But, when Iran comes up, and especially when we talk about their making democratic reforms, we really have to keep returning to this point. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei didn't arbitrarily designate us as 'The Great Satan.' We really did overthrow the democratic government and install a dictator in service to British oil interests. They're in a theocracy now because they didn't like that.

When I searched the New York Times for the above link, I found Nick Kristoff's column yesterday, where comments 4 and 5 refer to the coup, as does an Op-Ed today by a Columbia history professor. So, it's in the public discourse, which is a little comforting.

Five Mature Adaptations

2009-06-17T08:51:00.002-04:00

link (it's not going to take you very far)
So, returning to the last blog post, one needs five or six of the Seven Pillars of Happiness at age 50 to be 'happy well' at age 80 according to George Vaillant's analysis of Grant Study data. I don't know what happens to people with Seven, but it's probably not good. Anyway, my current plan is to go for all seven with the expectation that one (or two!) will be unattainable.

The First Pillar is 'mature adaptations,' altruism, humor, sublimation, anticipation and suppression. I believe the idea is, you have to walk around ready to use one of these five adaptations in any (otherwise) anxiety-producing arena. So, we have to remember what they are. One problem is, they make a sucky mnemonic acronym, first because there are no end stopped first letters -- one of the two consonants is 'H' and the other is 'S' -- but because the five words start with only three letters. If you went with 'assha[t]', for instance, you right off get confused with whether your talking about altruims or anticipation first, and you've got to make something up for 't.' Maybe 'tidiness'? The planets (my very educated mother just served us nine... oh, sorry. Um, jumped straight upon Neville?) or g-clef (every good boy deserves fudge) have little mnemonic sentences, which fails on the one hand for the same reason, and on the other because there's no intrinsic ordering for adaptations. We can be expected to keep Mercury and Mars straight, so the two Ms in the first sentence don't really create a problem.

In these cases, I don't think we have a lot of options other than digging down a level into the semantics, and making a rhyme based on the meaning. Something you can crochet and hang in the nursery. Something like

Do for others when you can,
when you can't, laugh at 'em;
plan for miseries to come
and when they come, postpone 'em;
Follow your base prim'tive drives,
in a way that none can see

Clearly, that's not going to catch on. But, submissions are welcome.

Happiness

2009-06-16T01:42:00.004-04:00

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So, I fell off the edge of the World, and am now in Brooklyn. But, since I had to blog anyway to note that I'd run up again in an Overheard in New York Headline Contest, I thought I'd check in in a slightly more rural, salt of the Earth sort of way.

So, happiness, really, is the goal. Not the Todd Solondz movie, which while a fine movie is a terrible date movie, but the state of being which Bhutan purports to let drive its public policy. Here's the current conventional thinking:

[H]appiness scientists have come up with all kinds of straightforward, and actionable, findings: that money does little to make us happier once our basic needs are met; that marriage and faith lead to happiness (or it could be that happy people are more likely to be married and spiritual); that temperamental “set points” for happiness—a predisposition to stay at a certain level of happiness—account for a large, but not overwhelming, percentage of our well-being. (Fifty percent, says Sonja Lyubomirsky in The How of Happiness. Circumstances account for 10 percent, and the other 40 percent is within our control.)

That's pretty useful to know, but there was this astonishing latitudinal study done on JFK, former WaPo editor (and 'Vice President at large') Ben Bradlee and 266 other students from the Harvard classes of 1947, 48 and 49 (WW II vet age) and further informed by a group of poor Boston boys identified in 1937 and high IQ girls from 1920s California written up in the Atlantic Monthly this month.

It seems pretty 'sensitive dependence of initial conditions'-ish, but the article is about a study which originally sought to make prescriptive statements about happiness. I'm going to allow the possibility that stuff that happens to one can have an effect. But, the article suggests a lot to watch out for. It's also fun to read, and has a lot about the study's current steward, George Vaillant, who in his most recent book suggests faith in God is essential to happiness -- I've come to believe this myself, so he's already winning me over.

I do recommend you read the whole thing, but here's the money graf:

What allows people to work, and love, as they grow old? By the time the Grant Study men had entered retirement, Vaillant, who had then been following them for a quarter century, had identified seven major factors that predict healthy aging, both physically and psychologically.

Employing mature adaptations was one. The others were education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight. Of the 106 Harvard men who had five or six of these factors in their favor at age 50, half ended up at 80 as what Vaillant called “happy-well” and only 7.5 percent as “sad-sick.”

Let's make this about me. I'm 41. I'm educated, I don't smoke, I exercise some. That's three. Eh, abusing alcohol. There doesn't seem to be any level that's really good for you([A]lcoholism... is probably the horse, and not the cart, of pathology.), so I don't know where abusing starts. I've been married less than three months. It seems pretty stable, but it's where it is in nine years that matters, apparently. Assuming I... or, you know, we can nail that down, I've either got to stop drinking or get to a healthy weight. Or, I could get into these 'mature adaptations,' so let's look at what they are.

The article mentions

altruism,
humor,
anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort),
suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and
sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship)

I feel like I'm doing pretty good on those, so I guess I can stop worrying about obesity.

This is another bit I love:

Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

I am always counseling people to open themselves up to emotional pain, to stay vulnerable in the face of the terrors of others, for some abstract payoff. It's nice to have Science on my side. There's more great relationship advice.

"On the bright side... reaction formation allows us to care for someone else when we wish to be cared for ourselves.” But in intimate relationships... the defense “rarely leads to happiness for either party."

Maybe I'm just hearing what I want to hear, but it sounds like emotional reactions have to be pretty carefully managed.

Regular exercise in college predicted late-life mental health better than it did physical health.

That's not good. Maybe some of you who went to college with me can help me out, but as I recall it, I quite running when I was 19 because it interfered with my smoking, and that's pretty much where things stood for five years. I can't be expected to remember myself, because...

[O]lder people tend to remember fewer distressing images (like snakes) and more pleasant ones (like Ferris wheels) than younger people. By giving a profound shape to aging, this tendency can make for a softer, rounder old age, but also a deluded one.

Overheard in New York: Ran Up Again!

2009-06-16T01:39:00.001-04:00

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Thought I'd let you know.

Quiz: Do private interests outdo government at assessing and pricing risk?

2009-03-08T01:36:00.004-05:00

there's no link
It seems like there's two possible responses to this question: yes and no. If yes, then you'd have to believe having the government buy structured derivatives products to 'make a market' is foolhardy on its face. If no, then we really don't need investment banks at all, and we should take this opportunity to let them fade away (for what it's worth, this is my side.)

I don't know if I've said this in the blog, but I think desecuritization is a goal we should take on. Maybe assess a tax on tranches, to incite financiers to put the mortgages, credit card balances and student loans back together, and then a regulation that the owner of a loan had responsibility for seeing it serviced.

These credit backed securities were fundamentally misguided, I think everyone accepts now. But, I don't hear about any initiatives about unwinding them. I don't know why this is not generally accepted as a goal.

The 80s called... they want their usufructs back

2009-02-25T17:08:00.002-05:00

link via Agora

No good, in fact, will come of a campaign to sustain the unsustainable, which is exactly what the Obama program is starting to look like. In the folder marked "unsustainable" you can file most of the artifacts, usufructs, habits, and expectations of recent American life: suburban living, credit-card spending, Happy Motoring, vacations in Las Vegas, college education for the masses, and cheap food among them. All these things are over. The public may suspect as much, but they can't admit it to themselves, and political leadership has so far declined to speak the truth about it for them -- in short, to form a useful consensus that will allow us to move forward effectively.

I'll save you the trouble. 'Usufruct' is the right to use something you won't damage. Like, when a developer builds a building in a public passageway, forcing people to walk through private property? That's a usufruct.

Afghanistan is bigger than Iraq

2009-02-17T08:06:00.003-05:00

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So, I'm traveling for business, and I have a rental car. So, I listen to the radio, and to broadcast news. In broadcast news, you just sit and hear whatever some corporation or other feels you should know -- in general, this is pretty bad for democracy, but you do hear things you wouldn't seek out.

NPR told me yesterday that Afghanistan was not only bigger, but more populous than Iraq. I could have told you that Iraq had about 27 million people when we invaded, but that Afghanistan had 32? I would have said around 5. But, no. It's big. Closer to California than Texas in population.

Obama-era survey on Bush

2009-02-17T07:04:00.005-05:00

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A lot of hay has been made over this C-SPAN survey of 36 historians, which puts Bush 43 not at the bottom and Ronald Reagan -- friend of petroleum and defense interests, enemy of public welfare and education, who turned America into history's largest creditor (while Dubya exacerbated every problem he encountered, he did not create every difficulty he left us with), in the top half. It sort of makes you wonder how much presidents suck in general.

The survey gives us two things to talk about -- movement from the 2000 survey and components. Three if you count the participants, but I don't know anything about historians. The public story is that they moved this one after inauguration so they could do it for Darwin/Lincoln's 200th birthday, but you feel they kind of wanted to get the end of Shrub's episode; Clinton was rated 21st in the last year of his administration before the Marc Rich pardon. Now, he's rated 15th.

The Clinton movement is pretty interesting. In 2000, there were people who thought the internet bubble wouldn't all end in tears, NAFTA might work out, and NEWCAG was a genius. The biggest things weighing him down were military actions in Kosovo and Somalia, and some personal peccadilloes. I guess we've decided that presidents are entitled to their little invasions here and there, and all we ask is moderation, as well as the idea that integrity and capability in your role as a public servant don't have a lot to do with whether or not you cheat on your wife. 8 years of a teetotaler with no known record of adultery and a military service record have warmed us up to Bubba, although even his successor beat him on moral authority. It turned out our signifiers were all wrong.

Americans are taught as children that the slavery compromise in The Constitution made the Civil War inevitable, but apparently adults blame it on James Buchanan. I don't have a personal opinion on what caused the Civil War, but it's bad and he's the scapegoat, but shouldn't Bush 43 be at best second worst? Anyway, it's Carter that chaps my ass -- he's ranked under Cleveland, Taft and McKinley! And going down!

I find it hard to talk about the breakouts because they seem a little crazy. "Pursued Equal Justice for All" is Guantanamo George's, best known before running for President for condemning the retarded to death, best ranking. If he's 24th in that, what should we think of the bottom 18*? "Performance within context of times" still damns Buchanan as worst, but 43's ranking is the same as his overall. Apparently, historians don't buy this "historical context" hogwash, except to say that JFK had it easy: he's 6th overall and 12th in context. George W. Bush even beats Buchanan (and Hoover, which I could see) on economic management, so I'm thinking there's some anti-Buchanan bias around. You'd think if we can rehabilitate McCarthy, we could do a little work on Buchanan, but no. He only beats our former President in International Relations -- Nixon's, as you'd expect, best rank at 11, down from 8 in 2000.

64 historians participated. The methodology's not super clear, but I think each historian rated each president as a percentile in each of ten categories, and C-Span used massive parallel supercomputers to average them. Then, they summed the average for a total score (the methodology, averaging the input then summing, suggest they didn't get responses back from all historians in all areas. So, there's some hidden bias.)

* -- As Cleveland served twice, 85-89 and 93-97, there are 43 presidencies, but only 42 presidents.

Obama-era polls on Bush

2009-02-12T07:29:00.004-05:00

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I'm in a hotel in South Bend, Indiana, and they bring me USA Today. My rewards profile says to bring me the Journal, but they bring USA Today, which always makes me feel like I'm on the business end of a misinformation campaign.

Close to two-thirds of those surveyed said there should be investigations into allegations that the Bush team used torture to interrogate terrorism suspects and its program of wiretapping U.S. citizens without getting warrants. Almost four in 10 favor criminal investigations and about a quarter want investigations without criminal charges. One-third said they want nothing to be done.

Even more people want action on alleged attempts by the Bush team to use the Justice Department for political purposes. Four in 10 favored a criminal probe, three in 10 an independent panel, and 25% neither.

Of course, what do you want to know when you read a public opinion poll? You want -- and it's not like I can see into your heart from here, everybody wants this -- to know how that's changed. But, USA Today isn't going to tell you, because it didn't know. I would have answered 'yes' to the question "Should the Bush Administration be investigated for probably illegal practices?" in 2002, and frankly for most of 2001. I'd guess that between 30 and 70 per cent of the American public felt a special prosecutor should be appointed at any given moment in the Bush 43 Presidency.

But, USA Today didn't ask. It sort of tried to make a frame in which everyone was OK with illegality as long as Oceania was at war with Eastasia. But, we weren't. We just weren't asked. So, the headlne should maybe be

Newspapers try to reingratiate themselves with American People after totally abdicating their responsibilities

Unmotivated

2009-02-11T22:24:00.003-05:00

there's no link

I'm trying to explain why I'm not posting. And, you know, here's the problem. If the Zeitgeist is with me, I've got nothing to say. A year ago, I could say, "Our economy based on retail spending fueled by a ludicrous expectation of eternally accelerating increase in real home values will detonate, obliterating the fantastical idea that 'innovative finance' was anything more than theft by the well-connected" and have some disagreement. Now, people just say, "Obviously. But, how do we get back on track?" It's sad. Over the past, say, twelve years we've been living on imaginary money, and that's got to balance out over the next few decades. This is neither a fun nor an interesting thing to say. There's an interesting drama playing out, where possible stakeholders in our future world of finance are (at least) one of two things: complicit or clueless. That is, anybody who can speak comfortably of the milieu of modern finance is probably partly responsible for its problems. The problem with talking about how this process plays out is that it's all behind the scenes. There's nothing to link to -- I'd become a source of information myself, and I'm really happier as an analyst.

WARFism is also arising on the climate change front. We've gone from people who don't really feel they have a stake in whether human life gets wiped out -- this was the kind of odd impression the Bush 43 administration made on me -- to people who, as they grapple with the issues, will come to understand that We Are Royally Fucked. Even if American meets my challenge to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from electricity production by July 17, 2018, humankind has at best even chances to make it to the end of the century.

I could talk about what 200% inflation is going to be like, but 'unpleasant' really sums it up.

It's not like people don't know there's trouble. What is there left to say? The current presidential administration wasn't elected on a platform of perfidy, or reelected after assuring the people that he'd had the epiphany that his job was 'hard work.'

The people who were enforcing the central lies of our lives have had it blow up in their faces. They're either begging for TARP money or registering for jobs as lobbyists, so I don't feel like I have to argue against them strenuously. I'm not officially hanging up the laptop, but....

Relativity for Kids

2009-01-24T20:32:00.002-05:00

there's no link.
A friend sent me this email regarding her son:

Hi there. I need help with a question that Max just asked.

If someone is traveling at the speed of light, could they see themselves in a mirror?

This was my reply. I'll point her here if you'd like to chime in with supplements.

Well, that's very similar to the question that Einstein asked -- what happens if you run as fast as a beam of light -- and to answer it, you have to change the way you think about the world. Fundamentally.

The speed of light isn't a speed you can go. It's just the end of what 'fast' is. A fuel tank has a gauge, it reads 'empty' to 'full.' For speed, 'Empty' is analogous to not moving. 'Full' is the speed of light. It doesn't make sense to talk about speeds past that any more than it would make sense to add gas to a full tank.

So, OK. The speed of light is the end of acceleration. You can't go the speed of light, because if you could, you could just juice it a little more and go faster, which wouldn't make any sense. You can only approach the speed of light. Acceleration gets harder and harder the closer you get.

Now, what does speed mean? If I leave my house, and trot along at 3 MPH, I'm moving at 3 MPH relative to my house. But, what about when I can't see my house? How would I know how fast I was moving? There's a bunch of other stuff in my neighborhood that moves at the same speed as my house, and I can choose one of those things to measure myself against. But, I have to choose something. And, as I measure it, I'm really measuring how fast that thing is moving relative to me. I really never move, from my perspective, right? We're all the center of our worlds, just like it feels.

Those are two points.
(1) I don't ever actually move. Things move relative to me.
(2) Those things never go as fast as the speed of light.

I forget how old Max is. Ah... you got married in, what, 1993? So, he was born in 1994? He's 14? Einstein was 16, you know. Anyway, I'm not going to muddy the waters with quantum dynamics. I'm not super sure I resolve them off the top of my head, anyway -- I think there's some outstanding paradox; I believe there was some news in recent years, but I didn't follow.

Clearly, there are some implications for time, here, and resolving that has some implication for linear distance. But, I'll let Max work those out for himself.

Inauguration

2009-01-20T08:18:00.000-05:00

Liberals

2009-01-15T12:28:00.001-05:00

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Hee, hee.

Now added to the pantheon of "liberal" dogma is the shrill, ideological belief that high government officials must abide by our laws and should be treated like any other citizen when they break them. To believe that now makes you not just a "liberal," but worse: a "liberal score-settler." Apparently, one can attain the glorious status of being a moderate, a centrist, a high-minded independent only if one believes that high political officials (and our most powerful industries, such as the telecoms) should be able to break numerous laws (i.e.: commit felonies), openly admit that they've done so, and then be immunized from all consequences. That's how our ideological spectrum is now defined.

You tell 'em, Glenn.

Patent and Trademark Giveaway cartoons

2009-01-14T09:13:00.002-05:00

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If you're still angry about the Boston Garden being renamed the 'Failed Bank Auditorium for Sports,' or whatever it is, this is a pretty funny series of cartoons. Don't miss Frito Lay the Verizon Middletown City Council meeting.

Two Words: Forest Fire

2009-01-08T18:07:00.002-05:00

link at 1:02

Now, the very fact that this crisis is largely of our own making means that it's not beyond our ability to solve.

That's not what that means. If a crisis is of your own making, you have to change your patterns of behavior and responses to events -- that's hard. Not to be not hopeful, but I'm not tracking the rhetoric.

Foreskin

2009-01-08T14:35:00.002-05:00

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So, I was just coming to this blog to post this apology; I typed 'Male' into Firefox's address bar and hit 'enter.' I got the Google search for 'male', which included this fascinating page on foreskins, which I know almost nothing about. I'm sure I've seen them, but I've never noted one outside the movies.

The foreskin performs several important functions. Most of these functions center on making sex more enjoyable, not only for just one, but for both partners.

Protection
Makes sex feel better
Lubricates during intercourse
Lubricates during masturbation
Reduces the drop insensitivity through age
Allows the erection to grow
Increases sensitivity slowing intercourse

They sound like great things.

Manhattan Exceptionalism draws to a close

2009-01-06T01:54:00.002-05:00

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In Manhattan, the inventory of apartments listed for sale rose almost 40 percent from a year ago to 9,081 units. Apartments sat on the market for an average 159 days before selling in the fourth quarter, up 21 percent from a year earlier, Miller Samuel and Prudential said.
...
Almost no new contracts were signed on condominiums in the quarter, said Miller.
...
New Yorkers paid less for smaller apartments. The median price of a studio fell 8.5 percent to $420,000, according to Miller Samuel. One bedroom prices were $715,000, down 4.5 percent.

Prices rose 9.1 percent for two-bedroom apartments to a median of $1.62 million. Three bedroom apartments slid 6.4 percent to $4.05 million, Miller Samuel said.
...
In the luxury market, defined as the top 10 percent of sales by price, the median fell to $4.13 million in the fourth quarter from $4.3 million in the fourth quarter of 2007. Inventory rose 26 percent to 1,730 apartments. Luxury units stayed on the market 169 days, 52 more days than the same period a year earlier.
...
“Foreign investors are having a real tough time getting mortgage money, and a lot of those young affluent buyers aren’t so affluent any more,” [Pam] Liebman, [chief executive officer of Corcoran in Manhattan] said.

Still, if you can borrow at 5.1 % ... say prices deflate 2%/year over the next two years before 20% inflation hangs around for another eight years. Prices will have gone up (.98)^2(1.2)^8 - 1 = 313%. If the real value of your house is half what it is now, the nominal value will still have more than doubled, or gone up 7.2 % a year. So, you're borrowing at 5.1% to get a 7.2% return. That's like free money.

Sticking with our assumption that the next two years will have 2 % deflation and ten years from now your house will have half its real value, you'd break even if years three through ten were at 16.6 %. If you expand the time horizon to 15 years (and your house will probably hang steady at half it's Q109 real value), you could let years three through fifteen be at 12 % inflation. You've got to agree that a twelve per cent inflation rate from 2011 to 2024 is a pretty conservative estimate. Paying off a 5.1% fixed interest loan on a depreciating asset will feel airy and light!

iPod Platelet

2009-01-04T16:15:00.002-05:00

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To review, I started accumulating platelet donation points in the interest of getting an iPod Nano 3G at 2600 points.
I bought an iPod Nano.
I had the NYPD write my driver's license number on it with indelible ultraviolet ink.
I went to a Yankees game and lost the iPod. The police said that to even file the thing as missing, I'd have to go back to the Bronx. How could I have ever thought going to a baseball game was going to work out for me?
I've reached 2200 points in platelet donations. On January 11th, I'll reach 2550 points (100 pts + 100 pts for Sunday, 100 pts for a triple and 50 points for a critical period.) So close.
So... they don't offer the iPod 3G any more. The 4G looks suckier, doesn't power by firewire, and won't fit the various 3G paraphernalia* I own. The big problem with it is that it's 4044 points -- another 15 100 point donations (or 5 300 point donations) after Sunday.
Well, OK. I can accept that I get punished for cheating. But, I'm going back to Maya-land at the end of March. My last trip to Cobá kept me from donating for 6 months, as it's malarial, and not donating for 6 months invalidates all of my points.
Apparently, I'm in a race against the clock.

* -- A win for Firefox's spell checker. Apparently, I've been incorrectly dropping the second 'r' from that word my whole life.

Powell Aide Lawrence Wilkerson backs me up

2008-12-30T16:07:00.002-05:00

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I haven't received the general agreement I expected to my assertion that Sarah Palin was "George Bush without Connections." But, here's something.

Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said that as a new president, Bush was like Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee whom critics said lacked knowledge about foreign affairs.

Conventional Wisdom Update on Climate Change

2008-12-27T15:03:00.003-05:00

link via TalkingPointsMemo
Could the time for Happy Talk be drawing for a close? It seems like sections of the government are forgetting Shrub is still president. One of my prospective brothers-in-law was saying the other day that Bush 43 had been a disastrous president -- it always makes me anxious to hear the President being spoken of in the past tense. He's still there, doing terrible things, and to forget that renders us blind to the danger.

Anyway, the USGS, who you'd think would be out trying to find kleptocrats to turn over mining rights to (just kidding, I know that's the Bureau of Land Management,) released a study announcing climate change was happening faster than they'd previously been willing to admit.

Are you ready for what the Federal Government now believes? This is from the [PDF] executive summary:

Based on an assessment of the published scientific literature, the primary conclusions presented in this report are:

• Recent rapid changes at the edges of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets show acceleration of flow and thinning, with the velocity of some glaciers increasing more than twofold.... Inclusion of these processes in models will likely lead to sea-level projections for the end of the 21st century that substantially exceed the projections presented in the IPCC AR4 report (0.28 ± 0.10 m to 0.42 ± 0.16 m rise)....

• [S]ubtropical aridity is likely to intensify and persist due to future greenhouse warming. This projected drying extends poleward into the United States Southwest, potentially increasing the likelihood of severe and persistent drought there in the future...

• The strength of the [northward flow of warm, salty water in the upper layers of the Atlantic, and the southward flow of colder water in the deep Atlantic, {which} plays an important role in the oceanic transport of heat from low to high latitudes.] will decrease over the course of the 21st century in response to increasing greenhouse gases, with a best estimate decrease of 25-30%.... [RFM: this means the lower latitudes will heat up much faster than the upper latitudes, and New York City, to choose a place at random, may even get colder for some time.]

• A... doubling of northern high latitudes CH4 emissions[RFM:, a much more intense greenhouse gas that Carbon Dioxide,] could be realized fairly easily. However, since these models do not realistically represent all the processes thought to be relevant to future northern high-latitude CH4 emissions, much larger (or smaller) increases cannot be discounted.

So, there you are. The main point here is that scientists continue to discount the impending global tsunamis predicted by this blog. They laughed at me! I should build a giant robot, or something.

Hope

2008-12-21T16:15:00.002-05:00

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I popped open my Christmas Kindle today to get the paper, and what did I see?

John P. Holdren, a physicist and environmental policy professor at Harvard, will serve as the president’s science adviser as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology. Jane Lubchenco, a marine biologist from Oregon State University, will lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which overseas ocean and atmospheric studies and performs much of the government’s research on global warming.

Dr. Holdren will also be a co-chairman the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology along with the Nobel Prize-winning cancer research Dr. Harold Varmus, a former director of the National Institutes of Health, and Eric S. Lander, a genomic researcher.

It struck me that maybe our perceived cynicism about politics was because bad things kept happening to us, and our apathy was because we didn't seem to be able to do much about it. I'm ready for good things to happen.

I do think it's too late to stop a catastrophic collapse of civilization. However! I've been wrong before -- as, uh, regular readers know -- and I'm very open to being wrong about this. It's really nice to see government being set up to respond in powerful ways. I don't even know how to respond, other than positively. Gobama!

I was 11 years old when Reagan took office, and we've just been in a world of shit since then. I'm giddy about the prospect of good governance.

Geek Out with some hurricane animation

2008-12-11T01:20:00.001-05:00

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I did.

Congress Catches On

2008-12-11T00:52:00.003-05:00

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Mel Watt, a Representative from Charlotte, North Carolina, asks Interim Assistant Treasury Secretary Neel Kashkari what I think is a key question: Is Goldman Sachs running this country? Ah... this isn't going to end well. Still, I guess it's better to know the truth.

Update: Apparently my fact-checking team failed to confirm which state Charlotte was in. It's updated from South Carolina.

Prosperity is just around the corner

2008-12-10T22:12:00.002-05:00

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The Simpsons features a bratty child, and starts every episode with him repeatedly writing upon a chalkboard some assertion that an authority figure wants him to internalize, like "I will not [do some prank.]" This episode, he writes "Prosperity is just around the corner."

Ah, adulthood. I can repeatedly warn you about stagdeflation, and a depression which will compare to the Great Depression like World War II did to World War I, and I still get supper. Heck, I could have dessert if I wanted it.

Ha!