big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
HA!
Man might be more tolerable, less fractious and smug, if he had more to fear. I do not mean fear of the intangible, the suffocation of the introvert, but physical fear, cold sweating fear for one’s life, fear of the unseen menacing beast, imminent, bristly, tusked and terrible, ravening for one’s own hot saline blood. — J A Baker
Probably not true. Destructive hormones and a’ that.
Bill O’Reilly: Let me be very bold and fresh again, do you believe that you are smart enough, incisive enough, intellectual enough to handle the most powerful job in the world?
Sarah Palin: I believe that I am because I have common sense and I have I believe the values that I think are reflective of so many other American values, and I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the uhm, the ah, a kind of spineless, spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite, Ivy league education and, and a fat resume that is based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles. Americans are could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership, I’m not saying that that has to be me.
This week, the British medical journal BMJ published a multi-part investigation that confirms that the scientific evidence just isn’t there to show that Tamiflu prevents serious complications, hospitalization, or death in people that have the flu.
The BMJ goes further to suggest that Roche, the Swiss company that manufactures and markets Tamiflu, may have misled governments and physicians.
test post
fixing FTP fail
The American Petroleum Institute wants you afraid. [pdf pamphlet]
The American Petroleum Institute is talking to you, America.
But API failed.
iStockphoto titled the original “Group of happy business people standing together against white background”. tip to Jon Taplin
These numbers are not faraway politics but get-up-in-the-morning industry.
Tuesday’s report from Exxon-Mobil, New Outlook for Energy: A View to 2030.
Energy demand to be about 35 percent higher in 2030 than it was in 2005.
Energy demand requires “trillions of dollars of investment and a commitment to innovation“.
He’s not arguing the science, just noticing arrogance and stupidity.
Grasping at Straws by Ed:
From my perspective the most prominent downside to the Climategate ‘nontroversy’ is the fact that every jackass internet commenter and talk radio lemming in the world will resort even more rapidly to “LOL we all know the ‘data’ on global warming is FAAKE!”
What is more interesting to me, though, is the broader public reaction to this ‘news’.
No amount of evidence or argumentation can convince Americans to think twice about starting a war, that universal access to health insurance will actually cost less in the long run, or that cutting taxes will not solve all their problems. Yet these same people are ready to believe at the drop of a hat that climate change is a hoax, an elaborate global conspiracy, based on out-of-context quotes extracted from emails among four inconsequential scientists.
First, let’s look at the words causing all the pant-shitting. This juicy quote has redneck America reaching for its revolver:
“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
The “decline” in question is not in temperature – it refers to measurements of tree rings. I have no idea what that means, but it seems worth noting that this is explicitly not referring to temperature. That’s kinda relevant. As for the word “trick,” among my circle of social scientists that term is commonly used to describe statistical techniques, especially techniques one poorly understands. But for all I know, these “tricks” and tree ring measurements could actually contradict the global warming hypothesis. I am not exactly qualified to draw conclusions about this data. That doesn’t stop most people.
Second, there is this gem:
“I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.”
Half of the editorial board of the journal in question resigned in protest of the decision to publish a global warming denialist article, about which Climate Research itself stated: “(The paper’s findings) cannot be concluded convincingly from the evidence provided in the paper. We should have requested appropriate revisions of the manuscript prior to publication.” Hmm.
An editor also claimed that global warming denialists “had identified Climate Research as a journal where some editors were not as rigorous in the review process as is otherwise common.” In other words, this is a shit journal, a grease trap that catches all of the detritus from the real journals in the field. Every academic discipline has a few and they are routinely denigrated as we see in this email – especially if it is known for blatantly ideology-driven editorial practices.
Third, we have:
“The other paper by MM is just garbage. […] I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
Folks, welcome to academia. Seriously.
This has always happened and happens today in every field with a peer-review process. Academics are elitist, catty little bitches. Find me a field – I beg you, any field – where this scenario does not play out.
Smith doesn’t like Wong’s work (no doubt over some petty, irrelevant methodological issue) so Smith calls Davis and Martinez and all three collude to reject Wong’s paper from the conference, journal, seminar, or whatever. Being able to identify the petty assholes, narcissists, and would-be gatekeepers is half of being a successful academic…and dealing with their neuroses is the other. Whoever MM is, he/she has challenged the consensus in the field and his/her colleagues, all of whom are ready to defend their decades of published work to the death. Not exactly man bites dog in terms of newsworthiness.
Not terribly impressive evidence of a vast global warming conspiracy.
So why are people so eager to buy it? Because Westerners, and car-centric Americans in particular, are desperate to avoid having to alter their behavior.
Like a terminal cancer patient who chooses to believe in ridiculous miracle cures offered in spam emails, the average American intuitively understands that fossil fuels and habitat destruction must be having some kind of impact on the planet. Warming, cooling, whatever – all that burning coal and hazardous chemicals dumped into rivers have to be doing something. But the problem either seems too large to confront, a situation highly conducive to denialism, or this ‘evidence’ of a hoax is the excuse people need to morally justify driving an empty Durango to the office every day.
These emails are spectacularly unspectacular.
It undermines the credibility of about four scientists at a university no one in the US has ever heard of. It specifically does not undermine the entire body of climate research.
There is no evidence of a hoax, no conspiracy to fabricate data, and no directives from the cabal of liberal professors and militant vegans who control the entire planet in the minds of paranoid Glenn Beck fans. Yet I’d be willing to bet that a majority of Americans will decide that the emails are in fact evidence of all of that and more.
What was that line from the X-Files? Not “The truth is out there.” The other one: “I want to believe.”
The former US Federal Reserve chairman told an audience that included some of the world’s most senior financiers that their industry’s “single most important” contribution in the last 25 years has been automatic telling machines, which he said had at least proved “useful”.
Echoing FSA chairman Lord Turner’s comments that banks are “socially useless”, Mr Volcker told delegates who had been discussing how to rebuild the financial system to “wake up”. He said credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations had taken the economy “right to the brink of disaster” and added that the economy had grown at “greater rates of speed” during the 1960s without such products.
When one stunned audience member suggested that Mr Volcker did not really mean bond markets and securitizations had contributed “nothing at all”, he replied: “You can innovate as much as you like, but do it within a structure that doesn’t put the whole economy at risk.”
He said he agreed with George Soros, the billionaire investor, who said investment banks must stick to serving clients and “proprietary trading should be pushed out of investment banks and to hedge funds where they belong…If you fail, fail. I’m not going to help you. Your stock is gone, creditors are at risk, but no one else is affected.”
Yo, America. Once the largest freshwater body of water west of the Mississippi… let’s fix it.
The lake’s disappearance has had far-reaching consequences.
In 1852, Army engineer George Derby could stand in the Sierra’s foothills and count the eponymous bulrushes, called tules, near the lake’s shoreline. But on many midsummer days now, it’s hard to see across the street.
Sometimes it hurts to breathe.
Judith Lewis: The Ghost of Tulare :
Reviving an ancient lake may help solve California’s water woes.
“The real question is: How do we manage the water we have for farms, fish and people?”
In fact, given the unfortunate confluence of water and fiscal crises in the state, restoring Tulare Lake — or at least parts of it — appears more feasible than ever.
“It would move the San Joaquin Valley toward regional self-sufficiency,” he said.
George Bush’s sloppy ideology reaches the ridiculous.
Safe Drinking Water Act analyzed at NYTimes:
That law requires communities to deliver safe tap water to local residents.
But since 2004, the water provided to more than 49 million people has contained illegal concentrations of chemicals like arsenic or radioactive substances like uranium, as well as dangerous bacteria often found in sewage.
Regulators were informed of each of those violations as they occurred.
But regulatory records show that fewer than 6 percent of the water systems that broke the law were ever fined or punished by state or federal officials, including those at the Environmental Protection Agency, which has ultimate responsibility for enforcing standards.
Studies indicate that drinking water contaminants are linked to millions of instances of illness within the United States each year.
“Prediction is very difficult. Especially about the future.” – Yogi Berra
Coupled with a rapid increase in global temperatures, ocean acidification, and other changes, we may be pushing the environment into a state we’ve never experienced as a civilization.
Extra carbon dioxide is creating a second worldwide evolutionary pressure as it dissolves into the ocean. There it is turning into carbonic acid and lowering the pH.
Knoll points out some disturbing parallels between today’s crisis and a pulse of mass extinctions that occurred 252 million years ago, wiping out an estimated 96% of species in the oceans and 70% of species on land.
A rapid increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere led, among other things, to ocean acidification. For animals that depended on calcium carbonate, “you had about a 90% chance of going extinct,” says Knoll. “Corals, sponges, brachiopods, they all kicked the can.”
Knoll doesn’t expect human-driven mass extinctions to be as bad as that ancient one. But they could still be unimaginably huge. “If we lose half the species on the planet, our grandchildren are not going to see them restored,” says Knoll. “It will take millions of years.”
One way or another, life will survive this current crisis. But where is life headed in the very distant future?
Why? Maybe just a bit of petty cash.
When word broke that 62 MBs of emails were hacked from the Climate Research Unit, the sheer amount of content (not to mention handpicking of select passages that were most incriminating) seemed to suggest that the hacking was more than just some average Joe hellbent on disproving climate change.
Now, the story gets more complex: fingers are pointing at Russia’s secret service.
A senior member of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change says that Climategate was an advanced, politically motivated attack.
According to Daily Mail, the leaked emails were originally posted on a server at a firm called Tomcity, an internet security business Tomsk, Siberia. Russia’s track record does not bode well in the wake of these allegations. From Daily Mail:
“Computer hackers in Tomsk have been used in the past by the Russian secret service (FSB) to shut websites which promote views disliked by Moscow….Such arrangements provide the Russian government with plausible deniability while using so-called ‘hacker patriots’ to shut down websites.”
Shaun Walker from the Independent cited similar information:
“The FSB security services, descendants of the KGB, are believed to invest significant resources in hackers, and the Tomsk office has a record of issuing statements congratulating local students on hacks aimed at anti-Russian voices, deeming them “an expression of their position as citizens, and one worthy of respect”. The Kremlin has also been accused of running co-ordinated cyber attacks against websites in neighbouring countries such as Estonia, with which the Kremlin has frosty relations, although the allegations were never proved.”
If FSB is truly behind Climategate, the obvious question is, Why?
The prestigious journal Nature summarizes Climategate:
Stolen e-mails have revealed no scientific conspiracy, but do highlight ways in which climate researchers could be better supported in the face of public scrutiny.
If there are benefits to the e-mail theft, one is to highlight yet again the harassment that denialists inflict on some climate-change researchers, often in the form of endless, time-consuming demands for information under the US and UK Freedom of Information Acts.
Governments and institutions need to provide tangible assistance for researchers facing such a burden.
New assessment of the $700 billion bailout program.
The Treasury Department expects to recover all but $42 billion of the $370 billion it has lent to ailing companies since the financial crisis began last year, with the portion lent to banks actually showing a slight profit, according to a new Treasury report.
Of course, the government’s potential losses extend beyond the Treasury program. The Federal Reserve, for example, still holds a trillion-dollar portfolio of mortgage-backed securities whose market value is unknown.
Tsunami on the sun? Well of course.
Towering waves rise quickly, a 100,000 kilometer-high tsunami sprinting across the surface of the sun at about 900,000 kilometers per hour, and spread out in a circular pattern millions of kilometers in circumference … a footprint of a coronal mass ejection.
Elizabeth May:
A Different Picture Emerges When You Read Them All
Strange, isn’t it that media are not wondering about who hacked into the computers and who paid them? Or why Dr. Andrew Weaver’s office in Victoria has been broken into twice. My guess is that all the computers of all the climate research centers of the world have been repeatedly attacked, but defenses held everywhere but East Anglia.
The scientists at East Anglia, plus colleagues around the world, are being hung out to dry as though they did something wrong.
I did not want to spring to their defense until I read all their emails. Yes, all 3,000 or whatever of them.
“Seven hundred billion was a number out of the air,” Neel Kashkari recalls, wheeling toward the hex nuts and the bolts. “It was a political calculus. I said, ‘We don’t know how much is enough. We need as much as we can get [from Congress]. What about a trillion?’ ‘No way,’ Hank shook his head. I said, ‘Okay, what about 700 billion?’ We didn’t know if it would work. We had to project confidence, hold up the world. We couldn’t admit how scared we were, or how uncertain.”
“Don’t try to score a touchdown. Just — if Paulson throws the ball, catch it.”
In February 2008, that meant drafting an emergency plan in the unlikely event of an economic meltdown. Kashkari and a colleague wrote, “Break the Glass: Bank Recapitalization Plan.”
When the banks actually tanked later that year, the 10-page plan laid the basis for TARP. Amid the chaos, Kashkari was appointed czar.
[ unlikely event? actually tanked? ]
Thoughts tended toward the apocalyptic.
Carbon dioxide indirectly causes up to 50% more global warming than originally thought…
“we do not want to be alarmist here”
But if people are thinking about stabilizing CO2 at a certain atmospheric level, or putting together a treaty, or having a debate about what the levels should be, it really is important to know what the long-term consequences of those emissions are going to be, because CO2 hangs around for so long.
!
Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial.
We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.
The science is complex but the facts are clear.
But one does not need to believe in climate change to support the potential climate deal which is scheduled to replace the Kyoto Protocol after 2012. The climate deal means much more than just carbon cuts, carbon trading and adaptation fund. A scientifically sound climate deal would bring many other positive changes for the environment, economy and the society.
At many regions exposed to air by various activity, the land sinks because bacteria then eat the dirt.
New Orleans, for instance. Florida. California. Yes, Holland.
Few subjects rival the federal budget deficit in its power to provoke muddled thinking.
It’s a pity, because there are really only three basic truths that policy makers need to know about deficits:
- It’s actually good to run them during deep economic downturns.
- Whether deficits are bad in the long run depends on how borrowed money is spent.
- Eliminating deficits entirely would not require any painful sacrifices.
To eliminate deficits, we need additional revenue.
The encouraging news is that we could raise more than enough by taxing activities that cause harm to others. Called Pigovian taxes [wiki] … such levies create a burden that is more than offset by the reductions they cause in costly side effects of everyday activities. …
- When producers emit sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere,… the resulting acid rain harms others. As the … Clean Air Act demonstrated, the most efficient … remedy was to tax sulfur dioxide emissions. …
- When the transactions of financial speculators fuel asset bubbles, they increase the risk of financial meltdowns. A small tax on those transactions would reduce this risk. …
- Carbon dioxide emissions contribute to global warming. Here as well, taxation offers the most efficient and least intrusive remedy.
Anti-tax zealots denounce all taxation as … depriving citizens of their right to spend their hard-earned incomes as they see fit.
… nowhere does the Constitution … grant us the right to harm others with impunity.
No one is permitted to steal our cars or vandalize our homes. Why should opponents of taxation be allowed to harm us in less direct ways?
Found at Economist’s View
The EPA will declare carbon dioxide a ‘Public Danger‘.
Such an “endangerment” decision is necessary for the EPA to move ahead early next year with new emission standards for transportation and large emitters such as power stations, cement kilns, crude-oil refineries and chemical plants, triggering a carbon cut of 17% below 2005 by 2020.
More people have more money.
Global production of meat is currently around 260 million tons and will increase 21% by 2015. Two thirds of the growth is expected to be in China, according to market research bureau Gira. [news clip]
Big winners of the increased consumption are poultry and pork.
Poultry production will grow 25%, an additional 24 million tons by 2015 reaching a total of 105 million tons.
World population will eat 125 million tons of pork in 2015, over 21 million tons above 2005 (+10%).
Beef will increase 13% (8 million tons) to a total of 70 million tons in 2015.
Michael Pettis:
How fast does consumption need to grow in China in order for a meaningful rebalancing to take place? Probably a lot more than you think. This is arithmetically the case because China is starting from such a low base.
At roughly $1.2 trillion in 2008, total Chinese private consumption is only a little more than that of France (around $1.0 trillion) and still less than that of Germany (about $1.3 trillion, not to mention the UK’s $1.4 trillion and Japan’s $3.2 trillion). This fact alone should cause us to be extremely skeptical of feverish claims about the role Chinese consumers can play in making up for any contraction in US consumption – which at roughly $9.4 trillion last year is nearly eight times the size of China…
I think too many commentators underestimate the magnitude of the problem.