Author: Brian

bellyaching along the way from plankton to pulsar

Gary Jones:

One of the reasons that heretics intrigue me is that the debilitating effects of staying inside the canon make one vulnerable to catastrophic failure as well as ordinary embarrassment: it makes one provincial. As an antidote I study weird science, the historical views of distant cultures and other alternative (contra-factual) histories including those found in speculative fiction. It ain’t necessarily so.

Still, one must resist every temptation to conclude that the search has been a success and that knowledge has at last been gained. Everything one knows is still wrong.

I find this comforting in an odd way. I never arrive but I wasn’t going anywhere in any event, I’m just out for a stroll.

another link

Paul Volker rolling:

Financial services in the United States had increased its share of value added from 2 per cent to 6.5 per cent, but he asked: “Is that a reflection of your financial innovation, or just a reflection of what you’re paid?”

Mark Thoma:

…the Fed’s support of the financial market and financial institutions made it appear that it favored some markets and some firms over others, and that has been a problem. But I don’t think the Fed had a lot of choice.

It lacked the authority to dismantle large financial institutions outside the traditional banking system, it lacked the plans to do so even if it had the authority, and the fact that regulators allowed these institutions to become such a threat to the economy if they failed meant the Fed had to intervene.

That’s why, going forward, three things need to happen. Regulators need to reduce the threat these banks pose, they need to have plans ready if a threat develops anyway, and legislators need to give regulators the authority to take control of troubled institutions outside the traditional banking system.

But I have to admit that “the dysfunction of the political system” makes me wary of what will happen once the legislative process begins. Things could get worse rather than better, and reducing the independence of the Fed is but one of many ways that could happen. Even so, the need for reform of the financial sector is sufficiently strong to justify taking that chance.

Banking will never be boring. Banking is a risky business. They are going to have plenty of activity. They can do underwriting. They can do securitization. They can do a lot of lending. They can do merger and acquisition advice. They can do investment management. These are all client activities. What I don’t want them doing is piling on top of that risky capital market business. That also leads to conflicts of interest.

Paul Volker:

What complicates this situation, as compared to the ordinary garden variety recession, is that we have this financial collapse on top of an economic disequilibrium. Too much consumption and too little investment, too many imports and too few exports.

We have not been on a sustainable economic track and that has to be changed.

But those changes don’t come overnight, they don’t come in a quarter, they don’t come in a year. You can begin them but that is a process that takes time. If we don’t make that adjustment and if we again pump up consumption, we will just walk into another crisis.

What should I say? … We have not yet achieved self-reinforcing recovery. We are heavily dependent upon government support so far. We are on a government support system, both in the financial markets and in the economy.

Dave Pollard: How to save the world.

“I think you have to feel secure before you can feel anything else.”

Another major Cabinet-level policy shift.

Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior:

“We’ve already done a U-turn from the place where the previous administration was taking the country with respect to climate change and energy.”

In addition to the 2,500 square kilometers that Interior is evaluating for solar power potential, the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab estimates that wind farms off the east coast could ultimately produce 1,000 gigawatts of power.

“That’s more power from wind alone than is needed to power the entire electrical needs of the US.”

He called for generating at least 20 percent of U.S. power from such wind resources by 2030—following in Denmark’s footsteps—and noted that 5,300 megawatts of new renewable energy projects, including geothermal, refitted hydropower, solar and wind (on- and offshore), are currently being evaluated by his department for public lands, along with the transmission corridors to go with them.

Richard Rodriguez:

Something funny I have noticed, perhaps you have noticed it, too.

We will end up with one and a half cities in America—Washington, D.C., and American Idol.

We will all live in Washington, D.C., where the conversation is a droning, never advancing, debate between “conservatives” and “liberals.” We will not read about newlyweds. We will not read about the death of salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels. We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus.

An obituary does not propose a solution.

Marisa Meizlish:

The list of heads of state that will be arriving to COP-15 on Wednesday is pretty impressive. Rudd, Netanyahu, Chavez, Kirschner, Sarkozy, Berlusconi, Mubarak, Kibaki, Arroyo, Yudhoyono, more controversial figures such as Mugabe and Ahmadinejad and on and on to over 100.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke urged the 192 nations who sent representatives to the UN Climate Change Conference to

1. resist pressures from those with vested interests in the status quo,
2. eliminate incentives to the petroleum industry, and
3. design incentives to create jobs in the clean-energy industry.

Locke said unparalleled economic growth occurred in the 20th Century because of two factors:

1. access to cheap, abundant fossil fuels, and
2. ignorance or disregard for the fact that those fuels produced greenhouse gas pollution that caused global warming.

Both of those factors, he said, belong to history.

“Those days are over.

“What’s required is nothing less than completely redesigning the way we produce and consume energy….

“We’re talking about creating an entirely new model of economic growth.

“The world has spent a century investing in petroleum infrastructure, Locke said: refineries, pipelines, stations. That creates vested interests in keeping things just the way they are.

Notes Jeff Mcmahon, Locke urged nations to stop catering to ‘vested interests’.

Danah Boyd:

“Kids have always cared about privacy, it’s just that their notions of privacy look very different than adult notions.

“Kids don’t have the kind of privacy that we assume they do. As adults, by and large, we think of the home as a very private space – it’s private because we have control over it. The thing is, for young people it’s not a private space – they have no control. They have no control over who comes in and out of their room, or who comes in and out of their house.

“As a result the online world feels more private because it feels like it has more control.”

Bruce Schneier:

“For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness.

“We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts.

“We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.”

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.

link Barely Imagined Beings

Cenk Uygur:

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.

The Atlantic:

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“.

1. “Energy challenges faced by the world are undeniable…
2. “Economic progress will drive energy demand…
3. “Oil and gas will remain indispensable for the foreseeable future…
4. “Global effort will be required to tackle greenhouse gas emissions…

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.”

Paul Volker at the Telegraph:

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

Carl Zimmer:

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.

NYTimes:

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.