Elsewhere: science, global warming,and Gore

Excellent: stages of scientific progress

Short video in which our favorite science teacher takes an updated look at global warming (a.k.a. global climate destabilization) in terms of risk analysis:

http://view.break.com/381084

And please watch this (considerably longer) Jan 2006 Gore speech to the American Constitution Society.

Gore, Doerr and activism

You heard it here last: Gore wins Nobel Peace Prize. Today's NY Times editorial -

[I]t shouldn’t have to be left to a private citizen - even one so well known as Mr. Gore - or a panel of scientists to raise that [climate crisis] alarm, or prove what is now clearly an undeniable link, or champion solutions to a problem that endangers the entire planet.

That should be, and must be the job of governments. And governments - above all the Bush administration - have failed miserably.
...
We cannot afford to squander any more time.

Video of Gore's press appearance, after winning the Nobel Prize -

He's not ruling it out.


I have maintained previously that I'm not an activist, but for some causes that's a luxury we can't afford - "Don't expect to live in a democracy if you're not prepared to be an active citizen.*" So for the most important concerns - our climate, and our freedoms - activism it's gonna be. I'll be out collecting signatures for the Draft Gore movement.

"Entrepreneurs do more than anyone thinks possible with less than anyone thinks possible."
See this video of Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr's TED talk, Seeking salvation and profit in greentech - it's powerful, and offers a different perspective from what we typically see in Nevada County. Doerr cares about his daughter's future, and has the financial tools to play a significant role in shaping it, and exhorts us to join him in doing so. Excerpts -

There is a time when panic is the appropriate response, and we've reached that time. We can not afford to underestimate this problem.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it; the second best way is to finance it.
...[his co. is] investing $200 million in a wide range of technologies for disruptive innovation in green technologies...
geothermal could supply us for a thousand years; yet the fed budget calls for only $20 million R&D in geothermal
...
We need to reduce CO2 emissions by 1/2, as fast as possible
...
[A representative from China pointed out:] "Americans use 7 times the CO2 per capita as Chinese. Why should China sacrifice our growth so that the West can continue to be profligate and stupid?" does anyone here have an answer for him?

Energy is a 6 trillion dollar business worldwide, it is the mother of all markets. Do you remember the Internet? Green technologies, going green is bigger than the Internet - it could be the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century.

[and if we don't do it...]

Several persons - your correspondent among them - were not dry-eyed at the end.

In Gore's U.N. speech he made the point that decades from now our children will be asking us one of two things:

What were you thinking - why didn't you act?
or
How did you find the moral courage to rise and solve this crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?

Let's get moving. Our house is burning.

Sun. update - since the demagogues' smear-o-rama can't abide leaders, the smears on Gore have returned - read about them here.
Also - see what Gore did during Katrina; and, if you'd like, compare and contrast...

Local climate denialist Russ Steele edits, censors, deletes comments?

Does he? The evidence points that way.

One comment I submitted Sept 30, in which I asked commenter "Anthony" (who appears to be "Surface Stations" Anthony Watts) for a disclosure statement, initially survived moderation but later was deleted. Russ said this deletion occurred inadvertently as he was editing my comment to remove Anthony's last name (which raises another question*...which also didn't survive moderation), but curiously, my resubmitted comment - in which I'd helpfully removed Anthony's last name - did not appear either.

Others appear to have been deep-sixed as well, including this response to Russ's post "Yes, the sun really is creating global warming" extolling a paper by Svensmark and Friis-Christensen. My comment (which quotes from Russ's post):

> [Russ Steele said:] "Physicist Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen, Danish National Space Center, defending their position in a peer reviewed study. There most recent study: Reply to Lockwood and Fröhlich (PDF)"...

The climatologists' blog today covers this paper, concluding that "...all the evidence goes against the notion that GCR[galactic cosmic rays] are the cause of the present global warming"

[...]

> "A paper by Ken Gregory, Friends of Science Society, Calgary, Alberta, Canada..."

Sourcewatch on the (oil industry backed) Friends of Science Society. Ought to be renamed - with friends like that...

> "Another look at the Lockwood/Frochlich paper by SPPI Staff here, who conclude:..."

Sourcewatch on the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) ("the content of the website draws heavily on papers written by Christopher Monckton. However, the SPPI website also lists a number of other prominent climate change skeptics...." [including D'Aleo])

Very entertaining and revealing recent email correspondence between Monckton and George Monbiot, Did Lord Monckton fabricate a claim on his Wikipedia page?

Credibility matters, except to the gullible.


Russ, please, wake up. Your children's house is burning.

And here's my saw-the-light-of-day-but-submerged-again comment responding to "Anthony" (presumably Anthony Watts) in these comments:

re weatherman Anthony Watts's
> "your lack of understanding of the scientific method is clear now"

Anthony, please review Science vs. Faith, and consider which investigative algorithm you employ.

Anthony, I'd really like to know - what's your position now on the recent (last 40 years) global warming - do you still think that it's caused by the sun, and if so, by what mechanism or correlation - solar rays? sunspot cycles? something else?
(and do you have peer-reviewed evidence for this belief, or is it faith-based?)

And Anthony, have you ever received compensation, whether monetary or nonmonetary, whether directly or indirectly, in exchange for engaging in PR(Public Relations) activities?

More to come, when I have time.

And, dear reader, if you have time, I spent considerable time over at Russ's denialist blog in September, investigating each claim he made and, typically, only needing a minute of Googling to find it was bogus. Please feel free to drop by there and browse through that month of posts and comments. Somewhat naively, I had thought that I might be able to get through to him...but I can't.

Russ Steele sits on uncomfortable comment

On Saturday I commented on this post by Russ Steele; he'd posted graphs purporting to demonstrate that there's no warming trend. Two days later my comment has still not shown up; it turns out Russ a) wants to think about how to answer it and b) is real busy, although not too busy to publish multiple posts on other matters in the meantime.

His reluctance is understandable; here, roughly, is the comment:

In case anyone wants to know what it is that Russ is showing graphs of here
(Russ, if you're trying to educate your readers rather than snow them, explaining what's being measured will help)

The upper, original graph - with the red dots marking El Nino events - is of Spencer and Christy's ("UAH") dataset for Middle Troposphere("MT") atmospheric temperature over time. (Of 3 research groups using different analyses to measure the middle troposphere, the trend S&C get is the smallest, although still showing warming over time.)

What you should know about this graph of the UAH data:
1. The presentation is misleading - it's designed to emphasize "noise" rather than "signal". It obscures the upward trend in temperature by stretching out the X (time) axis relative to the Y (temp.) axis, and by failing to provide a best-fit (regression?) line to show the trend, which is a warming trend.
2. The dataset itself has a bias. The UAH Middle Troposphere measurements (and trend) are 'contaminated' by contributions from the stratosphere, which is (known and expected to be; ozone depletion plays a role) cooling. Thus the MT actual warming trend is likely steeper than this dataset shows.
(from here: "The University of Washington (UW) versions of the UAH and RSS analyses attempt to remove the stratospheric influence from the mid-troposphere measurements, and as a result the UW versions tend to have a larger warming trend than either the UAH or RSS versions.")

---

Next graphs:

The four lower graphs are of:
TLT = Temperature of Lower Troposphere (closer to ground)
TMT = Temperature of Middle Troposphere (higher up)
TTS = Temperature of Troposphere / Stratosphere (still higher up)
TLS = Temperature of Lower Stratosphere (still higher up)

Note that the trend for the TLT and the TMT is upward (showing warming), despite Russ's creativity with the red pen on the TLT (temperature of lower troposphere) chart. I think that's against the rules, Russ; it's certainly unusual, and inconsistent with how the other data in same graph are treated.

As mentioned above, the stratosphere (layer furthest from the earth) is cooling, and not germane to global warming, so the TTS and TLS graphs don't tell us anything relevant.

In his use of the first (red-dots") chart, Russ
a) doesn't tell you what his graph is of;
b) fails to mention in text or show on the graph that in fact the data do show a warming trend;
c) has cherry picked the mid-troposphere data (choosing to show mid-troposphere rather than the more accurate (and more warming) lower troposphere data, and further, choosing to show the UAH data, not the RSS or the UW versions which show stronger warming)

Russ, it looks like you're trying to pull the wool over your readers' eyes.

(The upper, "red dots" graph is also addressed here at Skeptical Science.)


Readers, please, wake up - our house is burning.

Newt Gingrich shows conservatives can be pro-science

Update: The Pope and (via WorldChanging) British conservatives are in the reality-based global warming camp as well.

The time I've spent lately debunking Russ Steele's "We had nothing to do with it and anyway it's no big deal" global warming denial-and-minimization posts (and the comments from Mike M. and George Rebane, who share Russ's views) has made me a bit prejudiced about The Conservative Mind; seems to me you'd have to be from the planet Zortar to dismiss the peer-reviewed science, the climatologists' explanations, and the position statements of the American Geophysical Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, our National Academy of Sciences and the various science academies of the UK, France, Russia, Germany, Japan, Italy and Canada, Brazil, China and India - and get your global warming views from PR flacks instead.

But at least one conservative seems to be more local - from a news story on Newt Gingrich:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich challenged fellow conservatives Tuesday to stop resisting scientific evidence of global warming and to propose solutions that rely on free-market incentives as an alternative to government regulation.

During a nearly two-hour debate with Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, Gingrich called for a "green conservatism" characterized by a willingness "to stand up and say, 'All right, here's the right way to solve these as seen by our value system.' "

Global warming - resource sites, Steele and Lomborg

Update: 19 graphs showing the evidence for global warming; they're from Open Mind, a science blog that's new to me, and looks to be really, really good.

One thing I can do locally to fight global warming is to counter the misinformation being dispensed by deniers and doubters in our neck of the blogospheric woods. So I've started doing just that; if you'd like to watch or assist, please drop by Russ Steele's NC Media Watch.

Confidential to Russ: a while back I'd asked you not to comment extensively about global warming in my comments here on NCFocus; this was because I didn't want to get sucked into tracking down and debunking the claims you passed on here. Now, with the accumulated evidence that the problem's worsening much faster than anticipated, I think debunking the denialism is essential. So, I'd like to retract my earlier restriction - you're more than welcome to come over and discuss global warming in the comments here any time now.

(FYI to others - the most valuable online 'debunking' resources have been DeSmogBlog and the climatologists' weblog RealClimate, and Open Mind. Many thanks to these sites' proprietors/contributors.)

Bjorn Lomborg has a new "no need to get alarmed" book out, and I'm told he sounds great on TV, but please do not be taken in. Over at DeSmogBlog, science journalist Chris Mooney evaluates Lomborg's reasoning and finds it deficient:

Lomborg's argument isn't that global warming is a hoax--thank goodness, we're mostly past that. Instead, he merely argues that climate change is not as big a deal as some think (e.g., Al Gore)--and further, that it doesn't make good economic sense to take dramatic steps to address the problem by imposing mandatory emissions caps.
...
What I found [when looking at Lomborg's treament of hurricanes] is pretty consistent with what critics say about his treatment of other matters. Lomborg seems to ignore worst-case scenarios and precautionary thinking....

From the Salon review of Lomborg's book:

The glaring error in "Cool It," and the one that disqualifies the book from making a serious contribution, is that Lomborg ignores the main concern driving the debate. Incredibly, he never mentions even the possibility that the world might heat up more than 4.7 degrees. Although he claims IPCC science as gospel, in fact the scientific body gives no single "standard" estimate as its official forecast for this century's warming....

The global warming "alarmism" that Lomborg finds so distasteful is motivated by a serious, science-driven concern that hidden within our global climate system are powerful positive feedback loops. So that as we inch up from 3 to 4 and then 4 to 5 degrees of warming, we may very well cross some temperature threshold that would trigger a couple of degrees of further warming, causing a catastrophic upward spiral in global temperatures.

and

But give Lomborg his whole argument. Suppose, as he believes, that Kyoto-level controls will cost a cumulative $5 trillion over the next 100 years. That is about two years' worth of increase in global output. Suppose also that we ignore Lomborg's advice and in the next few years freeze global warming pollution in the rich countries. That would mean that a century hence, our descendants, living in a much richer world, would have to wait an additional two years -- until 2109 -- until a growing global economy left them as rich as they otherwise would have been in 2107.

Will they thank us? Stabilizing emissions now will open the door for deeper reductions should our kids need to make them, and send powerful signals to the marketplace about future demand for the low-carbon, low-cost technologies that will be critical to stabilize the climate by the end of the century.

The Guardian last Saturday: State inaction on climate is a grave dereliction of duty ("Government exists to achieve tasks individuals cannot tackle alone. On the environmental crisis, it has badly failed")

Sunday's SF Chronicle editorial, The Issue Of Our Time:

The world effectively lost eight years in the effort to apply a brake to climate change while the Bush administration slowly evolved from denial to foot dragging in response to a strong scientific consensus that human activity - namely, the consumption of fossil fuels - was putting life on Earth on a collision course with disaster.

Global warming - we have ten years at most, to turn it around

We are like small children, distracted by baubles, with our parents too drunk to notice that our house is burning.*

Or too sociopathic to care.

Rolling Stone on The Secret Campaign of President Bush's Administration To Deny Global Warming (June 2007)

U.S. scales back climate science via satellites ("'Overall climate program in serious jeopardy,' NOAA and NASA experts say'") (June 2007)

The Threat to the Planet, by NASA's James Hansen, saying we have at most ten years to turn this around. "Not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions."
Published a year ago.

Interview with Hansen: (Apr 2007)

The average temperature is now 0.8 degrees Celsius higher than in the last century, with three-quarters of the increase happening in the last 30 years
...
There's another half degree Celsius in the pipeline due to gases already in the atmosphere, and there's at least one more half degree to come due to power plants which we're not going to stop immediately. Even if we decide now we've got to slow down as fast as is practical, there's still going to be enough emissions to take us to the warmest level [1.8 degrees Celsius] that the planet has seen in a million years...close to and possibly beyond what I would say is a dangerous level.

If we want to keep the planet looking close to what it looks like now, then we had better not accept an increase by more than one degree Celsius. Because if temperature goes up another two or three degrees Celsius, it will be the temperature of the middle Pliocene about 3 million years ago. That was a very different planet. There was no sea ice in the Arctic in the warm seasons, and the sea level was about 25 meters higher. We will be headed towards this situation if we continue with business-as-usual.

The polar bears.

Our house is burning.

Guess what? The Iraq war is going swimmingly.

Two articles on Iraq that you must read, whatever your politics; free cup of coffee may await.

• Rolling Stone's The Great Iraq Swindle ("How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury")


• Crooks and Liars' American Whistleblowers Tortured - Lives And Careers Ruined By Their Own Government, on the Forbes article Whistleblowers on Fraud Facing Penalties ("One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted.").

If you can read these and still continue to support this government and its war in Iraq, please let me know and I'll
a) report your name here (it should be made public)
and b) buy you a cup of coffee; it'll be more than worth the cost see just who you are.*

If you don't read anything else this month, read these 2 pieces.

Food for thought

Newspapers often bullied their way to centrality in a community. They were a kind of Mafia, a kind of protection racket--you don't play nice with me, you don't advertise with me, I mess with you. *

"The press [should be] a watchdog. Not an attack dog. Not a lapdog. A watchdog. Now, a watchdog can't be right all the time. He doesn't bark only when he sees or smells something that's dangerous. A good watchdog barks at things that are suspicious."
-- Dan Rather*

More reading on global warming

NASA's Global Warming Questions and Answers

The recent Newsweek article on Global Warming Deniers

Grist compendium of presidential candidates' positions on climate change - on recognizing it, and on addressing it

RealClimate's 1934 and all that, giving the story behind NASA's recent adjustment of North American surface temperatures; on same topic, see Conservatives vs NASA on Global Warming ("This diary follows a rumor's spread through the conservative blogosphere....")
Also, from the 8/26 NY Times, Quarter-Degree Fix Fuels Climate Fight


Selling Ecocide, Monbiot on hypocrisy in the press ("The editorials urge us to cut our emissions. The adverts urge us to raise them.")

*From the trenches, "they're alarmist because it brings them funding" doesn't ring true:

It seems to me that scientists downplaying the dangers of climate change fare better when it comes to getting funding. Drawing attention to the dangers of global warming may or may not have helped increase funding for the relevant scientific areas, but it surely did not help individuals like Mercer who stuck their heads out.*

It's now ncvoices.us

and unfortunately the forwarding for ncvoices.org is progressing s - l - o - w - l - y so for now that URL won't work. So - ncvoices.us

List of deficient or obsolete major bridges in Nevada County

Just a table, not very informative as-is; will provide more info if I run across it. How many (what %) of our bridges are major? Deficient/obsolete minor bridges won't appear on this list.

(Related: County to ID bridge repairs ("Official says local structures generally 'safe'"), Aug 3 in The Union.)

Status: presumably D=deficient,O=obsolete.

MSNBC provided the following information:

Bridges that carry at least 10,000 vehicles a day and have been rated as either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete by inspectors:

(please scroll down; lots of whitespace between here and the table, for some reason)

Status	Rating	Road	Place	County	Feature	Location
O	92.9		GRASS VALLEY	NEVADA	ROUTE 49	03-NEV-049-R13.66-GVY
D	75.0	80		NEVADA	SR 20	UP RR
D	80.3	80		NEVADA	TRUCKEE RIVER	03-NEV-080-28
O	63.0	80		NEVADA	SOUTH YUBA RIVER	03-NEV-080-R2.63
O	86.3	80		NEVADA	DONNER LAKE ROAD	03-NEV-080-R9.01

(I'd originally published this yesterday as a Nevada County Voices piece, but felt it didn't merit the space and attention, so have moved it to my personal blog.)

NCVoice is down; it's temporary

It will return as Nevada County Voices (since it certainly doesn't speak with a single voice...)

The Psychology of Cleaning (and the importance of framing)

The reason people hate to clean house is that they're looking at the job wrong.

Those of you who know me in real life will find it hard to believe that you could learn anything about cleaning (beyond cautionary tales) from this space, but bear with me.

With the advent of Nevada County Voice(s) I've been reading Shawn's streamlining/organizing/efficiency blog Project Simplify regularly. So when on top of her indoctrinations I read in Paul Graham's excellent essay on Stuff his belaboring of the obvious (to everyone but me) fact that:

One reason [a cluttered room saps one's spirits], obviously, is that there's less room for people in a room full of stuff...

...it triggered an insight - namely, that I've been looking at household entropy reduction the wrong way.

Cleaning is not serving and caring for your home. When you clean, you are not your house's servant.

Cleaning is defiantly reclaiming space that the vile (but spineless! so easily beaten back!) god Entropy thought it could slyly claim via adverse possession, while you were otherwise occupied.

It seems to be working, so far...
(and Shawn, if you already made this point and it's only now springing back out from my subconscious...thank you!)

A failure to communicate: Scientists, journalists, reality

A very nice explanation of why journalists - and scientists - have failed for so long to inform the public about global warming*, in Pants On Fire, part 1 over at Little Blog in the Big Woods - it's the very forseeable, and very unfortunate, outcome of their different cultural strictures and conventions, regarding communicating about reality:

...we [in our society] rely on scientific opinion, as reported; by reporters.
...
...[It is remarkably common] for humans to speak to each other, hold what passes for a conversation, and leave the conversation reasonably satisfied; but with no information having changed hands.
Scientists, journalists, "policy makers", and the general public, are doing this now, big time...[They] do not, in fact, speak the same languages; and they do not know it. We need interpreters, and have none...
[Consequence, re global warming:]
...The real equation, in 1988, was that 85% of the scientists who studied the problem were 85% sure we were heading for horrifyingly serious problems, and the majority of their opposition were known fools.
...[But] what [journalists] reported was: no one is sure, and Dr. Billy, a colorful contrarian, says "BULL!".

Not unrelated: xarker on Science and Media, and their practioners' respective failures to communicate and to adapt.

...a New Yorker cartoon of two aging scientists in a quiet, darkened lab office. One says to the other, "Well, at least we never stooped to popularizing science." There's a lot of dark humor implied in that subject, and it's not related solely to scientists.

And (Wed update) The Truth About Denial - Newsweek on the deniers' funding machine