Those of you who follow the science policy wars - the question of how you determine where the science is on controversial policy questions - might be interested in a story by Annette Cary in the Tri-City Herald (reg. req.) Friday about litigation over whether the Hanford nuclear plant made people sick.
Cary does a good job of laying out the dilemmas in what could be a classic case study. You've got a Big Science consensus, in this case represented by a CDC study saying, essentially, "no harm."
"The best science that money can buy suggests no link between emissions and thyroid disease," said defense attorney Randy Squires in a earlier motion hearing.
You've got plaintiff's lawyers arguing that the data used for the CDC study is based on such uncertainty and imperfect knowledge that one has to fall back on first principles understanding.
"The one well-established risk factor for thyroid cancer is radiation," downwinder attorney Brian Depew told the judge as about 20 downwinders and their family members listened in a Spokane courtroom.
And you've got a judge who has to decide.
The magic is not predictable, and sometimes it's difficult to call it up when you need it. But when it happens, it's a delight to watch.
The case in point is gnome-utils. It's a little package of utilities that ships with GNOME, things like the dictionary and a system log viewer and such. It was my first serious involvement with the GNOME project back when I started, the place I did my first CVS commits, and I've always maintained a certain fondness, keeping an eye on the docs and a subscription to the bugs alias. The list of people who have contributed to it over the years is like a historic who's who of GNOME. Heck, even GNOME's astrophysicist emeritus, Mark Galassi, has code in there!
Of late it's been something of a chore to maintain, though. Glynn Foster most recently bore the burden, but needed to bail and try to find a new maintainer. And, out of the woodwork, a new team has materialized, which has been attacking the problem with gusto. Davyd Madeley, Vince Noel, Glenn Mason, Dennis Cranston (Dennis has actually been doing a great job of maintaining the file search tool for a while, which is rather like keeping a 1957 Ford pickup on the road - you really admire the person who does it, and are glad it's not you.) James Bowes.
Davyd today suggested a way to see if a bit of the magic could be made to rub off on the applets. Check it out.
This is a Google experiment.
Last month, I was incredibly frustrated when I went to Google to get schedule information for the New Mexico State Fair and couldn't find the fair's web page. Today, after a conversation at the office about this travesty, I spent some actual time with Google and could not find the fair's web site in the first 10 pages of Google. I found Matt Bohnsack's Fair pictures, and my own Fair pictures. But the actual web page was nowhere to be found. My hope is that by linking to it, I can lend it a little bit of googlejuice, so people who need information about the state fair can find it. Becuase it's a really fun fair. Y'all should go next year.
Here's what I said Oct. 7, in response to a paper in Science by Hans von Storch raising questions about Michael Mann's hockey stick paleoclimate graph:
Those opposed to action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have made the hockey stick a central focus, acting as though all they need to do is knock Dr. Mann's legs out from under him in order to doom the whole global climate change enterprise.
Here's how David Legates and Willie Soon described the hockey stick yesterday in Tech Central Station in their discussion of the von Storch paper:
In global climate reports -- particularly the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report (TAR) in 2001 -- it's used as proof that mankind's industrial revolution has over the last hundred years started dangerously pushing up global temperatures, thus justifying restrictions on emissions of human produced greenhouse gasses.
It's not that I'm smart. It's just that these people are so predictable, everyone playing their well-rehearsed roles. It would be funny if it wasn't so tedious.
Those of you closely following battleground state polls will be happy to know that the latest Fleck Yard Sign Survey has been completed. On my morning walk:
Kerry/Edwards: 10*
Bush/Cheney: 4
* Actually on one of those 10 the "Edwards" had been carefully covered up, so maybe 9.5/4? I've no earthly idea what the margin of error is, and there were a shitload of "decline to state" houses. Also one particularly entertaining house - a beat-up old van in the driveway with a peace sign sticker on the back and a Bush/Cheney yard sign.
John Keller sends along an interesting link to a Guardian story from earlier this month about climate "pressure points," places and situations on the globe that are especially vulnerable to climate change, from more extreme monsoons and El Niños to a parched Amazon.
So when I mentioned the art I saw last week in Portland, I didn't go into detail.
I had a morning to kill before my flight out, so I went to the Portland Art Museum. It has become my custom when I'm traveling for work to try to find the local art museum. I've seen art in Philadelphia, Boston, Toronto, Fort Worth, Washington D.C., Chicago and Cleveland this way. And now Portland.
I was thinking as I wandered the Portland museum about the reasons this gives me such pleasure. It has a lot to do, I expect, with my childhood. My father is an artist, and art has always been a central part of my life. I was dragged through many a museum as a youngster, which might suggest a possible explanation.
But I think it's deeper, the fact that I was surrounded by art all of the time - my father's paintings on the wall, the smell of oil paints in his studio - art as a thing intrinsic rather than a thing separate - water to the fish. To say that my father is my favorite artist would be to state something both subtle and obvious. My whole aesthetic is based on gazing at his work from the earliest days of my life. It's hard to imagine how it could be otherwise. My sister's the same way. Like I said, water to the fish. (One of my earliest memories is lying on my parents' bed at nap time, staring deeply and intently at a piece of my father's on the wall, an abstraction of Mesa Verde, I think. That very same painting, or one very much like it, is hanging on the wall of Mom and Dad's living room. I have tried to con them out of it, but my Golden Son Powers of Persuasion have thus far failed.)
In fact, the whole museum thing didn't really grow on me until I was a teenager. We went on some studio tours of working modern artists (Big Boys, as I would later hear Lissa describe them), and I began to link up what I was seeing there with what hangs on the walls of museums. It started to come together, my intrinsic understanding with the extrinsic World of Art.
My first great museum art epiphany was a show at the L.A. County Museum of Art called Art and Technology, with this amazing giant moving ice bag by Klaus Oldenberg. I thought it was hilarious! And I remember upstairs on a landing at the L.A. County slipping out again and again to see Ed Kienholz's Back Seat Dodge. At some point after that, I saw a moving Mark Rothko retrospective, panel after panel of variations on his two colored rectangles, an impossible obsession worked again and again through what I now understand to have been a troubled life. I think it was probably that Rothko show that sealed the deal - as if there were really any doubt. I still get goose bumps when I see a Rothko.
The foundation of my marriage is based on art. (Lissa has the catalog of Kienholz's L.A. County retrospective, something she bought at a used bookstore before we knew one another. She and I had the L.A. art scene in common before we met. She was the one who remembered Oldenberg's name.) She loves Christo, partly because of his shear audacity and partly because of the slightly loopy nature of his pieces. Which brings us back to Portland, where they had the documentary show of his wrapping of the Pont Neuf - his sketches, some of the cloth and tackle they used, correspondence with the mayor of Paris (Jacque Chirac), and photos of an earnest Christo. One imagines a young Woody Allen playing him in the film. "No, that's right. I want to wrap the bridge. Yes. In cloth." Pause. "Well, it'll be a tan color, not too obtrusive." I was surely wishing my L could have been there with me - it was a fun show.
They also had a collection of Edward Weston photos - not someone I knew much about, so the show was greatly rewarding. He used to hang with Paul Strand, another early modern American photographer who I only recently became acquainted with during a similar expedition, this one in Boston with sister Lisa.
And they had The Western Motel, a piece by Ed and Nancy Kienholz.
A blog reader and neighbor asked about rain in the 'hood. As I have a rain gauge and too much time on my hands, here you are, Mark:
That's cumulative rain for the 2003-04 "rain year," which starts Oct. 1. (They do it that way so the whole winter precip season is captured in a single year's statistic.) The red line is the long-term average at the official Albuquerque weather station. Green is the rain/snow at the official gauge this year, which is about three miles from my house. Blue is my rainfall.
By any measure, it's been an extraordinarily wet year. I've only got five years of data at my house, but the official ABQ gauge is at a very similar point on the city's elevational gradient, so there's no reason to think my numbers ought to be a whole lot different. Most of the difference was a monster July (the tenth month on the graph), when I had a couple of huge thunderstorms that hit my house but largely missed the airport. The 4.5 inches I got in July is by far the wettest month since I put the rain gauge up. These can be hit-or-miss affairs. But in general, looking at the long-term statistics this afternoon, I found that I'm often reading higher than the official ABQ number. A bit of a puzzle.
Alex Witze has a delightful story about Jim and Jenny Marshall, who are collecting all the elements:
In their townhouse in Denton, Texas, chemistry professor Jim Marshall and his wife, Virginia, have compiled perhaps the world's only collection of every element from hydrogen (atomic number 1) to uranium (atomic number 92).Not content with that, they have also traveled to most of the places where each element was discovered, bringing back a sample of the original minerals.
The Marshalls also have a web page documenting their adventures.
From Borowitz:
STEINBRENNER ACQUIRES NUCLEAR WEAPON
Trades Alex Rodriguez to Kim Jong-IlNew York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner acquired a nuclear weapon today in a transaction that sent slugger Alex Rodriguez and an undisclosed sum of cash to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il.
While national security experts were divided over what possible use Kim might have for the All-Star infielder, there was unanimity of opinion about Mr. Steinbrenner’s plans for his newly-minted nuclear arsenal.
“The warhead that George Steinbrenner has acquired, if deployed on a ballistic missile he already owns, could reach Fenway Park in a matter of minutes,” said Donaldson Tobin of the University of Minnesota.
Hat-tip to my Sis, who is unaccountably rooting for the Sox.
From the AP:
CORDELE, Ga. -- A Georgia man facing arson charges for burning his own home is blaming nine or 10 beers, and a disaster movie.Charles Adams told Crisp County authorities he had been drinking while watching the movie "Day After Tomorrow."
Adams allegedly told deputies that after watching the special-effects extravaganza depicting deadly natural disasters caused by global warming, he decided to set fire to pillows on his bed.
The flames destroyed his doublewide mobile home.
With the Yankees gone, I must now choose a team for the coming world series of baseball.
Watching the Red Sox against the Yankees, I grew a certain grudging respect, so that was a definite possibility. However, Lissa's late mother, Mary, was from St. Louis - a Cardinals fan. In addition, Lissa suggested she'd smack me if I didn't root for the Cards.
Fair enough. Cards it is. I love post-season baseball. As Luis said, bring it on.
Been travelling. Now I'm back. Saw some rain, some art, learned some fun stuff about snowpack and runoff, and spent far too much time in airports. Remember when airplane travel was an exciting novelty?
Saturday I blogged about a fortune cookie suggesting that it was up to me to "created the peacefulness" I longed for. An emailer notes the astounding coincidence that he received the exact same fortune at a restaurant in Kalamazoo, Mich. Coincidence? Or has some subversive group taken over the fortune cookie industry, pushing its agenda of fractured grammar and world peace?
One of the difficulties of understanding climate change is that it's hard to see it for yourself. The data tells an interesting story, made more interesting by the output of the climate models. But at a visceral level, numbers have a different status in our minds than personal experience.
In September 2002 I drove with Mom and Dad to the Grand Canyon, driving through places I've been visiting since I was a kid. I saw the dead trees. They registered.
Now, we know drought kills trees. And we know drought's been happening on its own here for the entire chunk of the Holocene that we can see through the tree ring record. So I was, in my own mind, having a visceral experience of drought, not any deeper sort of climate change. But peeling the onion back a layer, I've come to the realization that more than a simple drought cycle may be at work here, that the warming that has clearly been measured here is playing a role.
It is only in hindsight that we will know whether what I'm seeing now, here on the landscape of the desert southwest, is Climate Change or simply a manifestation of natural decadal-scale variability. That's the hard thing about the experience of Climate Change - it involves processes over time scales sufficiently long that our own experience may not be the best guide.
But I've sure seen a lot of dead trees, and they've made me mighty curious. Stuff I wrote elsewhere about this, on climate and New Mexico's dying trees:
FRIJOLITO MESA— Craig Allen's trees are dying.The ponderosa pines are gone completely from this patch of wilderness, and piñon are not far behind.
Insects have been the executioners, but warming temperatures and drought appear to have pronounced the death sentence, pushing trees to the brink for the bugs to finish off.
Allen, a 46-year-old federal biologist, has been studying the Jemez Mountains for more than two decades. He counts and measures the trees, tracks the growing grass and measures the dirt washing down the gullies, all in an effort to understand the complex interplay between climate and landscape.
Over the past two years, the one-two punch of warm weather and drought has brought extraordinary change.
Forgive me, Dano, for I have sinned. It has been three weeks since my last confession.
For the holy book of Cycling doth say, "When the grapes hath been made wine and the leaves doth fall, thy big chain ring shall be even an abomination unto you; ye shall not eat of the temptation of the hammer, but ye shall have thy big chain ring in abomination. Neither shalt thou ride with fast paceline in thy big ring as with thy small ring: it is abomination."
See, the thing is, there's this sweet little chicane down south of the Bueno chile plant, a pair of curves that dip right and then left. And my flesh is weak, as I slip through the shadows of the cottonwoods, feel the stirring in my legs, and it takes just a twitch of my finger and I am there, riding my big chain ring. Forgive me, for I am weak.
And then there was this paceline, see, that passed me on the bike trail. And they weren't going that fast, so I tacked on the back. It was mere flirtation, not real speed. What could be so wrong with that? And then the pace started picking up, and there was that stirring in my legs and the twitch of my finger. Forgive me, for I am weak.
And then this morning. This morning the flesh was weakest of all. Out with the guys - you know how that is! - I had every intention of a couple of easy hours, but it was the most glorious fall day, still and cool and fast. And I am so rested! All inhibition gone, the big chain ring was my savior. I know it is a false god, a pleasure of the moment that will be my damnation. What can I say? It turned into an epic ride.
Forgive me, for I am weak.
From lunch:
Good advice. Today I'll avoid the political blogs.
Fox, ever pushing the envelope of baseball broadcast technology (they're the ones who put microphones in the bases) has installed a tiny spy cam in the dirt in front of home plate, looking up at the batter. Yankee catcher Jorge Posada, imagining a bunt or throw to the plate hitting the little hole in the ground going awry, kicked dirt on it. A grounds crew member cleaning out the dirt left an even bigger hole, which Posada again covered with dirt, stomping on it this time for good measure, rendering the camera broken for good:
Fox and the commissioner's office weren't happy, and Yankees general manager Brian Cashman spoke with Posada. The All-Star catcher said the network did a very good job of hiding the camera in Game 2.Yankees manager Joe Torre had a simple explanation for Posada's actions.
"Jorge is a passionate guy," Torre said. "He just likes to be able to play baseball without people interfering, I guess. He just felt that that was a problem. ... We talked to him about it and as far as I know, it's not an issue."
Fox plans to keep using Diamond Cam during the series.
"We think the angle provides a very compelling shot that we weren't able to bring to the 15 million people who were watching the game," Fox spokesman Lou D'Ermilio said.
With all due respect to Lou D'Ermilio and the fine folks at Fox, every time they showed the Diamond Cam, I had no idea where the camera was or what I was looking at. As we say in my business, it "didn't read well." I'm with Jorge on this one.
It is taken as a given in the climate debate that reducing greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to reduce climate impacts will come at significant economic costs. This seems to me like a reasonable assertion.
There is an argument, however, that efficiencies could reduce greenhouse emissions and save money. That's the case laid out in what looks like an entirely anecdotal report (but with a lot of anecdotes) by The Climate Group. They list a long series of examples of institutions, both corporate and government, that have enjoyed substantial savings by making their operations more efficient, reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the process.
Some of their examples:
Savings by Governments:Berlin reduced emissions 15% from 1990 to 2000 through energy efficiency, use of combined heat and power and solar energy programs, with a municipal budget relief of €2 million per year.
The UK Action Energy Program stimulated savings of £650 million a year between 1989 and 2001 while reducing emissions.
Germany’s promotion of renewable energy and improved efficiency has led to the creation of more than 450,000 new jobs, undermining the oft-repeated claims that a strong climate policy is bad for business.
Savings by Companies:
Five companies have achieved reductions of 60% or more (DuPont, Alcan, British Telecom (BT), IBM, and NorskeCanada), with combined savings of over US $5.5 billion resulting from improved energy efficiency, fuel switching, and reduced waste.
DuPont has saved over $2 billion through increased energy efficiency, and has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 69% on 1990 levels.
British Telecom – BT – has reduced its emissions by over 80% below 1991 levels and has recently committed to cutting another 325,000 tonnes of its indirect CO2 emissions by making the largest ever single purchase of green energy.
I have a hard enough time getting my hands around the uncertainties in the climate science without trying to tackle the clearly far large uncertainties in the economic analysis of the climate issue. That's why, while you see me blathering on endlessly about the science here, you dont see me talking about Kyoto and societal response measures. So I'm not entirely sure what to make of this. It's clearly an activist group doing the analysis, so the data should be viewed with caution, but it is at least an interesting point in the debate.
New on the local blogging scene: Atasta:
Last night, on our kitchen table, was a copy of The Virtue of Selfishness, a book of essays on Ayn Rand's philosoply, Objectivism. Also on the table was a book about Buddhism. I don't remember the title or author of that one, we have many. I picked each book up, one in either hand, and held them at arm's lenght. I moved them slowly towards each other, wondering if they would destroy each other in a burst of energy when they touched. They didn't. Now they are stacked on top of each other on the table.
From the folks at NASA's Earth Observatory web site, Santa Fe from space.
There's been a flurry of reporting out of Great Britain in the last few days about the detection of a rapid rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide. David Appell has covered this at length, with a number of posts linking to stories on this, including The Guardian and others, all somewhat breathless about the revelation.
David also links to GRIST, which uses the stories to argue that the U.S. press, in ignoring this, is a bunch of slackers with respect to climate change. The problem here, as several people pointed out in comments to GRIST, is that the story's an old one. The AP moved a story back in March when this was first reported, which was apparently carried by the New York Times and a lot of other publications.
The puzzle here is why an eight-month-old story has been resurrected. My assumption is that this all came about because of David King's major climate address Tuesday.
My old buddy Ian Hoffman has done the best piece I've seen so far on the nuclear nonproliferation issue in the context of the fall campaign. It's interesting to see nukes rise in importance in the national debate (though Hoffman points out the occasions when it's happened before), but Ian makes clear these are very hard problems:
But there's no guarantee that Abraham's deadline or Kerry's is achievable. Nuclear security in Russia lies in the hands of large, slow and secretive bureaucracies. More money won't necessarily result in faster progress.Ultimately, Russians, not American presidents, control the pace.
"The major problem isn't 13 years or four years. We're not going to do it at all," said Hecker at Los Alamos, pioneer of the original U.S.-Russian scientific contacts that evolved into the nonproliferation programs. "Only the Russians can secure their nuclear materials, and we're at a point now where money is no longer a limiting factor."
"Russia is a place that still produces plutonium, and it's a place that doesn't like to tell you what it's got or what it's doing," Sokolski said. "It's not something that can be solved in a short period of time by force feeding of money and priorities."
The culture of cyclocross racing seems to value mud, frankly beyond all reason:
This is a difficult fetish to support here in the high deserts of New Mexico, where the terrain ordinarily looks more like this:
One must admire Rich Plunkett, organizer of Sunday's Psunshine Psychocross (that's rich in the second picture in the red and white KHS uni) for his diligence in finding mud. (I don't race this stuff. But it was fun to go out and watch.)
J. Robert Oppenheimer, describing Augustus Klock, his high school science teacher: "He loved the bumpy contingent nature of the way in which you actually find out about something."
From Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma, by Jeremy Bernstein.
Climate models don't prove anything. They are merely a set of hypothesis-testing tools for understanding how the intrinsically complex system that is our climate works. As such, they must be tested against the available data. Gerald Meehl and colleagues at NCAR have conducted another such test (published in the October Journal of Climate).
It's frequently argued that the models are the best we've got in understanding what might happen in the 21st century as we increase the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, because the "experiment" we can physically conduct will take a hundred years, with some risks related to the outcome. But in fact, we're reaching the point where greenhouse gases and the other climatological drivers have varied enough over the last 100 years that we can begin to conduct the experiment through a sort of hindcasting. That's what Meehl et al. have done in their latest Journal of Climate paper.
They plugged in five climate forcers into the model, two natural (solar variability and the cooling effect of stuff spewed out by volcanoes) and three man-made (greenhouse gases, ozone and sulfate aerosols). They ran simulations with various combinations to see what might reasonably explain the actual variance we see in 20th century climate records. The result:
The late-twentieth-century warming can only be reproduced in the model with anthropogenic forcing (mainly GHGs), while the early twentieth-century warming is mainly caused by natural forcing in the model (mainly solar). However, the signature of globally averaged temperature at any time in the twentieth century is a direct consequence of the sum of the forcings.
In other words, using the models, the greenhouse warming hypothesis is the best fit with the data. Again, this isn't proving anything, but it's nevertheless important for two reasons. First, it provides added confidence in dealing with the "attribution problem" - to what extent can the climate change we have seen thus far be attributed to anthropogenic effects?
And it provides increased confidence that the models might have something useful to say about what might happen in the future.
I'll leave it to Chris Mooney to sort out the political implications of this, but there's an interesting paper in Friday's Science (sub. req.) by Fraidenraich et al. on the use of embryonic stem cells to treat cardiac defects.
A review also in Science (more $ req.) by Kenneth R. Chien of UC San Diego, calls it "an exciting new study ... (that) expands the potential therapeutic repertoire of ES cells.":
These investigators provide direct evidence that ES cells can rescue otherwise lethal cardiac defects in mouse embryos.
I've not followed the embryonic stem cell debates closely (am I the only one who's uncomfortable with the way this issue has been transformed from science into tribal politics?), so I may be munging the science here. But as I understand from reading Chien's review, the importance here is not that the transplanted embryonic stem cells differentiate into cardiac cells. Instead, the embryonic stem cells secrete stuff that gets the regular cells to do what they're supposed to.
Here's how Rick Weiss explained it in yesterday's Washington Post:
The new work offers the most definitive evidence yet that the versatile cells, derived from embryos, can help repair organs two ways: by filling in damaged areas -- the primary focus of stem cell research to date -- and also by secreting potent chemicals that can make tissues rejuvenate themselves.
My story on warming and drought is up:
Four hundred years of "epic drought," from A.D. 900 to A.D. 1300, may offer clues to what western North America faces in a warming world, according to new research.That ancient drought coincided with a time in which the planet was warm, leading scientists to suggest that something similar may be in store as our planet warms again.
Our current drought, the worst by some measures since record-keeping began, coincides with a period of rising temperatures and increasing drought in the West. But it "pales in comparison" with the megadrought that settled over the West a thousand years ago, according to Ed Cook, a climate researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y.
"This is not intended to minimize the impact of the current drought," Cook said in a telephone interview, but to point out that "things could be much worse."
The work is not a prediction that human-caused global warming will definitely cause drought, Cook said. But given our growing understanding of the relationship between warmer temperatures and Western drought, the possibility that greenhouse warming could lead to a drier West must be considered, Cook said.
"The point is that it would not be a good thing," Cook said.
Roger Pielke Jr. has offered an interesting framework for watching the fallout from Hans von Storch's paper in Science last week challenging Michael Mann's "hockey stick" climate graph:
In this highly politicized atmosphere, given how many scientists spoke out in support of or against Mann et al.'s "hockey stick" it will be very interesting to see reactions among scientists to Von Storch's new paper. (It won't be so interesting to see how advocacy groups react, as it will be completely predictable.) Specifically, given the close connection of support or refutation of the earlier paper with explicit political agendas, scientists who were critical of Soon and Baliunas may be very hesitant to comment on Von Storch et al., except in a negative way. Conversely, we can expect howls of support from those scientists who supported Soon/Baliunas.
Mann's hockey stick is the iconic graph, based on proxy reconstructions of past climate, suggesting that the current warming is unprecedented over the past 1,000 years. The new von Storch paper suggests that Mann's technique essentially understates variability - that noise in the climate data recorded in proxies like tree rings effectively masks climate swings, making them appear smaller than they really were.
Andrew Revkin in the New York Times has a good explanation of the science, as does New Scientist. I finally got around to reading the paper last night, and I don't have a lot to add to the explanation of the science itself. It's pretty clear that if von Storch et al. are right, then Mann's hockey stick says something very different than what we thought it did.
From a scientific point of view, this is exciting. Proxy reconstructions are hard, and this is the way science moves forward - thoughtful challenges and aggressive skepticism. Past is prologue, and understanding the way the climate has behaved in the past is critical to understanding what we might expect in the future.
But in the rhetorical climate wars? This is only a huge deal because people on both sides of the global warming debate have misused poor Dr. Mann's hockey stick.
For those in favor of action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the hockey stick has been a powerful tool, a perfect PowerPoint slide: throw it up on the screen, point at it with your laser pointer and utter the phrase "unprecedented warming." That's rhetorically powerful. (It also, I think, misses the point. More on that in a moment.)
Those opposed to action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have made the hockey stick a central focus, acting as though all they need to do is knock Dr. Mann's legs out from under him in order to doom the whole global climate change enterprise. (In the most egregious example, the Calgary Herald, in an editorial last summer, called the hockey stick and the paper in which it first appeared "the sole evidence for the IPCC’s support of the human-induced climate change theory.")
Here, I think, is a useful framework for thinking about where the hockey stick fits in. It's a series of questions that I think are relevant to understanding the issue and role of the hockey stick in it.
- Is it warming?
- Are humans causing it?
- Will it be bad?
- If so, can the change be prevented, reduce, or mitigated?
- What are the costs and benefits of the steps necessary to prevent, reduce or mitigate it?
Nobody seriously debates the answer to one any more. It's warming.
The hockey stick might seem relevant to the answer to two, the attribution problem, but it's not, at least not beyond some small margin of understanding. The reason it seems so relevant is the rhetorical power of the hockey stick's image of unprecedented change. If it's unprecedented, doesn't that mean humans must be responsible? But that's just rhetoric, not science. The science of attribution is based on issues far more subtle than the question of whether or not it's unprecedented.
The question of precedence also has rhetorical power on the side of those who oppose action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They would argue that the possibility such change has happened before as a result of natural causes weakens the case for doing something about it in this case. But that's clearly fallacious. What happened before is not relevant, except again marginally, to the question of whether it would be bad if it happened now. The fact that the planet warmed a thousand years ago as a result of cause "A" would not make it any less troublesome if it happened again now as a result of cause "B," whatever "A" and "B" might be. (In fact, we know that climate changes in the past, natural ones, have had disastrous effects on human societies.)
My "will it be bad" question is, I realize, a bit of a cheat, a transition point between what science can say and what politics and policy must do. Science can only offer some useful explanation of what the physical changes might be. The question of whether that would be bad is a question of policy, politics and values. Science also can offer data to help inform the final two questions - though I must admit that my reading of the state of the science there is that there is much work to be done in informing us about what effects various carbon reduction strategies might have.
But it's clear that the life or death of the hockey stick does not fundamentally alter what we know or don't know in answer to any of my five questions.
It's that time of year in Albuquerque. Lissa snapped this flying over our house this morning while I was in the shower:
It landed at the apartments around the corner.
It's our 15th year, and I'm not jaded. It's still fun to see hundreds of hot air balloons flying over my city.
A news story in Nature explains why cell phone conversations on the subway (or wherever) are so annoying.
Apparently we have a harder time ignoring someone talking when we only hear one person's side of the conversation. A group of British psychologists tested the idea on the train with both cell phone conversations and face-to-face conversations in which only one side of the conversation was audible. Then they quizzed other passengers about how annoying it had been. The result - it's more annoying when you can only hear one side of the conversation.
A new edition of Tangled Bank, including a contribution from yours truly.
Check out Tom Hinterberger's San Andreas Fault pictures, especially the aerial photo of the orchard.
One of those proud Dad moments: Nora's byline in the morning paper, alongside my own. (I've gotta say, in all honesty, that what she had to say was a fair piece more important than what I had to say.)
One of the classic scientific debates, on a par with "nature vs. nurture," albeit far more obscure, is the question of what caused the great megafaunal extinction at the end of the Pleistocene.
Pretty much everywhere you look, you find evidence of big critters roaming the earth - mastodons, mammoths, big camels, and my favorite, beavers the size of black bears. And then they "blink out," to borrow a lovely phrase I heard a biologist use recently. In a very short period of time in geologic terms, they're gone.
Two dominant explanations are offered. The extinction coincides with the end of the Pleistocene, the emergence from the last ice age 10,000 years ago. That's big-time climate change. Could that have killed them off? But there's a second earth-changing event that happens around that same time - the explosion of us. Could we have killed them?
There's a new review paper(sub. req.) in Friday's Science by Barnosky et al. that offers a classically equivocal answer - it's both! And more research is needed!
OK, that's cheap, it's really an interesting paper.
The authors argue: "Evidence from paleontology, climatology, archaeology, and ecology now supports the idea that humans contributed to extinction on some continents, but human hunting was not solely responsible for the pattern of extinction everywhere. Instead, evidence suggests that the intersection of human impacts with pronounced climatic change drove the precise timing and geography of extinction in the Northern Hemisphere."
For example, pretty much all of the survivors were nocturnal and lived in the woods, where it would have been harder to hunt them. That argues for the human hunting hypothesis. Except in Africa, where there were lots of people, but large, slow-breeding animals continued to live in open country. Think elephants. And in northern latitudes, the timing of the major extinction events coincides quite closely with climate changes.
The archaeological evidence is ambiguous as well. Our ancestors on this continent, for example, seemed to be chowing down on lots of mammoth, but didn't have much taste for the ancient peccary known as Platygonus.
The good thing is that we finally know enough, and have developed finer-grained techniques, to begin to tease out the details of the complex interaction between climate and humanity's role as a major predator in the early Holocene ecosystem, which should allow us to begin understanding the role of each in the complex changes that overtook our planet 10,000 years ago.
Dave Thomas points out a tremendously ironic goof on the cover of the Barnes and Noble edition of the Autobiography of Charles Darwin.
Note the picture on the cover. Now check out this.
From my September server logs, my favorites among the search engine strings bringing folks to Inkstain:
- teflon pants
- broad street pump
In addition, Planet Fleck, my aggregator, received oddly misdirected Google fallout from Pika's penis mushroom.
I went to the opening last night of the Albuquerque High theater kids' performance of The Laramie Project.
It was draining and moving and I'm tremendously proud of what the kids accomplished. It's a play worth caring about, and they honored it.
Tonight (Fri.) and Saturday this weekend (Oct. 1 and 2) and next Thurs. - Sat. (Oct. 7 - 10), 7 p.m., at the Albuquerque High School theater, 800 Odelia Rd NE. (Odelia is Indian School west of Interstate 25, enter the theater on the school's east side entrance.)