Reading Richardson Gill's The Great Maya Droughts, I ran across a fascinating discussion of early Europe that shows why climate variability needs to take its place alongside great battles and intellectual ferment in our tellings of history.
Gill talks about the work of Carol Crumley, whose climate reconstruction shows how the Romans and the Celts each dominated large areas of central Europe when the climate was to their liking. The Celtic style of agriculture was more well suited to a cold climate. From 1200 to about 500 BC, much of Europe was cold, with great variability. This was the environment in which Celtic agricultural practices evolved, with a robust flexibility. By about 300 BC, the cold line had shifted north, bringing what we now call a "Mediterranean climate" to much of Europe. The Romans were good in this kind of an environment - few crops, urban living. So when the climatic line shifted north, the Romans went with it, pushing out the Celts and coming to dominate central Europe. Gill quotes Crumley:
The extent and duration of the Pax Romana in Europe was greatly facilitated by climatic conditions that favored Roman - as opposed to Celtic - economic, social, and political organization. Not only were Roman patterns of settlement and land use in marked dstinction to those of Celtic polities, the were especially suited to the mediterraneanized cliamte of Europe.
William Connolley notes that in some cases, the containers are shipped back to China full of trash:
"China is buying up everything it can. It is sucking in material from all over the world and it doesn't give two noodles what it takes," said one plastics recycler who asked not to be identified. "I know of 300 firms, mostly in China, offering to buy my plastics. I have three or four companies cold-calling me every day from China requesting material. They have very cheap labour to sort the material but the shame is that it is being done there and not here. They don't care about the quality, or the contamination. No one checks what is sent or what arrives."
On Pat Michaels' latest global warming discussion
The latest greenhouse gloom: modelling suggesting climate change, by influencing Atlantic circulation, could whack the ocean food chain.
Pika's observation of train after train of cheap shit from China, and my even cheaper response, generated a fascinating data point from a correspondent who recently toured the Port of Long Beach as part of a class on globilization:
In 2004 it processed 7.4e6 TEUs of cargo -- a TEU is a twenty-foot equivilent unit, the volume of a 20-foot long container. That is, the port is equivalent to a steady stream of containers end to end at 1.43 meters per second 24/7. It's amazing, in a thought-provoking way.
Put another way, that's a container for roughly every 40 people in the U.S. I figure there's approximately 40 people living on my block (maybe a few more), so there's the equivalent of a container of cheap shit from China, Korea, etc. for every Fleck-block-equivalent in America.
Today's trash day in the 'hood. We also have to go to a lot of trouble to cart the cheap shit off once we're done with it.
The conventional thinking is that the extremes of El Niño and La Niña are the times during the natural cycles of climate variability when climate causes the most damage. But an intriguing-sounding paper in the Journal of Climate by Lisa Goddard and Maxx Dilley offers intriguing alternative way of thinking about it. First (full disclosure here, I've only read the abstract, the full paper doesn't seem to be on line) they argue, " Contrary to expectations, climate anomalies associated with such losses are not greater overall during ENSO extremes than during neutral periods."
Second, climate anomalies during El Niño and La Niña can be more readily forecast, allowing folks to prepare and therefore reduce the damage. "Thus, the prudent use of climate forecasts could mitigate adverse impacts and lead instead to increased beneficial impacts, which could transform years of ENSO extremes into the least costly to life and property."
Fabulous news!
The Isotopes have hired an organist for the upcoming baseball season.
Who knew I had the thug gangsta of all majors.
Ed Felten tells the interesting story of a nameless computer scientist who's developed something useful, but... Well, I'll let Ed pick up the story:
He isn't sure he wants the public to find out about his research. He says this, even though his work would probably be of interest to many people, and could be useful to far more. The problem, he told me, is that if too many people find out what he has done and realize its value, some of them may start using it for illegal purposes. He doesn't want that kind of trouble.
Any more, it seems as if I don't have people's feeds on my planet, I forget to read them. (I thought Matthew Bohnsack had dropped from the face of the earth. Turns out he just jiggered the blog, and his feed had a new address.)
Today, I added MJH.
(Note to Telsa, requesting please an RSS feed?)
Pika's recent observations of cheap shit from China being shipped by the trainload to the heartland may or may not be related to something I noticed more than a decade ago along the same rail line.
I was making relatively frequent visits to Clovis, New Mexico. We'd stay in the Holiday Inn, which was right across from the tracks, and we would see train after train loaded with stuff going west. Only west. I figured all the shit would eventually end up out in California, and they'd run out of stuff in the east and have to start shipping it back.
Clearly, given Pika's observation, the whole thing was more international than I realized. That's probably why it took so much longer than I expected. I wonder what sort of value has been added. Or did it just sit around in containers on the dock at Tianjin for ten years?
Old school chum Kenna Ogg recently tracked me down, having found this:
That's me on the right and Mike on the left, though Kenna and I are both at a bit of a loss as to Mike's last name. It's from David Mackintosh's and Gigi Bailin's birthday party during our freshman year in high school. You can see my unerring fashion sense has deep roots.
Testing, testing. 1 2 3.
Can you hear me in the back?
Thanks. Look it's great to be here. We've got a terrific show planned for you this evening. Blarg is here, so stick around. We'll be right back.
There's an interesting new paper in tomorrow's Science by Rickaby and Halloran that supports the idea that warm conditions during the Pliocene were linked to a cool equatorial Pacific - a La Niña-like state:
Our Pliocene paleothermometer supports the idea of a dynamic "ocean thermostat" in which heating of the tropical Pacific leads to a cooling of the east equatorial Pacific and a La Niña–like state, analogous to observations of a transient increasing east-west sea surface temperature gradient in the 20th-century tropical Pacific.
This is relevant because of the connection between La Niña drought in the southwestern U.S.
This is an idea I first ran across last year in a paper by Mike Mann and some other folks. It also fits quite nicely with a paper last year by Ed Cook and some other dendrochronologists linking warmer temperatures during the Medieval with widespread drought in what is now the western United States.
I don't know a lot about this, but apparently there have been folks who have argued in the past that a warming greenhouse climate could tilt toward El Niño-like conditions. This is the latest line of evidence to contradict that assertion.
MJH passes along New Scientist's 13 Things that Do Not Make Sense. My favorite:
8 The Pioneer anomalyTHIS is a tale of two spacecraft. Pioneer 10 was launched in 1972; Pioneer 11 a year later. By now both craft should be drifting off into deep space with no one watching. However, their trajectories have proved far too fascinating to ignore.
That's because something has been pulling - or pushing - on them, causing them to speed up. The resulting acceleration is tiny, less than a nanometre per second per second. That's equivalent to just one ten-billionth of the gravity at Earth's surface, but it is enough to have shifted Pioneer 10 some 400,000 kilometres off track. NASA lost touch with Pioneer 11 in 1995, but up to that point it was experiencing exactly the same deviation as its sister probe. So what is causing it?
Nobody knows. Some possible explanations have already been ruled out, including software errors, the solar wind or a fuel leak. If the cause is some gravitational effect, it is not one we know anything about. In fact, physicists are so completely at a loss that some have resorted to linking this mystery with other inexplicable phenomena.
Bruce Bassett of the University of Portsmouth, UK, has suggested that the Pioneer conundrum might have something to do with variations in alpha, the fine structure constant (see "Not so constant constants", page 37). Others have talked about it as arising from dark matter - but since we don't know what dark matter is, that doesn't help much either. "This is all so maddeningly intriguing," says Michael Martin Nieto of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. "We only have proposals, none of which has been demonstrated."
What kind of police state is this that we're living in, when my daughter can't buy spray paint for her science fair project and can't go hear all-girl Japanese punk bands?
A bit shy of two hours into this morning's Highway 6 road race, I was out by myself (dropped long before by the main field in the Masters division - some of those old guys are tough!) when I glimpsed an electric green jersey creeping up from behind.
We were on the long gentle climb out of the Rio Puerco valley toward the finish line, and I was pooped. The spot of green was closer each time I glanced back, until finally he pulled up next to me.
"You aren't 60, are you?" he asked. I told him no, and he was delighted. He was pretty sure there was no one ahead of us older than him.
His name was Dwight.
"How old are you?" I asked Dwight. "62," he said. "I just filed for Social Security." We could see someone dangling a couple hundred meters up the road, and Dwight suggested we try to catch him. It seemed a fine idea.
There's a little road cut about a mile from the finish line, and as we reached it I shifted into a bigger gear and started hammering. My heart rate hit the red line within moments and we began reeling in the guy ahead of us. I kept looking behind me, and Dwight was right there the whole time, pounding right through to the finish line.
Dwight's my new hero. When I grow up, I wanna be just like him.
Congratulations to Inkstain founding member Scott Smallwood, whose work is a finalist for a National Magazine Award. Twice.
A correspondent points out that the well is usually "old man Johnson's place." But we still need a Timmy.
When Sadie came nosing into our room a little after midnight Tuesday morning, whining, waking us up, my first thought was that Timmy had fallen down the well. But we don't know anyone named Timmy. And we don't have a well.
Then I thought perhaps another pop culture icon had died.
When I got up Tuesday morning, I realized that the snow had collapsed the bamboo shade lattice Lissa and I had built in the backyard. Sadie was trying to tell us something.
OK, that's an intentionally provocative and more than slightly misleading title. The original and more meaningful title for this was "Climate Variability: Thinking About What Matters," but is that gonna sell?
I spend time on this blog explaining the science of anthropogenic climate change, and explaining the flaws in some of the more egregiously dishonest attempts to debunk it, which may create some misapprehensions about what I think is important. I was thinking about this recently when, for a project I'm working on, I came across some interesting data about the allocation Colorado River water (click through for more):
That's from R. S. Pulwarty, T. S. Melis, Journal of Environmental Management 63, 307 (November, 2001), and it shows how the Colorado River's flows were well above the long term average during the first few decades of the 20th century. That is the period during which the Colorado River Compact was negotiated, allocating the river's water among the states of the southwestern United States. The allocated more water than they had. (I've got some other longer-term data laying around somewhere, based on tree rings - if I can lay my hands on it I'll post it too. Same basic message - unusually wet when the decisions about distributing Colorado River water were made.)
It's an example of the same sort of decadal-scale climate variability that's bitten societies in this region and elsewhere again and again - max out your resources during a wet spell, grow to the boundaries of what's possible, and you'll get screwed when it gets dry.
Greenhouse gases could make those decadal-scale swings worse. But things societies can do to reduce their vulnerability to those decadal-scale swings will also reduce their vulnerability to the changes caused by greenhouse gases. Eliminating greenhouse gas emissions, and greenhouse climate change (if that were somehow possible) will not remove the risks of decadal-scale variability.
Here's similar data for New Mexico's northern mountains (courtesy Western Regional Climate Center:
(Blue x's are 10-year moving average.)
It was wet here in the 1980s and '90s when the region's population exploded. The extent to which the greenhouse debate has obscured attention to broader issues of societal vulnerability to climate change is a problem.
More on the Metric Martyrs' struggle (which I mentioned last week):
Brussels chiefs launched an investigation after a Euro-sceptic campaign group in the North-East received an abusive email from a European Commission address.The Metric Martyrs Defence Fund, run by traders who opposed the use of metric weights and measures, was called "f****** Luddites" in the message.
It was sent from an email address using the same cec.eu.int domain name used by workers at the Commission.
Neil Herron, who runs the Sunderland-based campaign, last night demanded an inquiry to find if it came from a member of staff.
After three days of racing, Wahid Noraizi is leading the prestigious Tour de Pakistan.
Will America be gripped by fear in the face of a new wave of desert shark attacks?
At the office from morning till night putting of papers in order, that so I may have my office in an orderly condition. I took much pains in sorting and folding of papers.
I really need to do that. But it's such a nice warm day, the bicycle beckons.
For the New Mexico audience, why, despite your perfectly reasonable decision to shop for fenders for the bike, the drought's not really over. (The story was written by Tania Soussan and myself - byline on the web version of the story is wrong.)
Via Kevin Drum, an interesting study using network analysis of political blogs - who links to what, and what they talk about.
One of the most interesting findings is that the liberal bloggers are more likely to talk about Donald Rumsfeld, and the conservatives are more likely to talk about Michael Moore. In other words, a big part of the discourse in one's political tribe involves complaining about the other tribe.
This seems to me to be a less than healthy mode of discourse. Listen to Al Franken or Rush Limbaugh and you'll see what I mean.
Inspired by the Brittlebush Collection, we greet spring with the work of the lovely and talented L. Heineman:
I've no idea of the context, which somehow makes this all the more charmng:
youre a bunch of f*****g luddites. Metric has to win cos thats what welearnt at school.
Update: Oh, one must read the full exchange, first here, then here.
Nitrous oxide at the dentist's office. It's almost enough to make one want to not floss. Almost.
Spirit has made it to Larry's lookout. (The "Larry" is Larry Crumpler, Albuquerque's man on Mars, in a manner of speaking.)
I don't know about reliable statistics, but here's my anecdote: the top three user agents requesting files from inkstain this month self-report as bots:
The bots seem to account for at least 30 percent of the file requests received by inkstain. I'm getting an average of 95 hits per day on my robots.txt file.
I'm not complaining here. Many of the bot requests are coming from RSS aggregators, which means there are human readers on the other end of the process. And I adore the way the search engines have made the web so much more usable. Just more of an observation.
From the Guardian:
Scientists have examined rates of autism among children in Japan, where the MMR vaccine was withdrawn in 1993. They found that the number of children with autism continued to rise after the MMR vaccine was replaced with single-shot vaccines.
I'm not sure I'm fully in sync with this Friday bird blogging thing, in part because I'm not much of a birder, or much of a photographer. And also, it's not Friday.
courtesy National Park Service, White Sands National Monument
There's a family of roadrunners (Geococcyx californianus) living in a bamboo patch behind some apartments up along the bike trail I ride in the mornings. This is high-grade urban nature - the bamboo sorta got loose from the back patios of the apartments, I'm thinking, crept under the back fence and established itself on the patch of dirt between the fence and the bike trail. And the roadrunners have made it their home. It's not uncommon to see them, but this year they've been looking especially fat and happy.
I had this friend years ago in South Pasadena, an old Catholic Italian-American woman. We were walking in the neighborhood, and I commented on the tenacity of a baby palm tree growing over between the sidewalk and the railroad tracks. These palms were amazing, the way they poked up through the gravel on the roadbed by the tracks. "The life force is strong," my friend said. She was right.
Roger Pielke Jr. and Daniel Sarewitz have a new paper reiterating an argument they've made before: that societal vulnerability is a much greater factor in the negative impacts of climate change than is the climate change itself.
The New Mexico version of the argument (they don't make this one in the paper - this is me talking) is that drought, a feature of natural climate variability on decadal to centennial scales, is the thing that most affects human societies. One can reasonably argue from the science that drought cycles might become worse as a result of anthropogenic climate change. But it's the growing population and its management of water supplies that dominates the system. All the success in the world in halting greenhouse climate change will at base make the variability slightly less, but it won't eliminate it. As Pielke and Sarewitz argue more articulately than I, there may be perfectly good reasons for changing energy policy, and climate change may be one of them (especially abrupt climate change). But any reasonable discussion of societal climate policy must also look at how and why societies are vulnerable to climate change in the first place, even in the absence of climate change.
I'll go out on a limb here and argue that a big part of the problem is testosterone. If you look at the climate wars, there are a bunch of guys (and almost without exception, it is guys, and I confess that sometimes I end up being one of them) hell bent on winning an argument. Yes it's warming! No it's not! But if it is warming, it's not anthropogenic! But look at that satellite data! No, the satellite data supports my side of the argument! Lather, rinse, repeat.
To even talk about adaption in response, rather than arguing about the science and focusing the policy response entirely on greenhouse gas reductions (and to be clear, both sides do this), is seen as ceding defeat in the shouting match.
There's a funny thing that happens in a number of fora, including the comment wars over on David Appell's blog and at my work, where when I try to explain and defend the mainstream scientific consensus on climate change, people automatically assume my political position and demand that I defend Kyoto.
From Pielke and Sarewitz:
Policy related to societal impacts of climate has important and underappreciate dimensions that are independent of energy policy. It would be a misinterpretation of the meaning of our work to suggest that it supports
business-as-usual energy policies, or obviates climate mitigation. But if a policy goal is to reduce the future impacts of climate on society, then energy policies are insufficient, and perhaps largely irrelevant, to achieving that goal. Of course, this does not preclude other sensible reasons for energy policy action related to climate (e.g., abrupt climate change) and energy policy action independent of climate change (such as national security, air pollution reduction and energy efficiency). It does suggest that reduction of human impacts related to weather and climate are not primary among those reasons, and arguments and advocacy to the contrary are not in concert with research in this area.
I agree with them.
The Inkstain Search String of the Month for March is who is Scott Smallwood. Apparently he's a musician and Princeton graduate student. Or something.
I've long had a hobby of collecting misuses of the "paradigm shift," Thomas Kuhn's notion of how science moves forward by throwing out old paradigms in favor of new ones. This is, I recognize, a cheap hobby, because it's almost never used properly. (As an aside, I'll note that my father, who taught art history, for many years collected bad reproductions of The Last Supper. That also was cheap, as there are really no good reproductions of The Last Supper.)
Today's paradigm crime comes from none less than David Brooks:
Thomas Kuhn famously argued that science advances not gradually but in jolts, through a series of raw and jagged paradigm shifts. Somebody sees a problem differently, and suddenly everybody's vantage point changes.
No, David, that's not quite what Kuhn was on about. One of the central points Kuhn makes in his "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is that it takes a long time for a new paradigm to supercede the old, frequently requiring old scientists to simply die off:
How, then, are scientists brought to make this transposition? Part of the answer is that they are very often not. Copernicanism made few converts for almost a century after Copernicus' death. Newton's work was not generally accepted, particularly on the Continent, for more than half a century after the Principia appeared. Priestley never accepted the oxygen theory, nor Lord Kelvin the electromagnetic theory, and so on. The difficulties of conversion have often been noted by scientists themselves. Darwin, in a particularly perceptive passage at the end of his Origin of Species, wrote: "Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume..., I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a pont of view directly opposite to mine.... [B]ut I look with confidence to the future - to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality."
Kuhn is clearly not saying "suddenly everybody's vantage point changes."
I was out on the bike trail earlier than usual this morning, just as the sun was topping the mountains that line Albuquerque's eastern edge. It was cold at my house when I left - 35 F (2 C) - but not bitterly so.
The trail I ride in the neighborhood runs along the edge of a big concrete flood control channel, with underpasses beneath the freeways, and as such it passes a lot of homeless hangouts. I never see their camps - whether its a privacy/dignity thing, or a security thing, I don't know, but they're always hidden away. But the trail and the channel are definitely homeless turf.
This morning, because I was out so early, I was around for the homeless rise and shine, and it was a very sad thing. The body language of the permanent homeless is always sad, the way they try to shrink inside themselves into invisibility. But in the cold of dawn, it was worse, shrinking to be invisible, shrinking against the cold.