Brad Pitt on Climate Change

Gristmill highlights this video in which Brad Pitt make an appearance:



Pitt says: "It's nice to be sitting in a room with a bunch of people who are not debating the existence of climate change."

Oh please, please, fucking please. Every time I turn around I'm reading about how Brad Pitt and Angelie Jolie are flying to Africa or New York or Cannes or some such place. These people are more responsible for greenhouse gas emissions than 99% of the human population, probably more. And yet he has the nerve to get up on stage and look down on the rest of us for not taking global warming seriously. Stop the moralizing.

Either we think global warming is a problem or we don't. If we do, we will stay home and, well, emit less carbon. Otherwise, let's admit that we're not going to curtail our greenhouse gas emissions and get busy with the business of developing less emissive technologies or at least geoengineer the planet. Just stop the hypocrisy.

Climate change and technology

Joseph Romm over at Climate Progress makes fun of President Bush for stressing technology as a solution to climate change. Now I don't for a minute think Bush is serious about climate change, or technology -- Bush is now irrelevant, frankly -- but that aside, I'd like to know what Romm thinks is going to solve the climate change problem. We are never -- never -- going to regulate greenhouse gas cutbacks of 75% with today's technology, what's needed to stabilize the climate. Never. People just can't afford that and they'll never stand for it. People want to drive, and they want to fly, and they want to heat and air-condition their homes at a reasonable price. They want food at today's prices, not 30% higher. They just are not willing to significantly cut back their standard of living, even a little.

So it's only going to be technology, in my opinion, that makes the difference. We are going to use all the oil there is, and then we are going to use coal, and we will only use alternative technologies if they are cheaper and more readily available. So the best thing Bush could do -- although of course he will not -- is to establish a massive program that develops these alternative technologies. Yes, regulating greenhouse gases will put a price on them that will promote the development of greenhouse gases. But that's a kind of secondary effect. If you want to regulate greenhouse gases in order to promote the develoment of new, greener technologies, OK, but to dismiss the role of technology and expect greenhouse gas regulation to solve the global warming problem is just silly.

CFL article

I have an article in the October issue of Scientific American on compact fluorescent light bulbs: Toxic Bulbs: Recycling rules vary for mercury-containing fluorescents, p. 30.

Pat Michaels reveals

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, via Deltoid:

[Pat] Michaels withdrew as an expert witness in a recently decided landmark court case in which automakers sought to turn back state efforts to rein in cars' production of greenhouse gasses. Michaels said he would testify only if his funders' identities could be kept secret, court documents show.

That pretty much tells you all you need to know, doesn't it?

Bush on Climate Change

It is impossible for me to work up any enthusiasm about anything Bush had to say yesterday -- I can barely even bring myself to read the newspaper articles on it. It has long since been obvious that he has absolutely zero intentions of doing anything about climate change, and that's certainly not going to change at this late stage. "New rhetoric?" Please.

"I want to get the job done," he [Bush] told environment ministers and ambassadors at the State Department. "We've identified a problem. Let's go solve it together."

Yes, except he proposes not solutions whatsoever. Meanwhile, his government officials are busy actually colluding with lobbyists to oppose California's efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks.

Of course, there isn't really much evidence that any other country in the world is doing much about climate change either. The European countries, by and large, can't make their Kyoto commitments. China and India certainly value economic growth far above limiting global warming. For almost all of them, it is all talk and no action.

California Elk

My friend Clinton was up visiting recently, and on the the way back to California took this picture of a elk just south of Orick, CA on the Redwood Highway. Click to enlarge.

"Climate Pricing 101"

The Sightline Institute up in Seattle has a nice little primer on pricing issues in climate policy.

They also publish a weekly newsletters on Fridays, which is a good way of keeping up on environmental issues here in the Pacific Northwest. You can sign-up here.

"You'll Be Comin' Down"

Several more songs from Springsteen's new album Magic have leaked out, and so far my favorite is "You'll Be Coming Down." It sounds both old and new, with some poetic yet vicious lyrics. It's not an uplifting song at all, yet there's something to like about it. I wonder who he had in mind when he wrote it.

Beth Ditto & Gossip

When I hear new music, which these days is usually through YouTube, I usually listen to the clip a few dozen times, until it is good and sunk in. After that I can't stand it, but until then it is great stuff. Boobs and all.

The latest clip: Beth Ditto and Gossip, "Standing in the Way of Control":

Lundberg denialism

Here is an incredible statement from Trudy Lungberg, publisher of the "Lundberg Survey," a national survey of gas prices quoted regularly by major news organizations. She does not think American's should conserve gasoline in any shape or form:

Q (CNN): As far as conservation, what are the trends you are seeing?

A (Lundberg): I'm hoping that consumers will see through the rhetoric about consuming less, demanding less, as faulty. It is not a given that consuming less will be good for our economy or for our personal freedom. It is not even established for our environment that we [should] deprive ourselves of gasoline for our personal mobility as well our commerce. And to suppose that it is good to do that, and pretend that we have consensus and put our heads together to deprive ourselves of this great product that makes the country go around, commercially and individually, I think is flawed. I'm hoping consumers and voters will see through that and be able to ignore some of the most extreme suggestions.

The woman seems to have absolutely no understanding of modern climate science as developed in the last 20 years. Or any sense whatsoever that oil supplies might actually be limited, as market trends seem to suggest. It is not immediately apparent to me that her schtick depends on increasing prices -- she seems to have a fair lock on price reporting, regardless of where prices are going -- so it is difficult for me to believe someone in her position can be so blind.

Bond's 756 HRer

I don't care too much about Barry Bonds, but this branding of his 756th home run with an asterisk really strikes me as wrong-headed. It almost seems sacreligious, and I say that with no particular fondness for him -- in fact, if anything, I suspect he probably did take performance-enhancing substances. But maybe he didn't. And if he didn't, the ball will be forever branded as if he did.

This is an ugly situation all around, and I don't blame the 49ers for cutting Bonds loose -- he has done absolutely nothing to show any nobility in this situation. But baseball has a long, glorified history and I don't think it's up to the very temporary, rich owner of his 756th HR to decide how the ball should be viewed for eternity.

First Landis, now this. Sports is getting very, very ugly, and who wants to follow it at this rate?

gas and oil prices

This is happening quietly and almost under the radar screen, but year-over-year gasoline prices are up 18% and oil prices are up an astonishing 39%.

Favoring Action on Climate Change

65% of the people polled in a world-wide poll said "it is necessary to take major steps starting very soon ... to take steps to reduce the impact of human activities that are thought to cause global warming or climate change." In the U.S. the number was 59%.

I do not believe these numbers. The poll notably did not ask what actions its respondents favor. It is all good and easy to be in favor of "action." Does that mean you're willing to drive 40% less? Pay 50% more for your gasoline and electricity? Tolerate significant increases in the cost of your food? I don't think any one of these would poll successfully.

People want action, as long as it doesn't cost them any money.

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By the way, the true cost of gasoline in the United States is more like $7/gallon, when you consider all the money we spend to secure oil resources.

More on Clotheslines

Today's Oregonian says that clothes driers use 6% of U.S. electricity usage. The U.S. uses on average 3.3 Tera Watts, so that's 200 billion Watts just for clothes driers, or an incredible 650 Watts/person. Or 480 kW-hr/month.

If electricity costs 10 cents per kiloWatt-hour, as it does here in Portland, that's $48/month. Per person. Yikes.

That is to say, it's as if each and every one of us were constantly and continually burning six-and-a-half 100 Watt light bulbs just to keep our clothes dry. Every single minute of every day.

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By the way, this same Wikipedia article says that in 1999 computers used 13% of total U.S. electricity consumption, expected to grow to 35-50% by 2020.

UPDATE/CORRECTION: Someone pointed out in the comments that the 6% number for electricity use by clothes dryers is probably of total residential consumption, and that seems to be the case. Here is some EIA data from 2001: 107 million households in that year consumed 1.140 billion kW-hr, or 130 billion Watts, or 0.13 TW. Or only ~5% of total US electricity consumption. That sounds low, but that's what I get. Air-conditioning and refrigeration each accounted for 14% of the US total. Electric clothes dryers consumed 66 B Kw-hr, or 5.8% of total residential usage.

Wolfgang Panofsky Dead

Wolfgang Panofsky, the founding director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) and a renowned physicist and science administrator, died last night at the age of 88.

Breathing

You often find global warming smart alecks, like Ben Shapiro here, suggest that we should all stop breathing in order to solve the carbon dioxide problem. I've always been (extremely) skeptical, but never really ran the numbers. It turns out the idea is indeed absurd -- of all the CO2 humans emit, only about 8.1% is from respiration:

• The US Department of Agriculture says the average human exhales about 900 grams of CO2/day.
• There are now about 6.62 billion people on the planet, says the US Census Bureau.
• That works out to a total of 2.2 billion MT (metric tons) of CO2 exhaled per year by the human species.
  
• Humans activities emit a total of about about 27 billion MT of CO2 per year.
• So human respiration is responsible for 8.1% of all human CO2 emissions.

Of course, that is probably dwarfed by emissions of all the other species, but still it's a bigger percentage than I thought. But stop breathing will come nowhere near to solving the problem.

"tomorrow"

Yesterday I spent some time with my nephew Quinn, who is one month shy of 3 years old. We were talking and he used the word "tomorrow," so I asked him what it meant. I know he knows it intuitively, but I was curious what he'd say.

He said, "That's when I'll be older."

I thought that was an excellent answer, better than I could ever do.

Galileo's middle finger

Did you know that Galileo's middle finger of his right hand was cut off 100 years after his death and preserved? It's on display at the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence, Italy.

Appropriate that it was his middle finger.

(From the August 2007 issue of symmetry magazine.)

Bruce Springsteen - Mrs McGrath

"All foreign wars I do proclaim
live on the blood and the mother's pain
I'd rather have my son as he used to be
Than the King of America and his whole navy"

Super-smart Artificial Intelligence by 2030

I really, really hate articles like this one by Ronald Bailey of Reason:

By 2030, or by 2050 at the latest, will a super-smart artificial intelligence decide to keep humans around as pets? Will it instead choose to turn the entire Earth, including the messy organic bits like us, into computronium? Or is there a third alternative?

Please. 2030 is only 23 years from now, as far into the future as 1984 is into the past. Life just doesn't progress that fast. In 1984 we had the beginnings of personal PCs. We had an pseudo-intelligent telecommunications network -- AT&T's CCS7 signaling network had been in effect for about a year. The Internet existed and email, especially on a single computer, was well-established. I exchanged my first IM-type messages over the Internet sometime like 1985 or 1986, while a graduate student at Stony Brook.

Yes, there have been amazing advances since then, mostly in networking, in the development of HTML and Web browsers and all kinds of transactions over the Web. We now have cell phones and wireless communication most places.

But really there hasn't been all that much change. Especially in the arena of artificial intelligence. I do not feel threatened by robots or artificial intelligence any more now than I did in 1985. I spend absolutely no time worrying that some robotic intelligence is plotting to undo me and turn me into a biological slave. Robots are still not a part of our daily life, or even tangential to our lives. They are good at helping make cars, and some other basic manufacturing tasks. In no way do they threaten to undo us all.

I'm sure Reason spent a lot of money to send Ron Bailey to the Singularity Summit in San Francisco, and he had to come through with a provocative article. But we're not more threatened by robots in 2030 than we are by genetically engineered kittens. Try to calm down, please.