This Will Be Fun....

Bjorn Lomberg does an about-face and is now calling for $tensB/yr spending on climate change mitigation and adaptation....

The Catholic Church

NY Times: "The former leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Belgium urged a victim of serial sexual abuse by a bishop to keep silent for a year, until the bishop — the victim’s own uncle — could retire, according to tapes made by the victim last April and published over the weekend in two Belgian newspapers."

Steven Weinberg: "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."

Steven Weinberg, quoted in The New York Times, April 20, 1999

US debt, today vs WW2

Here's an interesting graph of US federal debt vs GDP:

This is interesting because it shows that it's been mostly Republican administrations that have created the debt problem.

Is the debt a problem? Who knows, but here's an important data point, as elucidated by Jim Quinn on the ultra-libertarian site LewRockwell.com. At first glance, it does seem to make a certain amount of sense -- we are not at all in times like post-WW2:

When I read Paul Krugman and the other Keynesian boneheads saying that our debt is not a problem, they quote figures about our debt of $13.3 trillion versus our GDP of $14.6 trillion not being so bad. That is only 91% of GDP. They point to World War II when our national debt reached 120% of GDP. They say everything worked out after that.

Well lets analyze that comparison for just a second. In 1945, Europe, Russia and Asia lay in ruins. The devastation was epic. The United States stood alone as the only unscathed country in the world. America became the manufacturer to the world. We rebuilt Europe and Asia. Our GDP soared, as our National Debt declined from $269 billion in 1946 to $255 billion in 1951, remaining below $300 billion until 1963.

Quote

“No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”

-- Stanislaw Lec

Via: The Long Now Blog

PS: I agree, this is kind of dumb. Anthropomorphizing snowflakes doesn't really help.

U.S. Energy

Here's a great chart from The Oil Drum that shows how just little renewable energy the U.S. uses and how much fossil fuel usage there is to overcome. By the way, the green wind energy band is only visible in the last few years, atop the thin orange band.

The Majestic Plastic Bag

via: Dark Roasted Blend

The Cameron Problem

Somehow, the scientific issue of anthropogenic climate change now seems to depend on whom the movie director James Cameron is willing to debate.

Man, this subject changes fast. Just a minute ago I was studying a recent paper about statistical anomalies of the Greecian climate since 1955. I didn't realize that the scientific case now depends on the eccentricities of Hollywood celebrities. I guess I need to pay more attention.

Why Won't People Listen to Liars

Professional liar Marc Morano was, somehow, surprised that people would not sit still and listen to his lies at a recent conference on climate change.

And somehow he thinks this is supposed to discredit the conference, and not the liar.

Anne Rice

"As I said below, I quit being a Christian. I'm out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of ...Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen." 

-- Annerice.com (8/23/10).

Y

You know times are tough when even letters are getting laid off.

-- Conan O’Brien, on the YMCA's recent decision to rebrand itself as the "Y"

How Rights Erode

In a  demonstration of how individual rights erode one bit at at time, always for a supposedly good reason, a high school in Scio, (central) Oregon is now requiring mandatory testing athletes for drugs and alcohol. Here is the incredibly disingenuous claim of the school district's superintendent, Gary Tempel -- it gives the kids a way to say they're against drugs!

“We don’t look at this as a way to catch people,” Tempel said. “This is an opportunity for our students to stand in the gap, to say this is not what they’re about.”

“This is a tool for them to use, for them to be able to say no.”

-- Corvallis Gazette-Times

Unfortunately, only athletes are given the opportunity to make this statement, because, in the most admirably strained of non sequiturs, the chess club is "not hazardous."

I wonder if Tempel considers a speeding ticket a way for his to show he's opposed to dangerous driving. Somehow, I doubt it.

Moonrise Over the Columbia River

St Helens, Oregon

Quote

"What do you think, that a dollar in a savings account is freedom? Maybe you have understood nothing I have said."

-- Klaus Kinski

(Yes, Kinski was kind of a nut, but he was a kind of genius, too. If you haven't seen Fitzcarraldo, or Aguirre: The Wrath of God, you should. In fact, you must.)

GISS Presents Some Revisions

NASA GISS has revised their surface temperature data and 1998 has been determined to be only tied for the fourth warmest year. For January-December their top years (relative to the 1951-1980 average) are now:

2005               +0.62°C
2007, 2009      +0.57°C
1998, 2002      +0.56°C
2003               +0.55°C
2006               +0.54°C

The NASA page doesn't give the uncertainty in these numbers -- they should -- so it's hard to see any real difference in positions 2-7.

Regardless -- it's been very, very warm lately.

Here's a paper that explains their recent revisions.

More Fields Medal Gossip

I'm hearing from non-ICM sources that three of the Fields Medal winners are purported to be:

• Ngô Bảo Châu, Institute for Advanced Study
  
• Artur Avila, Paris
  
• Cedric Villani, Poincare Institute

No confirmation yet (so take these with a grain of sea salt), or word yet on the other....

Allocating the Greenhouse Effect

Here's a very useful result for arguing with climate skeptics who claim that, at only 0.04% of the atmosphere, CO2 is too small a fraction to have much effect on climate. This paper finds it's 20% of the Earth's total greenhouse effect.

From Gavin Schmidt et al, to appear in JGR:

The attribution of the present-day total greenhouse effect:
Abstract. The relative contributions of atmospheric long-wave absorbers to the present-day global greenhouse e ffect are among the most misquoted statistics in public discussions of climate change. Much of the interest in these values is however due to an implicit assumption that these contributions are directly relevant for the question of climate sensitivity.... With a straightforward scheme for allocating overlaps, we find that water vapour is the dominant contributor (50% of the effect), followed by clouds (25%) and then CO2 with 20%. All other absorbers play only minor roles. In a doubled CO2 scenario, this allocation is essentially unchanged, even though the magnitude of the total greenhouse e ect is signi cantly larger than the initial radiative forcing, underscoring the importance of feedbacks from water vapor and clouds to climate sensitivity.

(highlight mine)

People Are Not Trees

The consequences of living with a kitten who is enthralled with his newfound ability to climb, but hasn't yet figured out you are not a tree:

How Times Change

If you need no other explanation of why network television is dead, kaplunk, kaputt, shot squarely in the ass, simply watch this clip. It's nothing but embarrassing, and that neither CBS or Andy Rooney seems to have the slightest clue that it might be just makes it all the worse:





And to think that in high school my history teacher insisted that we watch 60 Minutes every week....

2010 Fields Medals

This is the year of the Fields Medals -- Mathematic's equivalent of the Nobel Prizes, except you have to be  under 40 yrs old to win.

(That's got to be a big smack in the face for older mathematicians.)

2 to 4 people usually win.

They will be announced in a few days, on Aug 19th at the International Congress of Mathematicians 2010 at Hyderabad, India, at 6 am GMT (that's 8/18 11 pm PDT, or 8/19 2 am EDT). The ceremony is supposed to be streamed live.  

Here's an article I wrote for Salon.com about the Fields Medal winners in 2002.

Here's a list of past winners. There are a lot of names on there you ought to recognize:

• John Milnor, 1962 (Sidenote: Mm 2nd summer in graduate school, I housesat in Milnor's wife's house in Stony Brook. She didn't know me, as I was leasing from someone who was leasing from her, and he certainly did not know me, though I looked glowingly at many of their math books on their bookshelf. But mostly I tried to get home each night in time to watch the Nightly Business Report. I was really into the stock market back then -- a few of my grad school friends made a killing (about 300%) on Adobe Systems, all because my friend Tom liked their manuals. I made enough money in the stock market in the '80s to buy my first car.)
• Michael Atiyah, 1966
• Grothendieck, 1966
• Alain Connes, 1982
• Gerd Faltings, 1986
• Edward Witten (of course), 1990
• Grigori Perelman, 2006 -- he proved Poincare's Conjecture, and has famously rejected a $1M prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute
• Terry Tao, UCLA (2006) -- he has a blog here.

The Fields Medals announcements are notorious for leaking early. I've been asking around, and here's what I've been able to come up with:

• Ngô Bảo Châu -- Vietnamese; now is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Semi-human (he obtained his PhD at age 25) he solved the fundamental lemma proposed by Robert Langlands for the case of unitary groups. (Here is an article from Time magazine about it that explains nothing.)
• Other than Ngo, I've only heard speculations about Mikhail Khovanov from Columbia University....

Have anything to add? Email me....

Another Result of Decreasing Arctic Ice

Here's an angle you might not have seen before:

Suppose Arctic sea ice melts. What does that mean?

Among many other things, it means that more sunlight will penetrate into the water. What does that mean?

According to a new paper in Marine Ecology Progress Series, it means that sea ice algae become less nutritious.

"Increased irradiance reduces food quality of sea ice algae," E. Leu1 et al, Marine Ecology Progress Series, Vol. 411: 49–60, 2010, doi: 10.3354/meps08647.

The nutritional value of sea ice algae is related to their content of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), which also matter for reproductive reasons. These researchers followed sea ice algae for a complete reproductive cycle and found that light conditions "proved to be decisive in determining the nutritional quality of sea ice algae, and irradiance was negatively correlated with the relative amount of PUFAs. Algal PUFA content decreased on average by 40% from April to June, while algal biomass (measured as particulate carbon, C) did not differ."

I suspect we are going to be learning about a lot of these types of nonobvious chains of consequence in this decade....