Washed-Up Dock May Have Brought Invasive Species

In the "Nature Always Laughs Last" department, that 165-ton Japanese dock that was taken out to sea in their tsunami, and just washed up on an Oregon coast, may contain some undesirable invasive species.

Along for the ride were hundreds of millions of individual organisms, including a tiny species of crab, a species of algae, and a little starfish all native to Japan that have scientists worried if they get a chance to spread out on the West Coast.

"This is a very clear threat," said John Chapman, a research scientist at Oregon State University's Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Ore., where the dock float washed up early Tuesday morning. "It's exactly like saying you threw a bowling ball into a China shop. It's going to break something. But will it be valuable or cheap glass. It's incredibly difficult to predict what will happen next."

Scientists have taken a torch to the thing, but it might have been too late. Here's a photo gallery.

There are two more of these docks out there, somewhere.

Heartland Institute to Respond Soon

The Heartland Institute tells me they will have a statement "shortly." (Update: there was no response to my question about status of any plans for legal action.)

Update: Here's their statement, which Watts has before it's on the HI Web site (11:28 am PDT). Perhaps now he is their spokesperson.

Here's Who Did the Peter Gleick Investigation

The outside firm that did the Peter Gleick investigation for the Pacific Institute is Independent Employment Counsel, LLP, the Pacific Institute tells me. They add: "The review will not be released because it is a confidential personnel matter."

That would be these guys.


 

Gleick Review Won't Be Made Public, Pacific Institute Says

Peter Gleick has been cleared(*) by the Pacific Institute's Board of Directors and reinstated to his position.

I asked them for a copy of the independent report; they told me it won't be made public as it's a personnel matter:

"The independent review conducted by outside counsel on behalf of the Pacific Institute has supported what Dr. Gleick stated publicly and has further confirmed and the Pacific Institute is satisfied that none of its staff knew of or was involved in any way. It will not be released because it is a confidential personnel matter."

Guardian headline (as of 6/6/12)

(*) It my opinion, a person under investigation is not "cleared" of something until their organization says they're cleared. That word, "cleared," and my interpretation of it, seems to be the crux of the beef some people had with me (especially on Eli's post). The Guardian article's headline explicitedly used that word in their headline. Headlines matter (I suspect all writers can tell a story about how a headline -- which they probably didn't even write -- has gotten their article in hot water; indeed, it's usually the very thing that makes a reader want to read the article in the first place, and may well be the only thing they remember), and the Guardian's headline gives the distinct impression Gleick was cleared of forgery by the Pacific Institute. But he wasn't -- an outside investigation found that he hadn't forged documents -- but (naturally) the PI's Board would want to review that investigation's methodology and findings (and perhaps more) before really "clearing" him of forgery. (And even then they still could have legitimately decided, perhaps on ethical grounds, to let him go.)

And let's be real: without the report, or not even knowing who did it, or without being able to talk to Gleick (I've asked), we really don't know anything at all.

That's all I have to say about this, except that I still think anonymous commenters (distinctly differentiated from anonymous sources) are meaningless -- as likely to be spreading disinformation, misinformation, or uninformation -- as information.

More interesting questions are:

• why do the PI and Heartland Institute differ on their conclusions about the forgery? 
• why hasn't the HI filed their threatened suit yet? It seems to me that the sooner they file it the better, given what's recently happened to their reputation. Wouldn't such a suit -- now or four weeks ago -- be a strong counterpunch? 
• How will Peter Gleick's story be remembered by history -- as an unethical scientist, as a scientist who let his activist side get the best of him, or as someone who caused the HI to overreach and implode? History is already being (re)written -- someone I read recently (I forget who) wrote that Gleick had "risked his career" to bring down the Heartland Institute. I wonder if Gleick would agree.

Huge Japanese Dock Washes Up in Oregon

A 66-foot dock from Japan has washed ashore on Oregon's coast, after being carried out to sea in their March 2011 tsunami. The Oregonian has a good picture.

The owner of the dock says they don't want it back.

Big things that wash up here don't always have happy endings:

Watching the Transit of Venus

My brother-in-law has a 4-meter lens set-up in his driveway and they're watching the transit of Venus. (The lens itself is about the size of a nickel.)

Yes, Obama Has Lowered Government Spending (by 4%)

Yesterday's Paul Krugman's column said that President Obama has, in fact, reduced government spending, when you account for inflation and population growth.

That seemed surprising, so I checked it out. And it's true. Here is inflation-adjusted, per capita federal government outlays since 1960, plotted annually:

Data comes from the Federal Reserve in St Louis: Federal net outlays, population, and CPI.

Here are the percentage changes for each administration since Carter, for that administration's last fiscal year compared to the fiscal year in effect when it took office:

Note only does this dispel the common belief that Obama is a disastrous spendthrift for big government, it also shows was an utter disaster George W Hoover was. (Arguments about the extent to which Presidents or Congress are held responsible for spending are left for the comments. I do think it's clear that, at least in the case of Hoover, his two unfunded wars, two unfunded tax cuts, and an unfunded expansion expansion of Medicare (Part D) are his responsibility, not Congress's.)

I also put together these numbers on change in stock market capitalization (as measured by the Wilshire 5000 index) and total federal debt (click to enlarge):

These data are calculated from the very first day of that President's term, to his very last day.

The Best Disinfectant

"If sunlight is such a great disinfectant, then why can't I eat chicken that's been left out on a park bench?"

-- Steven Colbert

Update: Oregon County Goes Native

Here's an update on Oregon's Josephine County, which last month decided it wouldn't take responsibility for itself, and--instead of funding its government and public services by raising their already lowest-in-the-state property taxes--shut down much of its government and public services.

Short story: Criminals released early. Citizens are arming themselves. Residents are getting surly.

This week the County jail released 39 inmates, out of about 160 -- some of them felons. One woman waiting for someone said, “I’m excited.... It’s scary that the real scary ones are getting out.”

The county is speeding up sentencing hearings in order to get prisoners on their way to state penitentiaries.

The Sheriff "also shut down his department's major crimes and records units and cut the number of patrol deputies from about 25 to six." By the end of the month his office will have been from 91 positions to 33.5.

"Well, a lot of people are armed," [a construction designer] says. "Just about everybody in the county is armed, including myself."

At Rogue Valley Pawn & Jewelry, owner Chris Oddo says some worry Josephine County will turn into the "Wild West."

"That's why our gun sales have gone up," he says. "Every person that's come in has mentioned the jail and the need to protect themselves."

Oddo is carrying. The bulge on his right hip, under his T-shirt, is a holstered pistol.

Oddo says he supported the tax levy and displayed 10 campaign signs. All but three were stolen.

"I'm very disappointed in our community," he says. "It's a shame."

After much debate, the local Chamber of Commerce supported a "Yes" vote on the tax levy.

Chamber President Colene Martin says her phone rang all the next day as members continued the debate.

"Nobody wants to go to a town that's not safe," she says.

Martin lives outside town, and worries about the lack of sheriff's patrols.

"I want my husband to put up a driveway gate," she says.

According to an report released Wednesday by Oregon's Secretary of State, Josephine County's (local) property tax rate is $0.59 per $1000 of assessed value -- the average in Oregon is $2.81. With 62% of its area in non-taxable federal lands, they generated the least amount of local revenues at $191 per capita in 2011 (Oregon average: about $300).

Incidentally, two counties with copious wind farms and/or landfill and recycling centers, Gilliam and Sherman, generated $4,156 and $4,384 per capita (chart, page 7).

Josephine County's per capita income is just under $30,000, 10th lowest in Oregon (of 36 counties). (The highest of any Oregon county is $43,600.) (page 16)

Local revenues for county government have dropped 50% since 2004, to $14.8 M in 2011. Timber payments per capita went from $203 to $122.

--

The first stanza of Yeats' famous poem sums up the situation (yet again). The object of the passion changes, but the result never does.

...Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity....

from "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats

The Incredible Story of Project Chariot

I came across this incredible story in The Eskimo and the Oil Man, which I hadn't heard of before:

At the same time, he [Shell executive Pete Slaiby] knew that each job came with unique problems. Slaiby's library at home was filled with books on Alaska's Arctic. He knew about the Yankee whalers and the diseases that decimated the Iñupiat, and about dangerous plans that outsiders have tried to push through before on the North Slope.

He knew how resentments still lingered over the worst of these, Project Chariot, which shocked North Slopers when they first heard about it on July 14, 1958, the day that Edward Teller, father of America's hydrogen bomb, flew into Juneau, Alaska, to announce a plan to create an instant deepwater harbor beside the village of Point Hope by blowing up several thermonuclear bombs there.

"We have learned to use these powers with safety," Teller assured listeners.

Villagers would leave temporarily and happily return after the event, he said. The blast would pack firepower 160 times larger than Hiroshima. Teller said that the Atomic Energy Commission, project sponsor, could control the explosion so perfectly that it could "dig a harbor in the shape of a polar bear if required," Slaiby read in Dan O'Neill's superb book The Firecracker Boys.

With the enthusiastic support of Alaskan newspapers, politicians and academics, workers were hired. Bulldozers arrived at the village. Scientists decided to test how radiation from a blast might spread in local water, so they sprinkled soil contaminated with cesium 137 and strontium 85--its radioactivity a thousands times stronger than federal law considered safe--around the area.

Meanwhile, Atomic Energy Commission spokesmen--unaware that the Eskimos had brought tape recorders--told an audience of Point Hope villagers that radioactive followers from any blast would be so little it would probably not even be detectable and that Japanese survivors of the atomic blast at at Hiroshima, having "very great exposures" recovered and later experienced no further effects, Pete read in O'Neill's book.


Eskimo opposition was credited with halting the project, but even so, raised radiation levels had been found in Point Hope in spots as late as the 1990s. It turned out that some contaminated soil had never been removed.

"Project Chariot put a huge context on any meeting I had in Point Hope," Pete said. "When they asked if we had any technology to detect radioactivity, I saw that they associated any kind of development with Project Chariot."

More on Project Chariot here, which says that (incredibly, it seems today) many Alaskans were in favor of the project. Dan O'Neill's book is here.

The Future of the Arctic Coast

"In twenty years the Arctic coast of Alaska may look like the Coast of Louisiana today, lit by the lights of ships and oil rigs. One port there may become a trade hub as important as Singapore. Singapore, once a mangrove swamp, is now the biggest seaport in the world."

     -- Scott Borgerson, Oceans Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, as quoted in The Eskimo and The Oil Man

Port of Singapore

USA: We Can't Even Keep Our Plants Straight

Yet one more way in which the U.S. has gone astray:

"The tomato, though a fruit to botanists, has been decreed a vegetable by the United States Supreme Court."
      -- Nicholas Wade, New York Times

Is there anything lawyers haven't ruined?

Global Warming Isn't Global

When thinking about something like 3°C warming by 2050, one thing to keep in mind (as I reminded myself today) is that that's the global average. But most people live on land, and average warming there will greater than warming over the oceans. And most people (90%) live in the northern hemisphere, where the trend is warmer still.

Here are the lower troposphere trends of different regions* as measured by UAH. (Uncertainties are statistical uncertainties, at the 95% confidence level; NH = Northern Hemisphere)

region	UAH LT trend (°C/decade)	ratio to Global trend
Globe	0.13 ± 0.02	1
Land	0.17 ± 0.02	1.3 ± 0.2
Ocean	0.11 ± 0.02	0.8 ± 0.1
NH Land	0.19 ± 0.02	1.4 ± 0.1

So perhaps as warming increases people will tend to move not just away from the equator, but to to small isolated islands, where (I suspect) the warming trend is more like that of their surrounding ocean than of land. Unfortunately, some of those islands will be underwater.

Perhaps really rich people will live on ships, and invite others in order to set them up as small independent countries of their own, a la Blueseed.

(*Of course, there will still be significant regional differences on smaller scales, too.)

My Guess for UAH's May LT Anomaly: +0.23 C

My estimate for UAH's May LT global anomaly, based on simple-minded assumptions of linearity, is +0.23°C, which would make it the 4th-warmest May (in 34 years) and the 56-warmest month (among 402 months).

Not close to perfect

Here's my record since I started guessing:

Note that I'm not even perfect on-average. (I was told that once, right before she slammed the door.)

And then my guess for GISS's May anomaly is +0.54°C, which would be the 7th-warmest May in their 133-yr record of Mays.

It definitely seems like things are heating up now that the La Nina is over. Or maybe that's just confirmation bias.

"The Eskimo and the Oil Man" is Excellent

So last night I started reading The Eskimo and The Oil Man, and it's excellent -- definitely in the hard-to-put-down category. Bob Reiss's style is very engaging, smoothly combining exposition and narration, which is even more impressive given the complexities of the topic.

Reiss tells the story of climate change and oil exploration in the Arctic, beginning just after the 2010 oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. His two main characters are the mayor of North Slope, Alaska--an Iñupiat Eskimo whose town is heavily dependent on oil revenue--and an executive from Shell Oil who wants to secure drilling opportunities in the Arctic in the face of opposition from environmental groups, the White House, and the mayor's conflicts between his town's funding and his concern for preserving his backyard and the culture of his people.

Here's an excerpt:

As [Mayor] Itta left his house, his concerns were shared by most residents of the region. Subsistence hunting was not only the basis of Iñupiat culture but it provided the food that people ate. In the last census 61 percent of residents who worked full time and 89 percent of the unemployed reported getting over half their nourishment from hunting and fishing.

What do do? Fight Shell or not? The whale hunter--in his political capacity--was one of the most influential rural mayors in the United States. At his orders borough lawyers had challenged Shell in court in 2007, charging the federal agency responsible for permitting any offshore drilling with failing to conduct underlying science, failing to show whether the drill plan would do hard to the areas offshore.

"Too much, too fast, too soon," Itta had said then, and the court had agreed with him.

A Shell spokesman said that year, "That we failed I lay directly at the feet of Edward Itta."

But now Shall had changed the plan--made it smaller, and promised to stay away longer during hunting weeks--so Itta had refused to join national environmental groups--and a few Eskimo ones--still trying to bar Shell in court. His problem was not that he wished to halt all oil development. It was far trickier. It as a microcosm of energy issues facing the world.

What's so attractive about Reiss's presentation is that he presents the story via his characters, which adds real zing to his writing. And these characters are fully dimensional, pushed and pulled by many forces, struggling to do what's best for them, and what's best for the world from their points of view, fully cognizant of all the many issues at play, modern men with modern responsibilities.

I'm finding it a very attractive account of an issue that, too often, to too many of us, appears black-and-white, as if its a Yankees/Red Sox game and we're all calling up talk radio as Pete-from-Dorchester or Louie-from-the Bronx. In every paragraph Reiss makes it clear that it's not like that at all.

Reuters: Correction on 11 F by 2050

Reuters tells me they issued a correction this afternoon (after I wrote them, but they didn't say that part) to their article where Fatih Tirol said emissions were on track to cause an 11°F warming by 2050; the story now reads:

"When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of 6 degrees Celsius (towards the end of this century), which would have devastating consequences for the planet," Fatih Birol, IEA's chief economist told Reuters.

This now make sense. Using the same chart I gave earlier, projecting using the linear trend from 1950-2012 [the slope of the log of emissions, in GtC, is 0.0098] out to 2100, cumulative emissions in 2100 would be 4,000 GtC, for a warming of 6.1°C (11°F).

[Note, though, that the simple carbon-climate response function does not hold above 2000 GtC.]

However, that would mean 2100 emissions are about 90 GtC, or 330 Gt CO2 -- over 10 times today's. Is that conceivable? If world population then is 10 billion people, per-capita emissions would be 33 Gt CO2 per year -- twice what current US per-capita emissions are.

That strikes me as unlikely, though perhaps no inconceivable. But if humans are really so stupid as to not take some drastic action by at least 2050, when total warming would be 3.0°C -- if even after that we continue to burn fossil fuels at an ever-increasing rate, well then we are clearly too stupid to deserve to continue as a species, and the Universe would best be rid of us.

(Unfortunately we would take a lot of other species down with us. (I don't suppose "we're sorry" would help much?) But some species will survive -- extremophiles, if no one else -- and they'd get a chance to start over.)

Eli and others: I still fault Romm for extremism, such as originally passing the 11 F story on without questioning it. [His "Update" came after -- note that he altered the post's title from its original.] But, I was not able to keep up with all the comments as they came in on my post. Sorry for falling behind.

The Eskimo and the Oil Man

I get sent a fair number of books for possible review, and since I can't always place reviews for them all (the market is sadly moribund, and the payment even worse) I'm going to start noting them here, in the hope some readers will find them attractive.

The first is The Eskimo and The Oil Man: The Battle at the Top of the World for America's Future by Bob Reiss.



As an entree to exploring the issues of the melting Arctic, Reiss examines the lives of two of the men deeply involved in that region's troubles and opportunities: Edward Itta, the Eskimo mayor of the North Slope of Alaska, and Pete Slaiby, an executive from Shell. The narrative "depicts the struggle to reach a drilling decision that will benefit Shell while protecting the native Iñupiat community's way of life."

It strikes me as very well written, smoothly working the particulars in the story. I plan to read this even if I don't get the opportunity to review it somewhere.

Visualizing Last Year's Emissions of Carbon Dioxide

I was working on something today and came up with the following:

So, in 2011 the world's humans emitted 31.6 gigatons of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels (and probably another 5 Gt or so from land use changes, but I'll ignore that for now).

That's 8.6 billion metric tons of carbon, and it were all in the form of diamond, it would be a cube 1.4 km on a side.

That diamond would weigh over 40,000 trillion carats -- it would take 330 million years to mine that amount, at current mining rates.

It would be worth about $3,000,000 trillion dollars, or over 42,000 times the GDP of the entire world.

It would be a sizeable mountain: as a pyramid whose base is a square, with each side equal to its height, it would be 1,900 meters tall (6,400 ft).

It would be the 1,459 times the size of one of the largest of the World Trade Centers. With the same base area of one of the towers, it would reach 378 miles high, or almost twice as high as the International Space Station.

If it were a rod that reached to the moon, it would have a diameter of over 9 feet.

In other words, it's a lot of CO₂! (But if it were all at the surface of the Earth, at sea-level temperature and pressure, it would be a layer only 3.3 cm thick.)

Note: Corrections cheerfully accepted.

Added: Lest these numbers seem too surprising, remember that the Earth's atmosphere weighs about 5 million gigatons (to first-order it's simply P_sA_s/g_s, where P_s is the surface atmospheric pressure, A_s the area of the Earth's surface, and g_s the acceleration due to gravity at the Earth's surface). And 2,000 Gt of that is CO2 (if the CO2 level is 395 ppm).

von Storch on 11 F: "I consider this pure alarmism"

Hans von Storch agrees: No way 11°F by 2050.

About that Reuters article he writes:

"...the 2 degree goal is repeated as a need established by scientists.

"...A forth interesting issue is that climate science has become irrelevant; it shows up in passing, when "limit devastating climate effects like crop failure and melting glaciers" is mentioned, and the quote "the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of 6 degrees Celsius (by 2050)" is made.This is a pretty bold prediction, given that we have so far less than 1 degree warming since pre-industrial times, so that the warming must be more than 5 degrees/38 years, i.e., about 0.7-0.8 deg/decade. I consider this pure alarmism, which is related to the timing, and a misuse of scientific analysis for creating some unsustainable short term drama for the Bonn-negotiations. I wonder if this 6-degrees claim is really from IEA, or just an addition by Fatih Birol, because is no not mentioned in the IEA's announcement."

I've written to Birol asking about his carbon-climate response function, but haven't heard back yet.

H/T: Tom Nelson

11 F Warming by 2050?? No way.

Note added 5/31/12: Reuters has issued a correction to the article this post was based on. Click here for details.

--

The new Romm Record of 11°F apparently comes from a Reuters article where Faith Fatih Birol, the chief economist of the IEA, says we are on track for that amount of warming by 2050:

"When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of 6 degrees Celsius (by 2050), which would have devastating consequences for the planet," Fatih Birol, IEA's chief economist told Reuters.

That seems preposterous to me, on its face and on further analysis, which seems to me implies an additional warming (from now) of about 1.5 to 2°F by 2050. Here's why.

The carbon-climate response (CCR) is about 1.5°C per trillion metric tons of carbon emitted. That's the number given in the recent Swart and Weaver Nature Climate Change paper analyzing expected from the Alberta tar sands, with a range of 1.0–2.1 °C per Tt C (5th–95th percentile). That result comes from a 2009 Nature paper by Matthews et al., and this function includes feedbacks.

So let's add up the emissions.

Fossil fuels and cement production: 
Here is historical carbon emissions data from CDIAC; it includes fossil fuel combustion and cement production, and comes to 347 GtC as of 2008. Add in the recent IEA figures -- which are for fossil fuel consumption only -- and using the CDIAC data to estimate cement-carbon for the last few years, and the total emissions in that sector are about 375 GtC.

Land use changes:
Here is CDIAC's estimates of carbon emissions from land use changes. It the 1800s it was several times combustion emissions, but since 1933 it has been less and is now about 16% of combustion emissions. Add these up and this sector's total emissions (since 1850) are about 165 GtC.

Total Emissions:
So total emissions since 1850 are about 540 GtC, for which the CCR gives an expected warming of 0.81°C , which is what's been observed. Here's the plot:

So cumulative emissions by 2050 look to be around 2000 GtC, give or take. [That's the upper limit of applicability of this CCR.] That gives an expected [total] warming of about about 3°C (2.2°C more than today), or a total of 5.4°F, half of Birol's number.

Even that seems large. It means the next 38 years will see an average temperature increase of 0.58°C/decade, which is three and a half times the GISS warming rate of the last 30 years. Be honest: does that seem likely to you?

Even taking the upper bound of the CCR range, 2.1°C (which, let's note, overestimates the warming that's taken place so far by over 30%), gives a total warming of 7.6°F -- an additional warming of 0.9°C/decade from now until 2050.

I just don't see how anyone can get 11°F out of these numbers. 2050 cumulative emissions would need to be about 3,500 GtC for that to happen, which seems very unlikely. (At the CCR's upper bound it would be 2,500 GtC, which seems unlikely, though perhaps not "very" unlikely.)

Conclusion: Romm is rong -- in this case, the "alarmist" label definitely applies.

Note added: On second thought, 2050 cumulative emissions could be much less than I assumed -- projecting the line in the plot above, starting at 1950, gives cumulative emissions of 1300 GtC in 2050, not 2000 as I guessed. That gives a total warming of only 3.5°F (2.0°C) by 2050.