Arctic Sea Ice

Arctic sea ice varies.

It's difficult to tell from one month to the next how things compare to previous years.

Sometimes it looks like this it indicates a much cooler Arctic year than in years past, and sometimes it looks otherwise.

But at the moment, here's how 2009 sea ice extent compares to the last two years:

(Click to enlarge.) ((That sounds vaguely sexual, doesn't it?))

This year just dipped below last year in extent. And while it was significantly behind 2007's record low of last year (over 5% more ice, as of a month and a half ago), this year now lags 2007 by just 1%.

It's hard to draw any conclusions except in an average sense. But that's kind of boring, blog-wise.

data source: IARC-JAXA

Climate Update

A short (7 min) talk by Al Gore at this year's TED (Feb 2009):



"We need to go far, quickly."

Innovative Data Presentation

Hans Rosling presents data like you've never seen it before (TED 2006):

Raw Data Now

An interesting talk by Tim Berners-Lee on his vision of the future of the Web: Linked Data.

Quote

“Mother Nature doesn’t do bailouts. One day, Mother Nature shows up and blows out your knee caps.”

-- Denis Hayes, CEO, Bullitt Foundation

Via: Portland Business Journal

The Science News Cycle

This cartoon is spot-on:

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

Front Yard Flower

Here's a flower in my front yard, which just popped out of nowhere in the last few days:

Guns in National Parks?

All I know about whether guns should be allowed in National Parks is this: several years ago I was backpacking on the Appalachian Trail, somewhere in Tennessee or maybe southwestern Virginia. One day we came across two hunters carrying rifles, hunting something or other. We exchanged short, polite greetings and we each went on our way. But I remember that the next half-mile was quite stressful, and I have rarely felt so vulnerable -- and this is a place where the locals hang fish hooks on the trail at eye level to warn-off hikers.

No one has a legitimate need to carry a gun in a National Park -- if you're that afraid of its animals, don't go there -- where hunting isn't allowed. It's a shame America will now allow this. People will die because of it, and, if not, will take on far more stress than need be in a civilized society.

Fitzcarraldo

Werner Herzog is perhaps an acquired taste, and the first movie of his I ever watched (I'm a little ashamed to say) was the 2005 film Grizzly Man. (Although I would still like to hear the audio of Timothy Treadwell's last minutes as he was eaten by a bear.) It was tastefully done and even inspiring (but realistic).

Since then I have been trying to catch up on Herzog. The Wild Blue Yonder is not Herzog at his best (or Brad Dourif), and you can honestly wonder what they hell they both had in mind.

But 1982's Fitzcarraldo is pure gold. You have to watch it. You especially have to watch it when you realize that Herzog used no special effects at all -- he actually filmed the actual dragging of the actual 340-ton boat over the actual mountain. It's insane, but it made the entire film.

That, plus the boat's later passage through the rapids. Rather than edit it as some loud, quick-cutting, fast-action horror sequence as this huge boat crashes through the rapids, Herzog simply pans back and shows the boat almost dancing through the rapids. It makes all the difference.

Towards a Real-Life Serge

One of the neater details of the new movie (and coming TV series) Caprica, which takes place 58 years before the just-concluded Battlestar Galactica series and explains the creation of the Cylons, was the robotic butler Serge, which looks a bit like a mobile, talking golf bag:


A new robot by Anybots is not exactly the same thing, but about half of it:

This is a teleconference on wheels -- the robot can follow you around, etc., but the voice is that of the person/people on the other end of your teleconference.

Here's a video of the concept. They cost about $30K apiece. I could see this catching on, if the price were a lot lower, and people have about 15 years to grow comfortable with the idea.

Google's Power Consumption

Google has a data center in northern Oregon, in The Dalles on the Columbia River. It's power consumption at full capacity will be (in 2011) an estimated 103 MW. (Google won't reveal its own numbers.)

The total electricity consumption in Oregon in 2005 was 46,457 million kW-hr/yr, or 5300 MW.

So Google will be using about 1-2% of all Oregon electricity (a state of 3.6M people).


The Guardian has another interesting article about Internet power consumption -- it's growing at about 10% a year. US data centers used about 61 B kW-hr in 2006, 1.5% of all US electricity consumption (or enough to power the entire United Kingdom for 2 months), and perhaps will use 80 B kW-hr this year (9100 MW).

Truman as a War Criminal

Was Harry Truman a war criminal for dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Jon Stewart said yes when asked the other night.

Of course (of course), anyone who ever dropped an atomic bomb on an American city would be labeled a war criminal, no question about it. What's the difference?

The difference is that we think we can parse out morality. We thought we had good reasons for killing tens of thousands of completely innocent Japanese women, men, children, and babies. Just as they thought they had good reason to bomb Pearl Harbor. I mean, the Japanese didn't just wake up one morning and decide to commit as much evil as possible. The Japanese needed oil, and the US was dogged in trying to deny them that.

Funny how, when we need oil, it's justifiable to attack Iraq, but when the Japanese needed oil, they're not justified in looking out for their interests.

Actually, the whole damned thing makes me sick -- it's OK to murder thousands of little babies in this case, but not in that case, and we were justified because of what they did to us, but of course they were justified because of what we did to them.

It's OK for the US to waterboard to protect our people, but it wasn't OK for the Japanese to do the same to protect their people. Because they're just Japanese but we're Americans.

Like it all isn't at the bottom just stupid, naked, nationalistic tribalism.

I do not believe in a God, but I almost wish there was one, just so maybe some day I could get to see Truman and Yamamoto and Patton and Eisenhower and Hirohito and every one of the murderers standing at the pearly gates still arguing with whomever is still listening about how right there were and how wrong everyone else was, all talking over one another, still pointing fingers at everyone else, still trying to explain why they were a true Christian or whatever other stupid religion they thought they were pretending to practice, but it was just all the other guys who still forever without a clue and why can't you let me in after all these years and how responsble can you expect me to be just because I dropped a bomb that killed thousands of children and babies?

What did you expect?

Las Vegas Sprawl

Here's an interesting set of photographs showing the sprawl in the Las Vegas area since 1984.

Sightline has an animated version here.

Moon

This movie looks like it could be pretty good:

Breaking Bad

The best show you're probably not watching (and, look, I'm not watching any of them either, as I haven't even had a TV for almost two years, but that doesn't matter anymore, given sites like SurfChannel.com) is Breaking Bad, about a too-smart-for-his-own-good high-school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque. It appeals to me because (1) it's very well written (better than Weeds), and (2) it's set in Albuquerque, where I went to college and where a couple of my parents still live.

Walter White's house looks pretty much exactly like my mother's house, which is a bit weird.

Anyway, this series keeps getting better and better, as evidenced by its recent inclusion of Bob Odenkirk. Odenkirk is the Bill Murray of the new millenium, times two, divided by i times the square root of pi. In other words, he's not even on the same plane as the rest of us, which just adds to his appeal. He probably makes a nice mid-to-(barely) mid-upper class living in Hollywood, though if there was any justice he'd now be living in Jack Nicholson's pad, dating skinny bitches like Lara Flynn Boyle, telling 5 out of 6 directors to go to hell.

Man, the world needs more Odenkirks.

Sea Ice blips

Stoat links to this IJIS plot of Arctic sea ice extent for the last several years. My question is, why is there a weird upward blip in the data every year about June 1st?

UPDATE: I asked JAXA, and here's what they told me (it's along the lines of what we all expected):

Current version of data processing makes an erroneous bias of
sea ice extent on June 1st and October 15th which are seen
in the graph of sea ice extent as a small blip on these dates.
The apparent bias arises due to a switching of some parameters
in the processing on both dates. The parameter switching is
needed because the surface of the Arctic sea-ice becomes
wet in summer due to the melting of ice which changes
satellite-observed signatures of sea-ice drastically.

We are planning to improve the processing to make the gap
much smoother soon.

Swine flu

This swine flu issue seems already to be getting out of hand -- I mean, only 20 cases in the US so far? No deaths? Let's not forget that the regular flu kills, on average, about 100 people in the US per day.

One interesting thing, though, is that, like other flus, this strain seems to disproportionally affect young adults. Here's a graph of the Spanish flu from Wikipedia:



Young adults (ages from about 18 to 25) are in the prime of their lives -- why are they more susceptible than those younger and older than them? Is it that they're more social than those groups?

(And why are they more social? I've found this in my own life, even though I don't really understand it. When I was younger I used to run around all over the place doing all kinds of things. Now I don't. What's changed?)

Caprica

If you are wondering if you should rent or download Caprica -- the prequel to Battlestar Galactica that is set to be a series next year --the answer is, definitely yes.

Caprica is great science fiction in the soft sense of the word. That is, there are no big starship battles with phasors and no one gets sucked into a quantum singularity and no one shapeshifts or teleports anywhere. Frankly, you can't even tell it wasn't set in 2012, or even 1972.

And it really has essentially nothing to do with Battlestar Galactica. Which just makes it all that much better.

But it does have the subtle tone of the near-future, told via its personal impacts on individual lives. Its characters live in a world you can identify with, full of concerns about money and status and health and beauty and sex, and not some 23rd century version of Star Trek, where no one seems the least bit concerned about money or fatty foods or loneliness or their own damn neuroses that can ruin everything.

People in Caprica are real. They love. They hurt. They do stupid things for stupid reasons. And they can't escape their times, meaning the future rolls over them just as much as they do the rolling.

You'll learn how the Cylons were born -- but that could have occurred a hundred different ways. The real reason behind their creation comes down to one reason, as it always does -- human weakness. We want what we cannot have. And it inevitably leads to our downfall.

Rent it. Download it. It doesn't matter is you've ever seen BG. Start anew.

NOM ad parody

Boehner's Boner

Minority Leader John Boehner's denial of the scientific consensus on climate change, offered this morning on ABC's This Week, is so comical, so stupid, and so incredibly ignorant that I don't know if I want to move to France, slit my wrists, or give him an award:

Boehner replied: "The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know when they do what they do you've got more carbon dioxide."

This is wrong in so many ways it's scary. (1) No one has ever claimed that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen (2) there are thousands of substances that are perfectly safe at one level of exposure and dangerous at another (say, water), and (3) the worst part of cow flatulence is its methane (CH4), not its carbon dioxide (CO2). Pound-for-pound methane is 20 times more effective in trapping heat than carbon dioxide. Livestock flatulence and manure is responsible for about one-third of global methane emissions.

So, yes, let's please take our scientific advice from Mr. Boehner.

Cheezeburger Shit

I'm not exactly sure why, but something about this picture that appears in this afternoon's NY Times seems to perfectly illustrate...everything that is wrong with our world.


It's just...everything, from this guy's oh-so-fashionable glasses, to his button-down, no-risk shirt, to the juvenile stuffed cat perched on his supposedly mature shoulder, to the fact that he didn't create any of this (only somewhat funny to begin with) Cheezeburger stuff, but just bought it to make money, and the fact that he'll probably make a snarky million dollars off of it while so much real and good and important literature sinks to the bottom of the resale bins.

Sometimes there just seems no hope.

Pirates and Snipers

I am not exactly a pacifist, but not really pro-military either. We -- the US and the world -- spend far too much on instruments of death and not the mechanisms of peace. But if I am ever captured by pirates, or by anyone, I hope there will be a few Navy snipers nearby, clinging somewhere to a ship's fantail, peering through their night vision scopes and confident of their expertise to take out my captors with a single shot, on rough seas with every one of us bobbing up and down in the dark. That's a little comfort in a very cold world.

1% of the Sun

Here's an amazing number:

"When the Soviet Union exploded a three-stage bomb yielding nearly 60 megatons on October 30, 1961, it was estimated that, for a moment, the energy flux exceeded 1 percent of the entire output of the sun."

-- Project Orion, George Dyson

Over to Audio

I've been blogging for about 7 years now, on and off, since, I think, back on October 10, 2002, when I lived way up in the mountains in New Hampshire, with the most marvelous view of Lake Winnipesaukee that you can possibly imagine.

I miss living up there. I remember that one March we had four snowfalls of three feet or more. I was forever, it seemed, shoveling a trough up to the driveway and digging my car out of the snow and ice. I had to stuff rags in the door frame to conserve heat. But I seemed to be making lots of money and had a budget for everything I needed, and lots more. Maybe I just lived on a lot less.

Anyway, I have concluded that I'm not a very good blogger. I appreciate the readership of all of you, to be sure, but the truth is I struggle to get more than a mere 100 hits a day, even after all these years. Whatever it means to be a successful blogger, I don't have it. Maybe I don't post enough. Maybe I'm too analytical and not opinionated enough. Maybe I'm just a lousy writer.

Also, I think that except for some big time names, blogging is winding down. It seems to be taken over now by the magazines and places like Politico, and all those guys linking to each other. I don't want to be part of that, like the poor Matthew Yglesias who is so terrified of not posting on each and every little development in the day that he freaks out. That strikes me as a ridiculous way to live -- and think -- though maybe not if I was getting 100,000 visitors a day.

Even Kevin Drum, who was once one of my favorite bloggers, seems now to be kind of mailing it in. What do I really learn there? A short comment on a news story. No big deal.

Frankly, all that blogging by these types just seems to me to be a bunch of words with little insight or meaning. It's great Drum or Yglesias can make a living at it. I can't. It's time to face that.

So I'm cutting back severely on my blogging and focusing on a few other things: (1) income, which is not so easy as a freelancer right now in the recession, (2) book-writing, and (3) the podcast show I mentioned briefly last fall. I really want to talk to scientists, mostly climate scientists, about the state of their science, and the state of the world. Climate change seems to me to be the most important subject in, perhaps, the history of civilization, and we are doing essentially nothing to try and solve it. And those working the hardest aren't getting heard from enough. The Chris Horner's of the world go on all kinds of sympathetic venues where they spread a skeptical message, all along avoiding any hard questions by real interviewers with real knowledge. I'd love to interview him, if he's willing to entertain a few honest questions. But most of all I want to interview the real scientists producing the real science.

I also want to let scientists talk about science. There is a terrible dearth of understanding about science in this country, and it's seriously harming us. Some scientists talking about what attracted them to science in the first place can't hurt. Nobody is personalizing them.

So I'm going to seriously cut back on blogging and setting up a podcast shop, perhaps someday to be a video shop. I don't know how I'll afford this -- I'm applying for some grants here and there. (If you or your organization have an interest in a partial sponsorship, please contact me.) The main cost isn't the Web space, but some of the Web programming and especially the ~ 1 day/week preparing to do a decent interview.

We'll see how that goes. I'm just trying to stay ahead of the future. After a few years of this, and after my beautiful cat Eli passes, I'm going to get a dog and a pickup truck with a camper bed in the back and travel around, with a laptop and WiFi and just two changes of clothes, writing about everything I see -- especially all the labs, department projects, and undercovered scientists I can possibly visit.

Thanks.

PS: Wow, I can't believe that after all these years none of my regular readers has anything to say about the demise (?) of blogging, or maybe just of my blogging, or of the potential role for a weekly podcast of interviews with scientists. Or do I just look weird here? Or have I cried wolf too many times?

Ice Age Movie

OK, this is just a kid's movie: Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

Of course, the dinosaurs lived about 64 million years before the really famous ice ages, and ice ages and dinosaurs don't necessarily have a lot of overlap.

Anyway, films like this are bound to screw up kid's notions of what happened when. I mean, my 4-yr old nephew sucks down information like a Hummer consumes gas, and (and this is a bit scary) he doesn't miss much. So this movie is bound to confuse him, until his obsessed uncle comes along and tries to set him straight, which no doubt probably confuses him even more.

Although I did teach him to add small integers.

Heck, I was confused until about 12th grade because some idiot teacher in the 7th grade said that pi was equal to 22/7. I'm sure he or she, the first time they mentioned it, said it was an approximation, but you can only do so many substitutions for it on the blackboard before you ruin even semi-smart people.

This movie will not help with American's scientific literary, which is already killing us.


PS: And now that I think about it, why were there so few ice ages before about a million years ago? Orbital factors?

Oil Prices and the Recession

I've proposed before that last year's spike in oil prices help caused our current recession, but no one else seems to buy this. But here's more evidence that it was a significant factor:

This chart is from Paul Schwartz from the Council on Foreign Relations, via Kevin Drum.

Spikes in oil prices sure do seem to have something to do with starting recessions -- and last year's spike (red) was bigger than usual.

To me this makes a lot of sense. Oil prices were up sharply at this time last year:

In the course of a year and a half, everyone with debt obligations, mortgages and the like, quickly found themselves paying over twice for oil and gasoline what they were. This doesn't just affect your gas tank, it quickly bleeds through all aspects of the economy, since everything you buy gets on the shelf via oil-based transport. Monthly inflation rates doubled or more.

I don't know what this cost the average consumer, but I would guess a few hundred dollars a month. And since you can't really live without gas for your car and food from the store, people had no choice but to pay the higher energy prices and...for those near the edge, skip on their mortgage payments. After so many defaults the whole system just tipped over.

This certainly isn't high-grade economic analysis. I've just surprised that I've never (I think) even once in the last year and half seen any professional note the role high oil prices might have played in causing this recession.

PS: Here's something Brad Delong said in August 2006, and something I wrote. He was clearly right. I wasn't.

PPS: John Fleck informs me that James Hamilton has been writing about the oil shock here.

Ponnuru on Same-Sex Marriage

Sure, there are people who have always defended bigotry and prejudice, but you don't usually see it in a young, educated person. That makes the black-is-white argument of Ramesh Ponnuru all that more ridiculous:

But nobody can plausibly claim that Iowans meant to ratify same-sex marriage when they approved a constitution including equal-protection language.

In other words, Iowans did not mean "equal" when they voted for "equal." Sheesh.

Quote

"When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others. It is much more nearly certain that we are assembled here tonight than it is that this or that political party is in the right. Certainly there are degrees of certainty, and one should be very careful to emphasize that fact, because otherwise one is landed in an utter skepticism, and complete skepticism would, of course, be totally barren and completely useless.

-- Bertrand Russell.

Via: The Irascible Professor

Arctic Sea Ice Update from NASA

NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center gave a press conference this morning on Arctic Sea Ice, and here is the most important graph: a sharp decline in "old ice":

"Old ice" is what sticks around year-after-year (here, one, two, or more years). It's the thinner ice that melts away every year.

As the chart shows, "old ice" is decreasing in percentage, and what's interesting is it continued to decrease (and sharply) last year, even though 2008's sea ice extent was slighter higher (at minimum) than 2007's. So when climate change deniers say that sea ice area is increasing (2008 compared to 2007) and this is a sign of a cooling globe, that's not the whole story.

Multiyear ice is only about 1 meter thicker than first-year ice; the average thickness of all of it is about 9 ft (3 m).

Here's the sea ice extent:

All six of the lowest years have occurred in the last six years, since satellite monitoring began 30 years ago.

By the way, total Arctic sea ice volume is about 16,000 km³, which is about the volumes of Lake Superior + Lake Michigan.

The NSIDC's Walt Meier said that it's "fairly unlikely" that the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer by 2013 or 2014, which some people have been suggesting, but that it's not out of the question and anyone would have been "laughed out of the room" if they suggested that 5 years ago.

The House Dog's Grave

The House Dog's Grave (Haig, an English bulldog)

I've changed my ways a little; I cannot now
Run with you in the evenings along the shore,
Except in a kind of dream; and you, if you dream a moment,
You see me there.

So leave awhile the paw-marks on the front door
Where I used to scratch to go out or in,
And you'd soon open; leave on the kitchen floor
The marks of my drinking-pan.

I cannot lie by your fire as I used to do
On the warm stone,
Nor at the foot of your bed; no, all the night through
I lie alone.

But your kind thought has laid me less than six feet
Outside your window where firelight so often plays,
And where you sit to read--and I fear often grieving for me--
Every night your lamplight lies on my place.

You, man and woman, live so long, it is hard
To think of you ever dying
A little dog would get tired, living so long.
I hope than when you are lying

Under the ground like me your lives will appear
As good and joyful as mine.
No, dear, that's too much hope: you are not so well cared for
As I have been.

And never have known the passionate undivided
Fidelities that I knew.
Your minds are perhaps too active, too many-sided. . . .
But to me you were true.

You were never masters, but friends. I was your friend.
I loved you well, and was loved. Deep love endures
To the end and far past the end. If this is my end,
I am not lonely. I am not afraid. I am still yours.

Robinson Jeffers, 1941

Can you say, "Positive Feedback?"

Now here's a new idea from Todd Wynn of Oregon's right-wing Cascade Policy Institute: we can't cut back on carbon-producing energy production because we're going to need that energy to deal with the climate change caused by carbon-producing energy production:

...politicians frequently introduce bills that declare an emergency and attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by increasing energy costs through a carbon tax, a cap-and-trade program, or by eliminating access to reliable and affordable sources of energy. These policies are the wrong solution to helping Oregonians with future changes in global climate and may greatly disadvantage Oregon if changes in climate were to occur.

I think even my young nephew can figure out what's wrong with the argument.

Next?

Amazing Jumbo Elephant Landing

This is just wonderful:



Via: Dark Roasted Blend

Monce Replies to Achenbauch

You may have seen the list of 100 climate skeptics who signed a statement that was published in yesterday's Washington Post.

The Post's Joel Achenbauch wrote about the statement, and in particular called out one signer, Micheal Monce of Connecticut College, an atomic and molecular physicist:

Now back to that ad in the Post: Who ARE these people? "Scientists," is the answer, but what kind of scientists? Are they climate experts?

Let's take a look at "Michael Monce, Ph.d., Connecticut College":

"His area of expertise lies in atomic and molecular physics, particularly atomic collisions."

Probably a smart guy. But why do we care what he thinks about climate change? How many of these people have actually published something on climate change in a peer-reviewed journal?

So I wrote to Monce, and he courteously replied with his thoughts on the controversy:

"Wow... I guess I've suddenly become a lightning rod, and in some sense I can see why which leads me to answer your first question:"

No, I have never published about climate change in peer reviewed journals.

My response to Achenbach would be along the lines as: As a physicist I understand energy fairly well. Also as an experimentalist I have some experience in looking at physical data and analyzing what it means, What lead me to my present thoughts on climate change was when I was researching the topic in preparation for a course I was going to teach on energy issues about 4 years ago. As I looked more into the data and also the models that were being generated, a lot of it didn't add up to me. There's fairly good data that there was a warm period greater than what we are experiencing at the moment during medievel times when CO2 was much less than today. Also in historic terms, the current warming actually started in about 1840 when the earth emerged from the Little Ice Age. Why would it do that without a large human CO2 emission? The IPCC models generated in the late 1990's seem to have failed to predict the current leveling of temperature for the past decade. There are many more instances I can cite all of which tend to lead me to think that perhaps the current temperature trends are more due to natural variabillity than due to human causes. So, as a scientist, I came to the conclusion that many of the IPCC's basic premises may not be valid. If the data changes I will change my view.

As to your third question, if a climatologist had an opinion on a new finding in atomic physics, yes I would be skeptical. However, any scientist should always approach any new finding with some skepticism; that's our job. New findings must be verified independently by other researchers, and even then we may continue to try and find holes... that's what drives science. However, maybe that climatologist may have a different insight into the atomic physics finding that would be useful. Here's the real point as an example of how science really works: even today we are trying to find flaws in Einstein's work. Why? Because by finding the flaws we learn more about how nature runs. Wasn't it a physicist (Alvarez) who came up with the idea of the asteroid/comet impact extinction of the dinosaurs? Cross disciplinary discoveries do happen and are often met, appropriately, with great skepticism. However, such discoveries, when verified, lead to greater understanding of nature.

BSG: An Alternative Ending

Did you notice near the end of the last episode of Battlestar Galactica ("Daybreak Part 2"), that was Ronald Moore reading the magazine about mitrochodrial Eve? He is, of course, the creator and chief writer of BSG.... It was a nice cameo. Here's a great cover that was mocked up for an alternative ending he had in mind:

It looks real and kinda gives you shivers.... Just imagine.

Columbia River

Columbia River, St Helens, Oregon.

Avery's Pathetic Error

Dennis Avery has published such a stupid error that, frankly, it ought to end his career.

Avery is the kind of conservative jack-of-all-trades that media outlets insist on using despite the availability of tens of thousands of more qualified scientists.

Opining on climate science, Avery wrote, in something called the American Daily:

The atmospheric CO2 levels at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa observatory

have declined since 2004. How can this be when humans keep emitting more greenhouse gases? Could declining atmospheric CO2 levels mean that the whole Greenhouse Warming theory is collapsing?

They're bound to cover up such a ridiculous claim, so here's the screen print:

Of course, this is beyond ridiculous, and so silly that a 7-year old wouldn't make it. Yet this is what passes for skeptical punditry on climate science these days.

Here is the actual data from Mauna Loa -- it took, literally, four seconds to Google this. Atmospheric CO2 levels continue to increase (of course), just as they have for years.

No legitimate author could write this, even in a first draft, and no legitimate editor could possibly sign off on it. Avery's reputation ought to be in the shitter after this. What do you want to bet that lots of places will still publish him and supposedly legitimate outlets like World Have Your Say will continue to host him. How sad.

Via: Joseph Romm.

Petitions and Polls and Consensus

It's funny -- for a bunch of people who claim there is no such thing as "scientific consensus," climate skeptics sure seem to like to imply they have one, whether it's the "31,000" person petition with the OISM or today's statement in the Washington Post.

Here are the signatories. I could take them a bit more seriously without the Obama caricature. I certainly don't think Obama is lying -- I just think he has a different opinion than these people. Of course, in their eyes that means you are a liar and a scoundrel and probably strangle puppies in your basement after midnight. I've been accused of worse.

Friedmann and "Mother Nature's Dow"

I don't buy any of Thomas Friedman's argument that the current economic crisis is partly due to environmental collapse. It's just too easy and too convenient, and too much what every extreme environmentalist hopes for deep down -- "the world's collapsing -- that'll show 'em I was right!"

Friedman has no proof of anything like this -- environmental problems like global warming happen slowly and gradually, which is exactly part of the problem of getting the public interested in them and concerned about them. Only very, very rarely are there sudden, momentous shifts...unlike economics, which runs in people-time and not geologic-time.

On the other hand, despite all this Friedman will probably write a book about it, sell a million copies, and go on a successful tour around the country, solidifying his reputation with the NY Times. Which is maybe why I'm not a successful op-ed writer.

Milton Creek

Milton Creek, St. Helens, Oregon.

Sour

I try to write to "skeptical" climateers about their work, just to make sure I cover all bases and don't fall into a rut. But I try to ask good and pointed questions. Anyway, on one reply I got from someone he Bcc'ed a whole group of skeptics -- people I've never heard of, an assorted group of meteorologists and amateurs around the world. And they, of course, can't resist writing back.

I have to say, almost without fail these people are some of the most sour and impolite people I have come across. They have no hesitation in calling me all kinds of names from the beginning, and "naive" and "deluded" are just the start of it. I'm stupid and a fool and can't think for myself and all of that.

It's really off-putting and speaks very badly for their case, I think. I never, ever get that from more legitimate scientists. It's like these people just can't help insulting you because they seem to have no other case. I don't even know if they understand how much their impolite posture harms their potential case.

There's no reason people can't disagree without personally disagreeable. If you can't refrain from personal digs and insults, please do not write me.

The End of Battlestar Galactica

I have spent many evenings in the last month catching up on Battlestar Galactica, which frankly I hadn't seen a single episode of before. It is....pretty good science fiction. Not perfect, but pretty good. OK, excellent. And it's all the better for having no real aliens in it, no genetic therapy, no nanotechnology and the like. The ships are clunky and dirty and not all that appealing. People fight and good people die. There are no phasors, but crude nuclear weapons, inebriation and sloppy love.

If there's anything more impressive than a bunch of Cylon Centurions charging fearlessly into battle (especially alongside the humans), I have yet to see it.

I just have a few major questions/problems:

• if the Cylons nuked Caprica to extinguish the human race, whey didn't they simply nuke New Caprica when they had 90% of the human race cornered there? Why "occupy" it instead?
  
• Kara Thrace in the last episode -- she just vanished. Very unsatisfactory. What was she, anyway?
• I can't believe that any of the inumerable times a human accused a skinjob Cylon of being just a "machine," the Cylon didn't simply answer back, "Oh yeah? And what exactly are you? A large collection of atoms and molecules, delicately arranged, no less and no more than me." They would then argue about the soul and all that, but I can't imagine the human would have much more to add.
• I could do without all the FTL jumps... but it's curious that when the 13th Tribe escaped Earth and wandered around, special relativity was invoked to explain how little time passed for them but a great deal of time did for everyone else.... Fine -- we all know about the time dilation aspects of special relativity. But then they have everyone jumping around faster-than-light and don't once touch on the temporal aspects of it all. Whatever faster-than-light travel might be, it's got to seriously screw around with time, no?
• The only thing I really, really hated was that Asian officier's Australian accent in Razor. A very discordant mix that I still have trouble getting out of my head.
  

Still, I'm looking forward to the upcoming movie and the upcoming series Caprica.

McKibben's Exaggerations

Bill McKibben has an article in yesterday's Boston Globe, and includes this:

In the meantime, though, scientists - and environmentalists - have figured out a more important reason to worry about coal-fired power plants, and that's the carbon dioxide they spew into the atmosphere. This is what causes global warming, and the scrubbers PSNH is talking about will do nothing to remove it from the exhaust. Which is too bad, because if the scientists are right about climate change, soon New Hampshire anglers will be able to catch salt-water species in their own living rooms.

Perhaps he meant this last sentence as tongue-in-cheek -- I honestly can't tell. If he did, he didn't set it up properly or pull it off. If he didn't, as I suspect, then it's exactly -- exactly -- the kind of completely ludicrous statement that makes people immediately dismiss him and his ilk and, with them, the entire case for anthropogenic climate change.

It really doesn't fool anybody, and does serious harm to the effort.

Lindzen at Heartland

Here's Richard Lindzen's talk at the Heartland Institute conference earlier this month. It's well-worth listening to.



His scientific arguments (as presented here) are very high-level and there's really not much you can say about them. But I do think one of his ideas is worth thinking about: if you really do not accept the AGW statements given by the various scientific societies, quit your membership with that society. Perhaps you should even go and form your own society. That would be a much more useful statement than signing some petition with thousands of essentially untraceable names which lack institutional affiliations, addresses, etc., which has also been signed by Ginger Spice.

50 Years of Global Warming

Here's some ammunition for you -- an article about the potential of anthropogenic global warming in Scientific American magazine from 1959.

Yes, that's right: 50 years ago. Read it. It's amazing how much they knew back then, and how the basic concept hasn't change at all.

Was the article perfect? Not quite.

Quite accurate records of the amount of fossil fuel consumed in the world each year show that in the past 100 years man has added about 360 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. As a result the atmospheric concentration has increased by about 13 per cent. The carbon dioxide theory predicts that such an increase should raise the average temperature of the earth one degree F [0.6 deg C]. This is almost exactly the average increase recorded all over the world during the past century! If fuel consumption continues to increase at the present rate, we will have sent more than a trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the air by the year 2000. This should raise the earth's average temperature 3.6 degrees [2 degrees C].

Instead of 2°C, the world warmed about 0.5 - 0.6 °C. It concludes:

We shall be able to test the carbon dioxide theory against other theories of climatic change quite conclusively during the next half-century. Since we now can measure the sun's energy output independent of the distorting influence of the atmosphere, we shall see whether the earth's temperature trend correlates with measured fluctuations in solar radiation. If volcanic dust is the more important factor, then we may observe the earth's temperature following fluctuations in the number of large volcanic eruptions. But if carbon dioxide is the most important factor, long-term temperature records will rise continuously as long as man consumes the earth's reserves of fossil fuels.

Gaslight Anthem

"It's no secret that after Bruce Springsteen saw the Ramones in Asbury Park, he went home and wrote "Hungry Heart" for the Forest Hills legends. Of course, Jon Landau convinced the Boss to keep the song and it went on to become one of his biggest hits. The Ramones, meanwhile, remained just outside the mainstream, always lacking the one massive single that would have brought them the fame they deserved. Now, three decades later, the Gaslight Anthem are like something out of speculative fiction: this is what pop music would be if Springsteen hadn't listened to his producer, let the Ramones record the song, and launched the C.B.G.B.'ers into megastardom."

-- Sobriquet Magazine

The Coming Climate Wars

If we have to go to war with Michele Bachmann over Cap-and-Trade, can we at least use tanks that run on ethanol?

The West

Since moving to the West I've been reading a lot of books about Lewis & Clark and the founding of Oregon.... and I really like this quote from John Fleck's blog, which seems to sum up all the noble and unseemly things done to overtake this place:

From Larry Calloway:

I asked Wallace Stegner if he could define the history of the West, expecting a Frontier Thesis answer consistent with his Wilderness Letter and “the geography of hope.” He leaned forward as cool as his heavy drift of snowy hair and said:

“One big real estate deal.”

Hire a Physicist Today

“A Nobel scientist is more likely to figure out Washington than a career politician is to figure out how to deal with carbon sequestration."

-- Dan Leistikow, Energy Department’s director of public affairs, NY Times

Redoubt Erupts

Mt. Redoubt in Alaska erupted overnight, four times. The ash plum has gone nine miles high, but so far there appears to be little ash fallout regionally.

This doesn't appear to be the size volcano to influence global temperatures. Volcanic activity is measured by the Volcanic Explosive Index (VEI), a nonlinear scale that takes into account volume of products, eruption cloud height, and qualitative observations.

• Mt St Helens in 1980 was about 5.

• Pinatubo in 1991 was a high 6. (That one did influence climate for a year or so).

• Tambora in 1815 was a very high 7. (It was the largest eruption in recorded history, and caused "The Year Without a Summer" in northern countries in 1816 -- or, my favorite term for it, "Eighteen hundred and froze to death.")

In 1989 Reboubt exploded with a VEI = 3.

Here's the Twitter page for the volcano, and an updating site from the Alaska Volcano Observatory.

Pity the Poor GM Engineer

From Nate Silver, via Andrew Sullivan:

The government has dictated that nobody at anybody of these companies is deserving of incentive-based compensation, unless their household income is less than $250,000 per year.

Just think about some of the implications of this. A senior engineer at General Motors, who shepherds the production of a new hybrid vehicle that will turn out to be a best-seller, shouldn't get a bonus for that. Really?

Well... yes. If this Sr engineer's great invention is supposed to be such a great seller, then why is GM's stock price scrapping along near zero? Apparently no one on Wall Street thinks he has a viable product, or that he can't break it through GM's no doubt impenetrable bureaucracy... so why should he be rewarded for it?

I thought the capitalistic system was about rewarding the winners, not just those who try.

If this Sr engineer's hybrid idea is so great, why hasn't it reached the market? And if it hasn't, why should the American taxpayers pay anything extra for it?

For that matter, why should this clearly intelligent, skilled Sr engineer not leave GM and go start his own company making hybrid cars. Let him put his idea on the line, not bury it under 8 layers of management at GM. We're not paying for his idea, we're paying for GM's implementation of it. This John Galt deserves no more than his company can achieve.

If he has any stones, he will quit his $250,000/yr job at GM and start his own company making hybrids, and if his idea is a good one he will be a significant impact in the market and make a huge amount of money.

Isn't that what all this is supposed to be about? Or are we just supposed to reward middling engineers too afraid to risk their ideas with their own capital and/or initiative, forever kowtowing to upper management to just please, please release their product, and if not, oh well, I'll still get a safe retirement.

By those lights, Bill Gates would be a division manager at IBM, living in a really nice house in Westchester County, with great ideas that never made it past his executive director. And we would all be the poorer for it. Should he be rewarded for just making a decent effort? And if he should, why shouldn't you or I?

Arctic Ice Peak

The extent of sea ice in the Arctic appears to have peaked for the year, at 14.4 M square-kilometers.

How does this compare to previous years?

It's a relatively early peak, and lower than last year's, but higher than 2004-2007.

(I'm using data from the ARC-JAXA Information System (IJIS) from the International Arctic Research Center in corporation with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and the Advanced Earth Science and Technology Organization of Japan.)


(click to enlarge).

Here's the full picture, from IARC-JAXA:

(click to enlarge).

Bottom line? The Arctic is still relatively cool compared to the last half-dozen years, but warmer than last year, as is also seen in the NASA GISS and Hadley surface measurements.

Monday stuff

Just some things I've come across:

• Hadley says... Feb 2009 was +0.343°C above the baseline. Seven of their last eight months have been warmer than the year before.
  
• Even National Public Radio is canceling their newspaper subscriptions.
• The international radio program World Have Your Say had a program last Friday on "Why is the World Full of Climate Change Deniers." Guests included Mike Hume, Dennis Avery, and George Marshall. Worth checking out.

Feb 09 from NASA

NASA GISS says Feb 2009 was +0.41°C above the long-term average -- cooler than last month, but warmer than last year.

For the sixth month in a row, global temperatures are warmer than the year before.

St Helens, the Movie

I warned you that I just got a new digital camera:

GOCE on Twitter

Here's an interesting use of Twitter: you can use it to follow the European Space Agency's upcoming launch of the GOCE spacecraft.

GOCE is the Gravity field and steady-state OCean Explorer, and will launch from northern Russia on March 16th at 14:21 GMT (10:21 am EDT, 7:21 am PDT).

GOCE will map variations in the gravitational field around the Earth. That doesn't sound overly exciting, but it will allow more accurate measurements of ocean circulation and sea-level change, both of which are affected by climate change.

(Actually, the Earth's deviations from a sphere is a long, deep and interesting subject. In undergraduate classical mechanics, we spent a few weeks doing detailed perturbative calculations on the gravitational field resulting from a nonspherical Earth. It involved lots of interesting mathematics, not too complex but heady enough. You kind of feel like a rocket engineer. Look into it if you want to lose yourself for a few good weeks.)

Billionaires Who Save Millions

Timothy Egan writes about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest philanthropy:

Consider one example of how that money changes lives: global deaths from measles have fallen from 750,000 to 197,000 in just seven years, in part because the foundation started focusing on vaccinations for such diseases.

That's in deaths per year -- still 22/hour.

And what have you been doing with your life?

Outright Corporate Theft

If you want an eye-opening look into the depths of the ripoff of taxpayers in the last six months in the name of saving the economy, be sure to listen to Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren on yesterday's episode of Fresh Air on NPR.

Warren was also chairwoman of the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) first panel meeting.

Not that it seemed to matter. You can listen to her talk about how the federal government -- especially Henry Paulson -- rammed through programs that absolutely did not respect American taxpayers and, in fact, gave them the worst deals in all these mysterious transactions, while powerful corporations got sweet-heart, favorable deals that gave them 10s of billions of dollars, literally, to do whatever they wanted.

And Warren, by necessity of her position, clearly must be circumspect. Her curt, one-word answers reveal her true feelings about this travesty.

It's clear that over the last few months hundreds of billions of dollars have essentially been given -- just given -- to large American corporations to do whatever they want to do with it. No accountability, no transparency, nothing.

American taxpayers have gotten ripped off in perhaps the most extreme transfer of wealth ever. And they don't even fucking know it.

Perhaps most culpable of all are the so-called "financial journalists" who have reported essentially none of this. They have never been more than corporate lackeys for Wall Street and have seemed utterly incapable of escaping that role.

Someday -- it won't be for decades -- this financial "crisis" will be dissected and documented. No one -- not anyone -- is going to look clean. Corporations and their executives will be revealed for the selfish pigs they are, the middle class for the dupes they always have been, and financial journalists for the useless, ass-licking peons they always were.

Of course, it will be about $2T too late. And the worse fucking thing is that the middle class doesn't even know they've just been fucked hard up the ass.

Download Physics World

The March issue of Physics World, about several aspects of today's astronomy, is available for free. It's worth checking out.

February RSS & UAH temperatures

I know the monthly global temperature data shouldn't be treated like a horse race. But it's fun.

RSS puts the Feb-2009 MSU global temperature anomaly[1] at +0.230°C, and UAH at +0.36°C. That's an unusually wide difference between the two.

In any case, both are warmer than last year at this time, for the fourth month in a row.


[1] base period = 1978-1998

New Star Trek Movie Trailer

The upcoming Star Trek movie has released a third trailer, and this one looks even better than the first two.

The movie premiers on May 8th.

March in Oregon

So far in Oregon today I have seen fog, a brief snow squall, rain, sun, blue skies, storms, hail, and now sun again. And it's only 4 o'clock.

Fleck Interviews Schmidt

John Fleck interviewed Harrison Schmitt in yesterday's Albuquerque Journal (sub or trial pass required). As you may know, Schmitt (former NM senator, last human to walk on the Moon) doesn't believe humans are responsible for the last few decades of warming, and that instead it's the sun.

"Schmitt argues that the current warming is part of a natural cycle that began in the 1800s, as Earth began emerging from the "Little Ice Age" — a warming that began long before industrial emissions could have played a role. Schmitt believes changes in the sun have effects on Earth's climate that are at this point poorly understood by scientists.
"It's a political issue," Schmitt said of global warming fears in a recent interview. "It's not a scientific issue."
Efforts to curtail greenhouse gas emissions, Schmitt said, "would be disastrous to our economy and actually our liberty."

I'd like to see his detailed calculations. Anyway, Schmitt is speaking at the Heartland Institute's skeptic conference, taking place in New York City over the next few days.

Snowiest December

This past December was the snowiest in Portland, OR's history: 18.9 inches. The Oregonian has a nice chart about it all here.

Video: No Global Cooling

I'm in an experimental mood tonight, so am trying something new: a short video explaining why there is no "global cooling" going on.

This is very rough and very experimental. Let me know what you think. But keep in mind:

• yes, I know I desperately need a haircut.
• I'm also under the weather, with a lot of gunk clinging the the orifices in my head.
  

Anyway:

Eli

I just got a digital camera and, I'm sorry, but you may be subject to some pictures and videos in the next few weeks until it loses its luster.

Here is my cat Eli, taken this afternoon. I have titled this video, "Eli."

According to a Steve Milloy-inspired blog, Robert Kennedy Jr. said the following at this past weekend of activism on behalf of the climate in Washington DC:

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said at today’s Capitol Climate Action rally that Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship “should be in jail… for all of eternity.”

Kennedy also said that coal companies Massey Energy, Peabody Energy and Arch Coal are “criminal enterprises.”

I'm unable to confirm this right now (write me if you can), but it sounds quite plausible. It also sounds juvenile, immature, and ridiculous.

I don't trust vaunted leftists like Kennedy Jr., who I suspect is only trying to keep his career in the media going, any more than I trust the noted climate skeptics on the right.

If, for example, the power in Kennedy Jr's home in Massachusetts or wherever it is were shut off because all the coal power plants in the US were suddenly terminated, he'd be one of the most prominent (if warbly) voices on the radio bitching for investigations and criminal convictions and who knows what else.

He is a blowhard whom I just cannot respect.

Sure, coal is bad for the climate, compared to other energy sources. That hardly means you have to demonize the people providing it. I grew up in a house with a coal furnace, and for many years remember my mom and my dad taking turns going down into the cellar to shovel coal into the furnace at 3 am in the morning. It kept us warm.

Yes, we need to transition to non-carbon energy sources, and we need to move away from coal. But calls like Kennedy Jr's are just arrogant and stupid, and are exactly why I cannot and will never be an activist. There are no grays in their world, only sharp divisions of black and white. And worse of all, Kennedy Jr. well knows this and deliberately chooses to ignore it for the sake of his personal publicity.

(Let's not even get in to his opposition to the wind farm off Cape Cod, or his extremely misleading article in Salon about vaccines and autism.)

The extreme left and RFK Jr. and Bill McKibben and 350.org and all those people are never going to accomplish anything at this rate. Their language is so inflammatory it is easily written off. Aren't there any adults in their movement?

quote

"A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism."

 -- Carl Sagan


PS: I'd down with the flu, so won't be posting much for a few days....

Pleasant Grove City v. Summum

There was a remarkable decision handed down by the Supreme Court the other day, and it hasn't gotten nearly enough attention.

The case was Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, No. 07-665. You can read the background and decision here -- I won't repeat it.

Most amazing is Justice Alito's explanation of the court's decision. Essentially, he says the government has a right of "government speech" and on that basis alone can decide what does and does not appear in government property.

Such a right is completely without precedent and a clear affront to the First Amendment.

Essentially, it says that whatever government wants to establish, it can, regardless of the feelings of anyone else not in the government. It is no less than an excuse for the tyranny of the majority.

Lapdogs Scalia and Thomas concurred (of course).

In a concurring opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, said the decision on Wednesday should foreclose all challenges to the Ten Commandments monument.

This is simply unbelievable to me. It essentially says that the government can choose which religions they will publicize and which they will not. Which they will support (tacitly or not), and which they will not. How can this not be contrary to the honest meaning of the First Amendment?

I am amazed at the degree to which people like Alito will dishonestly twist language to enact their favored weltenschaung.

This decision is a travesty. There ought to be a rally in Salt Lake City, with about 300,000 citizens, who go and dig this Commandment memorial out of the ground.

Bottled Water

Here are some amazing facts about bottled water quoted from Jackie Grom's article in the 2/26 ScienceNOW Daily News:

• From start to finish, bottled water consumes between 1100 and 2000 times more energy on average than does tap water.
• Bottled water consumption has skyrocketed over the past several years. In 2007, some 200 billion liters of bottled water were sold worldwide, and Americans took the biggest gulp: 33 billion liters a year, an average of 110 liters per person.
• bottled water has now surpassed milk and beer in sales
• the global demand for bottle production alone uses 50 million barrels of oil a year--that's 2 1/2 days of U.S. oil consumption.
• U.S. bottled-water consumption in 2007 required an energy input equivalent to 32 million to 54 million barrels of oil. Global energy demand for bottled water is three times that amount. To put that energy use into perspective, Gleick says to imagine that each bottle is up to one-quarter full of oil.

H+ Magazine

Here's a new magazine worth checking out: H+ Magazine, where H stands for Human. Stories on transhumanism, nanotech, the Singularity, living longer, and the like. Check it out.

Viewing the ISS

Here is a neat site that will tell you when and where you can see the International Space Station orbit overhead of where you live.

If you get out in the country it's really amazing how many satellites you can see go by, once you lay still on the ground for awhile and your eyes adjust a little. I don't do enough of that kind if thing anymore.

Horner

Chris Horner thinks that because NASA's carbon observatory satellite went into the ocean the other day the science is still unsettled:

The meaning of that global-warming satellite splashing down has struck home.

It looks like the science is just going to have to remain settled for a little while longer.

Which we have had officially confirmed by President Obama last night, of course, because without the massive revenues derived from the new, biggest-revenue-measure-in-our-history global-warming tax that's built into Obama's budget assumptions, he can't pay for his social engineering. The science has gotta be settled.

By the way, I have been reading -- or trying to read -- Horner's latest book, Red Hot Lies. Even considering the fact that I don't agree with his major thesis, I don't think I've ever read a whinier book than this. Everyone Horner disagrees with is an "alarmist"or a fraud. Everyone he agrees with is inevitably painted as a hero fighting the good fight.

I honestly don't mind -- and, in fact, welcome -- legitimate scientific arguments that purport to call anthropogenic climate change into doubt. But Horner's half-truths and fabrications and utter whining is so off-putting is so horrendous it's difficult to stomach for even a few pages. It is a crime that he has received all the publicity he has, which I can only attribute to a robust, colluding right-wing machine.

Carbon Sequestration

Is there something I'm missing about carbon sequestration? I just don't see how people (besides the coal industry) can get interested in it. For example, here the EPA boasts about an experimental project that will sequester... 1 Mmt (1 million metric tonnes), and say that ultimately the site could hold 100 Bmt.

The world emits 70 Mmt/day. Per day. And the US emits about 7 Bmt/yr (2006). So this site would only work for about 14 years.

OK, so maybe there are several such sites possible around the US.

But beyond that, it seems to me the chances of an accidental release of the sequestered CO2 could be phenomenal. If the CO2 escapes, it tends to lie low to the ground (being heavier than air) and suffocates people. You might recall Lake Nyos (1986: 1700 people dead, 3500 livestock dead).

Claims that these underground caverns will be safe...forever... something about it just doesn't smell right. Placing nuclear waste deep underground for millenia is bad enough.... but nuclear waste isn't a gas, even though one heavier than air....

Gas-to-Oil Price Ratio

I don't really know what this means, but the ratio of the price of gas to that of oil (on a per-volume basis) has been acting really strange lately:

(Click to enlarge.)

Incongruous Things

1) Portland is considering cutting 8 days of school this year because of lack of funds.

2) More than 5,000 profitable corporations operating in Oregon paid no income taxes in 2006 beyond the $10 minimum, according to the Oregon Center for Public Policy. Among the 5,156 profitable corporations that paid just $10 were 31 with over $1 million in Oregon taxable income.

3) Business leaders complain that Oregon workers often are poorly educated.

quote

"Putting astronauts on space stations is like putting little human tellers inside ATM machines."

Robert Park, What's New

"Inside the Meltdown"

For a great review of the unfolding of the financial crisis, watch this 1-hr Frontline episode, Inside the Meltdown.

Frontline is always good, anytime I've taken the time to watch it.

I Have Arrived

I have arrived -- there is now a blog dedicated to calling me all kinds of names and denigrating what I think. And it's by a wanna-be-Limbaugh talk show host in Portland!

Unfortunately, she seems to have run out of steam lately.

A Very Good Guide to Climate Change

This 9-page document from the UK Met Office is the clearest and most succinct introduction to anthropogenic climate change I've seen. If you want a 10-minute rehash of the argument or need something sharp to give to a skeptic friend, you probably can't do better than this.

Shark Attacks Down

Well, here's one good thing about the current economic downturn: shark attacks were down 17% last year, because fewer people
could go to the beach.

I suppose chocking deaths decline
during a famine, too.

Vulcan for Google Earth

Vulcan is an application that gives you CO2 emission data on Google Earth:


The CO2 data is from 2002, but the researchers say they hope to update it -- and eventually get down to the single building level.

You can download it here.

Australian Fires

The fires in Australia have burned 3,900 square-kilometers, which is just about the size of Rhode Island -- or, and this sounds scarier -- about 15% of Massachusetts.

Here's a satellite view.

Sterns

The new U.S. climate envoy's name is Todd Stern. This guy. Not this guy, though there is some potential for confusion. If only his approach to climate change is as good as his name.