This Has Become Farce

This has quickly become a farce.

Watts' recounting of the rush to complete their analysis and put something on the Web doesn't sound like any science I've ever done or seen -- it sounds like final exam week for undergraduates. It's crystal clear this isn't a scientific paper, but an extended blog post intended purely as a PR-counter to BEST's announcement.

And one's blog readers aren't peer reviewers (Watts: "So made announcement Friday. Figured on Sunday at noon so WUWT could provide peer review....").

Patient, careful thinking is the very hallmark of science -- perhaps the only real advantage it has going for it. There is simply no sense that that happened here, as others are quickly pointing out. Scrambling around for the sake of public relations nullifies the very essence of what makes science so useful and so powerful.

It has become impossible to take this "paper" seriously, when there is so much good and true science being put out that requires attention. When and if it ever appears in a journal -- which looks less likely with each passing day -- it's worth revisiting. I have no desire to be a wingnut blogger. Standards, people, standards -- have they really vanished in this day and age?

Audio of Tomorrow's Senate Hearing

Tomorrow the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (Chairman: James Inhofe, R-OK) Barbara Boxer (D-CA)) has a hearing entitled, “Update on the Latest Climate Change Science and Local Adaptation Measures.”

It's doesn't look to be Webcast It will be Webcast at http://www.epw.senate.gov, and it looks like CSPAN will have the audio here, starting at 10 am ET.

Update: At 10 am ET tomorrow, there will be a copy of James McCarthy's testimony here. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists "he will explain that the ocean has absorbed more than 90 percent of the heat trapped over the past century by greenhouse gasses that have accumulated in the atmosphere, and that this heat is now penetrating deep into the ocean. According to McCarthy, this pattern cannot be explained by short-term natural cycles; it is a clear signature of climate change. He also will explain how what happens in the ocean affects the climate on land, including seasonal patterns of extreme weather events."

Reax to Weekend's PR Blitz

Jason Samenow at the Washington Post has a lot of strong thoughts, and collects reaxs, to the weekend's PR blitz.

"Both studies staged high-profile releases and represent concerted efforts to influence public perception about what we know about climate science. But neither has been published in a peer-reviewed publication and there is cause to question their legitimacy."

Ben Santer in the LA Times:

“I think [Muller] can do great harm to the broader debate. Imagine this scenario: that he makes these great claims and the papers aren’t published? This (op-ed) is in the spirit of publicity, not the spirit of science.”

Samenow:

"The claim that this single study [BEST] was “too important” to hold back - especially in light of scores of other important studies which received no such pre-publication fanfare - reeks of arrogance on the part of the author team."

"Irrespective of the flaws in Muller’s analysis or its merits - grabbing headlines in the New York Times prior to peer review represents an enormous tactical mistake. Peer review is the primary pillar of scientific legitimacy. Without it, a study has little to support it." 

"Science blogger David Appell had it exactly right when he said the Watts paper is “exactly the kind of paper that most needs peer review: based on a lot of judgements and classifications and nitty gritty details....”

and

"The Muller and Watts studies no doubt represent a lot of hard work and may eventually prove to be valuable contributions to science. But we should reserve judgment on their significance."

"And this new effort by these scientists to grab attention for studies that have not yet been vetted by other, independent scientists is disturbing and unproductive. It’s a disingenuous attempt to score points on a highly polarized scientific issue."

"My advice? Ignore these publicity stunts and pay no attention to these studies until they have passed peer review. And even studies that have been peer reviewed should be viewed with a certain amount of skepticism until they have been confirmed in multiple subsequent studies and stood the test of time."

One obvious hole is that Watts et al made little effort to communicate the statistical significance of their trends. That's a crucial part of any piece of science, without which a result is essentially meaningless (ask the teams who discovered the Higgs), even more so when you're claiming results to three significant figures. Their section 3.2.4, "Statistical Significance Testing," isn't what I mean -- I mean the estimated uncertainty (error bars) on each of the trend results -- are they good to 1% or 50%? It matters, and I suspect some peer reviewers will fail it just for this.

Venema Review of Watts et al 2012

Victor Venema, a meteorologist at the University of Bonn, has a useful review of Watts et al 2012. He writes:

Thus what he found is that the Urban Heat Island effect exists. I did not know that this was controversial.

Good news is that the study finds that after homogenization, the station quality is no longer a problem for the mean temperature.

Venema understands the temperature data homogenization issues, and concludes:

Had the new study found clear differences in the temperature trend in the homogenized data, the study would have been interesting for the general public. Because it is the homogenized data that used to compute large scale trends in the real climate. If the homogenized data would still be partially polluted by the urban heat island effect that would have been an error. The aim of homogenization is exactly to remove artificial changes from the raw data. It seems to do so successfully, now acknowledged by WUWT the second time.

Earlier he had this review of data homogenisation of monthly and annual data from surface stations.   It gets into the weeds, but of course that's often where the science resides.

This is clearly a paper that needs a thorough peer review, which I suspect will take a good while if it's done right. Watts et al don't say where it is being submitted (you almost get the impression that's an afterthought), but that will matter. (E&E, for example, won't cut it.)

Then there are the deluded people who somehow believe one paper about 2 percent of the globe, that finds that quality sites have a 1979-2008 trend of +0.155 C/decade (3 significant figures?? error bars??) will change the debate about global warming and the influence of CO2. (Just like, I guess, the other hundred times they thought some result settled the debate for good.) It won't, of course.

Cost of the US Drought (Relatively Small)

Roger Pielke Jr. has an interesting chart on the cost of the recent drought, compared to past years. This year's hardly compares at all (at least, on a national scale).

You could also scale the numbers in terms of inflation, as measured by the annual CPI. I've give those in the table below.

In USA Today an expert says this year's cost will likely surpass last year's, but it would have to be more than 4 times larger to equal the cost of the drought in 1980.

Science Mores, Disappearing Everywhere

I can completely understand sentiments like this one from Michael Mann:

Some additional thoughts about Muller and 'BEST':
Muller's announcement last year that the Earth is indeed warming brought him up to date w/ where the scientific community was in the the 1980s. His announcement this week that the warming can only be explained by human influences, brings him up to date with where the science was in the mid 1990s. At this rate, Muller should be caught up to the current state of climate science within a matter of a few years!

and

My view is that Muller's efforts to promote himself by belittling the collective efforts of the entire atmospheric/climate research community over several decades, though, really does the scientific community a disservice. Its great that he's reaffirmed what we already knew. But for him to pretend that we couldn't trust this entire scientific field until Richard Muller put his personal stamp of approval on their conclusions is, in my view, a very dangerously misguided philosophical take on how science works. It seems, in the end--quite sadly--that this is all really about Richard Muller's self-aggrandizement :(

I suspect there are a lot of climate scientists out there who quietly and diligently go about doing their work and, though they'll never say anything, resent people coming along, retracing steps that were done long ago, and announcing their results in the New York Times as if finally the truth is known. Scientific mores seem to be disappearing everywhere.

Via Tom Nelson.

Watts et al: Clunk

Clunk.

That, to me, seems to be the sound of the drama queen's preprint hitting the Internet. First of all, it's exactly the kind of paper that most needs peer review: based on a lot of judgements and classifications and nitty gritty details that only siting wonks can evaluate. (So does a paper like BEST's -- but their conclusion is nothing surprising.)

And it just doesn't compete with the narrative -- record US heat, the US drought, BEST -- that is quickly sweeping by. It smells a little desperate. If it withstands peer review, then it's worth a good look. Until then it looks like PR, which is, of course, exactly how it's being delivered.

(Can I just say that delivering science as PR, or PR as science, is off-putting and worrisome, whether it comes from private groups or professional journals like Nature.)

Then there are the inconvenient facts that

(1) USA48 is 1.6% of the Earth's surface area, and

(2) the trend of the USA48 lower troposphere, as measured by satellites as calculated by UAH, is 0.23 ± 0.08 °C from 1979 to present (95% confidence limit, no correction for autocorrelation). Satellite measurements almost completely avoid the urban heat island problem.

Then, of course, there is the rank hypocrisy:

Anthony Watts, Oct 11 2011: "The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project puts PR before peer review"

Not to mention: Anthony Watts, Oct 30 2011: Why didn’t Berkeley Earth wait for peer review?

Clunk.

Where BEST Should Have Stopped

It seems BEST is getting into trouble with their claims of attribution instead of their reconstruction of the temperature data. What they've done sounds like -- well, like what a bunch of physicists would do, not what climate science needs (and what climate scientists do).

Andrew Revkin quotes Judith Curry (who declined to be a co-author on the BEST results being announced today):

Their latest paper on the 250-year record concludes that the best explanation for the observed warming is greenhouse gas emissions. Their analysis is way oversimplistic and not at all convincing in my opinion.

There is broad agreement that greenhouse gas emissions have contributed to the warming in the latter half of the 20th century; the big question is how much of this warming can we attribute to greenhouse gas emissions. I don’t think this question can be answered by the simple curve fitting used in this paper, and I don’t see that their paper adds anything to our understanding of the causes of the recent warming. That said, I think there are two interesting results in this paper, regarding their analysis of 19th century volcanoes and the impact on climate, and also the changes to the diurnal temperature range.

Physicists tend to see the world as made up of simple physical systems (particles and fields), and when the physical systems get too complicated (atoms beyond Helium, molecules, galaxies), they hand them off to the chemists and astronomers for analysis. Heisenberg et al found the laws of quantum mechanics; but then they didn't get much beyond calculating the spectra of He2+ before saying, yeesh, that's hard, enough of that! So they turned to the structure of the nucleus and the laws of quantum electrodynamics and partied it up there.

What does x-ray crystallography say about the structure of DNA? Don't ask a physicist! Pure physicists don't do that kind of stuff. Sure, they could if they really wanted to. But by and large they really don't want to, and it's not what they're good at.

Attributing climate is more like figuring out the structure of DNA than it is like figuring out the laws of quantum mechanics -- simple curve-fitting ("exponentials, polynomials") doesn't cut it. In fact, it makes you look kind of foolish. If it were that simple climatologists would have done it in the 19th century (and, of course, they've all tried curve-fitting on the second week of their research, then hid those papers in a bottom drawer.) That's exactly why they scratch around for all the clues they can get, and why they ruin their youth build climate models. (Sure, CO2 is one of the big factors, which is already enough to be worried about our large emissions; but there is usually a lot going on.)

BEST did a great job reconstructing the temperature history of the planet (assuming their work passes peer review, at least). Perhaps they should have stopped there.

Is the US Drought Really That Extraordinary?

Despite all the headlines, I am not convinced the current U.S. drought is that exceptional, compared to history. I'm sure it's very tough for farmers, and will be for those who will be buying their food, but farming has always been a tough business.

Here is data on the U.S. Drought Monitor, which looks broadly at the U.S.

The following are plots of the percent of the U.S. counties that is "moderately to extremely dry," going back over a century. Granted, this is a broader brush than the information above, since it puts an area in one of two bins instead of five.

So it definitely shows a serious drought today -- but it's akin to about a dozen that have occurred since 1895, and is not as severe as the 1934 or the mid-1950s (which was both broader and longer). Perhaps the spike are becoming a little more frequent in recent decades, but that's not obvious (unlike what Paul Krugman wrote).

Here's the 12-month moving average, which makes things a little clearer:

And here is the dry area 12-month percentage expressed as its standard deviation from the mean:

The current drought looks like a fairly normal drought, at least so far, with no evidence of "Dust Bowlification." (Notice how Romm sneaks in a plot of heat when writing about drought. They're not the same thing.)

I'm sure many farmers are being seriously affected. But farming has always been a tough business (which is why we have price supports). I just don't see an extraordinary drought in this data, but an ordinary drought.

Stoat, Caldiera: BEST Results Nothing New

Stoat finds these new BEST results "rubbish" (by which he means the data analysis is nothing new, and the attribution claims not very scientific), calls Muller a "prima donna," and quotes Ken Caldiera via Romm:

"I am glad that Muller et al have taken a look at the data and have come to essentially the same conclusion that nearly everyone else had come to more than a decade ago. The basic scientific results have been established for a long time now, so I do not see the results of Muller et al as being scientifically important. However, their result may be politically important."

The best part is that this study was partially funded by the Koch Brothers. They must have some PR agency working overtime this weekend (though maybe they don't even care enough to bother....)

BEST's Warming Expectation is on the Low Side

One thing to note is that BEST's expectation of future warming is actually on the low side. Muller is said to write:

"I expect the rate of warming to proceed at a steady pace, about 1.5 degree F over land in the next 50 years."

That's a rate of 0.17 °C/decade over land. But the land is warming faster than the globe as a whole; in the last 30 years the ratio of the trend of warming over land to the trend of global warming is 1.58 for HadCRUT4 (1.27 for UAH's lower troposphere).

So BEST's global warming rate for the next 50 years would be something like 0.11 °C/decade, which is low -- HadCRUT4's global warming rate for the last 30 years is 0.18 °C/decade....

BEST to announce 2.5 F Warming Since 1750

Ron Bailey is now reporting that BEST's Richard Muller has an op-ed appearing in the New York Times saying that warming has been 2.5°F (1.4°C) since 1750 and 1.5°F (0.83°C) since 1950. The op-ed is said to conclude:

What about the future? As carbon dioxide emissions increase, the temperature should continue to rise. With a simple model (no tipping points, no sudden increase in cloud cover, a response to gases that is “logarithmic”) I expect the rate of warming to proceed at a steady pace, about 1.5 degree F over land in the next 50 years, less if the oceans are included. But if China continues its rapid growth (it has averaged 10% per year over the last 20 years) and its vast use of coal (typically adding one new gigawatt per month), then that same warming could take place in less than 20 years.

Expect the usual complaints that BEST is by-passing the peer review process and heading straight for maximum publicity. (That might be true if there were normal, typical science; clearly global warming, with its immense societal implications, left that domain about 20 years ago.) Their first studies, submitted for peer review to JGR Atmospheres in October 2011, haven't even appeared yet.

Added: You have to wonder about their attempts at attribution, though. Muller writes (or is said to  have written):

How definite is the attribution to humans? The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect – extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as does carbon dioxide....

Curve-matching doesn't sound very sophisticated...and you might wonder how it would include various other factors that could be in play at different periods: a warmer sun in the early 20th century, increased aerosols (and perhaps dust from atmospheric nuclear testing from 1945-1970s) mid-century, etc.

If the BEST rumor of 1.5 C Warming is True

Ron Bailey at Reason Magazine says there is a rumor that next week the BEST group at Berkeley will announce a finding of a 1.5°C temperature increase since 1750.

OK, it's just a rumor. But what would it mean for climate sensitivity?

The CDIAC estimates of historical CO2 emissions start in 1751 for fossil fuel combustion, but 1850 for land use changes. What if you included land use emissions from 1750 - 1850?

Since 1850, the totals are:

cumulative fossil fuel consumption emissions = 374 GtC

cumulative land use emissions = 165 GtC

where I have filled in the last few years of fossil fuel emissions from IEA data and, since CDIAC's land use emission dataset goes only to 2005, assumed annual land use changes since then are equal to 2005's emissions of 1,467 MtC/yr.

Since HadCRUT4 global surface warming since 1850 (slope × interval length) is 0.73°C, that gives a carbon-climate response of 1.37°C/TtC, which can be compared to the Swart and Weaver CCR function of 1.5 °C/TtC (which comes from a 2009 Nature paper by Matthews et al, which finds the 5th - 95th percentiles of the CCR to be 1.0 - 2.1 °C/TtC).

So what might earlier land use changes, from 1750 - 1850, add to cumulative carbon emissions? Well, from 1850-1870 those emissions averaged 535 MtC/yr. Assuming that's what it was starting in 1750, and adding in CDIAC's numbers for fossil fuel emissions for that period (which are very small), cumulative emissions from 1750-1850 would be 54 GtC, or only 10% more than the total from 1850-2010.

That would only mean an extra 0.08°C (0.05-0.011°C) of warming (5th-95th percentile), for a total of 0.87°C (0.58-1.22°C).

So if the rumor is true and the warming since 1750 is 1.5°C, maybe the global average surface temperature is on the high side of the CCR.

These historical carbon accountings are difficult and the error bars are significant. On the other hand, the CCR should hold over any time period where natural fluctuations average to zero, and its value for recent decades does tend to be high:

CCR of last 20 years: 1.99 °C/TtC
CCR of last 30 years: 2.28 °C/TtC
CCR of last 50 years: 1.91 °C/TtC

Obama and Committed Warming

Really, someone should have told him about committed warming.

(Sea level by Aviso)

This Message Was Not Approved by Joe Romm

Keith Kloor:

I’m also starting to wonder if every article on climate change should carry this disclaimer: “This message was not approved by Joe Romm. It may not emphasize the full scope of the climate change-triggered apocalyptic death spiral of the human race, and it may not fully emphasize the full culpability of journalists, climate deniers, and all Republicans. May the climate Gods have mercy on my soul.”

This is good too:

Greens and climate activists shouldn’t count on sporadic heat waves and wildfires to do the work for them. This is crucial because extreme weather and disasters has become crack cocaine to the climate community. Many of them are now hooked. And they come crashing down once the heat breaks and global warming disappears from the headlines.

Crop Yields and Drought: Not that Simple

Anthony Watts has a post about the increase in corn yields -- up by a factor of about 7 since 1930 -- as if to say there's no need to be concerned about today's drought.

It's not that simple, of course. The US population has increased by a factor of 2.6 since 1930; the world population by 3.3. And new farmland is ever harder to come by. There's been a 10% increase in US corn acreage in recent years, mostly due to the demand for ethanol. Mark Perry wrote last year:

"Farmers today grow five times as much corn as they did in the 1930s – on 20 percent less land.... The yield per acre has skyrocketed from 24 bushels in 1931 to 154 now, or a six-fold gain..... The national average of 153 bushels produced on each acre in 2010 was nearly 20 percent larger than the average yield in 2002 – and plant breeding experts estimate yields may jump 40 percent before 2020 and, perhaps, hit a national average of 300 bushels per acre by 2030."

With people now (1) more abundant, (2) eating more calories, (3) eating more meat (which uses up crops and water fast), (4) using corn for fuel, there have to be to higher yields. Counting on them to counter drought and higher temperatures is risky -- and it's important to keep in mind that many farmers in the world don't have access to the level of technology that US farmers do. (So once again, looking at climate change as it applies just to the US is very myopic.)

A 2007 study by Lobell and Fields didn't look at corn but at six other crops, found that, all else being equal higher temperatures have decreased yields, just about offsetting higher yields from enhanced CO2 fertilization. They estimate the 2002-2007 global losses at about $5 billion per year. A recent study by Lobell found maize and wheat production declined by 4-6% in 30 years due to higher temperatures (that is, declined from their level in the absence of climate change).

Of course, all else is never equal. But counting on them being unequal in the direction you need is risky.

A recent study by Lin and Huybers found that wheat yields have leveled off in many regions. They write:

"Recent studies (Kalra et al 2008, Lobell et al 2011) also indicate that warming in Bangladesh and India have reduced wheat yields by approximately 20% of their average trend since 1980 (Lobell et al 2011). The deleterious effects of climate change may be expected to decrease yield potential and, coupled with yields already near their maximum potential, may have contributed to the observed leveling in India and Bangladesh. Western European wheat yields were also found to have incurred disproportionate losses from regional warming (Lobell et al 2011) and may be near their yield potential (Licker et al 2010), suggesting that similar factors as discussed for Bangladesh and India may have acted in conjunction with policy changes to cause leveling in that region."

Cavalier conclusions about the very things that keep us all going don't help anyone, and are more intended to score a point for your side than illuminate a complex situation.

Mann's Letter to the National Review

Here's the letter that Michael Mann's attorney sent to the National Review. Steyn's article is still up.

It's sad that it has come to this, but good to see an aggressive fighting back against the defamation and lies.

The Next Set of Questions for Exxon Mobil's CEO

Now that Exxon Mobil's CEO has admitted that CO2 emissions cause warming, the next reporter who gets a chance to interview him needs to be ready with the appropriate followup questions.

Last month, Exxon Mobil Corp. CEO ex Tillerson said, at the Council of Foreign Relations:

“Increasing CO2 emissions in the atmosphere will have a warming impact,” Tillerson said. “It’s an engineering problem and it has an engineering solution.”

Q: What is that solution?
Q: Should fossil fuel producers and consumers pay the cost of that solution?
Q: If not, why not?

Farmers may shift crops to new regions as temperatures rise. “As a species, that’s why we’re all still here,” he said. “We adapt.”

Q: How will the necessary adaptations be distributed across societies?
Q: Should fossil fuel producers and consumers pay the cost of that adaptation?
Q: If not, why not?

“There are much more pressing priorities that we, as a human race, need to deal with,” he said. The world’s poorest residents “don’t even have access to fossil fuels to burn. They’d love to burn fossil fuels because their quality of life would rise immeasurably.”

Q: Then, should those who aren't poor pay for the cost of their emissions?
Q: If not, why not?

Finally:
Q: Is it ethical for a company to keep the profits of a product, which admittedly causes damage, while expecting society to pay for that damage?

Opportunities to put questions to someone like Tillerson are far too infrequent, so reporters need to be ready. These questions would be a good start.

Getting the Basic Stuff Wrong

Fred Guterl started a recent piece in the New York Times with

"SO far 2012 is on pace to be the hottest year on record."

That's not true at all, globally. Year-to-date 2012 ranks 10th, as measured by GISS^*, and that's before you get into error bars and such. (YTD, 2010 is warmest at +0.71°C, while 2012 is at +0.50°C for January-to-June.) GISS says the "2-sigma (95%) uncertainty for comparison of global temperatures in nearby recent years is estimated to be 0.05°C."

It is true that, for the lower 48 states of the U.S., 2012 is the warmest year so far, as measured by NOAA. There the spread is more meaningful: 52.88°F for 2012, with the next-warmest YTD year being 2006 at 51.68°F. But then, the lower 48 states are only 1.6% of the Earth's surface area, blah blah blah. Guterl's piece has a global focus, so the global ranking would be the most relevant number.

Anyway, I know writing about climate change is in fashion this summer because of the US heat wave and drought^**. But science writers don't do anyone any favors if they get the basic stuff wrong.

--

^* Why is the Climate Research Unit holding back their version 4 numbers after 2010? I don't understand how they can calculate the anomalies until then, but not after. If they're going to wait a year to two until all the station data rolls in before releasing an anomaly number, that dataset is not going to be as useful as it could be (and was).
^** In this respect, Oregon is a lousy place from which to watch climate change. This June was 2.8°F below its 1981-2010 average, and the YTD has been 0.7°F below that baseline.

Spiritually Sick By the Afternoon

Yesterday morning I woke up and turned on the radio, and immediately it was about the shootings in Colorado.

It's always sickening, but the truth is it's not really shocking anymore. Mass shootings in America are now like the seasons -- you know there will always be another one. The only mystery is the number -- how many this time?

By now everyone knows the game: it's ax-grinding time. Pundits rush to their computers to get their name in the game: Roger Ebert in the New York Times. Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. Lots of bloggers everywhere, which other bloggers roll up into summaries.

They all have it figured out, or at least their piece of it, seemingly before noon.

It's all predictable. Someone will tie the shooter to the Tea Party. Someone else will tie him to Occupy Wall Street. He will be quickly be identified as a loner, or an atheist, or someone who played video games. Reporters will flock like lemmings around his mother, or father, or whoever they can find who might utter a sentence in the most shocking moment of their life.

The presidential campaigns will immediately delve deep into their playbook on how to appear concerned without alienating their base. How to show they care, but without committing to anything. Say something, but not too much. Their aides will start clocks, ticking until the moment fades away.

“It is an act that defies description," said Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper. Not good enough, Governor, except maybe for the dozen epitaphs that now need to be written.

Everything said was completely predicable.

There are too many guns in America.
There aren't enough guns.
What ordinary person needs all those weapons?
If everyone in the theatre had a weapon this wouldn't have happened.
The shooter was a brilliant mastermind.
He couldn't find a job in this economy.
He was mentally ill.
There are always going to be insane people among us.
Hollywood glorifies violence.
He wanted to be a superhero.

Everyone has it all figured out.

I swear, by the afternoon I felt so spiritually sick I shut everything off and pulled down an old book of fantasy by Peter Beagle. I thought about buying a small cabin somewhere in Montana or France. I looked at my cats with envy, chasing flies and worrying about the stray who jumps on my balcony to steal their food. Not that they do much about her -- they just wiggle and whine about it while she eats. She's young and very thin and weighs half what they do, but she gets her way. Or maybe they know she's hungry.

We're a big country, but so interconnected now that a shooting in Colorado seems like a shooting down the street. Virtual worrying, virtual suffering. Yet in my town of only 12,500 people there have been 3 murders in the last 2 years, all within a mile of me. Someone a hundred yards down the street tried to poison his upstairs neighbors by cooking a poison on his car engine late at night. Across town a son recently shot his mother in the stomach, and was let out on $110,000 bail. The police force has been cut by 20% in just 3 years, and only one in four serious crimes leads to a conviction and sentencing. More than one person in 11 here can't find a job.

Anymore it seems like the whole country is falling apart, and people are too busy fighting about why to care. Maybe it's just too big anymore to govern, or for anyone to notice and care that a 24-year old, obviously intelligent person like James Holmes become so alienated, isolated and alone that one semester he's in medical school, and the next he's outfitting himself for Armageddon.

Like Steve Duin recently wrote in the Oregonian, "Who still believes that either candidate wants anything from the rest of us beyond a show of hands?" Just shut up and vote. Maybe next year GDP growth will be 3.4% instead of 2.2%, and all will again be well. What do you expect, anyway -- to go to a movie in safety?