Global SST at record high

The record high for global average sea surface temperature (SST) is about 0.2°C.

The orange line is 2022.

Same for the North Atlantic:

Plots from University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer.

Here's an interesting article from today that goes into more detail:

Earth in hot water? Worries over sudden ocean warming spike, Seth Borenstein, Associated Press, 4-27-23

Good News, But Not Entirely

"Mike Lindell’s firm told to pay $5 million in ‘Prove Mike Wrong’ election-fraud challenge," Chris Dehghanpoor, Emma Brown and Jon Swaine, Washington Post, 4/20/23.

Lindell has done a huge amount of damage to America, and I hope the history books say that.

==

“The G.O.P. is a working-class populist party that has no interest in nurturing highly educated bobo boom towns. The G.O.P. does everything it can to repel those people — and the Tesla they drove in on.” 

- David Brooks, "Why People are Fleeing Blue Cities for Red States," NY Times, 4/13/23.

All people seem to care about anymore is their own pocketbook.

==

Someone from the Washington Policy Center wrote a blog post:

"Washington’s gas prices have increased between 35 and 52 cents per gallon since CO2 tax," Todd Myers, 4/17/23.

"Depending on the comparison, Washington’s gas prices have increased between 35 and 52 cents more than neighboring states since the state launched a tax on CO2 emissions at the beginning of the year."

Yeah, that's the point! Making fossil fuels more expensive incentivizes individuals to switch to noncarbon sources of fuel.

But I do agree with his second point:

"Despite the clear data, state politicians and agency staff refuse to acknowledge the cost of the increases and aren’t helping residents deal with the impact of the costs."

The poor (and middle class, today) can't just go out and buy an electric car to avoid the carbon tax. What's a new electric car cost, at least $25,000? That's beyond the means of a lot of people. 

Personally, I can't afford an electric car, new or used, right now. Probably never a new one.

So all the poor and middle class can do is suffer the carbon tax. If they drive the US average of about 12,000 mi/yr, and their car gets the US average of about 25 mi/gal, they buy 480 gal/yr of gasoline. If Todd's lower limit of an additional 35 cents/gal (at a minimum) is accurate, that's an extra $168/yr they're paying in carbon taxes. $14/month.

That's not trivial if you're poor. $168 would cover about two months of electricity. (Personally, my average electricity bill over the last 12 months is $87/month.)

The problem is that these Washington legislators want to keep the carbon tax money for themselves, to use as they desire.

A much better way to use it, if you're really serious about halting climate change, is as James Hansen started advocating for long ago: refund all carbon taxes back on an equal per capita basis. 

The poor would actually make money under this plan. Their refunds, since their use if average, would cover their up-front carbon fee costs. But those who use "too much" gasoline would pay more, and most of that would go back to the poor.

This plan would help alleviate poverty.

It should be relatively easy to return all money collected (minus a few percent for administrative costs) to households, it seems to me. They can return tax returns. But of course, there are people who are homeless, sharing a car, etc and how do you handle these situations? But it's not rocket science.

But politicians really don't care about the poor. Of course.

==

This March was the 2nd-warmest in its records, going back to 1880, according to NASA GISS. The 4th-warmest of any month. That's weird, considering we've just come out of the La Nina -- the third La Nina in consecutive years.

(Graph via Tropical Tidbits.)

So we're not even in an El Nino yet -- which many are predicting for later this year -- and already temperatures have soared out of the La Nina zone. (The GISS global anomaly this past November was "only" 0.73°C [baseline: 1951-1980].)

A new El Nino is likely to get very interesting. 

==

Sidney Crosby Story, plus.

Hockey's regular season is over and the playoffs begin tomorrow. Let me post this nice story first:

The Pittsburgh Penguins, my team, missed the playoffs for the time in 17 years. They played very inconsistently. Their playoff streak had been the longest in North American sports; I think the second-longest is now 9 or 10 years. 

Now it's over. 

They did this despite controlling their playoff destiny -- they lost to the worst team in the league, the Chicago Blackhawks, even though if they had won that game they were still in the hunt, and only needed to beat the second-worst team in the league, Columbus, two days later.

It was a monumental collapse. The Penguins fired their front office the next day, and they deserved it for having made several bad trades and contract agreements. 

But no doubt some of the players didn't have enough heart, either. (Easy to say, as a fan.)

Crosby played great this season: 93 points, 1.13 points/game, 3.38 points per 60 minutes, played all of the 82 games without an injury. 35 years old.

So did their other superstar, Evgeni Malkin: 82 points, 1.00 points per game, unexpectedly played every game. 36 years old.

But they didn't have the contribution they needed from their third- and fourth-lines, and they didn't have the goal keeping they needed (.907 save percentage, 3.03 goals per game, if my spreadsheet it right). 

It's a big disappointment, and although the Penguins have been receding since their back-to-back Stanley Cup wins in 2015-16 and 2016-17, this seems very stark, like the Crosby-Malkin-Kris LeTang era is over. Three Cups in Crosby's career, which is huge by any standard. Crosby was still outstanding this year, not only on offense, but making vital plays on defense too, diving for pucks in a way no others players were (consistently), and leading his team as always. (Crosby will always be a better 200-foot player than the league's current superstar, Connor McDaniel, and a better leader too. But McDaniel did score an incredible 153 points this year.)

In hockey, for players, a "point" is a goal or an assist. That's right, assists count as much as goals.)

Even though the Penguins would have very likely lost in the first round of the playoffs, to the Boston Bruins (the NHL's best team this year, who set the record for the most points ever in an 82-game NHL season), this is a great disappointment for Pittsburgh fans.

I guess now I will root for the Bruins. Actually I somehow got really tuned in to their playoff run in 2003-4 when I lived in New Hampshire; back then they were on regular TV out of Boston, and I had cable TV back then too, even though they were eliminated in the first round. I remember Ray Borque skating all over the place. But I didn't understand much about hockey then.

It's hard to imagine the Penguins doing much better next season. Sadly. As I've said before, I really regret I didn't become a Penguins fan until the year after their 2017 Stanley Cup. There were on a tremendous run, and changed the face of hockey with their fast play. But this year they were the oldest team in the league, which is now dominated by young, fast players (although most of them don't score a point a game, like Crosby).

Go Bruins, I guess. (Sigh.) But not one of them, or McDaniel, is the all-around player that Sidney Crosby is.

Boston

From the NY Times by Matthew Fetterman: The Boston Marathon Route: The Ups, the Downs and That Citgo Sign: From the rural suburbs to the bedlam of Fenway Park, the Boston Marathon is as special as distance running gets.

I think that's probably true, and I like this quote anyway. But I wish I knew Boston better (and not just one of its southern suburbs). I looked into living there in the early aughts, but concluded I couldn't afford it.

Snicker, Laugh, OMG

She's already shown she's incapable of embarassment.

If you believe that today’s “climate change” is caused by too much carbon, you have been fooled.

We live on a spinning planet that rotates around a much bigger sun along with other planets and heavenly bodies rotating around the sun that all create gravitational pull on one… pic.twitter.com/Tpzpgd2K2i

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) April 15, 2023

Camille Flammarion

Camille Flammarion was an interesting guy. He was a French astronomer and author who lived from 1842-1925 -- I posted one of his well-known woodcuts here, La Fin du monde ("The end of the world"). But he clearly had a very active and interesting imagination. 

Here are some of his other woodcuts/paintings:

Another Coincidence

There are very close to one mole of stars in the universe:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cm8F_iHDj_a/?igshid=MDJmNzVkMjY%3D

(Sorry, embedding doesn't work.)

Coincidence?

Number of humans who have ever lived ≈ 100 billion  

Number of stars in our galaxy ~ 100 billion

Number of galaxies in the universe ~ 100 billion

Pictures of Trump's Arrest

 Via Wired.

 This are all fake, produced by AI: 

Making pictures of Trump getting arrested while waiting for Trump's arrest. pic.twitter.com/4D2QQfUpLZ

— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) March 20, 2023

Higgins indicates how to spot these as fake, but I sure can't see that. These are excellent. 

La Fin du monde

La Fin du monde ("The end of the world") is a woodcut by the French astronomer and author Camille Flammarion. 

In the lower left corner is a toppled hourglass of sand.

Perhaps appropriate today (except for the direction of the temperature change) with the release of the IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report, which says (page 25), among many other things:

"...for thousands of years."

From The Guardian:

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said: “This report is a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every timeframe. Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once.”

"Everything, everywhere, all at once" -- I like that phrase. Sadly, there's no chance of it happening, of course. 

Kaisa Kosonen, a climate expert at Greenpeace International, said: “This report is definitely a final warning on 1.5C. If governments just stay on their current policies, the remaining carbon budget will be used up before the next IPCC report [due in 2030].”

Censored By Google

I received an email from Google (who owns Blogger) about my July 2019 blog post "I Am Now Too Old to Use the Internet".

Your post titled "I Am Now Too Old to Use the Internet" was flagged to us for review. This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content; the post is visible at 

http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2019/07/i-am-now-too-old-to-use-internet.html. 

Your blog readers must acknowledge the warning before being able to read the post/blog.

     Why was your blog post put behind a warning for readers?

     Your content has been evaluated according to our Adult Content policy. 

Please visit our Community Guidelines page linked in this email to learn more.

But why? All I can figure out is that I used the word "fuck" twice in that post. There's nothing else at all controversial there that I can see. Just me musing, a bit emotionally.

So really? Now you can't use the word "fuck" in a Blogger post? Seems pretty ridiculous, and very heavy. 

I wonder if an enemy of mine (?) turned me in to Google for such a piddling issue.

I never use the f-word in real life, among people. But I do use it when I stub my toe. 

I did use it here twice when emotional. I'm hardly going to apologize for that.

Fuck Google's unthinking AI. 

Weird and it makes me a bit angry. Of course, there's no sense in trying to fight this, even if I could figure out who to write to--there doesn't seem to be any way to contact them to ask questions.

Reminds me of the time I was banned from posting to Facebook for two months because I posted this picture:

What an amazing picture, full of strength and opposition.

And the unthinking robotic bitches at FB blocked it.

I don't do much of anything with Facebook anymore.

Maybe now Google will also ban me to for posting this amazing picture. If so, fuck them.

Alcohol and Pi

This is International Pi Day (3-14, get it?), which personally never excited me much, although the number itself is interesting per se. 

Anyway, in an article about pi in the New York Times, a commenter noted the following mnemonic for the first 15 digits of pi:

And it's true; count the number of letters in each word: 3-1-4-1-5-9-2-6-5-3-5-8-9-7-9.

Not very exciting either, really, but there you have it. If you can remember the mnemonic. 

I've always been a little intrigued that pi appears in Einstein's field equations for general relativity, his theory of gravity that says essentially "mass tells space how to bend, and space tells matter how to move" (John Wheeler). 

where the R's and g's specify the shape of spacetime, and the T specifies the matter distribution in the spacetime. This is actually a total of 10 different equations, but that doesn't matter here.

Why does pi appear on the right-hand side? And an 8? Weird. What does gravity  have to do with a circle, as pi is defined at the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter?

The 8πG/c⁴ is called the "Einstein constant" κ (kappa). G is Newton's gravitational constant, and c is the speed of light.

Wait, first, why does the speed of light appear here? It turns out that if you solve these field equations for a traveling wave, its speed in vacuum is that of light, c. Gravity travels at the speed of light. But it seems to me that it's more that light travels at the speed of gravity, because gravity--the very shape of space(time)--is more fundamental than electromagnetism. It's electromagnetism that exists in spacetime, so its fundamental properties are determined by spacetime.

I don't think the 8π is anything mystical or mysterious. OK, in a flat vacuum a gravitational wave would travel outward with its furthest points on a 4-dimensional sphere (3-dimensions of space and one of time). Something circular, since the circumference and surface area of a sphere also contains π. I think it's more that someone could have defined one of the items in the equation better, if they had deeper foresight. 

Which one? Maybe Newton's gravitational constant should have absorbed the 8π, so instead of G in Newton's equation, the proportionality constant would be G', where

G' = 8πG 

so Einstein's constant would be simply 

κ=G'/c⁴

But then why the c⁴? Newton had no reason to deal with that; he didn't even know if the speed of light in a vacuum was a constant. So naturally he just used G for the proportionality constant in his equation that gives the force between two masses. So an 8π popped out the other end, because our view of the universe is nonrelativistic.

No doubt there are plenty of people who have some insight into this instead of my banal musings. I wonder what they would say.

World GDP per Capita

In 2010 dollars:

About three times higher since I was born. Enough?

Real Income per Worker, US

2012 dollars:

(I really should fix that.)
 

2 People For Every Job

Unemployed per job openings, US:

 

Indoor Mile Record

This 2019 video of a world record set in the indoor mile really shows how incredibly fast these runners run:

 

I mean, I could never have run that fast, even for a single lap, when I was young. Not even half a lap. Not even down the back stretch.

I know the runner who set a world record here is genetically gifted, thin and tall, with a long stride. Sometimes I think this ruins world class athletics, that it's really only open to those who have the exact genome to excel in their event. Consider sprinters (Usain Bolt) versus this mile sprinter versus a champion weight lifter. All built very differently, and their events aren't open to those who aren't similarly born.

I'm not suggesting that everyone be weighted down a la Kurt Vonnegut. (Did Vonnegut ever assess his own advantages?) I guess most people enjoy watching a genetically gifted person run a mile in a record time. I do too.

But the same also applies to society at large. Smart people, people born smart for no reason of their own, will tend to do well in high-powered jobs in engineering or science or finance, while those who aren't as genetically blessed will not. No one ever wants to talk about this. Everyone feels they worked their way into their success an never wants to recall all their advantages, whether genetic, the environment of their youth, or luck. 

It's the ultimate discrimination.

Goalie Scores a Goal

For only the 16th time in NHL history, a goalie scored a goal. 

Two days ago, Linus Ullmark of the Boston Bruins put on in in the last minute of the game, into an empty net after the opposition pulled their goalie.

 

All of these have been since 1979.

I assume all goalies dream of this. Only 13 have scored. Some scored multiple times -- three for Martin Brodeur of the New Jersey Devils, and two for Ron Hextall of the Philadelphia Flyers, who is now the general manager of the Pittsburgh Penguins (who aren't doing so great this season).

Here are more if you want to see them:

About Ukraine

Record Warmth in New England

In an article about the loss of ice for skating in New England, the Washington Post wrote: 

Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont all experienced their warmest Januaries ever. After a short burst of extreme cold early this month, the mild temperatures returned.

The article is about this beautiful resort on the Vermont-New Hampshire border hasn't been able to open its famous four-mile ski trail on a lake until early February, and with only six inches of ice.

There's a saying that "Vermont is nine months of skiing and three months of bad skiing." Looks like that needs updating. 7 and 5? What a shame.

New England is warming faster than nearly every other part of the country, and the region’s winters are warming twice as quickly as the other seasons, said Stephen Young, a professor of sustainability and geography at Salem State University in Massachusetts. Any activity that relies on the cold, whether skiing or making maple syrup, is looking at an unstable future.

In New Hampshire it's been the same. The "ice-in" date for Lake Winnipesaukee -- the date when the boat MS Mount Washington can no longer make it to every one of its ports on the lake -- wasn't declared until Feb 5th. It's the latest ice-in date on record, and the first time it's happened after February 1st.

They've also had to cancel several winter activities there, or move them to a smaller lake: ice fishing, fishing derbys, hockey tournaments, a think a car fell through the ice....

New England in January is really beautiful, so cold and pristine it's like a different planet. March, April and the first half of May are tough though, when cabin fever sets in. 

It's so sad that these kind of experiences are going to end for so many people. Even growing up in Pennsylvania I have very fond memories of sledding down hills and nearly getting killed by trees, sledding down driveways and trying to avoid cars, even roads when there was a big snowstorm and school was cancelled. We used to stay out late on weeknights to where my mother could barely pry our boots off when we came into the cellar, they buckles were jammed up with ice. Warming back up actually hurt sometimes. 

Maybe kids don't go outside anymore anyway -- when was the last time you saw a group of kids playing baseball or football in a vacant lot? They were all over the place when I was a kid. I guess video games are too enticing now. Or they won't leave the security of Mommy and Daddy. Or Mommy and Daddy are afraid to let them run off on their own. Or they're off playing in traveling teams where they have to drive hours every weekend for a tournament. Honestly, I kind of feel sorry for today's kids.

Not my photo, not my field, before my time. But it 

was something like this.

Wild Sweet Orange

 It's a crime this band never made it.

Just got my external Bose speaker working again. Nice.