I Stagger in the Gathering

OK, first off, let me apologize for not updating this blog for almost 2 years. If you'll notice, the previous post is an analysis of the climate policies in a GW Bush state of the union address. So yeah, it's been a while both temporally and substantively. Oh, yeah, and I kind of dropped out of that Ph.D ecology program and became a DJ and music producer on a full time basis. Things changed. If you care to delve deeper into that stuff, go to philadelphyinz.com and read about how I'm trading my hearing for money and having fun doing it.

Now, for those of you who are surprised to be getting a ping from your RSS reader from good ol' Pour The Science, I'm posting not just to tell you that I'm still alive and in good health, but also because my buddy Sammy started a blog called DJs Against Climate Change - and I'm going to help him crunch numbers while we try to make the jetsetting DJ life more carbon neutral. In the spirit of the Copenhagen meetings, check it out and tell your friends.

And while you're at it, buy my record.

Things done changed

Remember back in the days, when niggaz had waves
Gazelle shades, and corn braids
Pitchin pennies, honies had the high top jellies
Shootin skelly, motherfuckers was all friendly

I watched the State of the Union address last night. The President said the following:

Let us fund new technologies that can generate coal power while capturing carbon emissions. Let us increase the use of renewable power and emissions-free nuclear power. Let us continue investing in advanced battery technology and renewable fuels to power the cars and trucks of the future. Let us create a new international clean technology fund, which will help developing nations like India and China make greater use of clean energy sources. And let us complete an international agreement that has the potential to slow, stop, and eventually reverse the growth of greenhouse gases....The United States is committed to strengthening our energy security and confronting global climate change.

Full text of speech here

Granted, there is a huge gulf between this type of rhetoric and actual policy on this issue- the United States has failed to participate in many international collective actions designed to reduce emissions, stalling and wasting precious time- almost a decade of lateral policy movement. Frankly, I don't have the time or energy to even get into it.

However, this stands in marked contrast to Dick Cheney's remarks (and the stance of the administration and Republican party) in 2001 when he rolled out the utterly absurd "National Energy Policy." He said "conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy."

Granted, the President's speech was that of an extremely lame duck. He spoke in oblique generalities and trumpeted easily cheered ideas. The speech was designed to keep Bush from hurting his party any worse than he already has. It was really nice to finally see over the mountain to a country without such a man who would roll out an energy policy characterized by Cheney's quote above, not to mention any number of the administrations absurd affronts to good environmental policy.

But one thing about highly conservative politicians, is that when they've finally changed their tune, you know that the winds of opinion have already changed. Apparently, it's political suicide for them to speculate in the oilmen's camp, at least publicly. Finally, they've acknowledged what people who have been paying attention have known with some certainty for quite a long time.

Climate Change has gone from political issue to political fact.

Don't call it a comeback, I been here for years

The big news today was that Al Gore and the IPCC won the Nobel Peace Prize for their work on global climate change. I find Al Gore to be a really facsinating bol, and maybe this Nobel will bring some awareness to the media age devaluation of politics which Gore has come to represent. In a nutshell, Gore, after being millimeters away from the presidency, said "fuck it" and decided that he could make more impact free of the restraints and ethical compromises inherant in politics. Many have understood that politics isn't the sole arena of power in this country, but few have been able to speak from outside the political realm with the authority that Gore can, only because of his former position of power. I still haven't formulated any real statement as to the nature and effectiveness, generally speaking, of this "insider-outsider" thing he's been doing, but no matter what the circumstances, he'll be bustin' at y'all daily for some time to come.

Bong bong bong your head went rung rung rung

If you're up for some (relatively) heavy reading, take a look at Scientific American's analysis of the potential problems and solutions inherent in the task of creating a carbon market.

But what that article really reminded me of was Kool Keith alter-ego Sinister 6000.

Age: 7999
Birthplace: Iceland
Likes: Warm, Cuddly Woman
Dislikes: Democracy, Carbon
Quote: "Sinster 6000 / new styles I be housing."

In the limelight

Here is an irresponsible (but not necessarily inaccurate) blog post (from ThinkProgress):

Climate change death toll ‘to double within 25 years.’

“Deaths and injuries from climate change are set to more than double in the next 25 years, according to estimates” by the World Health Organization. Deaths “linked to even a very narrow number of causes most closely connected to shifting weather patterns will reach more than 300,000 a year by 2030.”

That's it. That's the whole thing. Needless to say, the comments section over there is all stirred up.

The original article from the Financial Times cites some WHO data which points to "deaths inked to even a very narrow number of causes most closely connected to shifting weather patterns." I think that asserting such data as highly accurate is difficult because of the indirect relationship between climate change and individual weather events which haven't happened yet. I've said it a million times- climate is not weather. Although we could predict a mean of hurricane intensity or frequency over the next twenty years, we can't predict whether another one will hit New Orleans or Miami or Houston years ahead of time. Furthermore, populational and geopolitical issues have a huge role in predicting these deaths (e.g. migrations, emergency response, food supply) and thus the uncertainty grows.

Here's a good analogy for this type of report: What if you were to estimate the number of people killed by "poverty" in the United States over the next 20 years? This would seem difficult, because you would have to figure in deaths from poor medical treatment, deaths from exposure (for the homeless), deaths from malnutrition and maybe even deaths from drug-related gun violence. Is poverty the actual cause of death? No. But poverty is arguably the principal underlying cause. Climate change works the same way- a two degree rise in temperature may not kill anybody, but the hurricane resulting from more intense tropical ocean convection just might.

The issue here isn't the WHO report, which is surely based on broad estimates and designed to be preliminary and cautionary. The issue is that ThinkProgress presented the story so sensationally in a forum where people are looking for stories like these to confirm their biases. This is not good reporting, nor is it informative.

[ThinkProgress: Climate Change Toll to Double in 25 years]
[Financial Times: Climate Toll Will Double by 2030]

Ante up

After yesterday's Supreme Court decision, I neglected to mention that just because the court says that the EPA has the ability to regulate carbon dioxide and tailpipe emissions, it almost certainly won't until there's a new president. I was having an argument with somebody about the real differences between the parties and I pointed out that traditional conservatives are wont to let executive departments sit without enforcing the laws on the books, whereas liberals are unlikely to relax enforcement. This is largely a matter of beliefs regarding the role of government. The President, as the enforcer of federal law can generally choose to enforce or not enforce, to a certain degree. Conservatives, with a traditionally Libertarian perspective that minimal government is good government, generally try to use the existing governmental apparatus as little as possible, or eliminate parts of it should the opportunity arise. This is how Reagan turned thousands of homeless and mentally ill folks out onto the street in the 1980s, by cutting off funding to Federal programs pretty much regardless. He was a fucking dickhead.

A good example of lax or delayed enforcement is Brown vs. Board of Education, which served to strike down segregation in 1954. However, functional desegretation didn't happen until Eisenhower was forced to act on behalf of the Little Rock Nine to protect them from Arkansas governor Orval Faubus in 1957. George Wallace was forcing the Feds to play their hand still in 1963 at the University of Alabama. Another example of the potential laxity in executive enforcement would be the secret White House plan (recently uncovered) to limit the number of species which can be protected under the Endangered Species Act. More info on this here.

Anyway, back to the court decision. The New York Times has a good graphic showing the states that have their own carbon dioxide caps or regulations. I'm posting it here, but you can't host New York Times graphics on imageshack for some reason, so the graphic will probably rot in a week or so:



Not surprisingly, most of these maps look a lot like this one, from back in 2004:



Edit: I should point out that the states which have ethanol initiatives include those in the midwest, because these are the big agricultural states. However, this seems not to correlate with emissions regulation. Ethanol is a renewable energy source, but it does not eliminate greenhouse gas emission. I am not sure if ethanol burns cleaner than other combustion fuels.

Supreme Clientele

By a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court issued a ruling today in favor of states petitioning the EPA to classify greehouse gases such as carbon dioxide as pollutants. This means states can regulate carbon dioxide and so too can the federal government, I suppose.

This is a really, really big deal.

Here's the ruling (PDF) from scotusblog.

Al Gore is in effect mode

Al Gore is on the Hill today and he'll likely go toe-to-toe with A number One dumb dumb idiot and Pour The Science whipping boy Sen. James Ihofe (R-OK). The NYTimes talks about Gore "revisiting the old stage" and manages to point out that Gore has basically said "fuck you" to politics.

Marlo Lewis of the Cabal of Corpulent Industrialists Competitive Enterprise Institute has an absurd op-ed in the Atlanta Constitution Journal which contains the gem:

Carbon dioxide, which Gore demagogically calls "global warming pollution" (it's plant food, after all), is the inescapable byproduct of most of the energy that fuels the world's economy.

The rest of the "piece" is about how he believes that madatory emissions caps are an elitist cockblock on third world development. It's funny how a representative of such a powerful industry group (see bottom) will play the "pity the poor people" card during a brief break from screwing the poor. Two problems here Marlo: yes, CO2 is plant food... but so is cow shit... nice attempt at nice-ifying CO2 like it could [puppy dog face] nevuh evuh be a puwoootant because da happy flowees need it to bwooom (red herring count: 1). Second, CO2 is not an inescapable byproduct- you could decide to, uh, use something else for energy by working together and changing things for the positive. Oh, yeah, that.

Actually, let's take a two second break from beating up on Marlo here (because Snoop might be round the corner), and just quickly debunk his entire organization. Ok, step one- watch their propaganda video:



Step 2, read any one of these:

Nature's piece on Celia Bitz's recent sea ice model. Celia is a SCIENTIST, Marlo has a PhD in GOVERNMENT and a BA in POLI SCI.

A late 2005 paper about a decline in sea ice extent by SCIENTISTS at U. Colorado, NASA and U. Washington. The paper contains things like graphs and complex computer models that took years to build. The results were confirmed further in 2006. Marlo, on the other hand, has been published in "The Washington Times, Investors Business Daily, TechCentralStation, National Review, and Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy."



Einstein Escobar

I could go on for a long, long, long, long time, given the number of studies out there, which appear in Science and Nature (the premier peer-reviewed scientific journals in the world) almost every week. So let's just hope that Gore has his shit in line to be the point man for the people who dedicate their lives to researching these phenomena and fend off the people who dedicate their lives to attacking those who threaten industry. There's a lot at stake, and people are watching.

P.S.
File FoxNews "science" writer Stephen Milloy in the same category as Lewis (Naysaying Dickface).

P.P.S. One of those responsible for absolutely infuriating the scientific community by doctoring and altering government scientific reports on climate change has copped to it in front of Congress. Phillip Cooney said "My objective was to align these communications with the administration’s stated policy." The administration's stated policy, of course, was to look the other way. Watch It!

Triple P.S. Big up to homebody Joey over at Straight Bangin', who sent some bols this-a-way earlier this week. Between SB, Just Sayin and this blog, it's like a full school day. Early!

It's Ya Boy

Tale of the Tape:



Ya Boy
-Originates: San Fran
-Raps over the Imperial March from Star Wars
-Keeps Shit Hot
-Only person ever to be down with Stephon Marbury
-Came up in 2002
-Has a confusing-ass name



El Nino
-Originates: Indian Ocean
-Makes it Rain
-Keeps Shit Hot
-Will Fuck up your Fishery
-Comes up every couple of years, but never on the regular (like Cappadonna)
-Thinks Stephon Marbury is a complete piece of shit
-Gets accused of all sorts of shit he may or may not have done

_______________________________

El Nino (aka El Nino- Southern Oscillation or ENSO) is a pain in the ass, but an interesting one, if that makes any sense. The general public's short memory and scientific naivite (we are a nation petrified of doing our taxes for chrissakes) has been thrown through a loop by this year's warm winter in North America. El Nino, which has been a recent culprit for climate anomaly, has been implicated by many as a player in this year's steez. But is El Nino synonymous with global warming? If not, what is it? Does it fuck La Nina or is that it's sister, if yes, is that statutory? Does it hang out with Rick Rock?

El Nino is a force which warms winters in North America as westward trade winds weaken, allowing warm water to float eastward from New Guinea (where it is hot as fuck, according to Survivor). Waters in the tropics rotate counter-clockwise in the southern hemisphere and clockwise in the north like this diagram shows. El Nino has a bunch of strange effects on the Americas including playing havoc with fisheries off Peru, which used to be an extremely important source of fertilizer, various oils, guano and nasty canned fish for grandpas and Mediterranean people. El Nino happens cyclically but not quite regularly and it corresponds to the Southern Oscillation, which is a weather cycle that affects monsoons and other weather in South/Southeast Asia (read some history about it, but it is fucking confusing). La Nina is its opposite- La Nina is an abnormally cool easterly Pacific current, El Nino totally hit that. This University of Illinois site explains it pretty simply.



Like I've said a million times before- weather is not climate. 2006 is like a day in the long geological life of the earth. If you feel sick today, it's hard to say you've got AIDS, but if you are sick for a month, you might be in trouble. Unfortunately, news cycles and attention spans are 15 minutes at most, so this is a hard notion to get through to people- neither does it say that warming is not taking place, it's just good science. The El Nino signal is apparently not large enough to be entirely responsible for the record high temperatures of 2006, but it does have effects on seasonal climate. 1997-98 was certainly a more drastic year and stuck in people's memories. What seems to be going on is that El Nino and Warming Temperatures are interfering constructively, instead of destructively (picture two waves both moving in the same place at the same time, getting larger instead of clashing and breaking up- these waves are temperature).



So winter like "AYE!"

What weather can do is tip climate. For example, if your gutters are backing up, it's gonna take a good, hard rainstorm (No Bol) to blow the whole shit up...but that rainstorm in and of itself is not the cause of clogged gutters, they've been backing up over many many seasons. Penn State's Michael Mann breaks this down really well at RealClimate.org as it relates to El Nino versus global climate in 2006. I mean, shit, the man made Heat, gotta listen. OK, no he didn't. Here's what he says about El Nino and climate change, and I figure this is a good way to end, because frankly, this is a complicated issue and I can't say it any better than the pros:

Another issue here involves the precise role of El Nino in climate change. El Nino has a profound influence on disparate regional weather phenomena. Witness for example the dramatic decrease in Atlantic tropical cyclones this most recent season relative to the previous one. This decrease can be attributed to the El Nino that developed over the crucial autumn season, which favored a strengthening of the upper level westerlies over the tropical North Atlantic, increased tropical Atlantic wind shear, and a consequently less favorable environment for tropical cyclogenesis.

If a particular seasonal anomaly appears to be related to El Nino, can we conclude that climate change played no role at all? Obviously not. It is possible, in fact probable, that climate change is actually influencing El Nino (e.g. favoring more frequent and larger El Nino events), although just how much is still very much an issue of active scientific debate. One of the key remaining puzzles in the science of climate change therefore involves figuring out just how El Nino itself might change in the future, a topic we're certain to discuss here again in the future.

Oh, by the way, El Nino and Rick Rock are tight.

[NOAA: ENSO Education Resources]
[RealClimate: El Nino and Anomalous Winter Warmth]

As nasty as they wanna be

Pursuant to yesterday's post, the NYTimes blog The Lede details some leaked information about the IPCC's report, which will apparently come out in three stages. The comments section is predictably ill informed and painful for a scientifically educated person to stomach. And the basis for debate continues to be obfuscated.

In other news, National Intelligence Chief John Negroponte is apparently barred by the White House from saying "global" and "warming" in conjunction with one another. Meanwhile a new executive order gives the White House greater ability to review and edit scientific documents, which flies in the face of the Union of Concerned Scientists. The UCS put out a 2004 report entitled "Scientific Integrity in Policy Making" alleging that the Bush White House had been altering reserach through funding cutoffs and document editing to further political aims rather than scientific ones. Over 11,000 scientists have signed on to the scientists' statement including 52 Nobel laureates, 63 National Medal of Science recipients, and 194 members of the National Academy of Sciences.

The gathering storm

I've been pretty lax on two fronts over here at Pour Dat The Science. First, I've been lazy about posting in general. Sorry about that, for the two of you that subscribe to this here on Bloglines. I'm a busy guy. Second, I've been posting mostly about climate change. I don't mean to- I have much more varied interests than just ocean currents and dumbshit senators- but it is the one topic with the most super-meta public policy ramifications and it's been getting a lot of play because it's been so warm this winter (but remember, weather isn't climte!).

I'm going to give you a little satisfaction on the first point I mentioned- after all, I'm posting right now, but it's not a long one. On the second point, no dice.

I've known that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is due to release a new report soon. It is going to scare the living fuck out of everybody except James Inhofe and Michael Crichton, who both believe more strongly in modern dinosaur street apparel and unicorn poop facial scrub than in modern science. I expect the report to lay out a lot of the research that has been done in the last half-decade detailing predicted effects, ranges of expected effects and so on. People will probably be stunned and the ensuing debate will be fierce because the conclusions will be understandable but the methods will be complex, once again leading to an earpiercing sound and fury signifying... what?

P.S. While you're waiting, go pick up a copy of this.