After spending hours online and after playing with the available smartphones at both the Verizon and AT&T stores, I’ve concluded that the best touchscreen smartphone available, at least for my needs and wants, is not the iPhone. It’s the Palm Pre Plus.

In order to understand my reasoning, you need to something about me and why I bought my Treo in the first place.

I’m a trained electrical engineer with an advanced degree. That should suggest a number of stereotypes – nerdy, overweight, socially inept, and so on. While not all of the stereotypes apply, a couple of them do, and one more so than most. The stereotypical engineer is known for being able to focus on a task at hand to the exclusion of all external stimuli, a condition generally referred to as “tunnel vision” (and entirely distinct from the medical condition of the same name). I generally consider my tunnel vision as an asset because it enables me to focus and work very efficiently on one thing at at time. Tunnel vision makes multitasking more difficult, however, and so I rely on external stimuli to break into my concentration when I need to break out of my tunnel vision. So when I have to get to a meeting, I rely on my pop-up reminders on my Outlook calendar.

But sometimes I’m not at work when I have a meeting I need to remember, and after missing a critical 8 AM training session and another 8:30 AM meeting, I concluded that I needed a phone that would remind me sufficiently in advance of my early morning meetings that I could make it to my meeting from home even if I’d forgotten about the meeting entirely. So I needed a phone that would synch up to my Outlook at work.

When I went shopping for that phone, I couldn’t afford an iPhone (and didn’t really want one anyway) and the two main choices were manufactured by Palm and Blackberry. However, I figured that I’d be pressured by some of my coworkers to hook a Blackberry into my work email account, and as I actually like to turn off work when I leave my desk at the end of the day, I specifically chose a phone that I didn’t think could link into my employer’s email system. So I went with a Palm Treo.

Since buying my Treo, however, I’ve discovered why the Blackberry earned the moniker “Crackberry.” Sure, I don’t have a Blackberry, but my Treo has enough features that I now use it for my personal email, for meeting notes (via a Bluetooth keyboard), for keeping track of my errands and the grocery list, for texting my wife that I’m finally done at work and will pick up some beer on the way home, and so on. So all those features that were incidental when I bought my Treo have since become necessary features in my next phone. Oh, and I’ve got to have a touch screen – the damn little Blackberry trackballs and quasi-mice are just too much hassle.

The only feature that my Treo doesn’t have that I must have in my next phone is a decent web browser. Palm relied on IBM for their Treo Java engine, and then Palm and IBM had a falling out – right before I tried to upgrade to Opera Mini using a Java engine that was no longer available. So I’ve been dealing with a really crappy broswer on my phone for the last two years.

Luckily for me, however, all the Treo features that I use on a daily basis are standard in nearly all smartphones today, either built in or as an app I can purchase for a nominal one time fee. Except for the web browser, anyway – there are many phones out there that have a built-in browser that is only slightly better than the one on the Treo.

When I went into the Verizon store, I went in hoping that I’d be left along to fiddle with the smartphones, and that I’d be able to play with all of the touchscreen phones enough to decide whether any of them were any good. Forty-five minutes later I left the Verizon store having experimented with the Pre Plus, all the HTC phones, the Blackberry Storm, and the Motorola Droid. When I left the AT&T store 30 minutes after that, I’d experimented with the iPhone, a Garmin phone, and two more HTC phones. After playing with phones for nearly an hour and a half, I chose the Pre Plus even though it meant the hassle of porting phone numbers from one provider to another. Here’s why.

First off, I couldn’t get the handle of any of the five different HTC phones I used. The default screens were hard to read and the navigation screens were not intuitive to me. I couldn’t figure out how to switch the Garmin phone from road navigation mode to phone mode, so that meant it was pretty much out. That left the Droid, Storm, iPhone, and Pre Plus.

What did in the Motorola Droid is a usability problem. Because I use the physical keyboard on my Treo a lot, I need a decent physical keyboard or a usable touchscreen keyboard. The touchscreen keyboard on the Droid was hard for me to use, either because my fingers are too large or for some other reason. But the slide out physical keyboard was even worse. Look at the Droid image at right – see that little rectangle between the right side and the keyboard? It’s a navigation panel, and while I’m sure it’s hand to have there for moving around websites, it seriously impeded my right hand when I was thumbing out text on the keyboard. Sure, I wasn’t entirely thrilled with how the Droid’s user interface, and the web browser was just OK, but it was the keyboard that was the Droid killer.

The Blackberry Storm was much better than the Droid in nearly all ways. It didn’t have a physical keyboard, but the screen keyboard was pretty good. The user interface was clean and reasonably intuitive for me. I’d even go so far as to say that I think the user interface is better than the iPhone’s. And I was pretty sure that I was going to end up going for a Storm – until another customer had taken the Storm I’d been using and I was forced to use a different display Storm. That’s when I discovered that the second Storm’s screen was much more responsive than the first Storm’s screen. The web browser was just OK, but I knew that I could download at least one decent browser for the phone off the web, but it was questions about the long-term reliability of the Storm screen that did in this phone.

That left just two phones, the iPhone and the Pre Plus. Both are reasonably user friendly and both have multitouch screens, but that’s about where the comparison ends. A number of things pushed me away from the iPhone and toward the Pre Plus – the user interface, multitasking, and Apple. First my problems with Apple.

I’m not a fan of Apple products. I use iTunes not because I want to, but because, much to my personal chagrin, there’s really no better options out there for managing my music collection. Similarly, I use an iPod largely because it interfaces cleanly to iTunes. And yes, iPad branding jokes aside, Apple does make high quality, usable products. Apple has also earned a place right below Microsoft on my list of “tech companies to avoid because of borderline unethical business behavior.” Their products are expensive, they aggressively don’t permit Mac clones, and they jealously product iTunes in a fashion that is, in my inexpert opinion, monopolistic. So I don’t buy or use Apple products whenever I have a chance to avoid doing so. But I do own and grudgingly use Apple products sometimes when there are no better options, just as I own and grudgingly use Microsoft products.

The iPhone user interface appears to be a screen full of icons that you scroll through to find the thing you’re looking for. The problem is that I can’t stand the visual clutter of that kind of user interface – just look at my PC’s desktop. I don’t let myself have any more than two columns of icons on the left side of my screen because any more than that and I start losing track of where everything is that I need to use. I’m not looking forward to discussing with my wife what shortcuts to delete from the shared family computer now that it’s got three columns of icons instead of just two. This is why, in my time experimenting with the iPhone, I spent some time trying to figure out how to hide all those pages and pages of scrollable icons. I couldn’t figure it out, though, resulting in a strike against the iPhone. By contrast, the Pre Plus hides the icons by default and they’re easy to call up – and to dismiss – whenever you want them.

Another interface difference between the Pre Plus and the iPhone is the fact that the Pre Plus has a physical keyboard that I can use in addition to the touchscreen keybaord – the iPhone has only the touchscreen. And while the iPhone screen keyboard was the best of the screen keyboards I tried (I didn’t think to try the one on the Pre), it’s not as good as the physical slide-out keyboard on the Pre Plus.

I didn’t bother to check the iPhone’s default web browser, however – I’ve got enough friends and family who have iPhones already to know that the browser is just fine. But the default browser on the Pre Plus was just beautiful – I could zoom in and out using the Pre’s multitouch screen easily, and it was easy to scroll around on big pages.

But perhaps the biggest advantage that the Pre Plus has over the iPhone is the Pre’s ability to multitask. I bounce back and forth between email, web, meeting notes on my current Treo, but it takes the phone a long time to shut down one task and to open up another. When I experimented with the iPhone, it responded faster than my Treo, but it still shut one task down before it opened up another, and that takes time. In contrast, the Pre Plus has the ability to multitask different programs on different “cards” (think of them almost as tabs) that you can scroll through. Not only that, but you can have at least three cards partly visible on the screen at the same time – one to the right, one centered (the one you’re using), and one off to the left. So I could have my email, my browser, and my memos up and running at the same time with just a quick drag on the touchscreen between them. Not so the iPhone.

I didn’t know what phone I’d find was “perfect” for me. I figured it would probably be the Droid or the Storm when I started. But after it was all said and done, the best phone out there for my needs and wants at present is the Palm Pre Plus.

Image Credits:
WebOSarena.com
Motorola.com

The Craftsman, by Richard Sennett
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, by Matthew B. Crawford
Makers, by Cory Doctorow

Years ago, when we lived in the middle of New Jersey, I managed to get myself elected to the local school board, mostly by accident. This wasn’t exactly the plan—it was the incumbents, and me, and I just did it so that there would be a contested election. To my surprise, I got elected. And one of the first things I got to do, after dealing with the budget that got voted down that year for the first time in living memory, and the proposal to get rid of the German teacher (which passed), was deal with the proposal to get rid of the shop program and replace it with something that had “technology” in whatever the rubric was, presumably because everyone in the shop classes was now going to become a “knowledge worker.” I spoke against the plan, but I think I lost the argument, which was not unusual. I voted to keep the German teacher, and that didn’t work out either.

It turns out that this was part of an emerging national trend that I was unaware of at the time. But Matthew Crawford points out in his stimulating but frustrating Shop Class as Soulcraft, you can trawl eBay and pick up all sorts of used shop equipment being sold off by school districts around the country. This may be a good thing for the hobbyist woodworker looking to upgrade his band saw, but as a national trend, it leaves much to be desired. Crawford has written an extended rant against this trend—one where not only does anyone know how to do anything anymore, but no one is bothering to teach anyone how to do anything either. To a large extent it’s a successful rant—he has some good thoughts on why this is a bad trend. Like all rants, it leaves something to be desired, but it successfully captures a certain truth as well.

Coincidentally, I had just finished Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman when I picked up the Crawford book, and I thought they might complement each other nicely. The fact that they don’t, really, has more to do with the aims of each book, which are somewhat different, as we’ll see. But both Sennett and Crawford have written important books that require our attention. Sennett’s volume is the first of a planned trilogy dealing with the whole notion of craft, and it use (and abuse) in the tapestry of human history and development. As such, it is a more philosophic and historical work than is Crawford’s, and is a volume of intellectual history in a way that Crawford’s book is not. On the other hand, Crawford’s book is likely to resonate more with current American and European readers, because his subject has an immediacy and obvious contemporary context that Sennett’s appears to not have.

Sennett is concerned with craftsmanship as an end itself, but it’s more than that. He is concerned with craftsmanship in its broadest context, that of mastery of a set of skills, and includes not only what we would expect him to include, but other areas as well, such as cooking and music-making. Because mastery of skills can cover a broad range of activities, Sennett does as well. And Sennett makes it clear early on that he is concerned not only with the impact of this mastery of skills on society (and we’ll get more of that in the next two volumes), but he is also concerned with what one needs to do in order to achieve this state of mastery. And what sort of community facilitates all of this, and what sort of community does not. And it turns out it’s a lot more complicated than we would think. Sennett takes us through the physiology of the level of hand/eye coordination that needs to be developed by someone operating something manually. Sennett also takes us through the history of crafting things, at least in the where the medieval guilds are generally used as an exemplar of the craft system, with its hierarchy of skills, its period of apprenticeship, its quest for perfection. Sennett also spends considerable time discussing the British—or, more precisely, English—Arts and Crafts movement, and in particular the influence of John Ruskin, for whom the medieval craftsman was the ideal for what work should be, and what was being lost in the mass industrialization of the Victorian era.

Sennett is so broad ranging—cooking, Ruskin, Diderot’s Encyclopedia, music-making, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s architectural adventures, the physiology and musculature of the hand, the role of community in the creation of the craftsman—that at times the going does get a bit heavy. As exhilarating as this journey is, it sometimes gives the feeling of being perhaps a bit too broad. But that is exactly Sennett’s point—the ability and willingness to simply do good work is indispensable to being human, and in order to understand what we’re losing as a culture and society when we make it impossible for a substantial number of fellow citizens to do just that, Sennett recognizes that we need to understand the complexity of what goes into creating craftsmen and craftswomen. It’s not just the creation and appreciation of good work—it’s having a society that inculcates the processes that are necessary to learn to do good work, and to support the work once it’s done.

There is a philosophical theme running through here as well, which is Sennett’s response to his old teacher Hannah Arendt. Arendt made a distinction between activities that fulfilled what she referred to as animal needs, and other work that reflected “higher” activities of art and culture. Sennett finds this a false and dangerous distinction, one that ultimately betrays the goals of the Enlightenment. Sennett has a long discussion of Diderot’s Encyclopedia (the full title of which is actually “Encyclopedia, or Dictionary of Arts and Crafts.”) As Sennett points out, this was essentially a 35-volume collection of Arts and Crafts instructions—how to blow glass, how to repair furniture and so on. And this was produced with painstaking attention to the skills of the craftsmen represented by the Arts and Crafts surveyed by Diderot. This was Diderot’s attempt to repair the bridge that had grown us as a result of the eclipse of he medieval guild system during the Renaissance, when work and craft began to be separated. For Sennett, the task of the craftsman is to integrate the hand and the mind so that each informs the other—and much of the book is a discussion of attempts to do just that by individuals in history, and of the explication of the need to do this by thinkers such as Diderot and Ruskin.

Sennett has written a book of history, philosophy and psychology, and his discussions only rarely touch on the fact that so few people in modern America or Britain (where Sennett lives much of the year) actually have this sort of work to do these days—work that actually engages the mind and the hand, work that is the type of work where one can strive to a certain form of perfection. But this is in there anyway through Sennett’s ongoing consideration of the role of community in the creation and sustenance of craftsmanship—one does not become skilled at anything, really, without a social support system of some kind. Which is one reason why getting rid of shop classes is a really bad idea—learning anything, really, involves an apprenticeship, and if we remove the structured support group of the class, where else will these skills be developed? One reason why the conservative onslaught on the union movement over the past several decades has been baffling is the fact that most unions are premised on the apprenticeship system—and this is a deeply conservative method of not only passing skills on, but ensuring that those skills are used in the pursuit of good work. Of course, it may very well be that conservatives aren’t interested in good work, but I doubt it—the folks over at Front Porch Republic certainly are, and this is a strain of conservative thought that has not yet disappeared from cultural discourse.

Crawford, who refers to Sennett more than once, presents a similar argument ultimately, but we get there a different way. For what Crawford delights in telling us (endlessly, it seems at times) is how much he enjoys working with his hands, as opposed to sitting around thinking like he did when he was in graduate school at Chicago and in his subsequent think-tank employment. Crawford constantly seems to be a little too enthusiastic about presenting his academic credentials—really, he shouldn’t, because it does end up distracting from his central argument. And it’s a powerful argument, similar to Sennett’s—we risk devaluation as individuals by our lack of knowing how to do anything. And Crawford clearly does enjoy making things—in his case, motorcycles that run, since he runs his own motorcycle shop. And he is clearly upset by our devaluation of this sort of skillset in modern American culture. Crawford delights in a job well done in the shop—but he has broader concerns as well, mainly the fact that no one knows how to do anything, which means no has any appreciation of the work that people actually do.

This is exactly the sort of thing that is likely to appeal to the crunchycons over at Front Porch Republic, and sure enough it has—there have already been a number of posts on Crawford and his book (although these never gets as embarrassing as the fawning series Crooked Timber had on China Mievelle a few years back). And book reviews have generally been enthusiastic as well, as if Crawford wasn’t mining the same vein Wendell Berry has been mining for the past forty years or so. Clearly, it has to be said, Crawford’s academic background is a factor here. If some motorcycle shop owner in rural Tennessee without Crawford’s academic background (which is impressive, it should be pointed out) were to approach a publisher with a manuscript extolling the virtues of skilled physical labor, how far would he get? To ask the question is to already know the answer. So what we have is that old Eric Hoffer feeling—hey, look, a philosopher telling us that philosophy isn’t as fun as a valve job.

What detracts from the book is that Crawford seems a bit too mindful of this—he just knows how cute this all is, and it gets a bit wearying. As do the throwaway comments that not only don’t seem to fit, they don’t even seem to make sense. For example, we get this (as a number of other reviewers have noted as well):

Wood was for hippies. The wood whisperer with his hand planes, his curly maple, and his workshop on Walden Pond is a stock alter ego of gentlefolk everywhere, and I wanted none of it.

This sounds an awful lot like my own kids used to sound when they talked about hippies—as if it was someone else who rediscovered William Morris, Art Nouveau, and living off the land. This does not sound like someone who has exactly absorbed Sennett’s message, frankly. My kids grew out of it, and maybe Crawford will too, at some point, and hopefully then we’ll no longer get pointless but snide comments on “the 1968 generation,” whoever they are, and multiculturalism. I had a similar response to Crawford’s vaguely anti-feminist comments in the context of the joys of male camaraderie in the shop. Crawford is too smart to really take this seriously—there are joys to be had in male companionship, just as there are joys to be had in female companionship. How any of this relates to Crawford’s main theme, particularly the devaluation of work in modern America, is a little vague, and eventually seems like little more than an attempt to establish some sort of street cred.

Which is a shame, actually, since there is a very important book buried in here bursting to get out if only Crawford would let it. Because what Crawford is really concerned about, like Sennett, is what kind of society we get when we no longer take the notion of craftsmanship seriously. In fact, a society that looks pretty much like the society we’re getting, with permanently high unemployment, little appreciation of craftsmanship, and the inability to properly write an instruction manual. Crawford’s description of the current state of writing instruction manuals is one of the funniest in the book, a book actually chock full of funny and instructive anecdotes. Who will not appreciate Crawford’s discussion of those ridiculous little screws that hold modern gadgets together for which no known screwdriver actually exists in one’s own workshop? Or his discussion of what we all find under the hood of a car, pretty much any car, these days. (Ironically, one of the ideals of the hippies that Crawford is so dismissive of was to be able to fix your own car.) For Crawford, it’s all of one piece, though—our collective disregard as a society for actual work, and the consequences we reap as a society for our inattention to the joys of work properly done. It’s the artificial distinction between ”knowing” and ”doing” that has brought us so much grief. And Crawford makes an elegant argument that this whole approach is specious—and in this regard comes close to Sennett’s principal argument as well. And, of course, Berry. Like Berry and Sennett, Crawford is deeply appreciative of the kind of knowledge that manual and physical workers need to develop, and deeply distrustful of a culture that does not perceive the value of work.

Here Crawford and Sennett converge, and at times Crawford the bike shop owner often sounds a bit more radical that that old lefty Sennett. Crawford spends quite a lot of time laying out how work actually reflects our engagement in the world, and gives a good discussion of Heidegger to boot, specifically Heidegger’s attempts to get at the whole notion of engagement with the world. For Crawford, as for Aristotle and Heidegger, it’s through what we do. And at its best Shop Craft as Soulcraft is a plea to appreciate the work that people do, to move past the sort of divide that has emerged the past several decades. Both Crawford and Sennett want us to have the tools to live well—and this means a certain self-reliance that comes from knowing how to do things well. For Crawfod, like Sennett, believes that everyone is capable of good work, and deserves the opportunity to do good work. And he is as unhappy as Sennett that society continues its surge away from the sustaining of communities where people can do just that.

And that is exactly the kind of society that we’ve got now, particularly in the Anglosphere—the US, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and, to a lesser extent, Canada. Because the economic model we’ve been living with the past three decades has in fact been attacking this sort of work. But for all his rants at ”managerialism,” Crawford has little interest in discussing the wider economic and political system that has allowed this estrangement between work and the rest of society to develop, other than to note that that’s the way it is. In Europe, with which I am vaguely familiar, living right next door, it is different to a considerable extent—Germany has extensively build on its apprenticeship system, as has France. Which may in part explain why Germany, until very recently, was the world’s largest exporter in spite of the high value of the Euro relative to other currencies (China has recently caught up). France, which as everyone in the US knows is deeply “socialist,” (and we know this because Republican senators from southern states keep telling us), has managed to maintain an agricultural system where it is still possible for small farmers to make a living, and for the kind of local knowledge underlying Sennett’s notion of craftsmanship is still surviving, if not actually thriving.

In fact, one of the disappointments of both books is their non-attention to the political and economic trends that dominate modern American life to the detriment of the kind of self-reliance and craftsmanship that both authors discuss. Now, I’ll admit that this is a bit unfair, since certainly in Sennett’s case this is clearly beyond the scope of the current book (although not necessarily of his project.) But it is a bit of a surprise that Crawford doesn’t take the next step—a discussion of the social, economic and institutional impediments to doing good work, other than that there are a lot of crappy jobs out there. For all his exhortations that we should, if not become motorcycle mechanics, at least give due respect to the kind of work he (and millions of others) actually do, it is a surprise that he doesn’t give a more thorough discussion to the impediments that not only exist, but which keep growing. These have certainly been dealt with successfully in the past—David Noble’s Forces of Production, and George Anders’ Merchants of Debt, both have discussed extensively the gutting of the kinds of institutional knowledge in machine tool manufacturers for the sake of corporatism and profitability that Crawford and Sennett want to place at the center of our notion of work. There was a time in the history of the American machine tool industry when good work meant a certain kind of interaction between designer and machine—that went by the wayside a long time ago. In both Noble’s and Anders’ books, we see the kind of craftsmanship sought by Sennett and Crawford deliberately undermined and abandoned by management, for a variety of reasons—in these cases, union busting and margins, respectively.

In fact, it’s not hard to envision the remains of economies in which good work is abandoned. We see the detritus all around us, in the Midwest manufacturing corridor in the US, in the abandoned industrial cities of Northern England, and the constant movement of manufacturing around the world as capital relentlessly seeks out cheaper labor—today it’s China, tomorrow it’s Cambodia, all so that Wal-Mart can undercut local merchants. For all of Sennett’s diligence to the evolution of craftsmanship, and Crawford’s impassioned defense of the value of skilled physical work, we still inhabit a society where such work continues to be devalued, and where the institutional barriers to doing real work continue to get higher. The consequences are all around us, and there’s no reason to think this situation will get any better any time soon. We live in an economy where, according economist Samuel Bowles, about one in four jobs exists to protect the riches of the wealthy. Localism is partly the answer, as Wendell Berry and the Front Porch Republic crew keep telling us, but true localism requires the maintenance, development and sharing of a variety of knowledge and skillsets that are rapidly disappearing.

But one can always hope. One who does is Cory Doctorow, speculative fiction writer and erstwhile proprietor of Boing Boing, one of the more interesting blogs out there. Doctorow has a particular interest in technology, about which he is deeply knowledgeable and deeply concerned. His new novel, Makers, is a hoot, a serious romp, if such a thing were possible. The title—Makers—tells it all. It’s about the human compulsion for making things, even that even when denied the opportunity to do so, people will still try. A whole bunch of attractive geeks make interesting things, and then other people do as well, and so on until crises emerge, etc. This is the really hard kind of speculative fiction to write—the kind that’s about the world in 20 years. And America is a deeply unhappy place at this point—millions living in abandoned malls, eating crap food, and then suddenly getting the opportunity to do something in a culture that is, if anything, more corporatist than the one Americans inhabit now. Thank heaven for small, stupid robots. I won’t bother telling you what the New Work is all about—you’ll just have to read it for yourself, but Sennett and Crawford would approve. Highly recommended.

Let’s see how our 22 articles of foresight are holding up, one at a time.

1: Researchers will develop either a vaccine or a cure for AIDS by 2020. However, it will be expensive enough that the disease will plague the poor long after it has become a non-issue for the rich and middle classes (although this is one case where political leaders might fund free treatment programs). The end of AIDS will trigger a sexual revolution that will compare to or exceed that of the 1960s and 1970s (unless another deadly sexually-transmitted disease evolves, which is certainly a possibility).

Too soon to tell on the cure, although I suppose it’s still possible. We have treatments that can extend the HIV victim’s life indefinitely and any number of research programs are working on the problem so let’s call this a maybe. As for part two of the prediction, that one’s looking pretty likely, isn’t it? Part three I stand by, no matter when the disease is finally cured.

2: The first quarter of the century will see the assassination of a professional athlete during a competition.

Hasn’t happened yet, but there’s no reason to think it unlikely. Fans still have unprecedented access to athletes in some sports (in most NBA arenas front-row fans might as well be sitting on the bench) and it seems to me like it’s only a matter of time.

3: By 2015 a major corporate executive will be assassinated. As a result, top executives of American companies will have to live with security precautions we once associated only with top political leaders.

Again, hasn’t happened yet, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why. Lay, Skilling, Ebbers, Madoff, Nacchio, the Rigas, Koslowski, half the bankers on Wall Street – it’s damned near unfathomable how none of these deserving pillagers have been whacked by one of the people whose lives they ruined.

In any case, put me down for “when, not if,” even if I miss my 2015 target date.

4: By the end of the 21st Century humanity’s evolution into posthumanity will be all but complete. We will be bigger, faster, stronger, smarter, and our average life span will approach (and perhaps surpass) 100, all as a result of technology’s colonization of the flesh. These changes will result from medical advances (including pharmaceuticals, genetic engineering, and gene therapy, and possibly even nanotech) and computer interface innovations designed to link our minds more closely with the boundless information resident in the Internet. We will be fundamentally different from humans born 200 years ago – CyberHumans in the year 2100 will have less in common with humanity at the turn of the Millennium than we now have with Cro-Magnon humans from 10,000 years ago.

This is a long-term, too-soon-to-tell item, but I can’t imagine that it won’t come true. The impact of technology on the human physiology and human cultures proceeds at an insane pace, with the innovation curve being nearly vertical. So let me get on record as being more confident now that I was even a decade ago.

5: Columbine-type outbursts of school violence will continue to strike large, middle-class suburban schools. Intermediate steps to increase security will turn schools into armed compounds, and will deter all but the most serious conspiracies. However, these measures will only intensify the core disease infecting these environments, and unless major steps are taken to reduce the size of these schools (and hence the anonymity factor), some student or students will eventually succeed where Harris and Klebold failed, killing hundreds of their classmates.

We haven’t had a case that surpassed Columbine (although if we broaden the scope to include universities, Virginia Tech is comparable). We’ve seen no move to address the school size issue, so on the whole I’d say that I’m on track with this one.

6: The popularity of professional baseball will continue to slip. The pace of the game, already slow by late-20th Century standards, will fail to win over younger fans, who are increasingly attuned to video-game levels of sensory stimulation, and the continuing divide between big market and small market franchises will deprive fans in all but a handful of cities of the ability to emotionally invest themselves in the hope of winning. If Major League Baseball adopts a serious salary cap and revenue sharing structure in the first decade of the century the decline of the game can be delayed. But by the year 2100 America’s Pastime will be the third or fourth most popular spectator sport in the U.S., at best.

Ratings and attendance appear to be trending downward. A lot can happen between now and 2100, of course, but for the time being this prediction looks like a strong one.

I’m not terribly happy about it, either. I’ve played a lot baseball in my day and watched a lot more, and I love the game. I hope I’m wrong and that the game thrives in the future. But there are so many obstacles. The steroid scandals hurt the credibility of the game (although baseball has bounced back from scandal before), but nothing poses quite the threat of the rich/poor gap – and I say this as a fan of the Red Sox, the second-worst offender behind the Yankees. As long as supporters of 80% of the teams know they have damned near no chance to win, the sport is going to struggle.

7: The explosion of technological innovation and development we witnessed in the 20th Century (especially during the latter half) may plateau in the second half of the 2000s. Whether the leveling off occurs sooner or later will hinge on the feasibility of nanotechnologies. If nanotech proves as viable as many researchers (and science fiction writers) currently think we could continue to see the development of technological marvels we can barely imagine, and the plateau predicted here might not occur until late in the century, or even early in the 22nd. Otherwise, the nearly vertical innovation curve we’ve seen in the past few decades should be flattening out substantially by the middle of the century.

Perhaps more than any other item on the list, this one I’m not sure about. We could see a plateau – that has been the lesson of history – but our current pace is so explosive and shows no signs of doing anything except picking up more steam, so this prediction may wind up in the Nostraslammy’s loss column when all is said and done.

8: Artificial life will evolve, although not as a result of Artificial Intelligence projects. Instead, the massive growth of computing power, coupled with the development of the global communications web, will result in a ubiquitous network of connected information, and Information Life will occur when the concentration of information reaches critical mass, in a process not unlike the spontaneous eruption of organic life billions of years ago. Two things to note: first, given the non-physical, non-organic nature of this InfoLife, humanity may well not recognize it when it happens; and second, it may not recognize humanity as a life form, either.

This hasn’t happened yet, as far as we know, but I continue to believe this the most likely path to the evolution of AI/A Life. Not everyone agrees with me, including my friend and colleague Anne Foerst, who knows a frightening amount about AI and is convinced that it must arise within an embodied context. My counter is that the path I’m theorizing is the one that’s most like the evolutionary spurts we’ve seen throughout history.

We won’t know until we know, but mark me down as still confident in this prediction.

9: Public rhetoric about the democratizing power of the information economy notwithstanding, the rich-poor gap will not close, but will instead widen. It is unlikely that anything short of a major revolution will alter the underlying structures of power and wealth, which are robustly self-perpetuating.

Damn, this prediction is looking good. Of course, this was probably the most obvious one on the list.

10: The Neo-Luddite Movement will become increasingly violent. Cultural dislocations resulting from the rapid pace of technological innovation and deployment in the next 20 years will fuel increasing levels of resistance against “progress.” The Neo-Luddites, already well established and with spiritual leaders firmly in place, will eventually feel compelled to abandon rhetoric in favor of drastic action. At first the technoresistance will focus its energies in terrorist strikes against machinery and facilities, but will eventually graduate to widespread terrorism against technologists themselves.

We have not had outbreaks of violence tied directly to any overt neo-Luddite movements, but I’d argue that a lot of the terrorist acts we’ve seen have had at their core the same reaction to technopoly that characterizes our self-identified neo-Luddites (like Kirkpatrick Sale, Mark Slouka and others). For instance, I’d file any and all terror by religious fundamentalists under this heading, including 9/11. Fundamentalisms are ultimately about the displacement of religious institutions as the final arbiter of morality and ethics in a culture (and a hefty fear of the rampaging change brought on by technical innovation). Take something like abortion (or any question of reproductive rights), for instance. Isn’t abortion a direct artifact of the world of medical technics? And what happens to our ability to intervene in affairs on the other side of the globe if we strip away our technological superiority?

I believe this neo-Luddite impulse goes even further – I think there’s a great case to be made that the violence of the Unabomber (read his manifesto) and Harris and Klebold are essentially reactions against a technological society run amok.

So I’m declaring victory on this prediction and believe that the problem is only going to get worse so long as our technology evolves more rapidly than our ethics.

11: The Red Sox and Cubs will each win a World Series.

We knocked half of this one out in just a couple of years. Can the Cubs win it all in the next 90 years? I think so. They’ve shown signs of life in the last decade and I think it’s only a matter of time before they win one despite themselves.

12: Despite the growth of the Internet and other interactive modes of entertainment, the film will survive and thrive in its current form for the foreseeable future. Prognosticators who point to the power of interactivity and suggest that traditional one-way media are doomed may be right with respect to home-based media like television, but these dynamics don’t apply to film. First, it serves as a vital locus for social interaction (it’s an ideal activity for a date, for instance); and second, our thirst for the power and mystery of storytelling is in no danger of being extinguished (the most successful videogame authors have figured this much out already).

Anybody seen Avatar? It just cleared the billion-dollar mark over the weekend. Yes, we’ve seen an explosion in gaming and home-based entertainment offerings, but the movie biz looks stronger than ever.

13: By the year 2010, major universities will notice that their graduates lack many basic skills and will begin questioning the value of computers and the Internet in higher education. Some (but not all) will conclude that educational technologies place unproductive layers of machinery between student and teacher. This will spur a renewed emphasis on traditional educational strategies and basic literacy, organizational, and critical thinking skills.

Looks like I missed this one big time, didn’t I? In fact, it seems like precisely the opposite is happening at every turn.

Which is sad, because what I describe in the prediction is much needed. Our educational complex is in the worst shape it’s ever been in, and in so many cases technology is part of the problem, not the solution.

14: The U.S. population will migrate northward during the second quarter of the century. Rising average temperatures will fuel a move to milder climes. Air conditioning will insure the comfort of indoor living, but many people place a high importance on outdoor activities, especially during the summer months.

Too soon to tell, but if our scientists are right about climate disruption (and I think they are) this looks likely.

15: During the 21st Century we may finally learn that we are not alone in the universe. If intelligent extraterrestrial life exists, which seems plausible at least, humanity should soon reach the point where our technology will either allow us to find it (the Contact scenario) or encourage it to find us (the Star Trek: First Contact scenario). Hopefully our first meeting will be more like Close Encounters of the Third Kind than Mars Attacks!, and if we get really lucky our new friends might have technologies for scrubbing the atmosphere, purifying vast bodies of water, and curing male pattern baldness.

We haven’t found alien life yet, but we have found a lot more evidence of worlds with the conditions to sustain life (like recent discoveries concerning water on Mars). It seems like we hear a new report on alien worlds that are very Earth-like every month or two. As a result, I remain bullish on item #15.

16: The U.S. will elect its first female and minority Presidents. Sadly, they will prove as corrupt as the white males they replaced.

One down, one to go.

17: American media will become more vapid and less reliable early in the century, but the long-term impact could be positive. Between corporate ownership and the drive to maximize ratings at all costs, most major news outlets will be all but useless for the purpose of informing and educating the public by 2020 (with the exception of news services covering financial markets). Ironically, this could lead to a new age of subjective journalism. With the once-mighty press institutions either gone or discredited, and the ideologies of objective journalism along with them, a new breed of reporter may arise. This new journalist will be openly committed to advocacy, and will make his or her biases clear at the outset. The advocacy reporter would intersect perfectly with local populations whose disgust with the corruption and unresponsiveness of national (and even state) politics have driven them to seek involvement closer to home. It is possible that these dynamics could usher in a new golden age of civic engagement.

This one is a mixed bag at present. The first element is a gimme – this is worst moment for journalism since the days of Pulitzer, Hearst and Twain – and while I gave the legacy J establishment until 2020 to complete it’s full meltdown, it only seems to have needed half that much time.

The rest is unsettled. We could see the rise of a responsible, ethical advocacy press movement (see my series on the rise of “subjective” journalism), but there’s been no movement so far.

18: As hard as it is to imagine, commercial radio and the corporate music industry will suck worse in the next 25 years than it did in the last 25 years. The Internet will make it possible for unknown musicians to distribute their work, but in doing so it will massively increase the clutter of a media landscape that’s already over-saturated, making it harder for any particular artist to break through into the broad public consciousness. Since people love music, and since music will continue to serve as a gravity well for cultural and sub-cultural identification and bonding, mechanisms for sifting good from bad will become even more important. A service that fills this role will emerge on the Net. It may look like one of the currently developing music Web sites, or it may be a Web-based music journalism outlet, or it could be a type of service we haven’t imagined yet, but something will fill the void once occupied by commercial radio, and probably by 2010.

Part one of the equation – it would have been hard for me to be more right, huh? The part at the end looks like a miss – we’re still seeing all kinds of attempts at providing a reliable center, but so far most of our energies have been devoted to delivery systems (and it seems like it’s only a matter of time before Spotify or something very like becomes that all-songs-available-all-the-time uber-channel for us all). The filtering problem remains. Net radio and satellite are doing a nice job in places, but the only mass national music outlets are things like godforsaken American Idol, which really is the talent show at the Fall of Rome.

19: Killer storms will increase in number and intensity. Whether set in motion by industrial pollution or resulting from natural meteorological cycle, heavy weather is getting nastier, and the trend will continue. By the midpoint of the 21st century Category 5 hurricanes will hit the U.S. fairly frequently, and the mythical F6 tornado (which almost occurred for the first time in recorded history in 1999) will become commonplace. A Category 5 will hit a major coastal urban center in the next 25 years, resulting in near-total destruction of the city’s infrastructure. During the same time frame a city in the Lower Midwest will take a direct hit from an F6 or a strong F5 and will be annihilated.

Katrina was a lot closer to that Category 5 than we like to think about, and where destructive damage is concerned let’s remember that it missed New Orleans. All that damage happened on the back side of a Cat 3.

As with item #14 above, there seems every reason to believe that this prediction will come true, although it’s too early to put it in the win column.

20: Faced with mounting damage at the hands of increasingly sophisticated hackers, corporations will begin to see “black ops” (both online and real-world) as a necessary cost of doing business. The shift from “corporate security” to all-out “Info War” footing will accelerate by 2010, when it is revealed that a major online attack against an American company was sponsored by a foreign government. The U.S. government will be strategically, tactically, and morally unprepared to deal with this crisis, and the absence of policy leadership will result in the online equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis, only instead of three players there will be hundreds with the ability to spark a full-blown cyberwar. Needless to say, world stock markets will react negatively. When the dust settles, world governments and corporate interests of all sizes will work together to develop safeguards against activities that threaten the global economy. The most significant result of this accord will be to transfer most real power from public to private institutions.

This one is a mixed bag at best because there’s so much we don’t know. There is plenty of evidence that large corps have been hit in the way predicted (and an analyst like Winn Schwartau would tell you that foreign governments have provided all kinds of supports for the perpetrators). The problem lies with my prediction that this would all become public knowledge – that hasn’t happened, and in large part it’s because the companies involved have every incentive to keep it a secret. Further, if said companies (perhaps even with the help of our government) have launched black ops activities, that’s something else you’re not likely to hear about in a daily White House press briefing.

So all I can really do at this point is say that I failed to account for the need for secrecy, but at the same time I suspect most of the prediction was on the money. I may never be able to point to evidence that I was right or wrong, although I’ll be watching and listening with interest.

21: Sometime before 2075 a genuinely deserving artist will win a Grammy Award. Okay, so I’m out on a limb here…

This was mostly snark, but the underlying point is more valid than ever. The Grammys are almost as big a joke as the Rock & Roll Hall of Product Sales Fame.

22: Some form of nuclear fusion will prove technically and economically viable by 2015. If fusion and nanotech both happen by 2020, the year 2101 will bear no more resemblance to 2001 than 2001 does to 2001 B.C., and the specifics of the changes to society are nearly impossible guess at.

I have another five years before I have to admit defeat, but at this stage my chances look dim. I do believe that we’ll see widespread nanotech and commercial fusion in this century, but my timetable was too optimistic.

So there you go. A few wins, a couple of losses, some too-soon-to-tells and partial successes. On the whole Nostraslammy is doing better than the grandpappy of predictification, Nostradamus himself, and that ought to count for something, right?

See you in 2020.

Contributions to all federal candidates for House and Senate seats and the presidency from the 2000 through 2010 election cycles totaled $9.7 billion, according to an S&R analysis of records aggregated by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Contributions to candidates and committees in all 50 states, from 2000 through 2009, totaled about $14.5 billion, according to records aggregated by the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

In this decade, thanks to computerization of records and a few top-notch, non-partisan organizations, we’ve learned how to follow the money. Well, so what? Has vastly increased public visibility of political money changed the way politics operates?

The $24.2 billion spent on campaign contributions is only part of the story. Over the past decade, $23 billion has been spent by corporations, labor unions, and other special-interest entities to lobby Congress and federal agencies, according to records aggregated by the center.

More than $45 billion has been spent in the decade now ending to influence legislation and regulation at state and federal levels of government. It’s only conjecture, of course, but it’s hardly likely that the bulk of those billions of dollars was intended to improve the lot of the 99 percent of adult Americans who did not make campaign contributions or made gifts of less than $200.

Where did the $24.2 billion in campaign donations come from? Only a tiny fraction, generally in the tenths of 1 percent, of Americans over age 18 make campaign contributions of more than $200. Those who give more than $1,000 are even fewer — but the amounts given by those latter donors total significantly higher.

The bulk of the decade’s nearly $10 billion in donations to federal candidates came from special interests and individuals associated with specific special interests who gave $200 or more. According to the center, the top special-interest givers in the election cycles in this decade, generally in this order, were

the finance, insurance and real-estate industries; lawyers and lobbyists; miscellaneous business; ideological and single-issue donors; the health industries; communications and electronics; labor; agribusiness; energy and natural-resource interests; transportation; and the defense industry.

Corporations and individuals associated with these special interests donated more than $8 billion this decade to federal candidates. And the leader in campaign largesse for the decade and in each election cycle, at $1.62 billion, or more than 16 percent of all campaign contributions to federal candidates? The winner, by a wide margin, are the finance, insurance and real-estate industries.

The number of lobbyists has increased from 10,641 in 2000 to 13,426 this year. Now, that’s the number of people who have legally registered as lobbyists. There are plenty of revolving-door people (those who have left the Hill or the executive branch to become lobbyists and vice versa) who are not registered as lobbyists but are as influential. Consider the example of former Sen. Tom Daschle, who claims he’s a “resource” for his health-care industry clients and not a lobbyist.

Those interested in studying campaign finance and lobbing — who’s giving the money and who’s getting it — have two non-profit and non-partisan organizations to thank for ready, intelligible access to FEC and state election commissions data. They are the Center for Responsive Politics and the National Institute on Money in State Politics, which provides “free online access to public records in all 50 states, to document political donor and lobbyist contributions to policymakers.” Also helpful is Earmark Watch, a project of Taxpayers for Common Sense and the Sunlight Foundation, which helps expose what these billions of dollars can buy from legislators.

These groups have become technologically more savvy. Tracking campaign contributions and lobbying dollars can be narrowly focused on such data more easily than using the FEC’s website or state election data websites. The center and the institute now have talented staffers who frequently write analyses of donor data, especially when a particularly topic is in the news.

Congress irritated by the college football Bowl Championship Series? There’s the center’s Dave Levinthal on the Capital Eye Blog, detailing how much money the BCS, News Corp., the NCAA and major football universities are giving to whom for what purpose.

Wondering whether Congress will include legal importation of drugs from abroad (i.e., Canada) in health-care reform? There’s Levinthal again, pointing out that the pharmaceutical and health-products industries have spent nearly $200 million in 2009 to oppose it.

Want to know how much money the health-care industry has spent trying to influence state legislation and regulation? There’s the institute’s Anne Bauer, telling you “[i]n the last six years, major players in the health care industry gave $394 million to officeholders, party committees and ballot measure committees in the 50 states.”

When the short-term, high-vig payday loan industry sought to reinvigorate itself (i.e., screw the borrowers) through the ballot box, there was the institute’s Tyler Evilsizer to explain that in Arizona and Ohio, “donors from the industry gave more than $35 million to support ballot measures that would allow them to continue operating.”

Computerization of records and sophisticated staff allow an organization such as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, aka CREW, to track robocall ethics complaints against Sen. John McCain, develop a list of the most corrupt members of Congress, and keep track of the revolving door moves of White House staffers and cabinet members.

Yes, the governed can quickly track donations to those who govern or seek to govern. Yes, the governed can track the money spent by individuals, corporations, PACs and unions to legally influence those who govern. Yes, the governed can easily see how easy and legal it is for big spenders to influence legislators and regulators.

So what have we gained because we can do this? Not much.

Over the decade, corrupt politicians have been imprisoned for a variety of crimes. Convicted of crimes such as fraud and bribery, they were selfish and for sale. What they did was illegal.

But what remains unabated in the American political system is legalized corruption. The heightened ability to track political money does nothing to prevent the dramatic increase in legal campaign giving and the host of ethical and moral conflicts that so much money places in front of incumbents, challengers, and regulators.

We’ve seen the amounts of money spent to legally attain and maintain political power grow to such amounts that billionaires now spend tens of millions of dollars to finance their own campaigns. Modern elections trivialize issues and maximize dependence on name recognition. That costs money, which forecloses the possibility that better-qualified candidates who are not as wealthy can prosper at the ballot box.

We’ve seen how those with money to spend and an agenda to enact gain access to the levers of power, as did players in the health-care reform debate behind closed doors in the Obama White House.

Consider the consolidation of media, its threat to competitiveness, its anti-trust implications, and its potential to maintain unreasonably high consumer prices for news and entertainment. When Comcast announced its intended $30 billion purchase of NBC Universal from General Electric, its lobbyists flooded the Hill. Through September of this year, Comcast has spent $9.1 million on lobbying. The Federal Communications Commission must approve the sale.

Comcast’s 20-member D.C. lobbying team, reports Politico’s Kenneth P. Vogel, includes “former aides to Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), former Senate Majority Leader and Obama confidant Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and Democratic Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps.” (Oh, look: There’s “confidant” Daschle acting as a “resource” again, “aides” notwithstanding …)

Continual increases in media consolidation by conglomerates reduce the likelihood that Americans’ monthly bills for cable, Internet, satellite, and telephone services will decrease.

Earlier this month, the House faced an impending vote on what Paul Krugman of The New York Times called “a quite modest effort to rein in Wall Street excesses.” Three days earlier, wrote Krugman, “Republican leaders met with more than 100 financial-industry lobbyists to coordinate strategies” to sidestep banking reform. All Republicans and 27 Democrats voted against the measure. (Gosh, what wonderfully independent thinking from our members of Congress.)

That means it’s less likely that credit will flow readily and credibly to America’s small businesses and consumers, and that more Americans may lose their homes unfairly.

And the drug-industry lobbyists? We’ve seen how lobbyists for pharmaceutical giant Genentech have written statements that 42 members of Congress from both parties have “revised and extended” into the Congressional Record.

That means it’s likely the out-of-pocket cost (and that inherent in premiums) for prescription medications is likely to grow as a percentage of Americans’ expenditures even as their wages have remained stagnant through the past decade.

We continue to see the fruits of lobbying in which special interests reap financial reward at little cost, such as the American Jobs Recovery Act that provided no jobs but $100 billion in tax breaks for corporations.

Are Americans better off because of the ease with which they can track who gives how much money to the people who would represent them and propose and pass laws that may help or hinder Americans’ lives, liberties and pursuit of happiness? No. That’s because incumbents and challengers don’t care a whit that this system is so blatantly and transparently stacked toward the influence wrought by so much money.

We point fingers at the financially oiled, undue influence of special interests. Our legislators and regulators just shrug: “So what?”

No legislative intent lies on the horizon of the next decade that would stem the shameful influence of money on the conduct of legislators and regulators and what they do, or fail to do, in the public’s interest. There will be no sufficient, substantial changes in campaign finance laws or congressional ethics policies to end this system of legalized corruption.

No reform candidates exist on the horizon immune to the blandishments the crassly monied political system can promise or proffer.

From 2010 to 2019, expect more of the same. Another $45 billion will speak louder than you or me to those who govern us.

I’m greatly troubled by the content of Chapter 5, but only partly because of the many factual errors that L&D made. What troubles me the most about Chapter 5 is its arrogant tone, fed partly by a group of smart Seattle-based entrepreneurs, and the major inconsistencies that arrogance engendered. It is one thing to believe that you know more about climate disruption than everyone else when you’ve studied the field for years. It’s something else entirely to believe you know more than everyone else without verifying it first. And not only did L&D fail to verify their own knowledge about climate, they also failed to determine whether the entrepreneurs they interviewed knew more about climate than the real experts. The result was a fatally flawed Chapter 5.

L&D set the tone of Chapter 5 in the first 11 pages. They give a six-page explanation of the economic concept of an “externality” (the effect of an action that benefits the actor, but the costs affects someone else) that could have been explained as well in a couple of paragraphs. They claim that driving isn’t as bad for the global climate as eating locally-ranched beef, allegedly disproving both the “drive less” and “eat locally” green memes at the same time. And L&D label climate disruption as a “religion,” complete with a high priest (James Lovelock), a patron saint (Al Gore), “true believers” and “heretics,” and a quote from the mayor of London saying

the fear of of climate change is like a religion in this vital sense, that it is veiled in mystery; and you can never tell whether your acts of propitiation or atonement have been in any way successful.

And L&D naturally set themselves apart from those suffering from what they label as religious zeal.

L&D go on to toot their own horns when they claim that economists like Levitt

are trained to be cold-blooded enough to sit around and calmly discuss the trade-offs involved in global catastrophe….

They might as well have said “we’re better than you are because you’re ‘excitable’ and prone to ‘believing’ in global warming. We’re better than that.”

But it’s when we’re introduced to the entrepreneurs of Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures (IV) that the arrogant tone of Chapter 5 gets turned up to 11.

L&D extensively interview IV co-founder Nathan Myhrvold and former astrophysicist (and IV employee) Lowell Wood, building both men up to be larger than life. Myhrvold is described as “so polymathic as to make an everyday polymath tremble with shame” and L&D quote Bill Gates as once saying that he didn’t “know anyone [he] would say is smarter than Nathan.” With such a glowing recommendation, L&D’s statement that “Myhrvold thinks Wood is one of the smartest men in the universe” lends Wood intellectual gravitas. So does the listing off of Wood’s achievements during the development of the Star Wars missile defense system and how Wood trained under renowned physicist Edward Teller. But just because both men are smart doesn’t mean that either has any credible expertise in the field of climate disruption – Myhrvold is the former chief technology officer for Microsoft, not a climate modeling expert. Wood is a former astrophysicist who worked on lasers, not a climatologist. Yet L&D elevate both men to being the equal of an actual climate expert like Stanford climatologist Ken Caldeira.

I mention Caldeira because he’s also an IV consultant, and he is presented by L&D as the climate expert that he actually is. But L&D’s purpose in interviewing Caldiera appears to have been to burnish of Myhrvold’s and Wood’s climate credentials. Caldeira’s work is only briefly mentioned , and in a way that either fails to provide the necessary context or, in some cases, even is applied to the wrong context. For example, Caldeira is quoted as saying that trees planted in the wrong place can increase climate disruption because tree leaves may be darker than the ground was. The context of this quote in Chapter 5 is that “many climate disruption memes are wrong,” but L&D didn’t bother to point out that planting trees in other places would reduce climate disruption. Doing so would have reduced the impact of L&D’s preferred, and opposing, frame.

The other way Caldeira’s reputation is used to burnish the qualifications of Myhrvold and Wood is by lending credibility to their climate engineering ideas. L&D point out that several years ago, Wood proposed pumping sulfur dioxide (SO₂)into the stratosphere as a way to cool the Earth, and after running simulations, Caldeira admitted that it might work and that additional research was warranted. L&D use this apparently unimpeachable recommendation as the jumping-off point for proclaiming throughout most of the rest of Chapter 5 that climate engineering is the wave of the future. What L&D neglect to mention is that Caldeira has actually come out against geoengineering using SO₂ at this time for reasons entirely unrelated to global temperatures – it only treats one of the symptoms (rising global temperatures), does nothing for ocean acidification and other carbon dioxide (CO₂) related problems, and is therefore too risky. And it doesn’t help that L&D baldly misrepresented Caldeira’s actual statements and beliefs regarding climate engineering, as the prior links illustrates.

But based on Caldeira’s presence at IV, L&D remake Myhrvold and Wood into experts on geoengineering and climate. And so Wood’s statements on climate modeling are given the same weight as Caldeira’s using guilt by association. Or rather in this case, expertise by association.

Wood is quoted by L&D as saying that climate models are

crude in space and they’re crude in time. So there’s an enormous amount of natural phenomena they can’t model. They can’t do even giant storms like hurricanes.

Wood also claims that the models are all tuned in a similar fashion in order to keep the research money flowing and that current models don’t know how to handle water vapor. Wood’s claims have several problems. They’re presented in a way that’s misleading, they’re not given any actual scientific context, or they’re outright wrong. And because Wood, the former astrophysicist, is a “climate expert by association,” we’re led to believe that these claims are reasonable.

First, while L&D point out that computing power limitations drive climate modelers to make simplifications including lower spatial and temporal resolution than the modelers would prefer, those limitations don’t make the models “crude.” Neither does the fact that the scientists doing the modeling admit that they don’t yet agree on the best ways to model clouds and aerosols (two areas that scientists have made significant advances in since the publication of the IPCC AR4 in 2007). But neither of these issues mean that the latest models are crude. In fact, a quick analysis of the models illustrates that, contrary to Wood’s claims, the existing state-of-the-art general circulation models (GCMs) are quite sophisticated given the computational limitations.

The spatial resolution of an average IPCC AR4 climate model is about 55,350 square kilometers, or a square 235 km on a side (the highest resolution models resolve areas as small as 100 km on a side). For comparison, this is about one fifth of the state of Colorado, which has at least two different climatic zones. Sampling theory (Shannon’s sampling theorem) says that, in order to perfectly reproduce a signal, you need to sample it at twice its frequency. Applied to an average GCM from the AR4, the smallest spatial pattern that could be accurately resolved without help would be 470 km or larger. While there are regions around the globe where you can move through multiple climatic zones over the course of 470 km, they’re not exactly common. And while the average GCM wouldn’t accurately model these areas, climatologists have developed what are called “parameterizations” to represent small scale effects like cloud formation, aerosol effects, and convection that vary locally within the model spatial cells. And generally speaking, it’s not the spatial resolution that presently limits the models’ accuracy (or increases the models’ uncertainty), but rather how the GCMs handle these intra-cell parameters.

The GCMs don’t yet have enough spatial resolution to handle multiple major climatic transitions in small areas, but the models are presently accurate enough to draw conclusions for large climatic regions like “the desert Southwest,” or “the Great Plains,” “the Indian subcontinent,” or “the African savanna.” And while it’s unlikely that any model will ever be able to predict microclimate variations that can change from one kilometer to the next, there is no reason to believe that such high spatial resolution would ever be required for a climate model. So from my perspective, the word “crude” applied to the models used in earlier IPCC Third assessment reports rather than to the latest generation of GCMs. The figure below illustrates how the latest models compare to earlier generations.

Furthermore, sampling theory suggests that Wood is also wrong with respect to the temporal resolution of climate models. Climate models attempt to project the climate, which is itself a long-term average taken over years or even decades. Sampling theory says that we only need to model at twice the frequency of the fastest changing event we care about. One of the fastest changing climate events is El Niño/La Niña, but even at its fastest, it takes weeks to change significantly. This suggests that that sampling once a week or so would be enough, but due to noise and other limitations on sampling, it is usually best to sample more often than the minimum rate. Most climate models sample every 12 hours. If El Niño/La Niña is one of the fastest major climate changes that climate models need to model, then sampling twice a day represents 28x oversampling (assuming that El Niño/La Niña doesn’t pop up any faster than over the course of two weeks). It’s unlikely that the temporal resolution of climate models will need to improve much beyond where it is today. As a result, it’s clear that GCMs are pretty refined with respect to their temporal resolution.

Second, climate models don’t need to model any single storm, not even a hurricane, in order to be broadly accurate. Any individual storm has such a short term effect, and the effects are so localized, that they’re essentially weather, not climate. Four years after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the city is recovering and the parts of Louisiana and Mississippi that were damaged are physically different, but not so much that it qualifies as a local change of climate. The aggregate energy transfer from all hurricanes is important to climate disruption, but no single storm is going to transfer so much energy from the tropics to the subtropics to be critical. Remember – climate is an average over decades, not years or months or weeks. So the fact that no climate model presently models even the largest hurricanes is a distraction, not a real criticism.

Finally, Wood’s claim that models are tuned alike for research funding reasons runs counter to a social dynamic in the scientific community that values original research and intellectual competitiveness over the “same old, same old.” Most scientists live for discovering something new and having the opportunity to research it. Most scientists also enjoy finding errors in another scientist’s work and correcting the error. This is especially true of scientists at the top of their fields. As a result of these dynamics, most scientists would be more likely to tune their models to be different in order to garner attention from their scientific peers – if there was a physically legitimate way to do it. Furthermore, given that climate disruption will very likely become a nightmare for billions of people, discovering that climatologists had got it all wrong would greatly boost the scientist’s, the host organization’s, and the host nation’s prestige. So climate modelers have an incentive to tweak their models as much as scientifically justified in order to generate something new, publishable, and in opposition to the prevailing scientific understanding of climate disruption. The fact that all the models function similarly and reach similar conclusions suggests that, even with this social dynamic at work, scientists and labs haven’t been able to find anything major wrong with the science embedded in each other’s models.

There’s an irony here, though. Myhrvold and Wood, “experts by association” with Ken Caldeira, don’t think that climate modeling is accurate enough. Yet Caldeira’s climate expertise is based significantly on his experience modeling the effects of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases on plants, the ocean, and global climate in general. L&D only implicitly acknowledge this fact:

Caldeira ran a climate model to test Wood’s claims [about geoengineering].
…
Caldeira’s study showed that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide while holding steady all other inputs – water, nutrients, and so forth – yields a 70 percent increase in plant growth, and obvious boon to agriculture.

It is, after all, Caldeira’s models of the effects of pumping tons of SO₂ into the stratosphere to cool the globe that forms the basis of L&D’s main focus in Chapter 5 – geoengineering as a cheaper alternative to slashing CO₂ emissions.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, geoengineering is essentially using a technological, engineering-based solution to solve climate problems that were created by human civilization. L&D believe that geoengineering is the cheapest and most effective method to addressing climate disruption, and it’s this belief that drove them to talk to Myhrvold and Wood at IV. The two IV men believe that, for less than a billion dollars, they can built a big straw that would deliver tons of SO₂ directly into the stratosphere. Once there, the SO₂ would chemically react to form aerosols that scatter and reflect solar energy back into space before it could be absorbed by the Earth. The basic science underlying this idea is pretty solid – large volcanic eruptions blast SO₂ into the stratosphere where the sulfur aerosols naturally cool the globe for a few years. So it’s reasonable to believe that it would work.

Except as Myhrvold and Wood point out, there are a few problems. Minor problems, if you believe L&D. For one, it’s not possible to know at this time what effect all that extra sulfur in the stratosphere would do. Myhrvold and Wood also worry that it would make people complacent about continuing to emit GHGs instead of using the sulfur straw as a short-term solution. And they are worried that the technological solution is so cheap that it would be a political problem – could a country with a straw hold the world hostage by threatening to turn it off, or could it get turned up higher in order to cool and dry the climate of another, rival nation? These are potentially serious issues, but L&D largely ignore the broader political implications, giving the problems only three paragraphs after spending ten pages building the case for geoengineering. And L&D don’t even mention a problem that a sulfur straw would do nothing to fix, and what Caldeira is perhaps best known for – ocean acidification and the associated damage to marine ecosystems.

The bulk of Chapter 5 is spent talking up geoengineering – how it’ll work, how it’s “harmless” because the climate would just revert to its prior state if the straw were turned off, how it’s cheap. But there’s another irony that L&D don’t appear to recognize, and this one cuts to the bone of the geoengineering argument. Myhrvold and Wood, and by extension L&D, are proposing that we pumps megatons of SO₂ into the stratosphere in order to cool the Earth, but the only way to make this plan politically viable would be to rely on projections from climate models – the very same climate models that have been dismissed by the authors and the IV crowd.

At this point, scientists don’t know what pumping hundreds of kilotons of SO₂ into the stratosphere continually for decades or even centuries would do to the atmosphere. With less energy falling on the Earth in general, the water cycle would change and as a result, rain and snowfall patterns would change and would create water winners and losers. Projecting how and who would fall to climate models.

Stratospheric chemistry isn’t a straightforward science – it relies on atmospheric concentrations of ozone, oxygen, hydroxyl radicals (which are also necessary to convert methane to CO₂, among other things), CO₂, nitrogen, the availability of solar radiation in various wavelengths, humidity, prevailing winds, and so on. Projecting how the atmosphere will react to all that SO₂ being dumped continuously into the stratosphere will fall to climate models.

A separate chemical effect that needs to be considered is the effect of SO₂ on ozone depletion around the world. Lower ozone levels in the stratosphere may result in more skin cancers, cataracts, and may result in higher incidence of certain diseases. In addition, more ultraviolet radiation reaching the surface will have an effect on ecosystems and species as well as agriculture around the world. Climate models would be necessary to determine how these effects will vary seasonally as well as regionally.

Even the claim that the sulfur straw would be “harmless” because it could be turned off requires verification – and the only way to verify this claim before turning the straw on is with climate models.

If the models truly are as bad as Myhrvold and Wood claim, then we can not rely on them to project the effects of geoengineering. And if the models are good enough to accurately model the effects of geoengineering, then perhaps we should trust what they tell us about addressing global climate disruption, namely that cutting greenhouse gas emissions is the best way to curtail overall climate disruption.

Finally, Myhrvold claims to be advocating for a go-slow approach to creating his sulfur straw, opting for more research and development. He claims that

it’s like having fire sprinklers in a building. On the one hand, you should make every effort not to have a fire. But you also need something to fall back on in case the fire occurs anyway.

The problem is that Myhrvold dismisses the GHG-emission cutting goals of climate disruption activists so vehemently that it’s hard to take seriously his claim that he just wants more research and development. He says that

[global warming activists] are seriously proposing a set of things that could have enormous impact – and we think probably negative impact – on human life. They want to divert a huge amount of economic value toward immediate and precipitous anti-carbon initiatives, without thinking things through. This will have a huge drag on the world economy. There are billions of poor people who will be greatly delayed, if not entirely precluded, from attaining a First World standard of living.

Myhrvold apparently hasn’t heard how seriously climate activists are pushing for technology transfers and direct financial assistance to poor countries so that they don’t have to use high-carbon energy sources to improve their standards of living. Nor has he apparently read about the many studies that say the costs of addressing climate disruption will not affect the global economy as much as he seems to believe. Myhrvold instead seems to be more motivated by money than by research. The fact that IV has been accused of being “patent trolls” doesn’t help his case – IV is Myhrvold’s company, after all, and L&D mention the “patent troll” issue themselves.

It’s clear that Levitt and Dubner are both smart men and that they found other smart men in Myhrvold and Wood. The problem is that all of them are so convinced that they’re the smartest people around that they can’t seem to realize that they’re mired in myopia. Levitt and Dubner are certain that Myhrvold and Wood have come up with “The Solution^TM” in the SO₂ geoengineering project that they don’t notice, or don’t care, that the arguments in favor aren’t logically consistent and don’t stand up to basic scrutiny. Myhrvold and Wood are so sure that they’re right about climate models and geoengineering that they seem to blow off the serious problems and ignore the experts who actually know what the hell they’re talking about – experts like Ken Caldeira and his fellow practicing climatologists. And none of the men – not Levitt, not Dubner, not Myhrvold, and not Wood – seem to realize that they’re making statements that are counter to the best available science and, in many cases, could have been detected as wrong with some simple and basic fact checking.

Climate disruption is a huge issue, and geoengineering can’t be ignored as a potential insurance policy. But it’s presented as the first line of defense against climate disruption instead of a fall-back plan. And as much as Levitt and Dubner try, their arrogance wrote checks that their intellects couldn’t cash.

“Trust us – we’re smarter than you” doesn’t work when you make it so abundantly clear that you’re not actually smarter after all.

———-

There are legions of critiques of the climate disruption chapter of Superfreakonomics on the Web. Here’s a short list of some of the better ones:

• Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate.org
• Paul Krugman at his NY Times blog has both a critique and an explanatory note, plus some additional links and commentary.
• All of economist Brad DeLong’s many posts on the subject
• Union of Concerned Scientists
• Raymond T. Pierrehumbert of RealClimate and the University of Chicago (Prof. Levitt is a professor at Chicago as well)
• The Union of Concerned Scientists lists a large number of general errors
• Tim Lambert’s 10 major errors
• Brad at Think Progress’ The Wonk Room has a bunch of posts about this, chronicling errors big and small
• A Siegel at GetEnergySmartNow has a number of good links.
• And the best compilation of all the sites criticizing the book I could find

Image Credits:
SSEC
Stanford
UCAR
Accuweather

• Independent statisticians reject recent global cooling claims in blind analysis
• Melting glaciers releasing pollutants from decades ago
• IEA: climate treaty necessary to keep energy prices low
• Floating cities as a response to sea level rise
• American Physical Society rejects changes to climate change statement

Climate disruption deniers have been claiming for years now that the global temperature has been cooling down, even though the temperature data clearly shows that it isn’t. Scientists and statisticians have pointed out that, mathematically speaking, the recent reduced warming trend is well within the noise, or put another way, it’s weather, not climate.

A new report by the Associated Press reveals what many of us knew already – the denier’s claims don’t hold water, statistically speaking. The report is intriguing because the AP provided their data to four independent statisticians without telling them what it was, and all four found that the slower warming of the past decade was statistically insignificant with respect to the actual data.

In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time.

“If you look at the data and sort of cherry-pick a micro-trend within a bigger trend, that technique is particularly suspect,” said John Grego, a professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina.

Furthermore, the data that the AP sent to the statistician came from two different sources – the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), run by NOAA, and the satellite data preferred by climate disruption deniers that is generated by scientists John Christy and Roy Spencer from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. In both cases, the statisticians found no statistically significant trends over the last ten years.

Statisticians who analyzed the data found a distinct decades-long upward trend in the numbers, but could not find a significant drop in the past 10 years in either data set. The ups and downs during the last decade repeat random variability in data as far back as 1880.

Saying there’s a downward trend since 1998 is not scientifically legitimate, said David Peterson, a retired Duke University statistics professor and one of those analyzing the numbers.

Identifying a downward trend is a case of “people coming at the data with preconceived notions,” said Peterson, author of the book “Why Did They Do That? An Introduction to Forensic Decision Analysis.” (emphasis mine)

The AP interviewed Don Easterbrook, who claimed that “We started the cooling trend after 1998. You’re going to get a different line depending on which year you choose.” According to one of the statisticians, the fact that you have to choose 1998 as your starting point in order to observe a (statistically insignificant) cooling trend is part of the problem.

Grego produced three charts to show how choosing a starting date can alter perceptions. Using the skeptics’ satellite data beginning in 1998, there is a “mild downward trend,” he said. But doing that is “deceptive.”

The trend disappears if the analysis starts in 1997. And it trends upward if you begin in 1999, he said.

This is what’s referred to in statistics as “endpoint sensitivity,” and it’s the main reason that climate disruption deniers like Easterbrook can appear and sound so reasonable when they’re actually misusing or misunderstanding the data.

———-

Melting glaciers releasing pollutants from decades ago

A study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology has revealed a new and troubling aspect to climate disruption – as glaciers melt, they are releasing persistent organic pollutants like DDT, PCBs, other pesticides, and synthetic musks (chemicals that mask body odor).

The scientists studied the annual sediment layers in a high alpine lake in Switzerland and found that there the annual flux of pollutants varied consistently across all the studied pollutants – the fluxes started low in the 1950s, peaked in the 1960s and 70s, dropped off again in the 1980s, and then rose to a new peak in the late 1990s. But in the case of all the pollutants except for musks, the production of the pollutants ceased by 1986 at the latest, and the musks have been in constant production globally since the late 1980s. The image at right illustrates these peaks for the various pollutants the scientists studied.

According to the study, the first peak corresponds closely to when the production of the various pollutants peaked, either in Switzerland or in continental Europe. That peak likely is a result of airborne delivery of the pollutant, either by way of dust or precipitation depositing the pollution in the lake and surrounding land directly. But since there has been no production (or constant production) of the pollutants in decades, it’s extremely unlikely that dust or rain/snow is responsible for the second peak.

In addition, the authors compare the results from the high alpine, glacial melt-fed lake to several other lower altitude lakes. The comparison shows that the low altitude lakes do not show the same spike in pollutants in the late 1990s that the alpine lake does, but they do show similar dust/precipitation driven spikes in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

As a result, the authors’ hypothesized that glacial ice had been accumulating pollutants since the 1960s and 70s and then started releasing those pollutants into the lake as the pollution-laden ice melted. And given the strength of their data, they’re almost certainly correct.

The ramifications of this are significant. Other studies have found recent increases in pollutants around the world even though the production of those pollutants stopped decades ago. Pesticides have been discovered in alpine lakes in the Italian Alps and the Canadian Rockies, and Antarctic penguins have been found to have old DDT in their bodies. If this result holds for other glacially-fed lakes around the world (and there’s no reason to believe that the results won’t hold), then the dangerous pollutants that environmentalists thought had largely been phased out will return and could cause similar ecological damage as they caused decades ago (DDT-thinned eggshells, fishing limitations due to PCBs, etc.). And all as a result of glacier melt that has been caused or enhanced by climate disruption-driven warming. And the results of the study point out that the pollutants present in the studied lake are not likely to be everything that the glacier holds:

The burden of pollutants in Lake Oberaar sediment due to glacier melting is already in the same range as the earlier accumulation from direct atmospheric input. The undiminished increase of the fluxes of many organohalogens into the sediment of Lake Oberaar does not yet prefigure an exhaust of the glacial inventory of these contaminants.

In other words, the environmental toll of these pollutants isn’t over yet by a long shot.

———-

IEA: climate treaty necessary to keep energy prices low

There are many reasons to address climate disruption, ranging from saving species to reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil to reducing the chance of catastrophic drought. The economy is usually not considered to be one of the reasons, especially by those who have a vested interest in maintaining their own profits at the expense of the environment and global climate. However, there are those who say that addressing climate change is critical to maintaining a healthy future economy. According to a new Reuters article, we can now add to that small but growing list the International Energy Administration (IEA).

Reuters interviewed Fatih Birol, author of the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook, and he said that the world needed to work towards a carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentration of no higher than 450 ppm in order to keep energy costs from skyrocketing by 2030. According to Birol’s estimates, Europe alone would see energy prices increase by 300% over the average of what Europe paid over the last 30 years, from $160 billion per year to $500 billion.

Birol’s also estimates that oil prices will reach $100 per barrel by 2015 and $190 per barrel by 2030. Given that there is evidence that the high oil prices of 2008 were part of what caused the global recession, this should make the U.S. and other oil dependent countries nervous. And the global oversupply of natural gas that is keeping prices low in the U.S. this year won’t last – Birol estimates that the demand for natural gas by 2030 will far outstrip supply.

The Guardian is reporting that an anonymous IEA whistleblower is claiming that US pressure has been applied to redefine the point at which peak oil occurs. If this is true and can be verified, then peak oil is probably much closer than previously expected and Birol’s estimates are very likely optimistic. Similarly, Reuters doesn’t discuss whether Birol has any coal estimates or not, but the USGS has pointed out that the U.S. could be approaching “peak coal” as well, after which the price of energy would skyrocket.

Diversifying energy out of carbon-based fossil fuels makes sense from an environmental perspsective, from a climate disruption perspective, from a green jobs perspective, and from an economic perspective. All that remains is for the world’s governments to accept that it makes sense from a political perspective as well.

———-

Floating cities as a response to sea level rise

Some ideas are just too cool and deserve mention just because they’re cool. According to the NYTimes blog Green Inc., the Dutch are designing floating cities to replace or augment land-based cities as the global sea level rises over the next few centuries. The floating cities would be connected to each other and to the mainland via floating highways and rail lines. According to the article, the designers plan to use the ocean to help moderate the cities’ temperatures in much the same way as ground source heat pump does – pump cold water up from the depths beneath the city in order to cool it efficiently.

In case you’re not convinced that concrete can be made to float, there are floating bridges across Lake Washington in Seattle – the glacially-carved lake is far too deep to drive pilings into the lake bed to support the bridge, so it floats instead.

The first floating proof-of-concept residences in a Rotterdam residential neighborhood are expected to be available in 2010.

———-

American Physical Society rejects changes to climate change statement

Earlier this year, a small group of American Physical Society (APS) members requested that the APS change it’s official statement on climate change. This statement reads:

Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.

The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

Because the complexity of the climate makes accurate prediction difficult, the APS urges an enhanced effort to understand the effects of human activity on the Earth’s climate, and to provide the technological options for meeting the climate challenge in the near and longer terms. The APS also urges governments, universities, national laboratories and its membership to support policies and actions that will reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.

A committee was appointed by the Council earlier this year to determine if the latest science justified any changes to the statement. According to the official APS press release, the committee recommended that no changes be made, and on November 8, the Council of the American Physical Society “overwhelmingly” rejected the proposed changes to the 2007 statement on climate change.

Appointed by APS President Cherry Murray and chaired by MIT Physicist Daniel Kleppner, the committee examined the statement during the past four months. Dr. Kleppner’s committee reached its conclusion based upon a serious review of existing compilations of scientific research. APS members were also given an opportunity to advise the Council on the matter. On Nov. 8, the Council voted, accepting the committee’s recommendation to reject the proposed statement and refer the original statement to POPA for review.

The APS has over 47,000 members, of which only 206 appear to have signed the petition to the APS Council. That’s about 0.4% of the APS membership. According to the 2009 “Six Americas” study by the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communications, fully 18% of Americans are either doubtful or dismissive of climate disruption. If those numbers applied to the 47,000 members of the APS, we could expect almost 8500 signatories to the APS petition.

There are three possible interpretations of this difference:

1. Physicists may be less willing to sign online petitions for whatever reason(s).
2. Physicists may actually be more knowledgeable of the science and mathematics than the average American (or less easily swayed by denial industry-manufactured FUD) and thus they accept the overwhelming scientific data to date.
3. Both 1 & 2

My best guess is that it’s probably option #3. But even so, I doubt that reticence to sign petitions accounts for a 45x difference from physicists to the general population.

Image credits:
Geophysical Research Letters
Environmental Science & Technology
Delft University, via Green Inc

• Tipping points will be difficult to identify
• U.S. Chamber of Commerce President complains about environmentalists
• Barrels instead of bottles
• Ocean acidification to turn parts of the Arctic Ocean corrosive by 2018
• El Niño and its relationship to ocean heat content

Is the Earth’s climate approaching a critical transition, aka a “tipping point,” beyond which major and largely unpredictable climate changes are guaranteed to occur? At this point, scientists do not know the answer to that question. A study published in the journal Nature aims to explain the mathematics of critical transitions beyond just the Earth’s climate and in the process, determine if there are early-warning signals that indicate when a complex system is about to undergo a critical transition.

According to the paper, every complex system, whether it be climate, asthma attacks and epileptic seizures, or systemic crashes in financial markets, exhibits the same basic precursor signs of a tipping point, at least mathematically speaking. All complex systems exhibit one or more of the following early-warning signs: they can take longer to recover from small perturbations and become less random over time (“critical slowing” in the paper), they can bounce dramatically between the old and new states (“flickering”) before finally settling in the new state, or they can develop patterns that gradually change before suddenly disappearing into a new state (“spatial patterns”).

With regard to climate, reconstructions have identified the hallmarks of “critical slowing” in multiple climate transitions:

In a recent analysis, a significant increase in autocorrelation was found in each of eight examples of abrupt climate change analyzed.

And the authors reference one other paper which suggests that recent climate variability is an example of “flickering” that signals a transition to a significantly colder global climate.

The problem, however, is that not all critical transitions show each early-warning sign – some transitions might show more than one while others show one this time and another next time. The result is clearly state in the paper:

[D]etection of the patterns in real data is challenging and may lead to false positive results as well as false negatives.

In other words, not all fast transitions are “critical transitions,” not all critical transitions will be detected, and sometimes a critical transition will not occur even though there were signs of one approaching.

In essence, the science of critical transitions is still very young, and as such, projections of tipping points should be very carefully analyzed, whether they be toward a new glacial period or a sudden melt of all the Arctic sea ice.

For news of a few politicians expecting a “social tipping point” on climate disruption soon, please read this piece by my colleague Wendy Redal.

Thanks to Ubertramp for pointing this paper out to me and to Dr. Scheffer for providing a review copy of the paper.

———-

U.S. Chamber of Commerce President complains about environmentalists

Over the last several weeks, three utilities, Nike, and now Apple have resigned from or otherwise reduced their participation in the United States Chamber of Commerce (USCOC), a business lobbying group that represents millions of U.S. businesses. As a result, the USCOC President and CEO, Tom Donohue, held an hour-long press conference to defend the USCOC’s decision to oppose EPA regulation of greenhouse gases (GHGs).

According to the Greenwire report on the event (linked above), Donahue claimed that an “orchestrated pressure campaign” by environmentalists was responsible for the recent defections. However, National Resources Defense Council climate campaign director Peter Altman disagrees. From the article:

“It’s nice of Donohue to give the environmental movement credit for being able to convince Fortune 500 companies what group they should be a part of,” Altman said. “But it’s a red herring. These companies are making the decision on their own.”

Furthermore, San Francisco venture capitalist Nancy Floyd was quoted as saying “This issue (climate change regulation and/or legislation) has really divided the business community. The divide is not really along traditional players versus technology players; it is across the board.”

To date, the USCOC has not changed its position with respect to EPA regulation of GHGs or chosen to get behind either the Waxman-Markey ACES act or the new Kerry-Boxer draft legislation in the Senate. However, two Silicon Valley business organizations ran an advertisement in the San Jose Mercury News and the Congress Daily saying, in part:

As our European and Asian competitors move forward to build the next generation of clean energy technology, the U.S. Chamber seems mired in false debates over settled science and a 20th Century approach to energy. It’s time for the “voice of business” to move forward, embrace a market-based cap on carbon pollution, and help lead a new century of American prosperity. (emphasis original)

The two Silicon Valley organizations are the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG) and Joint Venture Silicon Valley Network (JVSV). A brief scan of the membership of SVLG turns up a veritable who’s who of tech companies, as well as some banking, health, and energy companies: Adobe Systems, Apple Computer, AT&T, Bank of America, Chevron Energy Solutions, Citibank, Dell, eBay, Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Kaiser Permanente, Lockheed Martin, McAfee, Microsoft, NASDAQ, Netflix, Oracle, Palm, Roche, Seagate, Sun Industries, Symantec, and Yahoo!. And those are just the ones that most people would recognize – the list is even more impressive for someone who works in technology like I do – nearly all of the major U.S. electronics manufacturing companies have a presence in the SVLG.

Perhaps even more impressive, however, is that the JVSV signed on. The Directors include the mayor of San Jose, a product manager for Google, the Chancellor of the University of California – Santa Cruz, a senior VP at Bank of America, the CEO of Cypress Envirosystems, a California State Senator, to name just a few. The private companies who invest in JVSV are just as impressive as those involved in the SVLG: Cisco, National Semiconductor, Mitsubishi, PG&E, the San Jose Chamber of Commerce, and McKinsey & Company.

The JVSV represents business, labor, universities, city and state government, and non-profits, all of whom are involved in charting the future of the most visionary, profitable, and productive companies and region in the entire country. And they just told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that they were “dinosaurs.”

Perhaps this advertisement points will convince the USCOC to change its approach to climate legislation and regulation – or perhaps the USCOC will become irrelevant as the companies with vision abandon it and the USCOC’s positions become equivalent to those of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity.

———-

Barrels instead of bottles

According to the NYTimes Green Inc. blog, a number of wineries are foregoing bottles and are instead shipping their wine in barrels. As a result, the wineries are saving money on reduced packaging and are dramatically lowering their carbon footprint due to shipping and bottle manufacturing.

As a beneficial side effect, the wine lasts longer in barrels than it does in bottles.

This is hardly the first time that companies have pushed for reduced packaging – Wal*Mart was one of the first, but it’s hardly the only company working this angle. Still, anything that makes wine cheaper to drink for myself and my family is all good for me – even if that means I have to buy nearly a case at a time.

———-

Ocean acidification to turn parts of the Arctic Ocean corrosive by 2018

Scientists researching ocean acidification in the Svalbard Archipelago north of Norway have made a surprising and awful discovery – the Arctic ocean is acidifying so fast that 10% it will become corrosive within the next 10 years and the entire Arctic will become corrosive by 2100. The Guardian newspaper reported last week on a presentation by French oceanographer Jean-Pierre Gattuso that revealed the terrible news. From the article:

“This is extremely worrying. We knew that the seas were getting more acidic and this would disrupt the ability of shellfish – like mussels – to grow their shells. But now we realise the situation is much worse. The water will become so acidic it will actually dissolve the shells of living shellfish.”

According to the article, the problem is that shellfish form the base of a massive food chain for herring, salmon, and several species of whales. In addition, walruses and seals subsist on shellfish and fish, and polar bears and other top predators feed on the seals and walruses, as well as on fish. So if the bottom of the food chain is disrupted by corrosive seawater, then the entire ecology of the Arctic could be disrupted. And the only way to prevent this is to dramatically and immediately cut carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions.

If you enjoy salmon or king crab legs, or even if you just enjoy the show Deadliest Catch, you might want to consider enjoying them sooner – there may not be a “later.”

———-

El Niño and its relationship to ocean heat content

Back in October, 2008, I pointed out in comments to another Carboholic that La Niña years were cold because the ocean absorbed heat from the atmosphere and that El Niño years were hot because the ocean emitted stored heat back into the atmosphere. This comes from the physics of thermodynamics, specifically the fact that energy moves from hot areas to cold areas, and not the other way around.

I recently came across this same basic information presented in a different form by the Climate Prediction Center’s El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Diagnostic Discussion page and the weekly ENSO updates contained therein:

The basin-wide equatorial upper ocean (0-300 m) heat content is greatest prior to and during the early stages of a Pacific warm (El Niño) episode (compare top 2 panels) and least prior to and during the early stages of a cold (La Niña) episode. (emphasis original), from page 9

In other words, the ocean heat content is lowest at the start of La Niña because after that, the La Niña is absorbing heat from the atmosphere and cooling it. Similarly, the ocean heat content is highest at the start of El Niño because after it starts, El Niño is emitting heat from the ocean back into the atmosphere and heating it.

Image credits:
AFP: Antara News Agency
U.S. Chamber of Commerce
DeLoach Vineyards
Russ Hopcroft, via Australian Antarctic Division
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service, Climate Prediction Center

• Climate disruption will disrupt volcanism too
• EPA Office of Inspector General finds standard gases not so standard after all
• Driest years in Pacific Northwest drier than expected
• Northeast Passage opened this year for commercial shipping
• 12% of the merchant marine fleet is idled
• Recycling used plastic into fuel
• US Chamber of Commerce and car dealer industry group fight California emissions waiver
• Slowing population growth more effective than renewables at slowing GHG emissions

Nature News reported last week that vulcanologists have concluded that climate disruption will increase the number of volcanic eruptions. According to the article, the reason is that climate disruption is expected to reduce the amount of ice present atop volcanoes and thus reduce the amount of material keeping volcanoes from erupting.

But there is definitely some evidence that less ice means more dramatic eruptions. “As thick ice is getting thinner, there may be an increase in the explosivity of eruptions,” says Hugh Tuffen from Lancaster University, UK.

As strange as this sounds, it’s well grounded in geologic sciences. For example, a paper published in 1999 found that there was a correlation between the eruptions of Pavlof Volcano on the Alaska Peninsula and the season (see the image above). Specifically, as a result of weather patterns in the region, the ocean gets slightly thicker in November, and the added weight is believed to be compressing the magma chamber that feeds Pavlof. As a result, small periodic eruptions at Pavlof tend to happen in November. And another paper in 2004 found that volcanoes tend to erupt globally during changes in the earth’s crust as a result of the water cycle – seasonal variations in ground and seawater. This paper studied a much larger number of volcanoes and found that volcanoes in different regions of the world respond to different changes, but the bulk of volcanic eruptions seemed to show some seasonal variation.

Other studies have found that there was an increase in volcanism as a direct result of climate change. This paper from 1999 found that there was a strong correlation (the chance of the correlation occurring by chance was less than 0.2%) between interglacial periods (like we’re in now) and increased volcanic activity in eastern California as a result of a number of possible factors, one of which is increased geologic stresses due to the weight of ice and glacial lakes.

What this means is that, as the Nature News article says, we can expect that disruption of the climate will in turn drive disruptions in how volcanoes erupt. Unfortunately, there’s very little data at this point about how climate will affect volcanism, and no modeling at all – the latest climate models all model how the climate responds to volcanism, but none of them presently model how volcanism will respond to the climate.

“The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] hasn’t addressed these kinds of hazard,” [Bill McGuire from the Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre at University College London] says. “You have a better chance of coping with any kind of hazard if you know it’s happening,” he adds. “Climate change is not just the atmosphere and hydrosphere; it’s the geosphere as well.”

———-

EPA Office of the Inspector General finds standard gases not so standard after all

Organizations that do pollutant monitoring rely on standard gases to ensure that their equipment functions properly. Each standard gas represents a specific amount of pollutant in a given volume of gas, measured in parts per million (ppm), parts per billion (ppb), or some other convenient measurement for the pollutant in question. The standard gas is then injected into monitoring equipment in order to calibrate the equipment to a known amount of pollutant. From that known amount, the equipment can then track how much pollutant is present in the test environment, either more or less than the calibrated level(s). But this process only works if the standard gases have very close to the amount of the pollutant that the gas is supposed to have.

For example, if a calibration gas used by a utility was certified to contain 100 parts per million (ppm) of SO₂, but only contained 96 ppm, the system operator would unknowingly calibrate the CEMS to read 96 ppm as 100 ppm. This would result in the CEMS overestimating emissions.

Last week, the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General found that approximately 11% of the standard gases for blends of SO₂, CO₂, and nitrous oxide (NO) they had purchased and had independently tested were different from the stated amount of gas by 3% or more when the acceptable range was within 2% of the stated amount. And in an example of the seemingly universal rule of “you get what you pay for,” all the failures were from vendors selling inexpensive standard gases, while all of the expensive gases were acceptable.

This is a severe problem because of the sheer number of things that standard gases are used for. The OIG report points out that accurate measurements are vital for the over $5.1 billion SO₂ trading market that has been responsible for a dramatic reduction in acid rain. Accuracy of measurements is similarly important for the $350 million NO_X trading market. And as for CO₂, the World Bank estimated that the global carbon market was $64 billion in 2007. And metropolitan areas are monitored by the EPA for air quality and are fined or forced to make changes to local utilities or transportation as a result of those air quality measurements – if the measurements are incorrect, then the EPA could be giving some cities a passing grade who actually fail air quality, or failing cities that should actually pass.

The OIG’s recommendation, which the EPA office responsible for standard gases agreed with, was for the EPA to implement a quality control process, something that the EPA does not currently have in place.

———-

Driest years in Pacific Northwest drier than expected

Climate models are always being improved with new understanding of how climate works (especially in two key areas, cloud and aerosol dynamics). But regional climate modeling is particularly difficult for two reasons: climate models are so processor intensive that they cannot yet model the Earth with high horizontal and vertical resolution, and scientists do not know all the regional changes that drive regional climate away from the global average. Put simply, scientists don’t know everything and can’t model in enough detail for accurate regional climate predictions.

Enter a new paper by two U.S. Forest Service scientists who have studied annual streamflow in the Pacific Northwest. They set out to determine if the annual streamflow (the amount of water flowing out of a watershed in a year) of the driest years was different than the annual streamflow of the average year or the wettest years. They used a statistical technique called “linear quantile regression” to detect any difference from the average change detected in other studies by use of another statistical technique known as “least-square regression.”

The scientists found that there was a greater reduction in annual streamflow in the driest years than the mean trend had detected. Climate models had previously predicted that there would be little overall change in the annual streamflow because the same amount of water would flow through watersheds, but at different times of the year. Instead, this study discovered that, while this was true for average and wet years, dry years were significantly dryer (in a statistical sense) as a result of changes in climate since 1949.

As a result, the authors expect that changes in water management throughout the Pacific Northwest may be necessary. The design of water storage reservoirs may need to change in order to hold multiple years worth of water. Reduced annual streamflow will have a significant impact on aquatic life living in streams that run much lower during dry years than they have in the past, and reduced streamflow will serve as a positive feedback with increased air temperature to increase the stream temperatures and possibly cause even greater reductions in fish populations. And while overall drying across multiple years already stresses forests, individual dry years can kill off large swaths of forest, lead to more forest fires, and slow the growth of surviving trees.

One of the more interesting points the authors made was that the dry years appear to be tightly correlated with El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) variation from year-to-year and with a yearly trend, but the correlation was significantly weaker when they included the cooling trend in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. While the authors take pains to point out that this doesn’t conclusively say that the PDO isn’t affecting dry year annual streamflow, they do “favor” a model that doesn’t include the PDO as a driver of the annual streamflow. And they call for more analyses to better identify the causes of the observed dry year changes.

More sophisticated analyses considering other indices, temporal lags, and temporal autocorrelation of indices would likely elucidate more information and provide greater certainty, but this rough analysis presents interesting insights.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Thanks to the paper’s primary author, Dr. Luce, for providing a review copy of his paper.

———-

Northeast Passage opened this year for commercial shipping

Historically, Russia’s Arctic coast has been too iced-in for commercial vessels, most of which are designed for hauling their cargo in ice-free waters. But this year, according to a NYTimes article, two German vessels, the Beluga Fraternity and Beluga Foresight, steamed north from South Korea and transited the Northeast Passage, also known as the Northern Sea Route. This route was largely ice free this year, and the two ice-hardened specialty cargo vessels took advantage of the clear waters to cut thousands of miles off the southern route via the Suez Canal. According to the article, while the Beluga vessels were escorted by at least one nuclear powered Russian icebreaker the entire time, the icebreakers were not needed this year.

For the moment, the article points out that the Northeast Passage isn’t expected to be open regularly enough for large just-in-time (JIT) shippers like Maersk to use – schedule accuracy is more important to JIT shippers than fuel savings. But if the Arctic sea ice continues to thin and open up the shipping channel during late August and early September, then specialty shippers like Beluga could start making use of the shorter route in order to get their cargo to its destination cheaper and faster.

———-

12% of the merchant marine fleet is idled

According to an investigative report in the UK’s Daily Mail, there is a massive fleet of idled shipping vessels anchored off the coast of Singapore and southern Malaysia. These ships, and others taken out of service around the world, represent 12% of the the entire global merchant marine fleet, sitting idle. And yet shipyards are continuing to build enough new cargo vessels to increase the total number of vessels by 12% next year.

But according to the report, there are no new ship orders for after 2011, and shipping experts expect that the number of vessels idled by the recession will rise to 25% of the merchant marine fleet in the next two years.

Does this mean that the government’s claims that the recession is over are false? Maybe. I’ve read some discussion that the recent small recovery is a result of companies having to rebuild some inventory after having finally sold off the inventory they had stockpiled before the start of the recession. But that’s a one-time event, and restocking inventory isn’t going to do much for the economy as a whole. What all these ships represent is a lack of advance purchases, either due to a general unavailability of credit or due to companies not expecting enough growth to justify re-expanding their global supply line. In either case, it’s not good news for the global economy in general. Remember – 90% of all goods are shipped on vessels like this, so a 12% reduction shipping merchant marine shipping capacity could mean as much as an 11% reduction in overall international trade – in the last year.

However, this reduction in shipping is good news for global carbon emissions and reduced marine pollution. Oceanic shipping is estimated to produce between 3 and 5% of the world’s carbon emissions, so a 12% reduction in vessels will mean a reduction of between 0.3 and 0.6% of total carbon emissions this year. That represents a reduction in total emissions of at least 100 million metric tons off CO₂. That savings represents more than Romania’s entire national emissions (98 million metric tons in 2006).

And, fortunately or not, depending on your particular perspective, the longer the economy stays depressed, the slower carbon emissions will rebound to previous levels, giving human civilization an opportunity to clean up its energy production technologies some in the interim.

———-

Recycling used plastic into fuel

Nearly all plastic is made from either natural gas or petroleum feedstock. Most plastic is recyclable in some way, either by turning one bottle into another, or by turning bottles into clothing or by turning packing material into park benches. But this is simply reshaping the plastic. Now a company in Maryland has figured out how to turn plastic back into a fuel feedstock that can be blended with diesel or gasoline.

According to Green Inc article, the cost is about $10 per barrel, and the Maryland plant is large enough to convert one ton of plastic into between three and five barrels of oil. However, Environ estimates that nearly 50 million tons of plastic waste are created every year, so a plant that can only convert 6,000 tons per year is a drop in the proverbial bucket. Converting all of that waste back into fuel would take about 10,000 similarly sized conversion plants. Or a bunch of much larger plants. And the process itself is energy intensive – each barrel of fuel represents enough electricity to power 2-3 residences for a day.

So this isn’t a solution to the global plastic problem. And it certainly doesn’t help the U.S.’ oil addiction. But if it can be scaled up, then maybe it’s a step in the right direction. After all, there are more environmental problems than just climate disruption – clean water, air pollution, hazardous waste, and yes, even plastics.

———-

US Chamber of Commerce and car dealer industry group fight California emissions waiver

According to the NYTimes Wheels blog last week, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Automobile Dealers Association have asked the EPA to review a waiver it granted to the state of California in June. The waiver allows California to regulate vehicle emissions CO₂ independently and more tightly than national standards. A spokesman for the NADA, Sheldon Gilbert, was quoted in the Wheels blog as saying “That’s a fair description” when asked if the filing was a precursor to a court case.

Clearly, the EPA believes that it’s in accordance with the Clean Air Act, as does the California Air Resources Board, and the Center for Auto Safety’s Safe Climate Campaign. However, the president of Clean Air Watch, Frank O’Donnell, believes that this is just the beginning of carbon emissions lawsuits. He’s probably correct, even though there have been a few lawsuits already relating to climate. But with the courts now involved, it’s fair to say that Arctic communities will be suing energy companies, developing nations will be suing developed nations, and it’s all going to get a lot uglier before things improve. And at least one major insurer/reinsurer believes that a wave of litigation is inevitable.

———-

Slowing population growth more effective than renewables at slowing GHG emissions

There are few taboo subjects when it comes to climate disruption. Environmentalists and activists regularly discuss pollution, energy consumption, the benefits of eating local and seasonal, drinking reclaimed water, even composting human waste. But one thing that is generally considered off-limits is population growth. Given that human reproduction is considered a taboo subject by a large percentage of cultures and religions, this is perhaps unsurprising. But no discussion of humanity’s impact on climate could possibly be complete without occasionally discussing how the mere existence of more people creates climate pressure, taboo subject or not.

A new study by the London School of Economics and commissioned by the British group Optimum Population Trust (OPT) found that reducing the number of people on the planet via voluntary family planning and contraception was pretty cost effective. According to the study, it’s cheaper than all current CO₂ reduction technologies except for geothermal and sugar cane-derived ethanol (see the table above).

However, this conclusion has met with significant criticism from groups opposed to family planning, contraception, and the like. The San Francisco Chronicle’s blog The Mommy Files has a post on this study, and they point out that a British anti-abortion group has attacked the study as concluding “that fewer children and more abortions means a better environment.” As the Mommy Files points out, the OPT actual study says nothing about more abortions creating a better environment. Instead, the study has the following things to say about abortion:

A Washington Post article on the same study also pointed out that there was an Oregon State University (OSU) study that came to basically the same conclusions, but went a different direction. Instead of estimating the monetary savings/cost of reducing CO₂, the OSU study estimated now much CO₂ a baby born in a given country would add to the atmosphere:

In the United States, each baby results in 1,644 tons of carbon dioxide, five times more than a baby in China and 91 times more than an infant in Bangladesh, according to the Oregon State study. That is because Americans live relatively long, and live in a country whose long car commutes, coal-burning power plants and cathedral ceilings give it some of the highest per-capita emissions in the world.

Just because the estimated costs are lower for reducing CO₂ emissions via family planning doesn’t mean that this will be enough to keep cumulative emissions from exceeding what many scientists consider “acceptable.” Recent science suggests that global warming should be kept “acceptable” (< 2 °C global temperature rise) if total cumulative emissions are kept below an additional 1,000 billion tons of CO₂ over what we’ve already emitted. The OPT study found that the cumulative emissions savings from 2010 to 2050 was 34 billion metric tons. In 2050, the difference between the worst case and the best case IPCC emissions scenario is about 500 billion tons of CO₂, with the best case staying below the 1,000 billion tons of CO₂ limit and the worst-case exceeding it by 250%. The 34 billion tons saved via population reductions from family planning represents only 6.8% of that difference, and actual emissions are worse than the IPCC wost-case scenario.

Reducing population will help solve so many problems beyond climate disruption that it’s difficult to argue against it from anything other than religious grounds. But as cheap as it could be, it won’t be enough. We’ll still need increased energy efficiency and more renewable energy and maybe nuclear power and to shut down coal plants wherever possible and to quickly transition away from petroleum-powered transportation.

Solving climate disruption isn’t multiple choice, it’s “all of the above”
Image credits:
Birkhäuser
EPA OIG
NYTimes
Daily Mail/Richard Jones/Sinopix
Optimum Population Trust

• EPA Office of the Inspector General recommends EPA enforce Clean Water Act
• Climate change lobbyists grow by 31% leading up to ACES vote
• New information suggests climate change accelerating glacial erosion
• Wind turbines mistaken for tornadoes
• First deep water tethered wind turbine now operational
• Rare earth metals and renewable energy

Last week, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that the EPA’s internal monitoring organization, the Office of the Inspector General, found that the EPA’s current approach to controlling excess nutrient deposition into the Gulf of Mexico by the Mississippi River was not working.

The OIG report described an EPA process that, after 10 years of recommending a set of procedures to the Mississippi drainage states, had resulted in the following:

the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico had become the second largest on record and the second largest dead zone in the world.

Further, the report found that, “[i]n the 11 years since EPA issued its strategy, half the States still had no numeric nutrient standards at the end of 2008.”

The states involved have claimed that the costs of creating their own numerical nutrient limits are onerous, and while the states could adopt the EPA standards, “many States viewed EPA’s criteria as overly protective.” And given that the largest sources of nutrients are agricultural states, the OIG report claimed that the political ramifications and costs to agribusiness were likely significant.

In 2001, the EPA published rules in the Federal Register which said that the EPA would force all states in the Mississippi River watershed would be forced to adhere to EPA standards if the states didn’t come up with their own standards by 2004. The OIG report found that “about one-third of the States did not have a nutrient criteria development plan or were not in the administrative phase of adopting standards.” Further, the report found that “States knew that EPA would not use its promulgation powers so the States were not pressured to accelerate progress” and that “EPA had not established measures to hold itself accountable for achieving the goals of its 1998 strategy” by a 2007 audit.

As a result of the findings of the report, the OIG recommended first and foremost that the EPA determine what waterways needed numeric nutritional standards to protect clean water downstream and that the nutritional standards be set according to the authority granted the EPA by the Clean Water Act. The EPA disagreed with these primary recommendations, claiming that:

“a strategic approach to leverage resources and existing authorities” for “waters of regional, local and multi-State value” is the best way to establish effective standards.

In response, the OIG report said “[h]istorically, EPA has said it would use its authority to set standards as a motivator and then failed to set standards…. These States have not yet set nutrient standards for themselves; consequently, it is EPA’s responsibility to act.”

———-

Climate change lobbyists grow by 31% leading up to ACES vote

According to a new article in the Center for Public Integrity’s “The Climate Change Lobby” series, there are now 1150 companies and organizations registered to lobby Congress on climate disruption legislation. This represented an increase of 31% in the total number of organizations lobbying Congress on this single issue.

The article guessed that at least $27 million was spent lobbying Congress leading up to the House vote on the American Climate and Energy Security Act (ACES).

———-

New information suggests climate change accelerating glacial erosion

What do you think erodes land faster – glaciers, rivers, or human farming? According to new data from various glaciated regions around the world, this is a trick question. Specifically, a paper recently published in the journal Nature Geoscience shows that all three erode land at approximately the same rate.

Previously, glaciers were believed to erode landscape at a rate faster than rivers. New information presented in the paper shows that this is not the case. In fact, the rate of erosion appears to change in proportion with the stability of the land that the river or glacier is eroding – in highly tectonically active areas like the Himalayas, glaciers and rivers both erode the land faster than in tectonically stable areas like Australia or the Oregon coast. In addition, erosion from glaciers and rivers appears to roughly match the rate of tectonic change – areas that are uplifting at a rate of 10 mm per year tend to see glacial and river erosion cut through the terrain at roughly the same rate.

There are a couple of other interesting observations described in the paper as well. For example, glacial erosion appears to increase as glaciers are retreating. The paper describes a number of possible mechanisms for this (namely increased flow of meltwater washing away sediment from the base of the glacier and glacial acceleration scraping off more terrain).

the time-dependent variability in glacial erosion rates we are seeing instead suggests that the erosional impact of glaciers is far greater during periods of warming at the end of a glacial cycle than when averaged over a full glaciation (~10⁵ – 10⁶ yrs). Several studies have recently documented a synchronous increase in retreat, ice loss and acceleration of many of the outlet glaciers in Greenland and Patagonia. Such synchronous ice loss and flow suggests that, contrary to previous conclusions, sediment yields and thus calculated erosion rates are more rapid during glacial retreat…

This suggests that glacial melt as a result of climate disruption will cause a significant amount of additional erosion to those areas that are presently deglaciating, namely Greenland, Alaska, Patagonia, and similar regions of the world.

In addition, the authors point out that lowland erosion from agriculture is approximately the same as the fastest glacial and river erosion, and much faster than river erosion in the tectonically stable lowlands would normally be.

[I]f we compare these erosion rates with rates from overland flow associated with conventional agricultural practices, as compiled previously, we see that farming erodes lowland agricultural fields at rates comparable to glaciers and rivers in the most tectonically active mountain belts (Fig. 3). In other words, the relatively recent advent of farming practices has accelerated erosion of many lowland basins at rates on a par with alpine erosion, rates that far exceed long-term rates not only of uplift but also of weathering and soil formation.

The image below is the aforementioned Figure 3.

Thanks to lead author Dr. Koppes for a copy of her paper for my review.

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Wind turbines mistaken for tornadoes

According to an Associate Press article, wind farms can be mistaken by Doppler radar as tornadoes. Specifically, the spinning blades at the top of a 200 foot tower look like the rapidly rotating winds of a powerful thunderstorm or a tornado. And in places like Texas, where there are lots of both wind turbines and tornadoes, turbines have generated erroneous tornado warnings.

As with all plans, the law of unintended consequences reigns supreme.

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First deep water tethered wind turbine now operational

The BBC reports that the first tethered deep water wind turbine is now operational in the North Sea off the coast of Norway. The Carboholic first covered the Hywind deep water wind project back in June, when it had been installed but was still undergoing testing. But now the turbine is adding 2.3 MW to the Norwegian electric grid when it’s windy out 10 km in the North Sea.

According to the BBC article, part of the reason that the turbine was placed in the North Sea was because of the severity of winter storms. The idea was to test how well the turbine withstood potentially damaging winds and seas over a two year test period. In the video that accompanies the BBC article, Hywind asset manager Sjur Bratland estimates that it’ll be at least another 10 years until deep water floating wind turbine technologies are advanced enough to deploy widely. According to the BBC article, part of that would be the development of turbines that are smaller, lower to the water surface, and that produce more electricity per turbine, up to 6 MW.

———-

Rare earth metals and renewable energy

Two new articles in Reuters last week pointed to a known but little publicized problem with hybrid vehicles and wind turbines – the large scale use of rare earth metals in the motors, batteries, and generators used in hybrid vehicles and turbines.

The first article points out that the Prius uses 1 kg of the rare earth metal neodymium, 10-15 kg of lanthanum, and trace amounts of terbium and dysprosium. These are used in the electric motor as a lightweight alternative to iron magnets and in the high capacity nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries. The problem is that the largest source of these elements is China, and the Chinese government is limiting exports specifically to ensure a supply of the rare earth metals to Chinese industry. As a result, Toyota and wind turbine manufacturers are looking to rare earth deposits in Canada, Vietnam, and a previously worked mine in California.

The second article is about the California mine. The mine used to be the largest source of rare earth metals in the world until Chinese mine production drove the price down so far that mining in California stopped being economical. According to the article, the mine not only has the largest known deposit of rare earth metals in the world, the ore has very little uranium or thorium, two elements that make extracting the rare earth metals more expensive. And with the development of a new extraction technology, the mining company expects to be able to start extracting 1,000 tons of refined rare earth metals from the mine per day by 2012. Just in time for the mine to fill in the expected gap left by Chinese export restrictions.

Given that the U.S. could possibly be trading a dependency on Middle East oil for a dependency on Chinese rare earth metals, a domestic source of elements critical to renewable energy would be a good thing to have.

Image credits:
Science Education Resource Center
Nature Geoscience
REUTERS/David Becker

You’re honey child to a swarm of bees
Gonna blow right through you like a breeze
Give me one last dance
Well slide down the surface of things

You’re the real thing
Yeah the real thing
You’re the real thing
Even better than the real thing

- U2

Fantasy stories, myths, legends, tall tales, fairy tales, horror, all these have been with us for a very long time. Science fiction, as well, has been with us since Mary Shelley found herself in a bet with Lord Byron about the possibility of writing a new kind of horror, one not grounded in the gothic.* So the presence in our popular culture of stories based in unreality of one form or another is certainly nothing new.

It seems to me that there’s been a lot more of it lately, though. I don’t have the means to conduct the kind of thorough study we’d need to prove the point, but a cursory examination of what’s on television demonstrates that a good bit of our attention is being occupied by various hyper-realities.

• In this TV.com list of most popular shows, at least 20 deal with the supernatural in some form.
• A quick look at the networks’ fall line-up reveals 11 non-reality-based shows. Add to this Chuck, which will be back mid-season sometime.
• That list doesn’t include cable, of course. In addition to SyFy (or whatever the heck it’s being called these days), HBO is currently burning it up with True Blood, an exceptional vampire/mystery series.

When you factor out reality and game shows, soap operas and children’s programming, the ratio of supernatural-to-natural (such as it is) is quite high. And we’re not even including ludicrously fanciful programming that’s ostensibly based in the plausible (think Desperate Housewives here).

Now let’s have a look at the top-grossing films of 2008:

• The Dark Knight
• Iron Man
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
• Hancock
• WALL·E
• Kung Fu Panda
• Twilight (2008/I)
• Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa
• Quantum of Solace
• Horton Hears a Who!

And 2009:

• Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
• Up
• The Hangover
• Star Trek
• Monsters vs Aliens
• Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine
• Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
• The Proposal

Beginning to notice a pattern?

I can’t help wondering why. Cultures behave the way they do for reasons, and studied examinations of those behaviors (and most especially, of the culture’s popular artifacts) tell us a great deal about the society. What does it love, what does it hate? What does it dream of, what does it fear? What are its dysfunctions…

In this particular case, what are we running from?

We Are the Hollow Men

I have a theory. Well, actually, it’s not well developed enough to be a theory. Or even a hypothesis, for that matter. So let’s just call it a question. I recently read Affluenza, a book that sets out to examine our culture’s pathological need for stuff. The editor’s review at Amazon sums it up this way:

The definition of affluenza, according to de Graaf, Wann, and Naylor, is something akin to “a painful, contagious, socially-transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.” It’s a powerful virus running rampant in our society, infecting our souls, affecting our wallets and financial well-being, and threatening to destroy not only the environment but also our families and communities. Having begun life as two PBS programs coproduced by de Graaf, this book takes a hard look at the symptoms of affluenza, the history of its development into an epidemic, and the options for treatment. In examining this pervasive disease in an age when “the urge to splurge continues to surge,” the first section is the book’s most provocative. According to figures the authors quote and expound upon, Americans each spend more than $21,000 per year on consumer goods, our average rate of saving has fallen from about 10 percent of our income in 1980 to zero in 2000, our credit card indebtedness tripled in the 1990s, more people are filing for bankruptcy each year than graduate from college, and we spend more for trash bags than 90 of the world’s 210 countries spend for everything. “To live, we buy,” explain the authors–everything from food and good sex to religion and recreation–all the while squelching our intrinsic curiosity, self-motivation, and creativity. They offer historical, political, and socioeconomic reasons that affluenza has taken such strong root in our society, and in the final section, offer practical ideas for change. These use the intriguing stories of those who have already opted for simpler living and who are creatively combating the disease, from making simple habit alterations to taking more in-depth environmental considerations, and from living lightly to managing wealth responsibly.

Grist notes that in the wake of 9/11, affluenza seems to have evolved from social disease into official policy:

In each of the past four years, more people declared bankruptcy than graduated from college. On average, the nation’s CEOs now earn 400 times the wages of the typical worker, “a tenfold increase since 1980.” Although the United States makes up less than five percent of the world’s population, we produce 25 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions; since 1950, we “have used up more resources than everyone who ever lived on earth before then.”

Many of us also know that bigger houses, bigger cars, more gadgets, and more expensive clothes do not make us more content, despite the glossy promises of advertisers. Yet consumer spending has long been used as an indicator of both the national economy and the national mood. The more we spend, the better off we are — or so we’ve been told. This mantra has been particularly insistent in the past year, as the great blooming bubble of stock market riches began to deflate and the Bush administration chose instant gratification as an economic strategy. Since Sept. 11, national leaders have been telling us with ever-increasing urgency that consumer confidence must and will rebound. While confidence — as an indicator of our faith in the future — should return, it’s equally clear that the past few decades’ rate of consumption is neither sustainable nor desirable. Moreover, we must assume — and hope — that tragedy has made us wiser, and tempered the impulse of so many Americans to affirm their existence with a pleasing new purchase.

To be honest, reading Affluenza is one of the hardest things I’ve done in some time. I not only saw the moral emptiness of my society laid bare, there were entirely too many pages that described my own life. Even in instances where I feel like I’ve won the battle against consumerist addiction, I still had to acknowledge that once upon a time I was eaten up by a craving for material things that not only couldn’t have made me whole, it would have made the hollow space even larger. I had to slog through passages that seemed specifically written about people I know, people close to me. Worst of all, the book flogged me relentlessly with details about how our obsessions with status and toys are annihilating the physical world that sustains us … for the moment.

Affluenza ripped at my guts in ways that brought me literally to the brink of illness. Or maybe past the brink – I haven’t written about it before, but I’m currently battling at least a couple of medical conditions that may ultimately be the result of affluenza. One of them – a blood sugar issue that I’m now taking medication for daily – is certainly a product of the American food complex. If you drink, on average, two liters of soda a day for the better part of 25 years, how many milligrams of high-fructose corn syrup have you strained through your body? I’m not blaming anybody for my stupidity, which was considerable, but let’s not pretend that our consumption patterns exist in a vacuum, either.

The physical impact pales next to the psychological, though. I grew up desperately seeking the sort of validation that comes with success in America, and if you aren’t careful you can fixate on all the wrong goals. Is success a certain income level? Is it a house in a certain neighborhood? Is it the security that comes from knowing that your children have newer, cooler and more expensive basketball shoes than their friends? Is it a Lexus or Beemer or Mercedes? Is it having a certain number of people reporting to you?

Is it the satisfaction that comes from working so many hours your wife doesn’t recognize you when you come home? Is it the number of ulcers you have? Is it having a physical stress level so consistently high that your body is more or less always sick in some way?

Affluenza made me think about the lies we tell ourselves about success. About the “American Dream.” We grow up enculterated into a consumerist assumption (unless our parents raise us in the woods, miles from the nearest television – and then we have a whole ‘nother set of problems). At some point we realize that we’re not happy (although “realize” may be the wrong word – one thing affluenza seems to do is systematically kill off our self-awareness – in any case, we aren’t happy). Everywhere we look, though, we see happy people (these are called advertisements), and the happiness we see emanates from a thing. A car, a haircut, a shirt, a house, an iPhone, a particular brand of computer…whatever it is, it’s something that can be purchased. So we purchase it. And after a few minutes, we’re not happy again.

I once watched a young boy on his first real Christmas morning. The monetary value of the presents he had under the tree was probably triple the value of all the presents I’d ever had under all the trees during my entire life. He ripped into the first present – it was spectacular. He looked at it, then put it aside and ripped into the second one. And the third. And the fourth, and fifth, and so on. He never paused to play with any of them. It was only about more, more, more. And when there were no more, he still didn’t play with them. The look on his face at that moment was one of profound and unmistakable disappointment. There were no more.

I had never seen anything like it, and I was as horrified as he was unfulfilled. That young boy has had several more Christmas mornings since then, and as best I can tell each one has been little more than a re-enactment of that first one, only with escalating price tags. He’s a smart kid and a very good kid in many ways, but I shudder at the hollowness that now threatens to consume his entire life.

Can I complain about the parenting decisions that have been made in this boy’s life? Well, I could, but in truth the significance of the story isn’t what happened to him, it’s that what happened to him happens millions of times a day all across our consumerist nation. The more we have, the emptier we are. We’re a nation of addicts, and all the stuff that we’re Jonesing for is a million times more addictive and destructive than crystal meth.

What Happens When We Run Out of Fantasies?

We are the age of insubstantiation,
a generation of digital bells,
loose change on the sidewalk.

Our days are loops,
our nights tight spirals,

and if the virtual is
          even better than the real thing

it’s only because the real thing is so goddamned empty.

So here’s my theory/hypothesis/question. We’re a hollow nation, a society that provides nearly all of us with rampant access to more material goods than we know what to do with. But we cannot find happiness in the material because there is not happiness in it. On the contrary – it’s a system that’s rigged to feed us a shiny, pretty lie that hollows us out some more, all the while whispering that only more of the lie will make us happy.

This is our reality. So should we be surprised that our favorite television shows and movies aren’t about “reality”? That instead, we turn toward the magical, the mystical, the alien, the supernatural and hyper-real realms that can promise us even more? Even when these narratives are dystopian, they can’t help but be more interesting than stories about this world. After all, we have everything that this world can offer and we’re still bored to tears.

These are heady days for fantasy merchants. But where will we go next, when even better than the real thing grows dull?

_________________

* Alkon, P. Science Fiction Before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994.

• U.S. Chamber of Commerce files for EPA climate disruption trial
• GRACE satellites show water use in India is unsustainable
• Biofuel crops may become next invasive species
• Is GM’s 230 MPG Volt claim real?
• Tubular Rail aims to invert train and rail
• July global ocean temperature sets two records

Earlier this week, the LATimes reported that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (hereafter “the Chamber”) has petitioned the EPA to hold a trial-like hearing on the science of climate disruption. According to the article, officials for the Chamber want to make it “‘the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century.’”

EPA officials interviewed for the LATimes article are dismissive of the Chamber’s petition, referring to it in the article as “frivolous” and a “waste of time.” However, given that the Chamber has threatened to take the EPA to federal court to force them to hold this trial-like hearing, it’s unlikely that the Chamber considers their petition “frivolous.”

A ClimateWire article in the NYTimes clarifies the Chamber’s point and points out that the EPA’s public process has already been extensive:

EPA has hosted two public hearings and received more than 300,000 public comments on the matter already.

“They don’t have the science to support the endangerment finding,” Bill Kovacs, the chamber’s vice president for environment, regulatory and government affairs, said in an interview. “We can’t just take their word for it.”

This indicates that the Chamber’s chief complaint isn’t so much as that the science underlying anthropogenic climate disruption is wrong, but rather that the science supporting the EPA’s finding that climate disruption endangers human health is wrong. This same point was reported by the Wall Street Journal’s climate blog here.

The response from around the web has been rapid and fierce. Skeptic and denier sites claim that the EPA is cowardly for rejecting the proposed hearing and that, if the Obama Administration were really for change, they’d order the EPA to hold the hearing. Not all such sites think this style of hearing on the strengths or weaknesses of scientific hypotheses and theory is a good idea, however.

The Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC) is one of the many sites supporting the EPA’s position. They point out that the Chamber is making their appeal after the official public comment period on the endangerment finding has closed. During the official comment period, over 300,000 public comments were made on the proposed endangerment finding and two large and well attended public hearings were held, one in Seattle and the other in Arlington, Virginia. The CAC proposes that the main goal of the Chamber isn’t to actually “win,” but rather to delay the EPA’s action as long as possible, an opinion that Pete Altman, climate campaign director for the NRDC, shares at the NRDC’s Switchboard blog.

Ultimately, though, one of the most interesting points in all of this is the fact that the Chamber has equated their position with that of William Jennings Bryan, the once famed anti-evolutionist lawyer for the prosecution. While Bryan won trial and the conviction was overturned on a technicality, the Scopes trial represented the beginning of the end for creationism in the United States, whether due to the cynical reporting of H.L. Menken or the death of Bryan shortly after the conclusion of the trial. It took several more decades before anti-evolution laws were ultimately overturned by the Supreme Court, but it did happen.

On the other hand, perhaps the Chamber is hoping simply for the same kind of delay that the Scopes trial was able to produce – several more years or decades of no effective action against climate disruption. Or perhaps the Chamber is playing to a particular audience, namely the same people who look at the Scopes trial as a win for creationism or, in its more recent incarnation, intelligent design.

UPDATE: The Wonk Room has obtained a copy of the Chamber’s petition.

The petition, acquired by the Wonk Room, claims that scientific research demonstrates global warming has stopped, the oceans aren’t acidifying or warming, sea level isn’t rising, extreme weather events aren’t increasing, tropical diseases aren’t spreading, wildfires aren’t increasing — but even if the planet were getting warmer, then U.S. citizens will be healthier, air pollution will decrease, and U.S. agriculture will benefit.

———-

GRACE satellites show water use in India is unsustainable

According to a new study reported in the BBC, the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite has detected a significant reduction in the amount of groundwater in India. According to the BBC, the study finds the reason for the falling groundwater level is overuse for irrigation. According to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory press release, the total loss from 2002 to 2008 was 108 cubic miles.

GRACE detected this change by monitoring the gravity of the Earth as it orbits. How much gravity affects one of the two paired satellites varies depending on how much mass is below the satellite. By very accurately monitoring the distance between the two satellites, scientists can detect the force of gravity and create a gravity map of the Earth. By monitoring changes in the Earth’s gravity over time, scientists can detect what parts of the Earth are gaining or losing mass. In the case of India, GRACE detected a loss in mass over land even though records showed that monsoon rains were relatively constant during the study period.

Since GRACE was launched in 2002, it has made a number of other important observations, two of which are critically important. The first was confirmation that Greenland is losing ice mass. Specifically, a paper confirmed that Greenland lost approximately 240 cubic kilometers of ice per year between April 2002 and November 2005. This was compared to 225 cubic km per year based on satellite radar.

The second observation was that, from 2002 to 2005, the Antarctica ice sheet lost approximately 150 cubic km of ice per year. Prior to GRACE, scientists didn’t know whether Antarctica was overall gaining or losing mass – there was widespread agreement that West Antarctica was losing mass, but no agreement over whether East Antarctica was gaining mass fast enough to compensate for the loss in the West – or if the East was also losing mass. What GRACE discovered was that the East was maintaining it’s overall mass while the West was losing mass.

So long as the two satellites continue operation, we can reasonably expect that more discoveries like the three mentioned above will continue to be made.

———-

Biofuel crops may become next invasive species

According to a ClimateWire story, scientists are becoming concerned about the potential for biofuel crops to become invasive weeds. The problem, as the article points out, is that the best cellulosic biofuel crops are going to need very little water, little to no fertilizer, and produce high yields. You know, like kudzu in the South or bindweed here along the front range.

Hey, here’s an idea – can kudzu or bindweed could be made into cellulosic biofuel feedstock? Kill two birds with one stone and all that.

———-

Is GM’s 230 MPG Volt claim real?

A couple of weeks ago, General Motors announced with great fanfare that the Chevy Volt was so energy efficient that it would get 230 MPG. According to the NYTimes, GM used an EPA-approved methodology, but the number itself hasn’t been verified or independently tested. According to an interview with Larry Nitz, GM’s executive director of hybrid powertrain engineering, at GM-volt.com, the EPA methodology is a baseline that is based on a statistical traffic study done in 2001 that measured how the typical vehicle will be used. Since the first 40 miles in a Volt uses no gasoline at all, it turns out that you’ll get 230 MPG if you drive precisely 51.1 miles. Any further than that and you’re gas mileage drops – at 80 miles, you’re down to 100 MPG.

Ultimately, though, figuring MPG for a mostly-electric vehicle is a challenge. If you never drive over 40 miles, you won’t consume any gasoline at all, and so you’re MPG is effectively infinite. But you’re still consuming energy. The difference is that the energy is coming from the electrical grid and whatever coal, natural gas, nuclear, or renewable generator is closest to you. For that reason, it’s probably more accurate, and certainly fairer, to compare the Volt’s overall energy consumption to the energy consumption of other vehicles.

Of course, given that GM has a vested interest in continuing to tout the MPG numbers, it’ll probably be third parties who perform those calculations and not GM.

For a more amusing take on the whole Volt MPG thing, check out satire site Smooth Operator.

———-

Tubular Rail aims to invert train and rail

Let’s perform a simple experiment. First, find a pen. Second, put it on the edge of the table and scoot it slowly off the edge. If you watch it closely as it starts to tip over, you’ll notice that it doesn’t start to tip until about it reaches about the middle. This is because the pen’s center of gravity is supported by the table until you reach approximately the pen’s center. But as soon as the pen’s center of gravity is unsupported, it starts to tip over and will eventually fall to the floor.

This fact – that a cantilevered beam doesn’t start to fall until it reaches it’s midpoint – is the basis behind a new form of train that the developers claim will cost 60% less than traditional rail. It’s called tubular rail, and its developers are at Tubular Rail, Inc. (TRI)

According to the website, it will cost less partly because components can be prefabricated, it has a lower footprint (and so would need fewer easements or use of eminent domain), and lower overall construction costs. And it’s a very interesting idea. The trains turn very gradually as they pass through the support tubes (that also provide power to the train cars) and since they’re suspended over roads and existing rail, they could be used pretty much everywhere.

The website is reasonably slick, but I couldn’t find any indication that their idea has any significant money behind TRI. And by “significant money” I mean enough money for TRI to develop their idea beyond the website stage and turn it into a demonstration project. Hopefully I’m wrong, since this technology could change the game for intermediate and long distance transportation around the country. If it lives up to the hype, that is.

———-

July global ocean temperature sets two records

The Associated Press has reported that the average global ocean sea surface temperature in July set a record for the hottest July since measurements started. The ocean was 0.5924 °Celsius over the previous record, set during the strong El Niño in 1998, of 0.5761. This is according to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) July 2009 highlights page. What the AP didn’t report, however, and neither did the NCDC, is that the preliminary data from July shows that July 2009 was the hottest sea surface temperature anomaly since recording started 130 years ago. Previously, the warmest month was December 1997 (0.5776 °C), as the 1998 El Niño was starting.

UPDATE: Skeptic Dr. Roy Spencer believes that he’s found a significant error in the NOAA SST dataset. He’s posted some data on his website that appears to show a warm bias to the NOAA data as compared to two different satellite datasets. It’s certainly possible that he’s correct, but it’s also possible that undetected errors/biases in the satellites are responsible. However, that there is an unknown error between the satellite and in-situ NOAA measurements appears to be pretty likely. I look forward to finding out the real story here when the source of the error(s) is discovered and corrected.

Additional information from the NCDC that bear mentioning is that, while the United States has been having an unusually cool summer (the 27^th coolest on record), the global land plus sea surface temperature anomaly for July was the 5^th warmest on record, the January through July 2009 period is tied for 6^th warmest on record with 2004, and this July was the 33^rd July in a row that was over the 20^th Century mean for combined land and sea surface temperature anomaly.

To put this into perspective, let’s do a few simple calculations. It takes a lot more energy to heat up a kilogram of water one °C than it does to heat up one kg of air – about 4.2 times as much energy, in fact. But a cubic meter of water has a LOT kg of mass than a cubic meter of air – about 854 times the mass of air at sea level.

So let’s take the volume of the lowest kilometer of atmosphere (roughly representing the land surface temperature region), multiply that by the mass of air at sea level, and then multiply that by the amount of energy it takes to increase that volume of air by 1 °C (aka “heat capacity”), and we get approximately 6.1×10²⁰ Joules (J). A really, really big number.

If we take just the top meter of the global ocean (roughly representing the sea surface temperature), multiply that volume by the mass of seawater, and multiply that number by seawater’s heat capaciy, we get about 1.6×10²³ J. An even bigger number.

Divide the energy in the top meter of the ocean by the energy in the lowest kilometer of atmosphere and you find that the ocean holds approximately 262 times more energy. And this is a conservative estimate, as I didn’t take into account the reduction in atmospheric pressure from sea level to 1 km in altitude, nor did I estimate the actual volume of the wave/wind mixed surface layer of the ocean, which is probably several meters to tens of meters deep. A real calculation would produce an ocean surface heat capacity that was much higher than my quick-and-dirty calculation.

Given that ocean covers more than 70% of the Earth’s surface and just how much more energy the ocean can store than the atmosphere, perhaps the most interesting point made by the NCDC was this, about this year’s El Niño:

El Niño persisted across the equatorial Pacific Ocean during July 2009. Related sea-surface temperature (SST) anomalies increased for the sixth consecutive month in this ENSO domain, where July SSTs were more than 0.5°C (0.9°F) above average. If El Niño conditions continue to mature, as now projected by NOAA, global temperatures are likely to exceed previous record highs.

For your information, the warming water trend is called “El Niño” because it historically peaks in December, which is why it’s named after the Spanish name of the Christ child.

Image credits:
NASA/Trent Schindler and Matt Rodell
Pacific Northwest Weed Management
Motor Trend
Tubular.com
SSEC

In thinking about technological change, and our relative inability to often recognize the transformational technologies at the time they come along, consider the electric guitar. Particularly the solid-body electric guitar invented by Les Paul, who passed away Thursday at the age of 94. The NY Times story does him justice – he was just messing around and came up with this thing because he couldn’t find it anywhere. And I don’t imagine that in his wildest dreams he could have foreseen the impact it would have; certainly no one else did at the time.

But in retrospect, it’s clear that the electric guitar is one of those things that changed everything. First came rock and roll, which led to the sixties, when led to the breakdown of everything…. No, wait, first came rock and roll, which led to drugs, which led to the breakdown of everything…. No, darnit, let’s see, first came rock and roll, then came… I can’t remember.

But it’s true. The electric guitar changed everything. It made music more interesting, certainly, and the cultural landscape has never recovered. Actually, the US culture wars of much of the second half of the 20th century focus on rock and roll as much as anything else, perhaps more so. I remember my first (and only) visit to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. We were on The Older Daughter’s college tour, which took us out to the Midwest – Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa – and it was a great holiday, one of the great family trips we took. And I remember insisting, over the bemused objections of everyone else in the family, that we should make a visit. Everyone was a pretty good sport about it, as I recall.

And it was worth the trip. For the rock and roll audience, it was interesting – most of the people we saw there would have looked completely at home in your standard Indianapolis 500 crowd. And the upstairs part, where the inductees have been enshrined, is a bit weird and over the top, actually. Of course, since so many of them are dead, maybe it’s a not inappropriate venue. (Les Paul was inducted in 1988.) But the really interesting part of the museum is the actual museum itself, which lays out, in a very serious but undeniably clever way, the history of rock and roll in America. And you realize, in a way that I’ve seen crystallized nowhere else, that the history of rock and roll in America is inextricably bound up with two other aspects of American life – race and censorship.

And both are still with us. The race thing is obvious – think of the South, changed on the surface but perhaps not underneath (given the racists they repeatedly elect to Congress and their local legislatures), and the outrage among a substantial part of the US population against Obama that is currently driving the tea party and healthcare protest lunacy. If America does permanently schism, as it shows every intention of doing, it will be over race. Which will be tragic, but perhaps nonetheless unavoidable. The censorship thing, too, is still around – fundamentalists of all stripes (who in the US are primarily, but not exclusively, Christian) will never stop trying to ban stuff, and if they can’t, they’ll burn stuff, and if they can’t do that, they’ll think of something else instead – as recently as a couple of years ago Dixie Chicks CDs were being bulldozed. The overlap between these two sets would make an interesting Venn diagram.

And rock and roll, for as long as it’s been around, has epitomized both of these conflicts. Early radio stations refused to play “Negro Music.” While it was on separate stations, that was fine – but as soon as white teenagers started listening in, civilization started to collapse, or something. But people really believed it then, and they still believe it now. Rock and roll in the US is inevitably political, in a way that it’s not in, say, Holland (which brought us one of the best rock guitarists, Jan Akkerman, who plays a Les Paul guitar too). Even in this day of corporate rock and roll, it’s still a principal outlet for the other, in Fanon’s framework, and always will be. Anyone can pick up an electric guitar and a bass and a drumkit and go to town. So the censorship thing will always be there. And who knows how long the race thing will still be around for – it may need for my generation to finally die out before America is mature enough to come to grips with it. Rock and roll has historically been one of the principal modes of attack on racism, ever since white boys like Carl Perkins first picked up his Les Paul Gold Top and came out with “Blue Suede Shoes” in 1956. And without Les Paul, no rock and roll as we know it.

So let’s all hope that Les Paul was greeted by a heavenly choir wearing sunglasses, all strumming away on their Gibson Les Pauls to “How High the Moon.”

Wufnik is an American who lives in London, has too many advanced degrees for what he does for a living, and has strong feelings about rock and roll.

Part one of a two-part series.

From Cronkite to Couric: the Kingdom of Signal is swallowed by the Empire of Noise

The recent death of Walter Cronkite spurred the predictable outpouring of tributes, each reverencing in its own way a man who was the face and voice of journalism in America for a generation or more. The irony of all these accolades is that we live in an age where “broadcast journalist” is such a cruel oxymoron, and we seem to speeding headlong into an era where the word “journalist” itself threatens to become a freestanding joke. Why, against this backdrop, would so many people who are so involved in the daily repudiation of everything that Cronkite stood for make such a show memorializing the standard by which they so abjectly fail?

As I read what people had to say about Cronkite, I realized that something I studied and wrote about over a decade ago helps explain why our contemporary media has gone so deeply, tragically wrong.

First, let’s state the simple part: Cronkite was about signal. Contemporary media is about noise.

When you flipped on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, you were engaged by a program where every attempt was made to sift through the static, to filter away the disinformation, and to present in a direct, clear, calm voice the essence of what was happening. More importantly, what was happening mattered, tangibly, in the lives of the audience. The emphasis was on the substance of what was needed instead of the shallow style of what was wanted.

At the end of the broadcast he’d close with his trademark signoff: “And that’s the way it is.” When he did, the assertion was credible because the news hadn’t relied on smoke and mirrors, dog and pony shows, cyniacally choreographed screaming matches (in order to assure “balance”) or artful PR-mongering. It was, instead, the proud product of professionals whose ethics stressed getting at the facts of the day. To be sure, other luminaries like Hunter Thompson warned us about confusing fact with truth, but what Cronkite and his colleagues wrought in 30 minutes was, on the whole, pretty useful at maximizing clarity and minimizing clutter.

The next question follow logically: why have media operations (sorry, but when people like Katie Couric are at the helm, I just can’t make myself use terms like “press” and “journalism”) abandoned the sacred quest for signal in favor of a decadent wallow in noise? How did this happen?

The answer, I fear, gets a little wonkish. If you’ll bear with me, though, I think I can lead us to some signal about noise.

Shannon vs. Barthes

In 1990, UCLA professor and scholar Katherine Hayles published Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science.* One chapter of the book, in particular, fascinated me. It looked at two of the 20th Century’s more prominent intellectual figures (prominent within their respective research communities, anyway) and contrasted them on how their work dealt with signal and noise. The first luminary was engineer and mathematician Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, and the other was Roland Barthes, the French post-structuralist “theorist, philosopher, critic and semiotician.”

Dr. Hayles parallels the development of Shannon’s information theory** with the radical post-structuralism of Barthes, explaining that both were concerned with the same issues in their respective communications systems. Varying institutional dynamics, however, led them to widely divergent approaches in addressing “noise” in the system.

Shannon, working at Bell Labs, was directly concerned with message clarity – it was his job to minimize noise in the system, thereby enabling as high a degree of communication between points as possible. In Shannon’s formulation, unwanted noise was defined as the “equivocation,” and one of his most important theorems posits that equivocation is reducible to zero if the proper code is employed (Hayles 188).

Barthes, on the other hand, argued that “literatures are in fact arts of ‘noise’,” and that this equivocation is what readers “consume.” As such, noise in the system is to be encouraged and maximized as much as possible (Hayles 188). In other words, what Barthes suggests as the optimal goal of criticism is the absolute negation of what most would see as the essence of communication. In a very real sense, it is the role of criticism not to facilitate communication, but to actively prevent it.

With equivocation thus maximized, the reader is encouraged to partake of this massive new body of noise which, Barthes suggests, is more interesting than the original intent anyway. This position, while stated “in a risqué fashion,” nonetheless represents the mainstream belief of the critical community (Hayles 189).

So far, so good. But why would anyone – even a French intellectual – want to destroy the possibility of communication (and in doing so, annihilate the possibility of shared meaning)?

Noise as the Servant of Institutional Demand

Here we get to the part that’s so important to understanding the sorry state of 21st Century media. As Hayles explains, Shannon’s attempts to decrease noise in the system were spurred by the well-defined institutional needs of the country’s growing telephone industry. Those of us old enough to remember the static in the average long distance call will immediately appreciate the value of Shannon’s work.

The deconstructionist desire to increase noise in the field of literary criticism, Hayles argues, was also driven by institutional demands. Before post-structuralism, she says, literary critics were relatively limited in the number of acceptable texts available for analysis. Aside from the new texts introduced by living writers, this body of subject texts remained relatively constant for decades. At the same time, however, the literary establishment experienced enormous growth, resulting in a comparative shortage of canonized texts for scholars to critique. “Too many critics, too few texts” ( Hayles 189):

Post-structuralism, especially deconstruction, overcomes this scarcity by showing how each text can be made into an infinite number of texts. Moreover, it actually converts scarcity to excess by proclaiming that theory’s proper subject is not only literature, but theory itself.
…
Thus the increasing number of theoretical texts in literary criticism, as well as their tendency to organize themselves in increasingly complex ways, can be understood as responses to the discipline’s systemic economy (189-190).

In other words, post-structuralism’s war on communication and meaning do not serve society’s need to better understand art or what art can reveal about the nature of culture; it is not driven by any evolution towards greater enlightenment in society; it is not about helping society overcome its “false consciousness” or moving us toward a more equitable form of self-governance; it is not even, as its proponents often suggest, designed to give voice to previously unempowered demographics: these are merely rationalizations.

Instead, the rage for noise was quite simply a response to the research university’s need to find tenure-track assistant professors something to do. It is, in the terminology of Complexity Theory, an adaptive response aimed at enabling the survival and growth of an evolving system. It is not about students, communities, meaning, authenticity, art, knowledge, or any of the other things scholars might use to justify their work.

Those who knew me in grad school can probably recall my indignation at what I termed the “DeMeaning Project.” As I put it in a paper I once presented at a conference (to a room full of Barthes devotées, I should note):

The De-meaning Project is, purely and simply, about the value-free perpetuation of academia’s ideology of research. It is about the exaltation and empowerment of the scholar, and if this comes at the expense of those the university is alleged to serve, so far nobody seems much concerned.

From the systemic demands fueling deconstruction, it is a small step to further envision the need the academy has for self-validation in a world increasingly obsessed with celebrity. Each step of the project I have here outlined finds the academic engaged in the deprivileging of someone or something non-academic. We must ask ourselves – once the individual is gone, once the artist is discredited, once the text is infinitely imprisoned within a bottomless pit of signification, once literary texts are replaced at the center of scholarship by critical texts – once this project is completed, what remains? What remains, and more particularly, who benefits? The academy has sought in the insecurity of the De-meaning Project to discredit all except for itself, and if it should succeed, then its stars become the only stars.

To sum it up: once upon a time scholars and critics were engaged in what we might call a process of signal, where they studied canonized literary texts and sought a communication and meaning-making connection with both the original text, the author and the audience. In time, the canon ran out of accepted books and things to say about them, which was a problem for all the young scholars who needed something to establish their records and justify their cases for tenure. The result was a new kind of scholarship that dynamited the canon, the idea of the great author, and even the very possibility of communication or meaning.

The institution had given up on discovering or cultivating signal, and so it shifted its focus to noise – which is exactly what happened to the American press.

Tomorrow: The Media Empire of Noise

______________________________

* Hayles, N.K. (1990). Chaos bound: orderly disorder in contemporary literature and science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

** I link to Wikipedia in multiple places above because it provides quick, accessible overviews of the people and topics referenced. Please, forgive my slothfulness – I know that Wikipedia isn’t always the best of resources. Those interested in a more detailed explanation of the concepts are encouraged to check the links at the bottom of each entry, many of which will take you as deep into the subject as you’d like to go (and farther than I’m probably capable of going).

I discovered this at the Northwest lounge at the Narita Airport. I apologize the images are not up to my usual standard, but there were actually other people waiting to photograph this amazing device. Turns out it has some renown among frequent fliers.

First you select your frosted glass from the fridge next to the machine. You slip the glass onto the platform and push the button.

The glass is held in place, tilted and the machine begins to dispense the beer. I prefer Sapporo, but Asahi was also on tap.

The machine levels the full glass, waits a moment and tops off the last drop. Perfection.

Cheers!

• Gas industry’s own fracking studies don’t support industry claims
• Can concentrating photovoltaic compete with solar thermal and standard photovoltaic?
• Wind turbines may affect weather
• Geoengineering doesn’t help acidification
• New study on the PETM raises questions, but no answers
• New climate idea might break US-China emissions stalemate

“Fracking” is the slang term used for hydraulic fracturing, a process by which the gas industry injects a slurry of unknown composition into a gas well in order to break up the rock and release the natural gas contained within. At present, the EPA exempts fracking from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), but Representative Diana DeGette of Colorado has introduced legislation into the House (H.R.2766) to force the EPA to regulate fracking. In response, the gas industry has pushed back with studies that purport to show that regulation is both unnecessary and costly.

A new article by ProPublica, an “independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest,” shows that the exact same studies being used by industry to oppose fracking actually counter the industry’s own arguments.

The gas industry claims that there is already sufficient regulation and oversight of fracking at the state level. The ProPublica article contests this claim, pointing out the following:

In fact, the report calls for some of same measures found in the congressional bill the industry is so hotly contesting.

Regarding fracturing in areas close to the surface or near shallow aquifers, the report reads: “States should consider requiring companies to submit a list of additives used in formation fracturing and their concentration.” It also says that shallow fracturing very close to certain drinking water aquifers “should either be stopped, or restricted to the use of materials that do not pose a risk of endangering ground water and do not have the potential to cause human health effects.”

The additives issue is specifically addressed in HR2766, just as the ProPublica article says:

In subparagraph (C) of paragraph (1) insert before the semicolon `, including a requirement that any person using hydraulic fracturing disclose to the State (or the Administrator if the Administrator has primary enforcement responsibility in the State) the chemical constituents (but not the proprietary chemical formulas) used in the fracturing process’. (Section 2 (b)(1))

The bigger problem is that, according to the article, “21 of the 31 states listed do not have any specific regulation addressing hydraulic fracturing; 17 states do not require companies to list the chemicals they put in the ground; and no state requires companies to track how much drilling fluid they pump into or remove from the earth — crucial data for determining what portion of chemicals has been discarded underground.”

So much for “the states do a great job regulating fracking already.”

As to the cost question, the study that supposedly claims that the cost of complying with the SDWA is about $100,000 per gas well has a number of major flaws. For example, the study uses data that’s 10 years old, it estimates costs for tests that aren’t required by the SDWA, and the vice president of the group who did the study (and was interviewed for the ProPublica article) believes “that many of the processes listed in the report are already being practiced to a greater degree than they were in 1999, meaning that even if they were required they may not be additional burdens at all.”

An estimate produced by Deutsche Bank analysts found something radically different from the industry’s preferred studies:

If all the testing that Godec includes is factored out, the regulations would cost the industry just $4,500 per well, according to his report, or just six hundredths of a percent of the cost of establishing a typical new well.

The jury’s still out on whether fracking is a threat to water supplies (anecdotes are not data), but one thing is abundantly clear: the industry didn’t do itself any favors by misrepresenting and/or cherry-picking study data and findings in order to oppose federal fracking legislation.

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Can concentrating photovoltaic compete with solar thermal and standard photovoltaic?

Photovoltaic (PV) electricity is notoriously inefficient. The theoretical maximum for a simple PV cell irradiated by a single sun (equivalent irradiance) is 31%, which is less than half of the efficiency of the best coal generation. More complex PV cells rely on the absorption of multiple light frequencies or the concentration of solar energy to achieve greater efficiencies. While there have been some interesting recent developments in solar power such as so-called combined-cycle solar, these developments aren’t intended for utility-scale electricity generation. A new technology reported by Greenwire has the potential to provide gigawatts of electricity – concentrating photovoltaic (CPV).

The point of CPV is to make solar electricity cheaper. Compared to solar thermal (the concentrating of sunlight on a tower that boils water to turn an electrical turbine), CPV uses much less water and has a more distributed footprint. Given that the same areas that are good for solar power are also short on water resources, cutting water consumption by over 99% is a huge deal. In addition, environmentalists are already getting concerned about large swaths of desert being converted into solar thermal and standard solar PV farms, with the accompanying environmental degradation and loss of wild space. CPV, on the other hand, is more like wind turbines – they can be spread out and the area between and underneath CPV structures can still be used for other purposes.

As far as the energy economics of the technology, one company mentioned in the article did a “cradle-to-grave” energy analysis and found that it takes only six months for their CPV technology to start producing more energy than it took to create the CPV structure in the first place.

But as good as CPV appears to be, the Greenwire article points out that CPV suffers from the same problem that all solar does right now – it needs government support in order to survive long enough to become cost-competitive with other supplies like natural gas and coal (although it’s on track to reach parity with other solar technologies in the next year or two).

CPV sounds like a great technology to me because it appears to be far more environmentally friendly than solar thermal is. But in the energy sector, as with commercial commodity products, the best technology doesn’t always win in the end. Instead, marketing, financing, and political influence are greater indicators of success than low water consumption, a small carbon footprint, and a smaller physical footprint.

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Wind turbines may affect weather

If you’ve ever laid down on the ground during a windstorm, you probably noticed that wind at ground level is much slower than wind at head height or a couple of hundred feet in the air. This is the main reason that wind turbines are raised up on massive towers – the wind blows stronger and more consistently high above the ground, making the turbine more efficient as a result. Similarly, wind doesn’t blow through the forest itself as fast as it blows does through open clearings. And faster or slower wind speeds has an effect on the weather downwind.

But what happens when you cover large swaths of land with extra-tall steel trees with spinning branches (aka wind turbines)? The Bright Green Blog at the Christian Science Monitor has a article devoted to answering this very question.

According to the article, wind farms on the scale of North American storm systems has an appreciable affect, in this case defined as “larger than typical weather-forecast uncertainties,” with the effects felt not just in North America but also across the North Atlantic and on into Europe. Of course, the size of a storm system is very often tens of miles in diameter and can be hundreds of miles across, but if you covered the Midwest with turbines, well, that’s certainly going to be large enough to qualify.

What does this mean? Well, the scientists interviewed for the article said that the impacts on wind speed, cloudiness, and temperature, but that the impacts were small compared to the benefits of removing carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere. Beyond that, though, the scientists weren’t comfortable speculating.

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Geoengineering doesn’t help acidification

According to a new study in the journal Geophysical Research Letter and reported by Standford University News, some forms of geoengineering may cool the planet but do nothing to reverse the effects of ocean acidification.

In the immortal words of Obviousman: No Duh!

Ocean acidification is a result of the burning of fossil fuels. In essence, the CO₂ is emitted in to the air and then absorbed by the ocean, resulting in the creation of carbonic acid and a corresponding reduction in ocean pH. Geoengineering schemes like covering up the sun with a sunshield in space or emitting large amounts of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere or seeding more clouds with a fleet of automated seawater spraying ships all work on the same basic principle – reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth’s surface. However, none of them pull the extra CO₂ out of the atmosphere that would be required to stop additional ocean acidification.

Perhaps I’m being a little too harsh on the study authors. They did run the geoengineering method through climate models in order to better understand how ocean acidification will be affected, and that’s valuable information to have. But the overall conclusion – changing solar insolation via geoengineering does nothing to stop ocean acidification – well, duh.

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New study on the PETM raises questions, but no answers

55 million years ago, the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) produced between five and nine degrees Celsius of warming globally, and that warming lasted for tens of thousands of years. A new study published in Nature Geoscience investigated the PETM using a single climate model and claims to have found that CO₂ alone was insufficient to have caused the PETM.

However, once you read the actual paper, it’s not quite that clear-cut. First off, the PETM happened during a geological era when the Pacific was much larger than it is today and the Atlantic was much smaller and the Earth was much warmer before the PETM than today. And the authors of the study acknowledge all these points:

Undoubtedly, the climatic boundary conditions before the PETM were different from today’s – including different continental configuration, absence of continental ice and a different base climate, which limits the PETM’s suitability as the perfect future analogue.” (emphasis mine)

Second, the study investigates a single climate model, rather than the many different climate models that are available. Even so, though, the study does raise a couple of important questions that really should be answered.

The first question is whether, as the authors claim, this study represents “a fundamental gap in our understanding” of climate that “needs to be filled to confidently predict future climate change.” It certainly suggests that we don’t understand enough, but is the problem our understanding of the PETM, our understanding of recent climate change, or both? At this point, there’s not enough information to know the answer to that question. After all, some scientists have suggested that climate models are insufficient to predict the long-term changes to the Earth’s climate resulting from anthropogenic CO₂, and that over the next thousand years, CO₂ will actually drive far more heating than it does over the next century.

The second question is whether this study supports the contention that climate models are underestimating the effects of anthropogenic climate disruption. The authors found that their climate model only accounted for approximately 3.5 degrees of the five to nine degrees of warming that actually occurred during the PETM. If this is accurate, then this study could mean that the models to date have underestimated the effect of CO₂ emissions by 43% to 157%, and that climate disruption during the next century or two could be much, much worse than it is already expected to be.

Which question you focus on probably depends more on whether you’re a climate disruption “skeptic” or denier, or whether you’re a proponent of anthropogenic climate disruption.

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New climate idea might break US-China emissions stalemate

The U.S. won’t cut emissions until China and India are on-board, but China and India won’t cut emissions unless the U.S. and Europe cut even more. This Catch-22 of blame justifying a refusal to act has dominated post-Kyoto Protocol climate politics for years now, and recent news suggests that it’s not going to get better any time soon. Into this stalemate steps some of the same Princeton researchers who developed the climate wedge visualization aid with a possible new approach that is agnostic to the source of the CO₂.

The idea is to force the top billion or so people who are the highest CO₂ emitters to cut their emissions, no matter where those emitters are located on the globe. The U.S. would still have a huge number of people who needed to cut their emissions (people like me, for example) somehow, but so would a large number of Chinese, most of the EU, Russia, and even a few countries in Africa and the Middle East. But this scheme would automatically exempt, at least to start with, the poorest countries and even permit them to increase their emissions. This scheme would also rope in developing nations as they started to reach the per-capita emissions cap, so a country like India that is presently mostly under the cap would find itself having to start paying automatically as their economy improves over the next several decades.

It’s an interesting idea, and given that it might enable real action on climate disruption and CO₂ emissions, it’s certainly worth considering. I look forward to hearing more about it in the coming months, especially if it starts to get traction among climate policy wonks.

Image credits:
AAPG.org
Goodcleantech.com
Stanford.edu
PNAS

William Forstchen has a bad dream—a really bad dream—that goes something like this:

A cataclysmic attack throws the United States back to the dark ages, with no electricity, no communication or transportation networks, and no medicines. The most vulnerable members of society—the very young and the very old—begin to die off first, but soon hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people, begin dying. Rogue bands of lawless predators, living by rule of force rather than by rule of law, prey on weakened communities. The government, crippled, can’t come to anyone’s rescue.

And all it takes is a single bomb detonated high in the atmosphere, two hundred miles above the continent.

“Welcome to my nightmare,” Forstchen says with the kind of grim chuckle usually reserved for gallows humor.

But this is no joke. “It sounds like it’s science fiction, Mayan-prophecy, end-of-the-world stuff,” Forstchen admits, “but it’s dead-on real.”

Forstchen is a professor of history at Montreat College, a small liberal arts school in the Great Smokey Mountains of North Carolina. He’s written some forty books, including a series of successful “alternative history” novels with former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

His most recent novel, One Second After, outlines his nightmare in chilling detail.

At first thought, it might seem far-fetched to imagine a single bomb wiping out the entire country. But it wouldn’t be the power of the explosion, per se, that would cause the problem. Instead, the real problem would be the electro-magnetic pulse—the EMP—generated by the explosion.

Traveling at the speed of light, the EMP would act like an enormous ripple in the earth’s electromagnetic field. As that ripple hits electrical systems, it would get amplified way beyond anything a typical circuit breaker could handle.

“This energy surge will destroy all delicate electronics in your home, even as it destroys all the major components all the way back to the power company’s generators and the phone company’s main relays,” Forstchen writes. “In far less than a millisecond, the entire power grid of the United States, and all that it supports will be destroyed.”

And if the power goes, everything goes.

“Everyone remembers the aftermath of Katrina,” Forstchen says. “It covered fifty-thousand square miles, but it was basically a local event. An EMP would be a nation-wide Katrina-like event.”

Some experts predict the resulting casualty rate could be as high as ninety percent by the end of the first year.

“This will raise a lot of moral questions, too,” Forstchen says. “Are we going to let people out of maximum security prisons? Do we triage off the elderly?”

The scenarios Forstchen envisions in the book aren’t necessarily fictional, either. “I didn’t want to turn this into some kind of Mad Max thing,” he explains.

Forstchen drew on his background as a historian to look for scenarios of desolation and desperation that would fit his post-EMP world. The WWII sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad provided a terrible bounty of examples: tiered rationing, bread with sawdust baked into it to make it more filling, vicious bands of murderous thugs, communal graves.

His visit to the cemetery outside of Leningrad proved especially haunting. “There were six-hundred-thousand dead after the siege,” Forstchen says. “And the Russian have a tradition of putting laminated photos of the deceased on their tombstones. I will never be able to shake that.” That trauma, he says, is still on the Russian soul.

And, the novel argues, America would suffer trauma even worse if an EMP strike hit us.

“I imagined my daughter being in that (post-EMP) world,” says Forstchen, a single parent. “I imagined my daughter being ill in that world.”

As a result, he says, “it got really bad for me” writing novel. “I will never be able to shake that.” Other parents who’ve read the book have had similar reactions. “’I saw my kids in the middle of this,’ they’ve told me,” Forstchen says. “Any parent who reads this, it’s going to hit hard.”

But for most people, the threat of an EMP attack is so abstract and remote, it’s hard to get them to take an interest. “Some people look at it and think it’s too big: ‘I don’t want to think about it,’” Forstchen says. “Well, we have to think about it.”

Forstchen has worked with Reps. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) and Denny Thompson (D-Miss) to educate other lawmakers about the potential threat of EMPs, but he admits the going has been tough. Even the House Armed Services subcommittee that was studying EMPs was disbanded. “Unfortunately, this is an issue that doesn’t have a constituency,” Forstchen says.

One reason he wrote One Second After, he says, was to “put a voice” to the issue. So far, the strategy seems to be working. The book peaked at number eleven on the New York Times bestseller list and is being developed by Warner Brothers into a film.

“I’m more optimistic than I was six months or even a year ago, when I was working on the book,” Forstchen says. “Lawmakers are starting to get the word again.” In late June, Forstchen met with a group that included members of Congress and intellectuals from various political think tanks to again press his argument, which suddenly has new urgency because of missile testing in North Korea.

“Look at North Korea and Iran,” Forstchen says. “Why are they so interested in building small-scale nuclear missiles? Only one model fits.” It’s the fact that the U.S. is so vulnerable that our enemies are even contemplating such an attack, he adds.

But even beyond the national defense reasons, Forstchen points out that there are significant environmental reasons for protecting ourselves against EMPs. The biggest reason, he says, hangs high above us in the sky every day.

In late August of 1859, a series of solar flares erupted from the sun with such magnitude that they burned out telegraphy grids across Europe and North America. Similar solar storms have taken place in 1921 and 1960. According the Forstchen, research suggests that we’re heading into a period that could see another, similar upswing in solar activity.

“We built this delicate, elaborate infrastructure without thinking about how vulnerable it is,” Forstchen says. “We need to get off the stick and do something about our infrastructure.”

Just one percent of the money allocated in the recent bailout package could be enough to create a survival infrastructure, Forstchen says. “It wouldn’t save the entire system, but it could be used to create nodes of infrastructure that could be quickly built upon. Otherwise, what good is a bailout of there’s no country to bail out?”

Most importantly, Forstchen says, individuals should learn to prepare and protect themselves. “What’s the big lesson from Katrina: Don’t wait for the feds,” he says. His website offers a variety of simple, precautionary things people can do. It also offers tips on how to recognize an EMP should one occur.

“People need to think on three levels: on the level of citizens of America/citizens of the world, the personal level, and the community level,” Forstchen says. “Eight, ten, fifteen people thinking together can do a lot. We have to learn how to think together.”

Forstchen realizes he may sound like “a crazy old crank” for sounding alarmist. (During his first-ever radio interview on the book, the first caller rang it to accuse him of being a paranoid right-wing survivalist.) “I just want to see bipartisan action on this,” he says. “I don’t care who gets the credit. We’re all Americans. We need to get by the partisan bickering, at least on this. Otherwise, we’re all going to be on the same sinking boat the next day.”

Forstchen urges people to contact their congressmen about EMPs. “If enough people do, suddenly the issue has legs, and something can get done about it,” he says.

And that, Forstchen says, will definitely help him sleep easier.

S&R will feature a review of Forstchen’s book, One Second After, on Tuesday.

• Early deaths cost Appalachia more than coal jobs earn
• Emission of strong GHGs exceed IPCC emissions scenarios and expected to continue to do so
• Raytheon testing oil shale tech to sequester CO₂

Appalachia has some of the most impoverished communites in the United States. The entire region is economically depressed as compared to the national average. But coal communities in Appalachia are even worse off than the rest of the region, a fact that runs counter to the idea that coal jobs support local communities. A new study out of the Institute for Health Policy Research at West Virginia University and published in Public Health Reports looked at this discrepency and found that, even using conservative assumptions, the economic costs of coal mining in Appalachian communities far outweighed the benefits from having a coal mine in the community.

The study reached this conclusion by gathering publicly available data from various government databases and then calculating how much economic benefit coal mines produced in Appalachian communities vs. how much the coal mines cost in early deaths. As a result, the study had to prove that there were unusual deaths in coal communities, and they did so using statistical analyses designed to account for the effects of “smokin, race, poveryt, physician supply, education, and other variables.” And even after adjusting for all these variables and removing their effects on early mortality, the study found that there was nearly 3000 excess deaths in coal-heavy Appalachian counties as compared to the rest of the US.

Multiply the number of excess deaths caused by “chronic forms of heart, respiratory, and kidney disease, as well as lung cancer” by the official value of statistical life (VSL, the amount of money that each life is worth for cost-benefit analyses performed by the federal government) and you have a conservative estimate of the costs of coal mining. Similarly, use an old 1997 estimate of the economic benefits to Appalachian communites, adjust for yearly inflation, unemployment since the start of the study period, add tax income and subtract government subsidies, and you get a reasonable estimate for the value of coal in Appalachia.

The result: just over $8 billion in estimated benefits to Appalachian communities, but at cost of $51 billion in lost economic power due just to the early deaths of people living in coal communities.

Put another way, since 1997, Appalachian coal communities have lost $43 billion dollars that they would have kept in their communities had they thrown the coal companies out.

The paper is careful to point out that they can’t definitively prove that air and water pollution from coal is responsible for the excess deaths detected in the coal communities. But the study’s conclusions and discussion make it abundantly clear that the preponderance of evidence is that coal pollution is directly responsible:

Elevated adjusted mortality [due to chronic diseases] occurred in both males and females, suggesting that the effects were not due to occupational exposure, as almost all coal miners are men. These illnesses are consistent with a hypothesis of exposure to water and air pollution from mining activities.
…
[G]iven the literature on the impacts of social disparities and the previously documented problems of coal-dependent economies, such a causal link [between excess mortality and coal mining] seems likely.
…
We concluded that [the role of environmental pollutants in excessl mortality] was possible given the results of the regression models and previously cited literature on the environmental consequences of coal mining.

And even with all that, the study points out that the cost estimate may in fact be too low. The cost estimates were just the costs of excess mortality and didn’t include health care costs, poverty reduction costs (such as food stamps), lowered property values due to nearby coal mining, or the intrinsic value of the natural resources (such as streams and mountains that could attract tourism or site renewable energy) that are destroyed in modern Appalachian coal mining (ie mountaintop removal).

The study’s authors specifically limited their scope to Appalachia. But if the results of their study holds nationally, then this could be yet another nail in coal’s coffin, right along side peak coal.

Thanks to lead study author Dr. Michael Hendryx, PhD, for a copy of this paper.

Paper reference: Hendryx M & Ahern MM, Mortality in Appalachian Coal Mining Regions: The Value of Statistical Life Lost, Public Health Reports 124, p 541-550, 2009.

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Emission of strong GHGs exceed IPCC emissions scenarios and expected to continue to do so

When scientists discovered that chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) were responsible for destroying the ozone layer that protects the Earth from dangerous ultraviolet solar radiation, the international community created a treaty known as the Montreal Protocol that layed out how to replace CFCs with other, less dangerous chemicals. Since then, however, climate disruption has become a serious concern. As a result, the powerful greenhouse gases known as hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) that were created specifically to replace CFCs have become a serious problem as well. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and originally reported by Solve Climate has found that, unless there is international committement to phasing out HFCs in favor of other refrigerants, the world will generate enough HFCs by 2050 to equal 6-13 years of global carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions.

According to the paper, the emissions scenarios used by the IPCC for the most recent Assessment Report underestimated the amount of HFCs being emitted into the atmosphere by approximately 20%. The study’s authors attribute this increase mostly to the wider deployment of refrigeration in developing countries. Because the bulk of the growth in HFC consumption is in developing nations instead of the developing world, national legislation limiting national emissions of HFCs like Waxman-Markey ACES or the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act frmo a couple of years ago have almost no effect on global HFC emissions. However, the study proposes several options for HFC phaseouts under the Montreal Protocol that could dramatically reduce HFC emissions. If the business-as-usual (BAU) emits so many HFCs that it’s equal to 6-13 years of CO₂ emissions, then the best-case Montreal Protocol solution proposed in the study could reduce that to 2-3 years of CO₂ emissions. That’s a huge potential savings in greenhouse gases that would reduce the thermal forcing on the Earth’s global climate.

As with the previousl study, however, not all the climate effects of HFCs were included. Only the direct effects on climate via radiative forcing (the amount of additional energy absorbed by the Earth due to the presence of HFCs) were calculated. But there are a number of indirect effects as well, such as energy consumed or saved during the use of HFC refrigerants and required to produce the HFCs in the first place. This means that the estimate of the climate effects of HFC consumption is conservative and thus likely to increase with a fuller accounting of indirect effects.

In other words, if the world doesn’t change refrigerants globally, we may find ourselves in a neverending cycle of “the Earth gets hotter, we run the AC more, which needs more energy and refrigerants, which makes the earth hotter….”

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Raytheon testing oil shale tech to sequester CO₂

Oil shale in the Green River Basin of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming holds what could be a trillion barrels of oil. It’s locked in the rocks in a waxy form called kerogen that needs to be mined or heated in place to extract it efficiently. One of the technologies being tested to heat the kerogen enough to pump it with standard oil pumps is a massive microwave system that heats up the rock. The developer of this technology, Raytheon, thinks that they can adapt it to efficiently sequester CO₂ in a solid form underground.

Most current plans for carbon sequestration rely on pumping liquid CO₂ into deep saline aquifers or depleted natural gas fields. The aquifer option assumes that an aquifer will absorb the CO₂, become more acidic, and react with the rock, turning the CO₂ from a liquid into a carbonate mineral. The natural gas field option assumes that the CO₂ will stay liquid or may even turn into a gas, but that the geology that held the natural gas underground will also hold the CO₂ indefinitely. But both assume that the geology will be able to contain the injected CO₂ indefinitely, an assumption that has not been tested and remains a huge risk to any carbon sequestration scheme.

However, the Raytheon solution reported by GreenInc supposedly injects the CO₂ into the ground encased in a gel that solidifies when exposed to microwaves (or hot rock – the GreenInc article isn’t clear on this detail), theoretically all but eliminating the risk that the sequestered CO₂ will leak back out of the ground.

If it works, then the Raytheon solution is probably lower risk than liquid CO₂ injection into aquifers or old natural gas fields. But the massive microwaves are going to take a huge amount of elecricity, and in the western US that means scarce water too.

I can’t help but wonder if the CO₂ emissions from generating the electricity needed for for sequestration outweighs the amount of CO₂ actually sequestered….

Image Credits:
Vivian Stockman via SouthWings
PNAS, via SolveClimate

• Study says offsets make ACES carbon cap almost meaningless
• China rejects binding GHG cuts
• USGS study suggests peak coal may be closer than previously thought
• FutureGen coal CCS pilot project revived
• EU needs to upgrade its electricity transmission
• Deep water wind turbine undergoing testing
• More wind power means fewer hydroelectric dams?

Michael Shellenberger is one of environmentalism’s persona non grata de jour. He and Ted Nordhaus founded the Breakthrough Institute in order to push for technological solutions to environmental problems instead of policy solutions that both men have argued are doomed to failure from the word “Go.” This was not exactly a popular thing to say in the halls of Congress or around the water cooler at any number of large environmental organizations dedicated to creating policy solutions.

An analysis of the American Climate and Energy Security Act (ACES) by Shellenberger and Jesse Jenkins, Breakthrough’s Director of Energy and Climate Policy, found that the offset provisions of the legislation are so loose that they essentially make the carbon cap portion of the ACES-defined “cap-and-trade” system almost meaningless.

The problem, as illustrated in the image above, is that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that companies will buy more carbon offsets (such as reforestation credits) than carbon allowances under the cap-and-trade proposal. Not only will this suppress allowance prices by an estimated 70%, Breakthrough estimates that it will also result in reductions of “cumulative emissions in supposedly capped sectors of the economy by just 0.5% through 2020.” That’s 55.1 billion metric tons instead of 55.4 billion metric tons of carbon emissions. (UPDATE: A typo in the Breakthrough Institute’s analysis has been corrected and the cumulative emissions is now 2%.)

Offsets are a huge problem in general – they’re difficult to verify and thus prone to fraud and easy to game. And this analysis illustrates that the sheer number of offsets available in ACES undermines the bill’s goal of cutting carbon emissions, perhaps fatally.

I’m still personally ambivalent about ACES. But if the analysis is accurate (and not everyone agrees that the Breakthrough analysis is), it means that parts of ACES are in desperate need of repair. Unless problems like this are fixed or, at a minimum no more problems like this crop up, I could actually find myself hoping for ACES to fail. And that is just depressing.

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China rejects binding GHG cuts

In yet a further indication of “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” TerraDaily reports that China will not accept binding cuts in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

According to a quote from Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang:

China is still a developing country and the present task confronting China is to develop its economy and alleviate poverty, as well as raise the living standard of its people. Given that, it is natural for China to have some increase in its emissions, so it is not possible for China in that context to accept a binding or compulsory target.

This is bad, but it’s hardly news. China has been hiding behind the “we’re a developing nation” and “the U.S. and Europe have to cut first because they’re more responsible than we are” excuses for years now. The problem is that China and the U.S. combine to total more than 50% of all GHG emissions globally, especially carbon dioxide (CO₂), so no real progress can be made on cutting emissions without both nations going along. And without a binding national cap, China has essentially said that they’ll continue to emit GHGs as necessary to grow their economy.

China’s emissions will fall naturally due to the global recession just as U.S. emissions have fallen. China’s economy is overwhelming driven by exports, and other nations simply lack sufficient money to import all the Chinese goods that China can manufacture. But China’s electricity is overwhelming generated from burning coal, their coal plants aren’t particularly efficient, and they’re still building coal plants at an alarming rate. As such, smog is a serious problem throughout China. And because of government corruption and horrible living conditions, I suspect that popular pressures to reform government and clean the nation’s air and water will ultimately slow China’s economic growth and it’s related carbon emissions.

But if not, then there’s always a carbon tariff on imported Chinese goods. That would get China’s attention….

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USGS study suggests peak coal may be closer than previously thought

“The United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal.” “We have enough coal deposits in the U.S. for 250 years.” These kinds of claims are heard all over the place by proponents of coal power and coal-to-fuel conversion technologies. And the claims are technically correct – to a point. But what coal boosters fail to mention is that there’s “total coal,” and then there’s “coal that can be extracted economically using available technology.” And, as a Daily Green article about a United States Geological Survey (USGS) study from 2008 points out, the two are most definitely not the same.

According to the Daily Green article, the USGS studied the Powder River Basin coal deposit in Wyoming and found that the recoverable reserves were only 38% of the total demonstrated reserves of 201 billion short tons. This difference was due to rights of way, coal deposits under rivers and towns, and so on. But the USGS also estimated that the amount of coal that was economically viable to mine at 2008 prices was only 6% of the total, or just 10.1 billion short tons.

I looked up some Energy Information Administration (EIA) data on total coal reserves and consumption rate and did some quick calculations. The EIA estimates that there are 489 billion short tons of coal in demonstrated reserves nationwide. But if we cut that down to only 6% of the total using the economic arguments made in the USGS paper, that produces a total of 29.34 billion short tons of coal that can be extracted profitably. Assuming that coal consumption grows at an annual rate of only 0.86% (the average of the growth rates between 2002 and 2008), the U.S. would consume all of that available coal by 2032.

Now, there’s a lot of caveats to this quick estimate. First, as prices rise, more and more coal will become profitable to extract and better extraction technologies will be developed. Second, the USGS analysis was for one coal deposit in one region, but there are massive coal deposits in the interior of the U.S. and in Appalachia. Whether the Powder River analysis holds for those other regions is presently unknown, at least to me.

But if my quick estimate holds water over the entire country, then there’s a question I have to ask – does it make sense to spend billions of dollars developing carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies that might not even be ready for deployment until after we’ve passed peak coal?

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FutureGen coal CCS pilot project revived

Late in the Bush Administration, the FutureGen coal CCS pilot project was canceled because of supposed cost overruns – or because President Bush’s home state of Texas was rejected in favor of President Obama’s home state of Illinois. It later turned out that the overruns were erroneous, but the project wasn’t reinstated. According to the NYTimes last week, the Department of Energy (DoE) revived FutureGen. The DoE will supply $1 billion while the private energy and utility companies involved in the project will pay between $400 and $600 million total over several years.

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EU needs to upgrade its electricity transmission

Electricity transmission is likely to be one of the more difficult problems facing deployment of renewable energy. Most people don’t want high voltage power lines running near their property and environmentalists don’t generally like the idea of spoiling wilderness or habitat with the same. But under one renewable paradigm, more transmission lines are necessary if electricity will be moved from where it’s generated to where it’s consumed, such as moving wind power from the Midwest to the east coast of the U.S.

But there’s another, related problem that needs to be solved with transmission of renewable electricity – old transmission lines may be unable to carry the new electricity at all. According to an article in the Guardian, this is precisely what a new study of Europe’s transmission lines has found.

According to the article, the European Academies Science Advisory Council (Easac) electricity grid working group found that the 20% renewable electricity generated by 2020 could be “wasted unless it can be distributed properly.” Furthemore, the article says that the Easac report also found “[u]pgrading the grids in individual countries should be done to common standards, and eventually the movement of electricity across Europe might even be managed centrally.”

A report last year (and reported by the Carboholic) found that all of the EU’s electricity needs could be met by large solar farms located in the Sahara that then transmitted the electricity via high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission lines to Europe around and across the Mediterranean Sea. The Guardian article says that the Easac report found the following:

In order to do that, you need to design the transmission system so it can cope with the large power flows through existing countries’ networks [but] Italy’s transmission system is not designed for that, nor is Spain’s.

No single country’s electricity grid is designed to carry half a continent’s electricity through its borders, which is essentially what would happen with Spain and Italy.

There is another renewable energy paradigm that might help alleviate the transmission bottleneck, at least enough to give the EU time to build out a whole new set of modern transmission lines – distributed generation of electricity. The question is whether or not solar and wind power could be made cheaply enough and deployed widely enough to make centralized renewable generation (like the Sahara proposal) largely unnecessary. Time will tell.

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Deep water wind turbine undergoing testing

According to an NYTimes GreenInc article last week, a deep water marine turbine is nearly ready for testing off the coast of Norway. The article and some background available on StatoilHydro’s website say that the turbine will float upon a tower that is anchored to the bottom with wires. The physics of a deep center of gravity (approximately 100 meters below the ocean’s surface) and some intelligent control systems will reduce the amount of bobbing that the floating turbine suffers as a result of wave action. The technology has been adapted from offshore oil drilling platforms, StatoilHydro’s area of expertise.

There are a number of reasons why deep water turbines are being developed. First, as the nearly eight year saga that is the Cape Wind project attests, environmentalism can run afoul of NIMBYism even in the most “liberal” of places – Nantucket Sound, Massachusetts. In this case, the wealthy homeowners along the Sound didn’t want white turbine towers spoiling their ocean view. But deep water turbines could be placed much farther out to sea, reducing the threat of NIMBY lawsuits.

Second, the American Wind Energy Association points out in their FAQ that winds tend to be stronger and blow more consistently farther offshore. This means that turbines will produce more electricity more consistently than near-shore or on-shore turbines will.

And third, according to the GreenInc article, not all regions of the world have shallow off-shore continental shelves that are suitable for shallow-water, near-shore wind turbines. In these situations, deep water turbines are the only offshore wind power option.

The turbine is slated to start generating electricity in July after the transmission line is laid from the turbine to the shore and will run for two years.

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More wind power means fewer hydroelectric dams?

Last week, the NYTimes had an article about the interaction between wind power and hydroelectric dams in the Pacific Northwest. The Bonneville Power Administration is building out large numbers of wind turbines along the Columbia and Snake rivers, but as the number of wind turbines goes up, environmentalists interested in restoring salmon habitat and spawning grounds have started to suggest that now is the time to remove the dams and return the rivers to a (more) wild state.

This provides yet another example of the tradeoffs and problems that environmentalists are going to have to face as their goals of wilderness protection, endangered species protection, renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, etc. come into conflict.

One of the problems facing this kind of a tradeoff is that the wind doesn’t blow all the time, and so standby electricity generation is necessary to fill in the gaps. In most parts of the country, that extra capacity is provide by natural gas or coal plants, but the Pacific Northwest is largely powered by hydroelectric. So removing too many dams and the electricity generation the dams provide will probably make the grid in the Northwest less stable, a point made by Bonneville in the NYTimes article.

In response, Bill Arthur, a Sierra Club representative for the Northwest, suggested in the article that Bonneville build more turbines scattered across a wider geographic area, with the idea being that the wind will probably be blowing somewhere and that the additional turbines would “smooth out” the wind power supply. And he pointed out that “dismantling [dams] could take six or more years, allowing plenty of time to plan the transition to new power sources.”

One of the problems with Arthur’s suggestion is that the list of alternative power sources that are likely to be available by the time the dams come down are the usual suspects: coal and natural gas, with possibly some solar power added into the mix. Is trading a hydroelectric dam that stresses salmon for a coal plant that poisons them or overheats their river (directly via cooling water discharges or indirectly via climate disruption) a good idea?

I don’t know. But I do know this – these tradeoffs aren’t going to go away. In fact, they’re going to get more common and become thornier different environmental projects collide head first more and more often over the coming years and decades. Ultimately, some hard decisions and difficult compromises will be necessary.

Image credits:
Breakthrough Institute
S&R
EIA
Solberg Production / StatoilHydro

Despite pie-in-the-sky economic theory, competitively priced, quality products do not always trump those of lesser quality in the marketplace. A variation of Sony’s Beta format video was used for decades by professionals because of its superiority to the VHS format, but this didn’t stop VHS from becoming the dominant consumer format. McDonald’s does not make food that is cheaper, more nutritious, or even better tasting than a good sandwich from a local deli, but this hasn’t stopped the burgermeister from selling untold billions of its artery-clogging offerings. The US health care system gets arguably fewer positive results per dollar spent than any other health care system in the world, but there are US consumers who will defend it as being “the best” right up to their untimely deaths.

The truth is that marketing techniques often trump product value when determining marketplace winners and losers. The growth of advertising in the late 19^th century taught marketers that they could make profitable products that had no value whatsoever. These included electrical trusses, waistbands, and other devices to improve health, universal medicines that were mostly alcohol mixed with God-knows-what, and “arctic” boots guaranteed to produce frostbitten toes for the clueless Yukon prospector. Breakthroughs in psychology in the 20^th century gave marketers powerful new tools for their arsenals. For instance, they learned that products could be sold while ignoring their real attributes by attaching them to an image. Cigarettes, a product that tastes pretty much like you would expect burning leaves to taste, could make you so sexy and alluring that people would ignore your tobacco reek. Rocks could be packaged and sold as pets. A coonskin cap could make you Davy Crockett, and becoming a fake blonde would make you irresistible to men, while having little or no effect on your intelligence (or that’s the claim, anyway).

In one sense, nothing has changed much. A brightly colored, but underpowered, computer can be sold because it’s been carefully linked to “cool,” or a lousy video game can fly off shelves because it’s based on a popular movie. There are signs, though, that the days of sizzle counting for more than steak are coming to an end, and the best current example of this may be the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3 camera, a product that most traditional marketing departments would consider very difficult to sell, but that is selling so well, in fact, that it is going for up to 50% over suggested retail price at those few outlets that can manage to keep it in stock. The reason the LX3 is selling so well is that it is a superior camera for its class. The marketing issue is that it does not appear to be superior, and therein we have both the mystery and the hope for the quality of future products.

Most of us have walked through consumer electronics stores and seen the compact camera displays. Generally, there is at least one long row of small cameras, each having a little card next to it with the brand name, model name and number, price, and a few sales points. Most common among these sales points is the number of megapixels a camera’s sensor possesses. There was a time, indeed, when the number of megapixels on a sensor was a pretty fair indication of a camera’s resolution, which is one of the key factors of image quality. Early compact electronic cameras had barely enough resolution to make a decent 3×5 print, so there was a race to pack ever more pixels onto small chips to improve images.

It was true then (and now) that a three megapixel camera will almost always outperform a one megapixel one, and a six megapixel camera will make a much sharper image than a camera with only three. But once one gets above six megapixels, the issue becomes much more complex. Understanding why is a bit technical, and it’s the very complexity of the issue that has kept camera marketers trumpeting ever more megapixels — while tolerating ever-decreasing image quality at most settings — to sell their products. Simply put, consumers have come to equate megapixels with higher image quality even though it is not true, so marketers have forced camera manufacturers into degrading image quality to sell to badly informed camera buyers. Consumers also seem to like large range zooms of almost telescopic power, not realizing that these relatively slow lenses also work to degrade image quality. The LX3 bucks this trend and, contrary to expectations, consumers have rewarded it for doing so.

Some Technical Notes

Note: I’m going to go into a bit of a technical explanation here, and will try to make it as painless as possible. Those who would prefer to skip the technical part are welcome to read down below this marked section for my conclusions.

The race for ever-more megapixels has an enormous quality drawback. By their nature, electronic components produce fields that interfere with other electronic components. Pack too many pixel-sized sensors on a tiny chip, and this interference manifests itself as noise in the final image. The noise is caused when a number of pixels produce colors (often white) that are at odds with the colors they should produce. The result is a sort of static that is roughly like the grain one can see on high-speed films.

At their lowest sensitivities, when there is the least current or “gain” in the electronic sensor, small chips with very high megapixel counts can perform quite well. When the sensitivity is turned up to account for low light, however, or to allow greater depth of field by closing the aperture or faster shutter speeds to freeze motion or avoid camera shake, the noise increases. Camera-makers have fought this problem with software that identifies the noisy pixels and guesses at the correct color replacement. This software inevitably blurs the image until, in some cases, it appears to be almost a watercolor. As a result, camera manufacturers have tried to set their software to allow some noise in order to maintain sharpness. The end result is that small-sensor, compact cameras tend to produce poor image quality and/or unacceptable noise at anything above the film equivalent of ISO 400. For some cameras, even ISO 400 produces too much noise for acceptable images.

Compounding this problem is the race toward ever-more-powerful zoom lenses for these little cameras. Zoom lenses tend to be long lenses, and long lenses are a bit like looking down a cardboard tube – they are “slow” because they simply admit less light than larger, less zoomy lenses. So, a camera with a sensor and software that tend to produce poor images in low light is often equipped with a lens that lets in a half to a quarter of the light allowed by cameras with less-aggressive zooms, meaning that it will produce many, many more inferior, noisy images than the “faster” lens-equipped camera.

The obvious technical solution is to build compact cameras with larger sensors and/or fewer megapixels than is currently possible, and equip them with large, fast, wide-angle lenses of limited zoom range. All other things being equal, cameras built this way would produce superior images in more lighting conditions than cameras equipped with small, megapixel-packed sensors and slow, long-zoom lenses. They would also allow higher shutter speeds and greater control over depth of field in lower-light conditions, giving both more creative control and less possibility of hand-held camera shake.

The obvious marketing solution is to build cameras with ever more megapixels packed onto a small chip, more aggressive software to gloss over the noise, and longer and slower lenses to wow consumers with telescopic range most of them will seldom use, because these things are supposed to be what consumers want and will buy.

Can Internet Product Reviews Overcome Marketing Hype?

The LX3 uses a larger-than-normal sensor for a compact camera, limiting it to only 10.1 megapixels. It also uses a fast, 2.0 to 2.8 zoom with a rather limited 35mm camera equivalent range of 24mm to 60mm. It is also built around a high-quality, Leica lens with minimal barrel distortion for a lens this wide and this small. It also has a retro, rangefinder look and a manually removed lens cap that is dictated by its fast lens and larger-than-average sensor. None of these attributes is supposed to make buyers of the average consumer. So, why is the LX3 flying off shelves for nearly $700 in some places, when its suggested retail price is around $500?

I wish I knew for sure, but I suspect, and hope, that we are witnessing the power of the Internet. Key “Panasonic LX3 review” into google.com, and you’ll get a list of glowing reviews. Or just go here for a thorough review or here for an abbreviated review comparing the LX3 to its competition.

If one tracks the pricing history of the LX3, it’s clear that the initial pricing curve was what one would expect; discounting to around 80% ($400) of its suggested retail price within a few weeks of its introduction. Within a few months, however, large outlets such as Dell, B&H Camera, and other on-line camera stores were sold out, and prices soared. When I phoned around my metropolitan area for a camera store with the LX3 in stock, I couldn’t find a single one. They all wished they had them because they could sell as many as they could stock, but they’re sold out and had no idea when they’ll receive a new shipment.

What could explain the LX3’s phenomenal sales performance other than the power of Internet reviews? Based on its design, it appears that they were trying to produce a camera compact enough and with a high-enough quality image to appeal to professionals and serious amateurs who don’t want to haul around 30 pounds of camera equipment and a tripod everywhere they go. In other words, the camera is meant to appeal to experts or semi-experrts – not the average consumer. Panasonic must have expected the product to have limited appeal in a high-end compact market being threatened by a price drop in digital single-lens-reflex (DSLR) cameras. Instead, they can’t make enough LX3s to meet the demand.

Have we entered the beginning of an age when information, in the form of product reviews, will be so available to the masses that consumers will start to make better quality buying decisions? Will this trend force manufacturers to actually make better products instead of gimmicky devices that sell by fooling consumers? Will the promotion-oriented marketers lose power and influence to product development departments?

We can only hope.

Here are some images taken with the LX3 the day after delivery:

Editor’s Note: Space limitations prevent us from displaying these images at full size and resolution.

You will want to know what happened. You may not immediately want to know what someone else thinks or feels about what happened. That may come later. You first want someone to tell you clearly and with minimal subjectivity what happened with no opinion or impression attached.

You live in a second-hand world. You need someone to observe the world first-hand when you cannot. Who will you trust to faithfully do that for you?

Sociologist C. Wright Mills described this half a century ago in the book The Politics of Truth:

The first rule for understanding the human condition is that men live in second-hand worlds. They are aware of much more than they have personally experienced, and their own experience is always indirect.

The quality of their lives is determined by meanings they have received from others. Everyone lives in a world of such meanings. No man stands alone directly confronting a world of solid facts. …

[I]n their everyday life they do not experience a world of solid fact; their experience itself is selected by stereotyped meanings and shaped by readymade interpretations. Their images of the world, and of themselves, are given to them by crowds of witnesses they have never met and never shall meet.

Yet for every man these images — provided by strangers and dead men — are the very basis of his life as a human being.

Your information needs may be summed up by three questions: How does the world work? Why does it work that way? What will be the impact on me?

The answers reflect the raw data of empirical observation and a neutral explanation of phenomena eventually followed by analyses laced with points of view. Those “crowds of witnesses” offer that information in many forms — books, movies, art, advertising, television, music, and the various means by which journalism and pseudo-journalism are distributed.

You first need to know what happened. But doesn’t it increasingly seem that your principal sources are also those who didn’t witness the event first-hand either? Doesn’t it seem as if your first notice of what happened comes from a second-hand source who is not a witness at all? Is that source someone using the pretense of a witness, someone who imbues that initial report with analysis laced with a point of view, pre-coloring and presaging your first impression? Which do you need first — a subjective point of view or one as objective as possible?

Reflect on your information needs. (Not your wants — that’s a different post.) What do you need to know? Why do you need to know it? Who will credibly tell you?

Mills’ analysis of understanding the human condition anticipates the digital world you live in. Your second-hand world consists of, in Mills’ words, “stereotyped meanings and shaped by readymade interpretations.” From what source do you not receive pre-digested reports?

If you want information without a point of view shaping it, perhaps you need Anne. She is a Fair Witness in Robert A. Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land.” Her employer, Jubal Harshaw, is asked to demonstrate her capabilities. Harshaw points to a building and asks Anne its color. Her reply: “White on this side.” In Heinlein’s fictional world, a Fair Witness has total recall, is fully impartial, and makes no intuitive or analytical leaps beyond what she can witness (such as assuming the color on the side of the building she cannot see).

A Fair Witness is the antithesis of a Spin Doctor. Anne, the Fair Witness, is a source of unfiltered fact. You are left to divine the meaning of that fact in a context uniquely yours.

In the midst of this high-noise, low-signal digital information age one S&R writer called “Shoutworld,” no Fair Witness appears to exist. Traditionally “objective” sources of information increasingly have colorized what happened through an ideological, self-centered, or selfish lens. The numbers of those sources who minimize the predigestion of what happened declines daily.

You eventually may find that subjective witness reports are necessary to help you ascertain context, importance, and meaning. On what basis, however, do you trust their authors?

If all your information sources tell you what it means before telling you what happened, how certain are you of what, indeed, did happen?