Today is already Mischief Night. As a teenager, that was the time we ran around in packs doing really thrilling things like jumping out from behind bushes and hitting each other over the head with flour-filled socks. For the more adventurous, an egg smashed in the hair was pretty exciting, or ringing random doorbells and then dashing away.
The urban myths about razor blades in trick or treat apples have been around since then, but the latest twist is more post-modern and very American: football games have been postponed or rescheduled because of text messages warning in their viral way of dangerous activities planned for Mischief Night and Halloween. The mayor of Newark was on TV making pronouncements about the threats to…well, at that point I clicked away, because I just had to know what second hand store Sarah Palin shops at in Alaska. At least we have that much in common! Apparently she’s going to return the $150K of designer clothing the Repubs thought necessary to make her look ordinary.
What would the globalisers and anti-globalisers make of the shops in Costa Rica that advertise Ropa Americana, which is really just second-hand clothes? Most of these come from the US, but in a typically circuitous and complex modern way, were manufactured elewhere, including Central America. Costa Rica is a nation of small time entrepreneurs, and every street has a variety of offerings, from a front-room beauty salon to a sign saying ‘shoes repaired’.
The real Mischief Night is likely to be next Tuesday. The airwaves and internet are abuzz with claims about voter fraud, machines that can be subverted, about long lines for early voting and voters being disenfranchised. As always, the real information is online, for example the excellent California Voters Foundation (www.calvoter.org) which provides accessible information on ballot issue, the money trail, and other matters that the informed voter needs nowadays. For example, in a few minutes of helping my mother to understand the public questions on the NJ ballot, I discovered that the REAL state debt in NJ is about $28 B, but the narrowly defined legislative debt is only (!) $3 B. The difference, and the scary bit, is what state instrumentalities borrow, currenly without voter approval. The states have been playing the same shell and pea game as the hedge funds, often playing with them.
These are my thoughts as I wander the streets of my childhood, dodging the dozens of monstrous four wheel drives that show up twice a day where obese parents in obese vehicles show up to drop off and pick up the not yet obese children from the grand new unified (obese) school. Gone are the days when kids could ride a sleigh two blocks downhill, picking up speed to mount the snow-packed curb and continue on past the brick school to end up finally in the baseball field. Today they’d run into the school, or a truck, but then it doesn’t snow much anymore
It has turned colder here than mid-winter in Canberra, and Halloween is coming! It is too early to put up the Christmas decorations, but they are fully into it with monsters, cobwebs on hedges, and lots of pumpkins. It is all colourful and good fun, along with the marathon fright night movies they have scheduled for the next fews days.
Some of the monsters look more alive than John McCain, but let’s not get nasty. I leave that to television hosts like Jon Stewart and Bill Mahar, who are not as inhibited as Australian comedians by ridiculous libel laws. Not only are they extremely cruel, they bring on actor/activists like Tim Robbins to provide what passes for informed debate. And then, in true American fashion, analyse to death (but only superficially) the impact of satire on voting patterns. It’s almost enough to make you scream.
But it’s all less scary than the prospect of McCain getting elected, which seems to be fading like a bad nightmare. It does look like Obama will get elected, and then the real fun begins. Will all his millions of small donors hold him accountable to his promises of change? Will the fine detail of his plans be corroded by the likes of Nancy Pelosi, or will the Democrats realise this is not a triumph, it is a challenge? Obama makes the right noises about health care, energy, and the real cost of Iraq, but can he deliver?
With the New York skyline in the distance, I await the passing of Mischief Night and the next installment of the American dream/nightmare.
October 30, 2008 | Ronda Jambe
It’s almost Halloween but I’m not even scared
October 29, 2008 | Graham
Putting your ecological footprint in it
According to the WWF Australians are consuming four times as much per capita as we should.
“So Australians are among the biggest consumers of the world’s resources.
“The sustainable average round the world is probably about two hectares per person. So we’re using about four times more resources than we should be.”
But when you look at the map in the Living Planet Report (p3), which is produced by WWF and is the basis for these comments you find that we have 50 to 100 percent more biocapacity than we need. Canada does even better 100 to 150 percent more. However the Mediterranean, India and China do much worse having less biocapacity than they need.
This suggests to me that rather than using too much biocapacity, we aren’t using enough. Someone has to take up the slack to feed these other countries.
October 28, 2008 | Graham
More on climate sensitivity
The climate science is slowly blowing more and more holes in the IPCC anthropogenic warming case, but just as with any other bubble, the bulls are at their most vigorous just as their case starts to collapse. The result? You won’t hear references to the collapse around the water cooler, anymore than people were telling you a few months ago that the financial system was going to crash.
The major climate change issue has never been whether CO2 is a a greenhouse gas, but how sensitive climate is to it. The Vostok ice core samples were telling us that CO2 is not the major shaper of climate 10 years ago. The IPCC models say that it is. We’re starting to get some real world modern observations that give us a better handle on climate sensitivity.
Roy Spencer has impeccable credentials and is doing really interesting work with the data from the Aqua satellite. His latest paper demonstrates a relationship between the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and climate change. His thesis is that this is amplified by changes in cloud cover. His conclusion is suitably modest, given the triumphalism (and nihilism) of the IPCC:
The evidence continues to mount that the IPCC models are too sensitive, and therefore produce too much global warming. If climate sensitivity is indeed considerably less than the IPCC claims it to be, then increasing CO2 alone can not explain recent global warming. The evidence presented here suggests that most of that warming might well have been caused by cloud changes associated with a natural mode of climate variability: the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
The IPCC has simply assumed that mechanisms of climate change like that addressed here do not exist. But that assumption is quite arbitrary and, as shown here, very likely wrong. My use of only PDO-forced variations in the Earth’s radiative energy budget to explain two-thirds of the global warming trend is no less biased than the IPCC’s use of carbon dioxide to explain global warming without accounting for natural climate variability. If any IPCC scientists would like to dispute that claim, please e-mail me at roy.spencer (at) nsstc.uah.edu.
If the PDO has recently entered into a new, negative phase, then we can expect that global average temperatures, which haven’t risen for at least seven years now, could actually start to fall in the coming years. The recovery of Arctic sea ice now underway might be an early sign that this is indeed happening.
Another paper (hat tip to Anthony Watts) suggests that the hole in the ozone layer may be due to cosmic radiation. We’ll know if the theory is any good later this month because it makes a prediction for this period. If the prediction fails then I don’t have to revise my view on CFCs.
If it does hold true, then the people at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology have another possible explanation for their theories on southward shifts of climate patterns. This is supposed to be due to the hole in the ozone layer making it colder at the South Pole and sucking weather patterns further south. I have problems with cold air pulling, rather than pushing, hot air, but assuming they are right, then the culprit for this may be outside the atmosphere, rather than inside.
If I do have to revise my views on CFCs then so should David Michaels. He’s the latest global warming conspiracist, who joins such Australian “luminaries” as John Quiggin and Tim Lambert, and now apparently Philip Adams (who gave him an approving interview last night), in drawing a link between tobacco lobbyists and climate skeptics. CFCs and their effect on ozone are a stepping stone in the “proof”.
We’ll see. It certainly looked to me at the time that CFCs were implicated in the expansion of the ozone hole. Some of the global warming skeptics disagreed at the time, most notably Fred Singer, who Lambert and Quiggintry to portray as a tobacco lobbyist. Only three more sleeps.
But whatever the truth of the ozone hole, it is surely outrageous to label those who question the IPCC catechism as being linked to those who say smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer.
October 23, 2008 | Graham
Unions have the power to check executive pay
Kevin Rudd has declared war on “extreme capitalism”, by which he mostly seems to mean obscene executive rewards. But you have to ask yourself what the unions have been doing.
One of the consequences of the introduction of compulsory superannuation was the establishment of industry super-funds with significant union representation on their boards. These funds have actually proven to have excellent track records, mostly because they don’t slug their depositors with outrageous management fees. However, when the trend first became apparent there was concern that union muscle would be used to bend commercial interests to the will of the lumpen proletariat.
The proof that this fear was poorly-grounded is apparent in the way executive remuneration has taken off. If the union appointed execs on these funds were going to make a mark anywhere, surely it would be in the case of executive remuneration, yet from what one can see from the outside there has been not a tweet from any of them on the subject. Why is this so?
I asked an executive from one of the industry funds this the other day. His explanation was in some respects a commercial version of Stockholm Syndrome. Once you get to run one of these funds you become a member of the club, and it is socially very hard to look someone in the eye when you’ve just been responsible for denying them a multi-muilion dollar pay rise. Besides, if your career trajectory holds true, you may well be in their position in a few years time, and you wouldn’t want to set a precedent.
In the modern world, unions, it would seem, are like every other large organisation – a conductor for upward social mobility; a way for working class men and women to join the privileged classes. You get the rewards by meeting your clients needs, but not to the extent where that prejudices your own bright future.
Kevin Rudd can jawbone companies about excessive pay, and even introduce some regulations, but it’s likely executives will find a way around those restrictions. A better course might be to ring the ACTU and get some counter-active social pressure operating on their representatives in the managed funds industry.
October 22, 2008 | Ronda Jambe
Why Colin and I will be voting for Obama
Now that Colin Powell has shown his hand in the US elections, it is time for me to return to my country of origin to exert my somewhat more modest influence. With my morale much boosted by the news that in the ACT the Greens now hold the balance of power (whoo- hoo!), à look forward to watching the election unroll from an armchair in the usually Democratic state of New Jersey (that many Italian gangsters can´t be wrong).
In the inevitable trend towards obfuscation that seems to characterise US society, they are already talking about the polls and people casting their vote. Indeed, I have already cast mine via post from Costa Rica, and am somewhat miffed that despite long conversations and documents filled out before I left, they did not send me the papers necessary to aid the Greens in the ACT election. Luckily they didn´t need my help.
Yes, the Americans are already voting, and every day the reports about voter registration fraud, problems with the counting, etc, increase. There is a business opportunity in both manipulating the voters to declare themselves Republicans or Democrats, and carpetbaggers of all persuasions are hard at it.
An equal army of thieves is busy persuading people that they can become debt-free, for a price, of course. Anyone stupid enough to think they can buy their way out of serious debt is, well, probably stupid enough to swallow the McCain rhetoric (more accurately, propaganda) that the US can extricate itself from its much larger financial mess while lowering taxes. Wow, just watch, as the deficit and overseas borrowings grow, but the fed props up the value of your house for the very short term.
Colin Powell gave intelligent, well thought through reasons for finally switching teams. He has long been one of the most respected Republicans in the front line of Washington life, and probably one of the few four star generals who is black (well, more beige, like Obama). He said he watched both candidates respond to the financial crisis, and that Obama seemed to have the most intelligent, calm approach. Powell also thinks Sarah Palin is not ready to be the president, and let´s face it, McCain is old and has had melanoma 3 times. The chances of her popping up as President, should McCain get elected, are somewhat greater than Joe Biden taking over.
Powell also called for generational change, rather than more of the same Bush policies. And Powell is a reasonable man. What does not sound reasonable to my ears is the shallow ranting of the McCain troup, including Palin, who just repeat the mantra of lower taxes, without once drawing breath to consider just how the government will continue at a time of war and great challenge, without getting the money from somewhere.
At least Obama hints that gee, the war is kinda pricey and that the corporations have been paying rather less than previously. Both candidates emphasise the middle class, but in reality urbanites are the bigger chunk of undeclared voters.
McCain´s pandering to the less enlightened in society (who really gives a damm if gay couples want to get married? Not me) might also backfire, as a number of initiatives in various states are bearing the cruel teeth of the ultra conservatives. Ellen Degeneres has come out fighting a California initiative to make existing gay marriages illegal, and there are other attempts afoot to limit abortions more drastically.
Moral posturing is one of the more prominent characteristics of the Republican right, along with their profound hatred of action for the general well being of the population. They don´t admit that they really love regulation, but only if it helps to concentrate power and redistribute wealth to their mates. Anything that smacks of democratic oversight, however, is quickly branded ´socialist´. The facts of a hearty situation in European countries, with adequate health and education, are never allowed to enter the discussion. Let´s not be eggheads here, let´s just all pretend that Joe the Plumber is the role model for everyone.
When McCain carps on Obama´s consideration of wealth redistribution, he doesn´t mention that the Republicans have in fact been serious redistributors of wealth – to the wealthy. But these issues are only hinted at in the mainstream news coverage. A typical ánalysis´is just two speakers who immediately reveal which side of the fence they sit on. One longs for a few facts or a coherent exposition, but it never comes.
After weeks of watching cable news I´ve also worked out why the US coverage is always so polarised – they don´t do investigative journalism. They just do sides, and therefore further polarise the discussion. They don´t have a Four Corners or a Background Briefing, just slang matches, sometimes tempered by a bit of wit, but don´t count on it.
Thus have I changed my view from being very sceptical of Obama to being hopeful for his chances, and much more aware that there are serious differences between them. Obama is, like Powell, a modest reformer. Radical black men just don´t get that far in the US. He is, however, much more intelligent than McCain, more sophisticated in his understanding of what is possible and necessary. We shall see if that huge ship of state can possibly change direction, and here´s hoping for all our sakes, that it can. Meanwhile, I am quietly gloating and glowing over the victory of the the ACT greens, with 3 members now balanced against 7 Labor and 7 Libs. That little ship can certainly shift a bit.
October 20, 2008 | Graham
Another global warming tipping point
I just came across Joanne Nova and her The Skeptics Handbook. Joanne appears to be eminently qualified as a scientist, and a science communicator, having even occassionally stood-in for Dr Karl on ABC radio. She can’t be dismissed as some sort of an outsider, and unlike many of the skeptics she’s not a superannuated professor, but someone mid-career. Taking this position is a considerable career risk.
The Handbook is a good read as it condenses the argument down to its basics. One of the problems on this issue is the degree of complexity that can easily intrude into it. Faced with complexity most people throw up their hands and just do what everyone else is doing, which on this issue plays into bad policy making.
Joanne’s analysis asks the major “so what” questions, and the answers are readily comprehensible by anyone. Her takeout message is “…There is only one question that matters: ‘will adding more CO2 to the atmosphere make the world much warmer now?”
And on the question of tipping points.
Atmospheric carbon is at higher levels than any time in the last 650,000 years. But go back 500 million years, and carbon levels were not just 10-20% higher, they were ten to twenty times higher. The Earth has thoroughly tested the runaway greenhouse effect, and n o t h i n g happened. Indeed the earth slipped into an ice age while CO2 was far higher than today’s levels. Whatever warming effect super-concentrated-CO2 has, it’s no match for the other climactic forces out there. Further, it doesn’t matter if it’s man-made-CO2 or ocean-made-CO2. They are the same molecule.
But more significantly, Joanne was a believer until 2007, and she lists a number of others who have also changed their minds recently. It seems that while policy is heading in one direction, reality is heading in the other, which should eventually, one way or another, give us another tipping point.
October 11, 2008 | Graham
Getting blogged down
I’m speaking at the AEF conference in Canberra today on the subject of blogging and politics. Except that I’ve unlitaterally decided to extend it beyond blogging and to talk about the uses of the Internet in politics, with a few examples.
I’ll summarise the speech after I’ve delivered it, but as you can probably tell from the title, I’ll be expressing some skepticism about just exactly how important and influential blogging really is. Looking at phenomena like Facebook I wonder whether blogging still means what it used to.
October 08, 2008 | Graham
Oceans drive climate
Climate skeptics are frequently incredibly bad at arguing their case. I’ve been following the greenhouse issue since I was a kid back in the 60s, so I should have heard all of the persuasive arguments by now. But I read a very persuasive one today that I had never seen before. If the skeptics were doing their job that shouldn’t be the case.
This argument is actually eight years old. In the Summer 2000 edition of 21st Century, Dr. Robert E. Stevenson gives a run-down as to why it is oceans, not atmosphere, which control climate. Stevenson is an oceanographer and the truncated version of his argument runs like this:
Water retains heat better than earth or air. Water and earth are heated by direct exposure to the sun’s radiation which mostly passes through air. The heat is returned relatively quickly by the earth, so that in areas remote from the sea minima are lower and maxima higher than areas closer to the sea. Air is heated by the infrared radiation, but its re-radiation of energy in this spectrum cannot significantly heat water.
Transfers of heat from the ocean to the atmosphere follow a relatively predictable cycle. When the sea is hotter, the atmosphere is hotter, but as the air cannot be the source of this heat, it is the oceans that drive the temperature of the air rather than the other way around. The contribution of CO2 to global warming is therefore relatively trivial.
This view of the world fits in neatly with one of my most recent posts. Douglass and Christy, taking aerosols and the ENSO into account, argue there is no evidence for the greenhouse effect being enhanced by forcings. The corollary of this argument is that the ENSO and aerosols are capable of significantly masking the effect of CO2, and everyone seems to agree that it was the El Nino event in 1998 which made it the hottest year in the last century. What’s more, AGW proponents are now predicting cooler years because of ocean temperatures until next decade.
In the same post, noted climatologist Henderson Sellers is quoted::
Until and unless major oscillations in the Earth System (El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) etc.) can be predicted to the extent that they are predictable, regional climate is not a well defined problem. It may never be. If that is the case then we should say so. It is not just the forecast but the confidence and uncertainty that are just as much a key.
The ABC’s Science Show carried a story the other day about GOCE, a project to measure earth’s magnetic field which will allow us to more accurately measure sea levels. Marek Ziebert, Professor of Space Geodesy at University College London, explains:
It is that big, and the reason for it is because what this mission in particular enables us to do is to understand what the energy transport mechanisms are in the ocean. The ocean carries huge parts of the energy budget of the planet around the ocean, and so as that changes, as climate changes, then it’s going to affect everybody. Here in the UK everyone is aware of climate change these days and our climate is very affected by changes in the Atlantic. Most of our weather is driven by the moisture and the winds and the energy transport mechanisms from the Atlantic.
The difficulty we have at the moment is that although we know the shape of the surface of the ocean from space, what we don’t know is the physics of it. We can’t model the physics of it because we haven’t got a reference surface against which to measure these changes in height in the ocean. What this mission will enable us to do is to define that reference surface very clearly. So then we can say because that reference surface is at such a height, then the water is flowing in such a way and it’s driven by such forcings and such energies.
So the models may not only be flawed, but they may very well be trying to understand the wrong part of the earth system, and as yet we may not have enough information to model that more important part of the system, the oceans, properly.
October 06, 2008 | Graham
Ronan Lee puts LNP one closer to winning
New Greens MP Ronan Lee has probably handed the Liberal National Party its first seat at the next election. Lee, until yesterday the Labor member for Indooroopilly, is unlikely to hold the seat for the Greens. His defection should cause enough problems for the ALP that the LibNats will pick the seat up.
Lee was an accidental member of parliament. He was elected at the age of 25 after beating the incumbent Denver Beanland in the Beattie landslide of 2001. No-one expected Beanland to lose, who prior to 1998 had held the seat by a margin of 13.3%. This had been whittled down to 0.7% after that election, but Beanland was well-entrenched in the area and many observers expected a swing back to him at the 2001 election.
Lee has been an enthusiastic supporter of environmental causes and claims the Queensland Government’s “Wild Rivers” legislation as one of his successes. In recent speeches he has been openly critical of the government, leading me to suspect that he was going to “do a Beattie” and run against his own party at the next election, whilst remaining a member.
To be returned as the member for this seat at the next election Lee would need to win all of the Greens votes last election and approximately half the Labor vote to give him a primary vote of around 35%. That would reduce the Labor vote to around 20% and might be just enough, assuming at least fifty percent of Labor voters allocated a preference to him, and none to the Liberals, for him to get over the line. Pigs might fly too.
What is more likely is that he will attract sufficient Labor voters to decrease their first preference total, but still run second to the LibNats, and more importantly, ahead of Lee. Having effectively delivered a vote of no-confidence in the government, his voters may well be then even less inclined than usual to allocate preferences to anyone, leaving Labor short of the flow that it needs to retain the seat. Added to that, any good potential preselection candidates will be able to do this maths too and will find somewhere else to run, ensuring a lacklustre ALP campaign.
While his defection says more about Ronan than it does about the government, it is likely to be leveraged by opponents of the government as a sign that it is on the skids. Bligh is already facing suggestions that her ship of state is sinking, and Lee won’t help.
This seat should be very safe LibNat, so for the future of Queensland politics it is to be hoped that they choose a candidate with leadership potential. They threw away their chances at previous elections with poor preselection choices.
It looks like the LibNats now only need to win 24 seats to have an absolute majority in the next parliament. Put that way, Lee also has a message for them. Bligh’s ship might be leaky, but it’s still riding very high on the water, relatively speaking.
October 05, 2008 | Graham
How good are climate models?
The only way General Circulation Models can produce catastrophic CO2-induced warming is to introduce positive forcings from other agents, such as water vapour. Without these forcings temperature increases are relatively benign. What most don’t understand is that the values attributed to these forcings are largely imaginary.
I’ve just come across two pieces of information which demonstrate the precariousness of the modelling assumptions of forcings. The first is courtesy of a post on Jennifer Marohasy’s blog. In a soon to be published paper Douglass and Christy eliminate all of the known forcings on climate from the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and aerosols (produced by volcanoes) and demonstrate that the underlying increase in global temperature without these independent forcings is 0.062±0.010ºK/decade, which they argue is consistent with the IPCC’s formula for unforced CO2 which gives a value of 0.07ºC/decade.
Of course correlation doesn’t equal causation, but Douglass and Christy point out that if the IPCC assumptions of positive forcings are correct, then there must be other, as yet undiscovered, negative forcings which have acted over the last 30 years.
The other piece of information is these notes posted by Roger Pielke Senior. They are by Ann Henderson-Sellers, Professor in the Department of Physical Geography at Macquarie University, and until 2007, the Director of the World Climate Research Programme http://wcrp.wmo.int (WCRP) based in Geneva at the headquarters of the World Meteorological Organisation. She is one of the most frequently cited researchers in the world.
Professor Henderson-Sellers notes are of feedback from the IPCC lead authors on the AR4 IPCC report. I have reproduced the bullet-points below that refer to climate models.
Serious inadequacies in climate change prediction that are of real concern
- The rush to emphasize regional climate does not have a scientifically sound basis.
- Prioritize the models so that weaker ones do not confuse/dilute the signals.
- Until and unless major oscillations in the Earth System (El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) etc.) can be predicted to the extent that they are predictable, regional climate is not a well defined problem. It may never be. If that is the case then we should say so. It is not just the forecast but the confidence and uncertainty that are just as much a key.
- Climate models need to be exercised for weather prediction; there are necessary but not sufficient things that can best be tested in this framework, which is just beginning to be exploited.
- Energy budget is really worrisome; we should have had 20 years of ERBE [Earth Radiation Budget Experiment] type data by now- this would have told us about cloud feedback and climate sensitivity. I’m worried that we’ll never have a reliable long-term measurement. This combined with accurate ocean heat uptake data would really help constrain the big-picture climate change outcome, and then we can work on the details.
- [Analyse] the response of models to a single transient 20th century forcing construction. The factors leading to the spread in the responses of models over the 20th century can then be better ascertained, with forcing separated out thus from the mix of the uncertainty factors. The Fourth Assessment Report missed doing this owing essentially to the timelines that were arranged.
- Adding complexity to models, when some basic elements are not working right (e.g. the hydrological cycle) is not sound science. A hierarchy of models can help in this regard.
This should give readers some idea as to just how uncertain the outputs from these models are. On another note, given the reservations about regional climate modelling, it makes one wonder what our government agencies think they are doing. This Google search on “gcm climate” turns up reference after reference to the CSIRO and various Australian governments making regional predictions about climate under enhanced CO2 conditions. According to Henderson-Sellers’ notes, they are wasting their time and our money.