Disappearing Bees and Frogs and...

New research on bee colony collapses, which have accelerated and expanded over the past five years, suggests the culprit is indeed us, but in more complex ways than previously thought. If the researchers are right, this lends new significance and urgency to biodiversity conservation policy. Richard Black at the BBC:

...The latest twist in the plot comes from the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, where scientists working in the lab have found a link between the health of hives and the diversity of plants on which bees forage for food.

Although the finding needs to be confirmed in field trials - which the team is hoping to instigate - the indication is that a diet of diverse pollen gives the bees the amino acids they need to synthesise their full panoply of chemical defences against pathogens.

A reasonable hypothesis, then, would be that if you put your bees to work pollinating one particular crop all summer and feed them on one particular food all winter, such as corn syrup - as is the practice in US commercial hives - they're going to fall like insects out of the sky when an unpleasant disease comes along.

Along with that goes the notion that if you lose a diversity of wild plants, you'll begin to impact wild bees. (The reverse may also apply, a little more intuitively.)

A recent study using records kept by amateur naturalists in the UK and the Netherlands suggests that the diversity of bees and flowers have been declining at similar rates for more than a century - a conclusion that could suggest the causes are intertwined.

If a monoculture diet was the only issue, perhaps it wouldn't matter; perhaps the insects would survive.

But add in a lack of genetic diversity among commercial stocks, the use of pesticides and other agricultural chemicals to which they may be somewhat sensitive, changes to the availability of water brought about by everything from man-made climate change to dams, the greater mix of pathogens that commercial bees must encounter as the hives travel from one workplace to the next, the declining extent of "natural" habitat for wild bees, and so on and so on and so on - and once again, "everything" becomes a reasonable suspect.

If this is right - and other branches of the natural world such as coral reef ecosystems are also under multi-frontal attack - it raises a pretty obvious problem: how do you combat "everything"?

Warm Year

The Goddard Institute for Space Studies confirms that 2009 was the second warmest year on record and the 2000s the warmest decade in modern recorded history. More here.

Carlos the Jackalina

I see a terrorist reality show on the horizon....

Purple Apple-Berry

Sometimes I Almost Agree With the Conspiracy Theorists

There's a theme in conspiracy theory that says that the United States government is totally controlled by shadowy forces - choose your favorite - and we, and our duly elected representatives, are simply acting out a script.

So today I will turn to something I usually leave to my friend the Armchair Generalist: the faux weapon of mass destruction. I see that he's got another white powder scare, too, but it's in Manchester, England, so it doesn't count in the same way as this Washington Post article on the WMD potential of Botox.

Actually, the article itself says that Botox, and even the dreaded botulinum bacterium, is not suitable for biological warfare. So no story, right? No, for some reason, an editor at the WaPo thought that Joby Warrick's ramblings about a non-threat deserved three Web pages and the headline "Officials fear toxic ingredient in Botox could become terrorist tool."

There's quite a bit about shadowy botulinum salesmen in Russia and its environs. Good for them, I say; keeps the potential buyers from getting something useful. And some of the time, it's even fake botulinum they're selling. Even better. And that's the lede to the article, which is supposed to set the tone, and, kudos to Joby Warrick, it actually does.

Warrick repeats the old chestnut about a gram of pure toxin potentially killing half the earth's population, or whatever. So I'll repeat that that can happen only if that gram is distributed to all those people, which is always the problem, and, since botulinum is very heat-sensitive, as Warrick notes later in the article, most state bioweapons programs gave it up long ago.

Here: I'll scare you even more. You can make this WMD in your very own kitchen!!!!! (Is that enough exclamation points?)

I learned to can foods as a girl. One of the big warnings was that less-acidy foods (meat, beans, pretty much anything not-pickles, not-tomatoes and not-jam) could develop botulinum poisoning. So you had to process them longer and, if they looked funny after standing for a while, throw them out. This led some of us to speculate whether one might leave a can of mayonnaise out to spoil and then throw it in the local reservoir to poison the users of that water. It seemed a scary prospect to a bunch of eight-year-olds.

But we also learned, as did the weapons researchers on tax money, that cooking foods thoroughly would destroy the toxin. So an added precaution was to cook canned non-acid foods for a while. This was back in the days when green beans were supposed to be mushy anyway.

I ducked the problem by sticking to jams, pickles and tomatoes.

But, but, but! Warrick did the research and needed a story. Or perhaps our sinister overlords decided we needed to be scared this week so that we wouldn't try to get health reform passed. So maybe, just maybe, the terrorists could throw a spoiled jar of mayonnaise in the ressy, or, or, something!

"We know al-Qaeda has talked about going after food supplies in the United States," the official said. "There are new reasons to be concerned about what they're going to target next."

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

If there is a conspiracy, they really need better propagandists.

Update: I see that the Armchair Generalist posted on this almost at the same time I did.

And Phila puts his spin on it.

What the States Would Look Like If They Had Equal Population

From here via here. Click for a larger version.

Bits and Pieces - January 22, 2010

Leadership on health care reform starting to emerge in the House: John Dingell

Michael Bérubé writes in praise of the Democrats' political humility. The commenters chime in equally wittily.

47 health policy experts say "Sign the Senate bill."

Andrew Sullivan writes why he's continuing to support President Obama. I've been thinking of writing something along these lines, but Sullivan's is probably better.

There must be something to the idea that greening our energy economy will produce jobs and profits.

Good news coming on START, it looks like.

Those famously anonymous diplomats around the IAEA (Israeli, likely as not) say that nuclear negotiations with Iran are off, although the IAEA and Iran say they're still on.

The week could have been worse. A big rock from outer space could have fallen on your head.

Can You Write News Based Only on Facebook and Twitter? Probably not.

On Speech

Here's how the U.S. Constitution protects speech:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That's the 1st Amendment, lead item of the historic Bill of Rights.

It's based on this prohibition that U.S. courts have certified the underwriting of campaigns by corporations and broadcasting to a hundred million eyes and ears at once. But no basis is there. Go ahead and read it again.

Money does not speak, and neither does TV or radio. If a corporation or union could speak, it wouldn't need a spokesperson.

Speech is what comes from mouths, is made powerful by assembly, and is reproducible from products of the printing press when read aloud. As the founders would say, it's self-evident, or should be.

Werner Herzog reads Curious George

This Is Important

Balloon Juice has all the information you need to call your Representative and urge her/him to vote for the Senate health care reform bill and fix it later.

Do it. We need to stiffen those congressional spines. I'm not great on communicating with my congresscritters, but this is important. And it's easy. I may start doing it more regularly.

Pass. The. Damn. Bill.

Pass. The. Damn. Bill.

Pass. The. Damn. Bill.

Bits and Pieces - Supreme Court Edition

Erwin Chemerinsky blasts judicial activism. Let's see...it was the conservative argument that their judges weren't judicial activists, that judicial activism was bad, and the same public swallowed it that is now swallowing that health care reform is bad, that public debts are bad,...I'm just wondering when these folks are going to realize that conservatives, particularly the Republican variety, lie.

The Court’s Blow to Democracy (New York Times editorial)

Conservative Supremes: superheroes of hypocrisy (Eva Rodriguez, Washington Post)

Campaign finance ruling reflects Supreme Court's growing audacity (Michael Waldman, executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law)

The Supreme Court removes important limits on campaign finance (Washington Post editorial)

Juan Cole considers the effect of the ruling in a Web 2.0 world.

Added later:
James Fallows:

The head of the nation's judicial branch was purposefully deceptive during his "umpire" testimony. Or he had no idea what his words meant. Or he has had a complete change of philosophy and temperament while in his mid-50s. Those are the logical possibilities. None of them is too encouraging about the basic soundness of our governing institutions.

Prized People

Our congratulations to two great human beings and influential scholars for the recent accolades bestowed upon them. These two people are very close to our hearts here at Phronesisaical and, although their work is widely known, we are glad to see them once again appreciated for contributions that remind us of what a good thing it is to be a human being.

Herman Daly, ecological economist at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and former Senior Economist at the World Bank, was yesterday awarded the 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE). His constitutes the core of an entire field - ecological economics - which challenges many of the foundational assumptions of conventional neoclassical economics. His work on sustainability and steady state economy has been widely influential beyond economics. He is author or co-author of several game-changing books. Herman Daly's candid farewell speech to the World Bank is now considered a classic (and scathing) indictment of the international development industry. Still treated as an outsider by economics orthodoxy, he has nonetheless deservedly racked up the awards for his work, including the Grawemeyer Award, the Honorary Right Livelihood Award (Sweden's alternative to the Nobel Prize), the Heineken Prize for Environmental Science (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences), and the Sophie Prize for work on the environment and sustainable development (Norway).

Ian Hacking, emeritus professor of philosopher at the University of Toronto and the Collège de France, received the 2009 Holberg International Memorial Prize given by Norway's Ludvig Holberg Memorial Fund in recognition of outstanding scholarly work in the fields of the arts and humanities, social sciences, law and theology. He brought a fresh and influential historical and pragmatic approach to the philosophy of science and has continued to write on diverse subjects in an always entertaining and wise voice. Importantly, from my view, his intellectual life and production have always been idiosyncratic and generous, setting him apart from an academic field shredded by sub-disciplinary and methodological differences. His entertaining Holberg Prize acceptance speech can be found here.

Congratulations and gratitude to both. They are exemplars whose lives remind us that it is possible to combine the very pinnacle of scholarship and influence with warm generosity, decency, and wisdom.

Thought for the Day

The crisis consists precisely in the fact
that the old is dying and the new cannot
be born; in this interregnum a great
variety of morbid symptoms appears.

- Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

Thai Maroon Guava

Frustration and Reset

This morning I think we all live in a subatomic universe underneath the fingernail of The Great Propagandist and Jokester, whose "gotcha!" ways are beyond our comprehension.

This letter to Sullivan pretty much nails my first reaction to the combination of the Brown election and Coakley incompetence in Massachusetts; the idea that somehow a 59-41 majority is a disaster for any real policy making; the reality that a small minority of voters often less affected by a given policy than their fellow citizens determine national elections; and Nancy Pelosi's announcement not long ago that healthcare reform is essentially over (not her language, of course, but what has to be inferred from it). The letter writer says,

...A handful of morons in (insert a state here) invalidate my choice because the Senate is ruled by 5-6 Senators that refuse to face tough choices that need to be made to avoid a financial catastrophe in 10 years. There will be NO health care bill passed and the raging idiots will blame the Democrats and vote the Republicans in a landslide in November 2010. Forget about the REALLY tough problems like the debt, Social Security, moving away from our dependence on foreign energy supplies, etc. If Congress can't get it's collective shit together to pass a bill that attempts to fix a problem EVERYONE agrees on, then all hope is lost.

Obama can't change this. The country has exactly the government it deserves: fat, stupid and lazy. Built to respond to the 24-hour news cycle and a singular goal of protecting seats in the next election. Obama is a one termer. I hate writing that, but it's true. Republicans will put up some populist puff piece in 2012 and he's going to win.

The morons have indeed won, once again voting and acting against their own interests and their obligations to fellow citizens pressed by a GOP that has, as Sullivan says,

...abdicated any responsibility to tackle the problems we all acknowledge, while indulging in extremist rhetoric. They live for the spin and the rage. So this is the moment they have been waiting for.

And maybe our fat, stupid, and lazy asses justifiably deserve a GOP that has demonstrably run the country into the ground over the past decade, the only alternative being a Democratic Party that can't do anything about it.

But... recall this piece on Obama as philosophical pragmatist that I posted the eve of his election that concludes,

It's uncontroversial to say that US political life is dualistic and polarized. Demagogues constantly prey on this polarization by reinforcing it. Thus, most of the pundit class can't see past the possibility of either a conservative-Republican ideology in power or a liberal ideology in power. For these people and their dualistic framework, an Obama victory is necessarily an ideological shift to the left. What neither the right nor many on the left get, however, is that Obama is not an ideologue. He's a pragmatist...

I'm not worried about [Barack Obama] being an ideologue. Despite the right's best efforts to paint him as such, there's little evidence that he's that sort of person. He's going to make a lot of people unhappy on both the left and the right when he doesn't follow the rules of prior ideological commitments. That unhappiness will unwittingly reflect something profoundly wrong with the older and hopefully dying form of polarized ideological politics in the US. But, unlike how many pundits put it, the problem is less "polarization" than it is the epistemological backwardness of ideology-driven politics.

All the media narrative, voter reactions, party strategies on left and right, etc. are premised on the ideological dichotomy of conservative-liberal. President Obama has himself demonstrated that the dichotomy is not real or, rather, it has no existence outside of our own intellectual lassitude in perpetuating it. But he's a philosophical pragmatist, a perspective that has both profound roots in American history and culture and a generally progressive view on the future. This is why Obama seems conservative to some, liberal or socialist to others. They're all looking at him through their own antiquated ideological lenses. Meanwhile, the mass media, when not simply out for personal gain, relish what they see as a bare knuckle fight in which they encourage more blood by giving them brass knuckles. If it bleeds, it leads. Make it bleed. Oddly, we often seem to know well this situation and its dire limitations but yet have the inability to think ourselves past it.

The crass variety of pragmatist, how we usually understand the term, simply plays the match for advantage within the pre-existing structure and set of rules no matter the meaning or consequences of the match in the larger scheme of things. There is nothing else to lend it meaning. Obama is trying his damnedest to stand outside of this framework and acknowledge and act in the name of a real future for which we will have had to make serious policy choices, real sacrifices, and real gains. When the current hysteria dies down for a moment, I hope we'll realize that this is the guy we need to work with. Work with.

It's not the parties, stupid. It's the president. Despite my present urge to break something, I really do believe Andrew's cheerleading conclusion,

This is not over. In some ways, it is only just beginning.

Which is why Obama needs us breathing down his neck, and galvanizing support for necessary reform - now, more than in the campaign. If we give up, we will be copying the hysteria and nihilism of the right. Do not give up. Focus. Argue. Mobilize.

On Returning the Senate to Form

A timely Op-Ed in the Times by Thomas Geoghegan explains how the mere prospect of filibuster has incapacitated the senate since inception, just as the founders anticipated.

Toward a Nuclear-Free World: The Weapons Laboratories

The four nuclear statesmen, George Schultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn, have another January op-ed. This one is not as attention-getting as the past two and will probably get lost in the uproar over the Massachusetts Senate election.

The four say that we must track deterrence along with disarmament. The last Nuclear Posture Review revised the old “triad,” which was composed strictly of nuclear weaponry, to include the capability to provide nuclear weapons, more or less just-in-time, which includes the nuclear weapons laboratories, Los Alamos, Livermore, and Sandia. A manufacturing capability would include more; the Department of Energy has been trying to sell a new manufacturing complex for a decade or more, misreading the politics and overreaching every time.

The weapons laboratories have historically been the brains behind the hands that manufacture the weapons. They not only design the weapons, but they have worked out most of the scientific and engineering problems associated with manufacture. They decide on the specifications and tolerances.

As the numbers of nuclear weapons decrease, the ability to manufacture them may increase. Being able to maintain or reconstitute that ability will be an essential part of any nuclear weapons program that eschews first use and resolves that such weapons exist only to deter their use by others. Even when all nuclear weapons have been eliminated, such a program, perhaps vestigial, will continue. We know how to make them and can never give up that knowledge.

Knowing how to build nuclear weapons gives you the knowledge of what other nations might do if they are trying to build up a nuclear weapons capability of their own. The weapons labs work with the State Department, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and other countries to train people and provide their own expertise in figuring out what is going on in places like Iran and North Korea. They have developed and installed radiation monitors to detect the movement of dangerous materials out of Russian laboratories and at border crossings.

I came to Los Alamos in 1965, at the height of the Cold War nuclear weapons buildup. The Laboratory was smaller then, and more focused. Diversification from nuclear weapons was beginning, with design of the Rover reactors (nostalgia here, pdf) and the Ultra High Reactor Experiment, along with a tiny grant from the National Science Foundation for extracting energy from geothermal deposits that didn’t have water associated with them.

It’s been a downhill slide since then, with a few bright spots. The weapons groups have not suffered as much as other groups, but from what I hear from friends and associates at Los Alamos, it’s a very unhappy place. Livermore and Sandia are having their troubles too.

When I came to Los Alamos, it was understood that anyone there might be called upon to work on nuclear weapons. That has changed, and there are staff members who don’t realize that nuclear weapons are the primary product. Non-weapons researchers look down on the weapons people, and vice versa. The tradition of management’s acquiring large projects has collapsed in favor of a university principal-investigator model, while everyone has to fill out time sheets to the tenth of an hour.

There’s more, but the bottom line is that morale has been on a downward trajectory since 1965, still continuing.

So what the four nuclear statesmen are proposing is that the weapons laboratories be funded more generously to retain scientists and engineers who can maintain a capability for manufacturing nuclear weapons.

I would have made this op-ed stronger than the four did. More funding for the weapons laboratories is part of making them the motivated and competent institutions they once were. But massive culture changes are needed as well, along with much-improved management. That would likely require a change in the expectations of the larger culture, as well, a recognition that there are some things that are uniquely the province of the government, like developing and maintaining nuclear weapons.

Bits and Pieces - January 19, 2010

Lots of snow here, and more predicted!

Some positive assessments of Obama's first year from Fred Hiatt, Aaron David Miller, and the Avuncular American. I guess Hiatt is trying to convince the Democrats who are complaining that Obama has not yet delivered their ponies that they have taken the right position.

Dialing the panic and militarism down. It's significant that this comes after the underpants bomber. A small move, but maybe a harbinger of more backing away from security theater.

Pakistan takes a leaf from the Republican playbook. Unfortunately, this is an inherent weakness of the Fissile Material Control Treaty, which is the next big item on the Conference on Disarmament's agenda: the big nuclear powers already have more than enough fissile material, so such a treaty is mainly directed at nuclear wannabes like Pakistan. Not a bad idea, but they can figure this out.

Haiti, Poverty, and Media Chaos

Chris Blattman notes something very important about current media accounts of apparent post-earthquake social chaos in Haiti:

Is robbery so endemic? One of my wife’s colleagues, a veteran of dozens of catastrophes and crises, is amazed by the (relative) calm and absence of looting. She reports storefront windows broken, but the goods behind intact. She’s seldom seen a crisis so under control.

Most journalists I know are keenly aware of the impact of their work on public opinion and policy... But looters and thugs on the front page only bolsters impressions that Haitians are ungovernable. This is a tragedy if untrue.

I wish I could say that security and aid decisions are not made on the basis of what is fit to print in the Times, or that accurate intelligence always filters up from the ground to the policy makers on high...

...an aid and security policy designed for thieving, ungovernable, progress-resistant Haitians looks very different from one that views civil society institutions as shaken but fundamentally strong.

I’m worried because the latter doesn’t make a very good news story.

David Brooks took the opportunity in the Sunday NYT to suggest that the apparent chaos in Haiti is really a matter of poverty. For all the generous efforts of the wealthy, developed world, Brooks, says, there is still no final answer to poverty, economic development, and corruption. He writes that we should accept the hard reality that, "some cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them."

Brooks' answer is that the Haitians - still digging dead family members and friends and strangers from the rubble - need more of a personal responsibility approach to their impoverished condition. Brooks subtly shifts blame for a devastating natural disaster to the character of the Haitian people themselves in a secular and urbane version of Pat Robertson's recent remarks. Robertson, of course, had said that the disaster was visited upon the Haitian people because they long ago made a pact with the devil - "true fact" - in order to drive out the French colonialists. Thus, "...we need to pray for them a great turning to God."

For his part, Brooks concludes his column with his own "great turning,"

It’s time to find self-confident local leaders who will create No Excuses countercultures in places like Haiti, surrounding people — maybe just in a neighborhood or a school — with middle-class assumptions, an achievement ethos and tough, measurable demands.

Haiti is poor in many ways - income, literacy, mortality rate, environmental conditions, etc. Poverty usually entails much greater vulnerability to natural disasters and social, economic, and political shocks. Regarding climate change adaptation, for example, vulnerability to the effects of climate change tracks poverty with geographic features often determining degrees of risk and likely intensity. These two elements are mutually reinforcing as the poor often live by default - for socioeconomic reasons - in high-risk areas and are ill-equipped to reduce their vulnerability to environmental shocks. Why poverty exists in the first place is an old question that involves political and economic context, history, and the cosmic accident of particular institutional and environmental conditions into which any given individual is born. But, in our moment in history, the reality is that poverty persists. As this century moves along, I think we're going to come to view Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake as harbingers.

Yes, it's true that poverty is complex and thus difficult to understand. It's true also that half a century of Bretton Woods institutions and development economists ostensibly fighting global poverty has still not yielded an encompassing concept of poverty and what to do about it. But, to set aside Brooks' indecorousness, he assumes that a conclusive definition of and approach to poverty is necessary and/or sufficient to global anti-poverty policy. In fact, this same assumption may be at the heart of the failures of the Bretton Woods institutions.

For most development economists in practice, low income - below $1 or $2 per day - remains the determinant of poverty. But this easily measurable definition of poverty has been challenged over the past several decades by more sophisticated studies, conceptual frameworks, and empirical data. Today, we think of poverty in economic and non-economic terms. In some cases, the very word "poverty" has been replaced by other terms such as "well-being" precisely because the former has failed to capture important elements, often qualitative, of the human condition and development. There exist different approaches - different monetary approaches, Amartya Sen's capabilities approach, social exclusion approaches, participatory poverty assessments - yielding different sets of data and targeting somewhat different objectives. Poverty or human well-being is measured in different ways - UNDP's Human Development Index, income poverty, the Human Poverty Index, aggregate approaches, etc. None of these approaches and forms of measurement can be considered comprehensive. Income as an indicator of poverty quite possibly retains its salience in the development industry precisely because income can be measured quantitatively (while aspiration, for instance, cannot), which makes for neater comparisons across spatio-temporal contexts and is thus considered more "objective."

The conceptual model that has failed is the unidirectional paternalistic model. Once the World Bank finally got around in the 1990s to asking poor people what they themselves want - a massive survey compiled in the three eye-opening volumes of Voices of the Poor - it became clear that the poor across cultural and national contexts don't want handouts but simply the ability to start a small business of their own or gain some semblance of security. The poor don't want dependency; they want autonomy like everyone else.

But - and this is essential - poverty is corrosive in that it destroys aspirations, the engine necessary for helping people pull themselves out of poverty. When you've come up against the same obstacles time and again, a reasonable and efficient response is to quit trying. Think of people in the US trying to find jobs in this lousy economy. The 10%+ unemployment rate doesn't include the deeply discouraged who have given up looking for employment. It's the same phenomenon. At some point it's futile to continue to look for employment. Once this happens, one's aspirations for the future undergo a transformation; one's sense of well-being is recalibrated. With poverty, once any aspirations to move beyond poverty are destroyed, one focuses attention elsewhere - on scavenging for food on a given day, for example.

The "personal responsibility" claim implicit in Brooks' column is a function of a mythical and simplistic view of poverty, one that's currently worming its insidious way through media accounts of the Haiti situation. I think it probably says more about those of us enamored of our generosity than about objective reality on the ground in Haiti.

Lucy in the Sky...

What a fabulous universe.

Oceans of liquid diamond, filled with solid diamond icebergs, could be floating on Neptune and Uranus, according to a recent article in the journal Nature Physics.

The research, based on first detailed measurements of the melting point of diamond, found diamond behaves like water during freezing and melting, with solid forms floating atop liquid forms. The surprising revelation gives scientists a new understanding about diamonds and some of the most distant planets in our solar system.

Via the fabulous BLDGBLOG.

Calming Down on Massachusetts and Healthcare Reform

Ezra Klein, voice of reason:

To state some of the arguments of my earlier post more succinctly, the short-term danger of a Scott Brown victory is not Scott Brown in the Senate, or even 41 Republicans in the Senate. It's Democrats freaking out and abandoning the House bill. But on the merits, this is just absurd. If health-care reform was a good idea last week, it's a good idea next week -- and just as feasible.

The bill has left the Senate, can be passed by the House, and can be tweaked using the budget reconciliation process -- which is not some wild idea, given that Democrats initially considered running the whole bill through reconciliation. Nor is a Brown victory some national referendum on health-care reform: This is a special election in Massachusetts where a bad Democratic candidate has insulted Red Sox fans no less than twice. If anyone thinks Ted Kennedy would lose this election or vote to filibuster this bill, they've not said so aloud.

Finally, Brown opposes the national health-care reform bill even as he supports the virtually-identical Massachusetts health-care reform (the main difference between the two is that the national bill is more conservative, with more cost controls). His candidacy, as Jonathan Cohn points out, is evidence that health-care reform is popular once implemented, and becomes an article of faith even among Republicans....

Salmonberry

The Greenhouse Metaphor – More Response to Comments

Adding a bit to my earlier response. During an e-mail exchange, I recognized one of my assumptions: Things mix. This is a direct result of the second law of thermodynamics and part of why I was baffled by some of the comments. Gases mix particularly easily; it takes time for solids to dissolve in water, and some liquids don’t mix well, but gases mix very quickly and easily.

In order to separate things, you have to put energy into a system. They don’t separate by themselves unless there is a driving force that overcomes the tendency to mix. In the atmosphere, most of the concentration effects come about either because things haven’t mixed yet (think about the water vapor you see from cooling towers) or because chemistry is producing or destroying them. So the ozone is more concentrated in the ozone layer than in other parts of the atmosphere because sunlight is producing it from the much more plentiful oxygen.

Phila brings up the issue of engaging climate skeptics. I tend to agree with most of what he says, but I’ll give my reasons. He’s made my response easier by excepting my preparation for my lecture, which will largely be attended by those who are not hard-core skeptics. And part of what I’m doing is just trying to understand the issues better for my own satisfaction. I’ve had some questions rattling around in my head that I must clear up before I go before an audience.

Phila divides skeptics into three categories:

In terms of everyday skeptics -- the ones who think that "common sense" disproves this or that aspect of AGW -- I tend to be a bit fatalistic. I think the emotional payoff of not understanding is much larger than the payoff for becoming better informed. I don't think better metaphors and analogies will help, in those cases.

Which makes me wonder, sometimes, how much of the debate is actually necessary. Arguments by "scientific" skeptics tend to contain huge mistakes, but the people who are fooled by them don't care...they're just looking for something that sounds like science.

Meanwhile, amateur arguments are usually based on endlessly rotating misconceptions -- contradictory ones, often. Correct one, and another pops up instantly to take its place. Culturally, this stuff is allied to creationism and it's similarly difficult to argue against.

I’d add that I suspect that some of the skeptics are bound and determined, for purely political or wealth reasons, to take down climate change.

I guess I tend to be a bit of an evangelist for science. I find it ultimately fascinating, and it’s hard for me to believe that others won’t share that fascination if they understand it better. I may not be entirely correct on that, as Phila notes.

But what will be done on climate change will be the outcome of a political struggle. We need to convince the people in the middle that we need to do something. So we need to argue with the skeptics to show we’ve got a case, and we need to make that case well. Recent polls show a dropping-off of support for carbon trading legislation.

Maybe the time we spend arguing with people who can't or don't want to understand would be better spent motivating and encouraging people who either do understand, or are willing to trust the scientific consensus. Maybe that's exactly what skeptics are trying to prevent us from doing.

I think that some are raising objections, the same ones over and over again, to muddy the waters and throw sand in the gears. But I think we need to keep saying stuff that will encourage people, and sometimes that’s replying to the skeptics.

What English Sounds Like To Other People

Nonsense words that sound like English to an Italian.

But languages sound different when you don't understand them and when you do. Or at least I found that to be true as I learned Estonian.

The Massachusetts Senate Race

All the other pundits are weighing in, so I guess I might as well.

E. J. Dionne points out the many reasons why Martha Coakley, the Democrat in the race, might lose, and why it's not fully a referendum on Obama (here and here). He goes on to list some things that Democrats might learn from this race.

But I decided to write this post when I read Steve Clemons, who echoes a sort of common wisdom (if we may use that word) on the left. It's the messy health care bill that this is a referendum on, says Steve; President Obama was in office when this extremely messy process went on, and we sensitive beings who would prefer a more perfect bill and would have averted our eyes from the spectacle of politics being made have been forced to see this awful thing taking place, so of course we will stay home or even vote for the Republicans.

Dionne wonders why the Democrats' message isn't taking the way the conservatives' message is. He should be on the listserv I'm on. Or he could look at Clemons's post. How different is that message from the Republicans'? Obama is doing terrible things to the nation with the health care bill. I'm sure that Rush Limbaugh and the Tea Partiers are delighted with Glenn Greenwald's and Marcy Wheeler's attacks on the administration.

I keep wondering why people who call themselves progressives keep lining up on the other side. They're forgetting history and losing sight of the future. If you want to grade the administration, you need to think about whether you're grading on a curve or not. Curving Obama with George W. Bush, Obama's marks are all A++. Improving foreign relations. Getting the health reform bill this far along. Averting the financial disaster that was in progress during the transition. Good cabinet and other appointments. Changes in executive orders and agency regulations that will give us a handle on global warming and better regulation of food and hazardous waste. A wise Latina woman on the Supreme Court.

It's the future I'm worried about, though, in this election and in the constant carping of some so-called progressives. If the health care reform bill doesn't pass, it's pretty much all over for a progressive future. Big Republican wins in November, which will destroy chances for progressive legislation. A failed presidency, which those progressives are already trumpeting. (Why do they want this?) A Republican president in 2012. Do they think that will bring the progressive change they want?

The country has a bunch of trials to get through. We've chosen Barack Obama to lead us. What are we doing to get to the future we want?

Update: Bernard Avishai, Kevin Drum, and Andrew Sullivan. And John Cole, who just broke his shoulder protecting his dog from the cold.

Just Wondering

How much does it cost to do one of these? I wouldn't be surprised if it's a few million per incident if you count passenger time as having value, silly idea, I know. Plus the extra time getting to the airport? Plus all those TSA blueshirts hanging around?

This is the second one of these "unauthorized person" events in two weeks. One might argue that one of those TSA blueshirts might have done his or her job and kept this from happening.

Or that maybe all this "security" is working right along al-Qaeda's plan to paralyze us.

Buddha's Hand

Obama and Spending

Via Sullivan:

President Obama notched substantial successes in spending cuts last year, winning 60 percent of his proposed cuts and managing to get Congress to ax several programs that had bedeviled President George W. Bush for years. The administration says Congress accepted at least $6.9 billion of the $11.3 billion in discretionary spending cuts Mr. Obama proposed for the current fiscal year. An analysis by The Washington Times found that Mr. Obama was victorious in getting Congress to slash 24 programs and achieved some level of success in reducing nine other programs... By comparison, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says Mr. Bush won 40 percent of his spending cuts in fiscal 2006 and won less than 15 percent of his proposed cuts for 2007 and 2008.

And an entire political movement is built on a myth born of propaganda. A fine example of right-wing populism for the annals of history.

The Greenhouse Metaphor – Response to Comments

Many thanks for the excellent comments on “The Greenhouse Metaphor.” They’re good enough that they require some extended response. I'm putting some phrases in quotes more to draw attention to their not-fully-literal nature than to discredit them.

Lifetimes of various gases in the atmosphere don’t have much to do with their segregation in various places. Yesterday, I could see Albuquerque’s brown cloud. It’s brown because of nitrogen oxides, which are gases, and particulates, which are solids. The nitrogen oxides are visible and more concentrated in that brown cloud because they haven’t mixed into the rest of the atmosphere or been rained out. Mixing doesn’t have much to do with lifetime, but being rained out does. Gases may be soluble in water and get rained out onto the ground, where they may react with vegetation and soil. That’s what happens with nitrogen oxides, and they have short lifetimes. Methane doesn’t have a long lifetime because it reacts with gases in the atmosphere: oxidation, just like burning, but slower. Carbon dioxide is water-soluble, so it may get rained out, but it’s not as reactive as the nitrogen oxides, so it may just go back into the atmosphere. So it has a long lifetime in the atmosphere.

The “different layers in the atmosphere” – that metaphor again. Gases mix rapidly and completely. That’s the primary fact. But we have the “ozone layer.” We have statements like “Most of the atmospheric ozone is contained in the ozone layer.” Which is true. All this gives us a picture of a clearly-defined shell of mostly ozone around the earth. But

Ozone concentrations are greatest between about 20 and 40 km, where they range from about 2 to 8 parts per million. If all of the ozone were compressed to the pressure of the air at sea level, it would be only a few millimeters thick.

Emphasis mine. And further, the article goes on to say that the “boundaries” of the ozone layer fluctuate with the seasons and from one place to another. Those “boundaries” are defined as ozone concentrations. Here's some more about the ozone layer. There isn't nearly as much of this kind of explanation on the Web as I'd like to see.

If you boil a bit less than a gallon of water for pasta and put about a tablespoon of salt in it, you have 500 parts of salt per million. That tablespoon of salt would be few parts per million in a smallish swimming pool. So you’re talking about really small differences in composition between those “different layers.” The rest of the gases in the ozone layer are the usual earthly suspects, nitrogen, oxygen, and argon.

The differences resulting from the masses of the gases (could we make a song out of that?) are much smaller than the other processes in the atmosphere. Albuquerque’s brown cloud is gone today because a new air mass has moved in. It’s pushed the brown cloud out, but it’s also mixed the particulates, nitrogen oxides, and whatnot into the rest of the atmosphere, giving us the adage that

Dilution is the solution to pollution.

Those air masses keep moving around, so there’s not much chance for molecules to settle out. In any case, carbon dioxide (44 mass units) is heavier than oxygen (32 mass units), so it should be less prevalent at altitude if such settling were possible. Blood concentrations aren’t simply related to atmospheric concentrations.

Phila’s comments require a separate post. Perhaps today, perhaps the weekend.

Haiti Earthquake

Photo: Tequila Minsky for NYT

It is an unjust world. Our thoughts are with the Haitian people. Please help if you can (more here).

The Greenhouse Metaphor

I’m scheduled to give a lecture on “The Science of Climate Change” to an adult-education class next month. My topic changed at the last minute because of circumstances beyond the control of those of us involved. I decided to take a chance and force myself to learn something.

I’ve followed the climate change debate loosely, starting a decade or more ago with some of the early modeling by colleagues. I was using similar computer models for another problem, and I started out skeptical because I knew the limitations of those models. But the models have improved mightily, and the evidence seems pretty firm that the climate is changing rapidly and the reason for it is all the carbon dioxide we’ve been pouring into the air for a couple of centuries now.

But, having started skeptical, and following my usual principle of preparing for questions my audience might ask, I’ve been looking at what the skeptics have to say as well as the IPCC website, RealClimate, and other explanations of the science.

I’ve said before that I think the science is not being explained well, and in working through the material along with a discussion with skeptics at an undisclosed interweb bulletin board, I think I see one of the stumbling blocks. It’s not clear to me whether the people who have seized on this are genuinely confused or are just trying to muddy the waters. I think there are probably some of both.

This particular stumbling block comes in several guises. The basic claim is that the explanation of carbon dioxide’s role as a greenhouse gas as given by the IPCC and others contravenes the second law of thermodynamics, or perhaps the first. The argument seems to be that there cannot be a layer of gas high in the sky that radiates energy back to earth because the temperature of that layer of gas would be lower than the earth’s surface temperature. I have not tried to catalogue all the variants. There are at least two levels to refuting this argument.

First, the scientists of the IPCC have learned their thermodynamics and will spot basic flaws. Those of us who have taken thermodynamics courses know how the sins of perpetual motion machines against thermodynamics can be subtly hidden. The sheer number of scientists looking at this material assures that such errors will not slip through.

The other level is a bit more fun. I didn’t realize how much the greenhouse metaphor had made its way into my own thinking until I started looking at these “second-law” arguments. It turns out I had two parallel lines of thought: a mental picture and the mechanisms of heat transfer and molecular dynamics.

The standard explanation of the greenhouse effect is that the glass in a greenhouse is transparent to visible light, which strikes the soil and other objects in the greenhouse and is converted to heat, or infrared radiation (I could say light here or radiation after visible, but I’m using the common idiom), to which the glass is opaque. So the light comes in, and the heat doesn’t get out. The glass is separate from the interior of the greenhouse, a shell over it. In the same way, it is said, carbon dioxide is transparent to visible light and absorbs infrared radiation, thus heating things up.

But it’s not quite “in the same way.” The carbon dioxide isn’t separate from the rest of the atmosphere, it’s thoroughly mixed in. Gases mix rapidly and completely. There isn’t a shell of greenhouse gas in physical analogy to that shell of glass on a greenhouse. Unfortunately (and this is where my mental picture got suckered in), most of the diagrams explaining the greenhouse effect look like this one from My Climate Change:



Problem with Plovers has an explicit layer of greenhouse gases!



Even the Department of Energy does it.



This one, from the University of Arizona, is a little better, but it’s still got a layer. In fairness, some of those layers represent the top of the atmosphere, but if you’re thinking about the glass in a greenhouse, those layers might seem to be the equivalent of that glass.



So the well-mixed carbon dioxide absorbs that infrared, maybe two feet from the ground, maybe ten thousand feet from the ground. After it absorbs that energy, it’s warmer than the surrounding molecules are, so transferring that energy to them is right in line with the laws of thermodynamics. No problem.

Avatar in Real Virtuality

From Mongabay, get your full metal Avatar on....

Bits and Pieces - January 11, 2010

Analysis of four possible outcomes in Iran. Plus some good background.

Since the beginning of the Green Movement in Iran, 27 diplomats have abandoned their posts and have sought asylum in Western countries. h/t p_r

Still talking with Iran about a nuke deal? Will Turkish-Iranian cooperation be a part of an agreement? Laura Rozen is getting a lot of information; we can hope it's reliable.

North Korea is now putting a peace treaty (from the early 1950s Korean war) front and center. Hard to say if this is genuine or just a bargaining tactic.

Perhaps a bit more understanding up front of the situation could help to focus intelligence collection. Casting a wide net is good, but not if it brings you more than you can analyze.

New York Times calls Blackwater guards as mercenaries. I think that's a first.

I think that Ezra Klein, among many others, has this wrong. Lowenstein's article on walking away from mortgages is simply the logical outcome of the monetization of our society. Money is the ultimate value. That results in those obscene bonuses for the people who wrecked our economy, and, just as logically, walking away from an underwater mortgage.

A Murdoch family feud over Roger Ailes and Fox News? Get out the popcorn!

Copenhagen Bicycles

One of the great things about the city of Copenhagen is how bicycle friendly it is and how bikes are essential to its modern identity as a "green" city. It's really a lovely feature of the town. There are, of course, basic ways of encouraging this healthier and cleaner method of transportation, such as real bicycle lanes as in the photo above. Copenhagen even has mini snow plows just for the bike lanes. Of course, we'd have to be prepared to be a little more resistant to the elements.

Photos courtesy of cool blog Copenhagen Chic.

"Help, they are killing me"

This is a country in which torture, and the sense of supremacy and dehumanizations of others underlying it, encourages and is encouraged by this. The rest of the world sees this - the prisons, the immigration detention centers, the torture chambers. This country needs accountability if for nothing else the sake of healing itself.

...after two Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents returned him to the San Pedro detention center after dialysis, Mr. Rodriguez told a supervisor that the agents had made him stand up from the wheelchair and let him fall to the ground several times, laughing and insisting that he could walk.

“He asked why they were treating him that way,” the supervisor wrote in a report about the allegations. “They picked him up from the ground and harshly shoved him into the transporting vehicle. One used his feet to shove or kick him into the vehicle.”

...a Chinese computer engineer who died in April 2008, his spine broken and his body riddled with cancer that had gone undiagnosed in a Rhode Island detention center, where he had pleaded in vain for proper medical care. In that case, however, the investigation unfolded against a backdrop of news media coverage and a lawsuit by relatives.

Detention center guards had been caught on security cameras as they dragged Mr. Ng from his cell a week before his death, insisted that he could walk, and ridiculed him as they loaded him into a van. The agency, caught in the spotlight of public attention, stopped placing immigration detainees there.

And, in another article, the systemic, coldly administrative nature of the cruelty:

...the injured man, a Guinean tailor named Boubacar Bah. Mr. Bah, 52, had been left in an isolation cell without treatment for more than 13 hours before an ambulance was called.

While he lay in the hospital in a coma after emergency brain surgery, 10 agency managers in Washington and Newark conferred by telephone and e-mail about how to avoid the cost of his care and the likelihood of “increased scrutiny and/or media exposure,” according to a memo summarizing the discussion....

...In the agency’s confidential files was a jail video showing Mr. Bah face down in the medical unit, hands cuffed behind his back, just before medical personnel sent him to a disciplinary cell. The tape shows him crying out repeatedly in his native Fulani, “Help, they are killing me!”

Nectarine

Nuke Geek Request

I have a small piece of graphite from the first nuclear reactor, CP-1, which was built under the Stagg Field spectator stands at the University of Chicago as part of the Manhattan Project in 1942. It's encased in clear plastic, and I was given it as a memento of some meeting or other.

I've always wanted a piece of diffusion barrier to go with it. Diffusion barrier is the material used in Oak Ridge's gaseous diffusion plants, which separated uranium isotopes in the Manhattan Project.

They've got a surplus of that stuff. It can't be all that radioactive; clear plastic should take care of any hazard. And I need a piece for my desk. I'll bet there are a lot of other geeks out here that would want one, too. That's how they could get rid of it.

But I suppose it's still classified. Sigh.

Just Wondering: The Terrorist Watch Lists

There seem to be several lists, but I've been looking, since the underpants bomber lit himself on fire, for an indication of how these lists are used.

The lists should be current and focused. Further, if the people on them are seriously suspected of terrorist activities, they should be investigated. Are the lists used as a basis for investigations? If it is found that more than one person has the same name, is there an attempt made to figure out which one is suspected of terrorist activities? Are names removed when an investigation finds that that person is innocuous?

Return of Protest

James Fallows thinks that the United States will muddle through, despite our current worries. I tend to agree with that, and with his judgement that our government is not working at all well. What worries me is the state of our civil discourse. I’m not going to give in to the journalistic convention of false even-handedness and will just say it out. We have a group of people on the right who are willing to lie, misrepresent, and corrupt discourse for their own aims, which are not clear to me and seem to be purely destructive.

Fallows didn’t say much about that. His article focuses on different issues.

But he did say something that I think might bear the seeds of a clue to understanding the problem that I see.

One of those ingredients is exaggerated complaint by whichever group is out of political power—those who thought America should be spelled with a “k” under Nixon or Reagan, those who attend “tea bag” rallies against the Obama administration now.

The Iraq war produced no antiwar movement of demonstrations in the streets of the type we saw in the 1960s and early 1970s. The Tea Party movement, however, has produced a continuing stretch of demonstrations. Comparing the Sixties demonstrations with the Tea Party demonstrations might yield some insight.



Exaggerated, yes. That is the nature of demonstrations. But that very exaggeration, and how it’s different in the two movements, might tell us something about today’s uncivil discourse. It’s not just about being out of political power, although that is part of it. I am going to try to locate the broad contrasts between the two groups to perhaps illuminate something about America today and will make broad generalizations, noting here only that exceptions exist to everything I’m going to say.

First, some similarities. Both movements are outside of, and impervious to, normal political discourse. Both are aimed at presidents; Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama. Both are made up of many subgroups with varying degrees of organization. Both are suspected by their opponents of being manipulated by other forces, including some very extreme organizations, which may provide funding and other support. A part of the population does not participate in the demonstrations but is sympathetic to their goals. Both carry incidental behavior that alienates many in the general population; drugs and a self-destructive lifestyle in the Sixties demonstrators and racial prejudice in the Tea Partiers.

There are similarities and differences in the objectives of the two movements. For both, the purpose of any given demonstration may not be clear because of the differing goals of the subgroups, but each has an overarching theme. The Sixties demonstrators were protesting the Vietnam war and its accompanying draft. The Tea Partiers are protesting economic conditions, from the bailout of the banks to a high unemployment rate to a too-large national debt. In both, lifestyle issues accompany these themes. For the Sixties protesters, those issues had to do with equality for people of color and women, along with loosening prohibitions against sex and intoxicants. For the Tea Partiers, it is a reaction to the changes set loose in the sixties.

The Sixties protesters were of college age; most of the Tea Partiers are older. The differences in age parallel the difference in objectives. Young men did not want to be drafted into the military; money issues are more important for older people. Young people agitate for change on lifestyle issues; older people are less enthusiastic about change.

The relationship to media is different. The Sixties protests developed their own media, and Rolling Stone, for one, is still in existence today. The Tea Parties grow out of and have been encouraged by Fox News, and their ideas have long been promulgated by Rush Limbaugh and others.

Finally, there’s teh crazy. It took some time to arise in the Sixties protests, and there hasn’t been as much time for the Tea Parties. And it depends on who is opining: some would say that both have been manifestations of teh crazy from their beginnings. I’m thinking about people and ideas that are quite beyond the main themes of the protest: the Weathermen and Symbionese Liberation Army for the Sixties, along with the Yippies, who I was never quite sure whether they were serious or just a parody of the movement itself. There are bizarre components of the Tea Party movement, but none that are obviously dangerous.

Squeaky Fromme, a member of the Manson Family, tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford. We haven’t seen her equivalent from the Tea Partiers yet.

But the Sixties protesters had a stake in the future in a way that the Tea Partiers do not. It was a desire to be able to participate in that future that motivated many of them. The Tea Partiers want to return to an America that they think they’ve lost, in some cases to the values of the Sixties. The Sixties protests had an effect: many of their subordinate issues, particularly those relating to equality for women and minorities, are the stuff of today’s normal expectations. Some of those, the Tea Partiers would like to remove.

What effects will we see from the Tea Parties in forty years? Changes in social mores are hardly ever turned back; the most effective instances of this recently have been Iran’s Islamic Revolution and a return to more modest dress for women in other parts of Islam. There is likely to be a return to a more regulated financial sphere, a concern that reaches far beyond the Tea Parties. Formation of a third party is likely to hurt the Republicans more than the Democrats, but the Republicans themselves are the result of a revolt against the Whigs, so it could happen. And we can hope that teh crazy doesn’t take hold as it did in the Sixties.

[Photo credits: Sixties and Tea Party.]

Dutch Hero

I was wondering why the news media hadn't turned the passengers of Northwest Flight 253 into media stars, "heroes," as we like to say. You know, the passengers who stopped Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his underwear from blowing up the plane. Turns out the guy who "threw himself" onto Abdulmutallab and found the explosive device was Dutch, not American.

Iran's Tunnels

I've read the New York Times article on Iran's tunnels a few times now, and I'm still slightly baffled by what is going on. There's nothing new in the Times article.

Gary Sick sees it as part of the Obama adminstration's bringing the press along as they try to remain agile in dealing with Iran. I'll go a little further and suggest that it's very subtle payback to Israel, or perhaps a warning against attacking Iran.

Sick also observes that the Mojahedin-e Khalq, through the National Council of Resistance of Iran, comes out of the story looking good. NCRI has provided information on hidden Iranian nuclear sites since at least 2002. But these sites have not been unknown to intelligence specialists through overhead photos. So I'm wondering about this discrepancy reported by the Times:

“We followed whatever they came up with,” Mohamed ElBaradei, the recently departed head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said of the council in an interview. “And a lot of it was bogus.”

Frank Pabian, a senior adviser on nuclear nonproliferation at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, strongly disagreed. “They’re right 90 percent of the time,” he said of the council’s disclosures about Iran’s clandestine sites. “That doesn’t mean they’re perfect, but 90 percent is a pretty good record.”

Pabian must know about the record that ElBaradei is talking about. Quite a difference in interpretation.

Why Newspaper Articles Are Boring

Michael Kinsley has a very smart article on the wordiness of newspaper conventions in writing. Felix Salmon gets rather wordy on the differences in production that he says result in some of those newspaper conventions, but he doesn't make the connections clear.

I'll distill it down to a single difference that neither mentions: hyperlinks. Much of what Kinsley objects to, the wordy identifications of people we don't know and probably don't care about, can probably be omitted. But if there's any reason at all to include a person's name, the identification (and perhaps life oeuvre) can easily be supplied on the Web with a hyperlink.

By and large, the big newspapers haven't figured that out. Or the other fun and informative things that any good blogger has figured out can be done with hyperlinks. Instead, in their Web editions, they link random words in a story, frequently not even the most important ones, to their search machines, which frequently give boneheaded results.

Bits and Pieces - January 5, 2010

Photos of humpback whales feeding in Alaska.

Jay Rosen's fix for the Sunday talking head shows. The networks fact-check what the guests have said, and publish it on Wednesday.

Campaign promises that Obama kept. And we're only a year into his presidency.

Michael Kinsley on the useless words that fill up newspaper articles.

Countries that aren't really countries and the dangers they pose.

Even Conservatives Are Getting Fed Up With Security Theater

Jonah Goldberg and Anne Applebaum say some sensible things.

Buah Lahung

Copenhagen Link Dump

The links have piled up. I'm dumping them below. These are all on the Copenhagen meetings and future efforts on climate change.

But first up, Brazil makes good on its pledge as President Lula signs into law a 39% reduction in emissions by 2020.

Now for the others. Some are new, some are a little old:

WRI on what "taking note" of the Copenhagen Accord means.

Tim Flannery at NY Review on the question of what next.

BBC's take on "failure" in Copenhagen.

Scott Barrett on the Copenhagen Accord and the potential opportunity it represents.

David Doniger of NRDC on Copenhagen's "success."

Five possible climate scenarios based on different degrees of temperature increase.

The New Yorker on China's rush to capture the renewable energy market.

China and the Copenhagen Accord.

China's unique take on China's glorious role in Copenhagen, "Verdant Mountains Cannot Stop Water Flowing; Eastward the River Keeps on Going."

Mark Lynas' now-famous criticism of China's actual role.

UK climate secretary Ed Miliband seconds that.

Bits and Pieces - January 4, 2010

I'm wondering how this happened. Every time I've exited an airport concourse, there's a TSA agent sitting there to make sure it doesn't. Perhaps the negligent TSA agent could be found and punished?

I've said it before, and Gary Sick agrees: Obama is a strategist.

How's that party switch working out down in Alabama?

Hazardous Chemicals

From today's Washington Post: Use of potentially harmful chemicals kept secret under law

The chemicals I would like to know about are the ones in shower cleaners and, with my latest bottle, Formula 409. I am not particularly sensitive to chemicals, but these really make it hard for me to breathe and have to be bad for the lungs, particularly since they are used as aerosol sprays.

The ingredient labels are highly uninformative. A bottle of Lysol with bleach gives "active ingredient" as sodium hypochlorite, 2%, and "other ingredients" as 98%. Formula 409 gives "active ingredient" as alkyl (C12-40% C14-50% C16-10%) dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride, 0.3%, and "other ingredients" as 99.7%. The information has decreased since I last read labels.

Sodium hypochlorite is bleach and the organic ammonium chlorides are cationic detergents.

I recall a label that listed "organic acids," which would make some sense for removing soap scum, but those organic acids would not necessarily be compatible with bleach or cationic detergents. Still, the pungent smell is chokingly the same. I don't recognize it, and I know quite a few chemicals by smell.

Bits and Pieces - January 3, 2010

Dithering on whether to put the bad news first or last. Here it is. Israel wants a nuclear deal with the United States like India got. This was the intention of the Bush administration. Israel is either thinking that a distraction from the settlements is necessary or that now that Netanyahu has put Obama in his place, they can go ahead with the plan.

Some good ideas from Bono. I don't agree with all of them, but it's refreshing to see someone thinking ahead in a positive way.

Speaking of refreshing, the Washington Post today has President Obama's back on terrorism. Whoda thunk it?

If you've been reading me regularly, you don't have to read this. But it's nice to see that someone in the media is starting to figure out that 1989 in Eastern Europe was a bit different than the neocons' fantasies.

We are becoming a nation of fruitcakes.

The Nuclear Policy Review

Bryan Bender has a long article in the Boston Globe on the Nuclear Posture Review. By other accounts, President Obama threw an earlier version, containing few if any changes from the status quo, back at the military and told them to do what he said. It sounds like they are.

The article is a summary of what's out there along with some rumors I've already read and a few new things. All of these, if they are accurate, are genuinely moving toward obama's vision of eliminating nuclear weapons. They are also safe moves that will not endanger the United States in any way. Some will require negotiation.

The review is assessing the potential threats over the next decade that would require nuclear weapons, seeking to match the arsenal and strategy to emerging dangers like North Korea, a rising China, and nuclear terrorism - and away from the far less likely massive nuclear exchange with Russia, according to several administration officials who are familiar with the review.

This is something we've needed since, oh, say, 1992.

For the first time, influential voices, including a former top nuclear commander and senior Obama advisers, are proposing that one leg of the nuclear arms “triad" - a $30 billion-a-year enterprise made up of land-, air-, and sea-based weapons - be eliminated.

The article later goes on to say that it's the bomber leg of the triad that is being considered for elimination. It would be much better to eliminate the ICBM leg. The missiles are too easily targeted and need too much lead time to get ready, so they remain on alert, as the article starts by dramatizing.

Another historic change under consideration is adopting a “no-first-use" policy, a public declaration stating the United States would not use nuclear weapons first, a step long advocated by arms control advocates who believe it would reduce the incentive for other nations to develop nuclear weapons.

There is a lot of resistance to this by those who would prefer for "all options to remain on the table." Others will say it's just words and can be revoked at any time, so it's meaningless. But words are part of an overall strategy, and to the extent that they can provide a bit more stability, it would be a good move.

Also on the table, the officials say, is explicitly limiting the nuclear arsenal’s mission to deterring other nuclear weapons - not chemical or biological attacks or halting a massive conventional military assault, as current policy stipulates.

This would also turn down the volume and uncertainty.

It sounds like the military are listening to their Commander in Chief. Get ready for anguished screams from the parson's brothers.

Respect

The Pope is calling for it, and so is North Korea (NYT, WaPo).

Just to make it clear, North Korea is calling for a peace agreement to end the Korean War of the early 1950s. There is only an armistice. Still.

And, yeah, I'll jump in the Obama tank with Helmut. I'm looking forward to the O years.

Happy New Decade

Goodbye zeros, hello Os (the Obama Decade, that is)!

Just Wondering

If those full-body scanners are such a good idea and not a threat to privacy, then why are all the demonstration photos we're seeing of men (particularly ugly one here)?

Why not a woman or a twelve-year-old girl?

We're not supposed to be worried about any threat to privacy or our concept of decency in the service of security, after all.

Update: After I wrote the above, it occurred to me that most of the commentary I'm seeing from ordinary people - letters to the editor and comments on news articles and blogs - is taking the underpants bomber in stride. It's the security consultants and others who might make a buck from, er, enhanced security, who seem to be most insistent that any and all means must be used to make sure that terrorists never, ever, ever get on a plane. Well, any and all scanning devices. This convinced me it was worth saying. Michael Chertoff should be ashamed of himself, as should Fred Hiatt.