This combines together on one page various
news websites and diaries which I like to read.
Also: BBC In Pictures
| mySociety panopticon
| mySociety Google reader
| Francis is (my own blog)
Global cooling bites the dust: Hottest January followed by second hottest February. Now March is busting out. | by Climate Progress | 17 March 2010, 11:20 PM
Last month, NOAA reported the world experienced the warmest January in both satellite records. And NOAA just reported (here) that it was the second warmest February on record in both satellite records. Now the UAH satellite data shows record-smashing temperatures in the first half of March:
The yellow line is the 20-year average temperature, the purple line is of the 20-year “record highs,” and the green line is the 2010 temperature (make your own chart here).
Other temperature datasets show slightly different results. For NASA, January and February were tied for the second hottest on record.
Of course, there never was any global cooling — see Must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira — “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.” The vast majority of the warming went right where scientists had predicted — into the oceans (see “How we know global warming is happening” and below).
In fact, 2005 was the hottest year on record in both NOAA’s and NASA’s dataset — and in every dataset, the 200os were the hottest decade on record. But the anti-science crowd loves their much-vaunted satellite data. Why?
First, the satellite data shows the warmest year on record to be the uber-Niño year of 1998, allowing the disinformers to ignore the long-term trend and keep repeating the mantra, no warming since 1998.
Second, I think many in the anti-science crowd still operate under the mis-impression that the satellite data doesn’t show any significant long-term warming — a mis-impression creating by some mis-analysis by anti-scientists John Christy and Roy Spencer, mis-analysis that just happened to bias the data in the direction of their beliefs (see “Should you believe anything John Christy and Roy Spencer say?”). Go figure!
In fact, NOAA points out that both satellite data sets show about the same amount of warming as the land-based record, “which increased at a rate near 0.16°C/decade (0.29°F/decade) during the same 30-year period” — once you remove the expected stratospheric cooling from the satellite records (see NOAA discussion here).
This is from Spencer’s blog on March 5:
It’s clearly warming, and Spencer himself says the “trends since 11/78 [are] +0.132 deg. C [+0.234 F] per decade.”
It’s also worth noting that this current El Niño is puny compared to the one in 1998. This is from the weekly update, “ENSO Cycle: Recent Evolution, Current Status and Predictions“ from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center:
The current El Niño is already winding down, although the temperature anomaly in the key region of the tropical Pacific has stayed steady in the last few week around 1.2°C.
Finally, the record temperatures we’re seeing now are especially impressive because we’ve been in “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.” It now appears to be over.
But, of course, it’s hard to stop the upward march of human-caused global warming — other than by a sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
Anyway, the media and anti-science crowd probably only have a few more months to push the “global cooling” meme, because it’s looking increasingly likely that — barring a very sharp drop into a La Niña like we saw 2 years ago (or a major volcano) — this will be the hottest year on record in every temperature dataset.
Memo to media: If you are going to try to squeeze in one more global cooling story before the end of the year, please do remember that 80% of anthropogenic warming was always expected by scientists to go into the oceans, which have seen a pretty steady increase in heat content:
Figure 1: “Total Earth Heat Content [anomaly] from 1950 (Murphy et al. 2009). Ocean data taken from Domingues et al 2008.”
And from another JGR article, “Global hydrographic variability patterns during 2003–2008” (subs. req’d, draft here [big PDF])
Figure 2: Time series of global mean heat storage (from 0 to 1.24 miles).
So perhaps we are near the end of the global cooling nonsense, at least until the next big La Niña or volcano….
Related Posts:
Graham, Kerry, Lieberman share details of bipartisan climate and clean energy jobs bill with industry groups | by Climate Progress | 17 March 2010, 10:05 PM
Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), John Kerry (D-MA), and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) “shared an eight-page outline of their draft legislation that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions over the next four decades, including provisions to limit business costs while ramping up domestic production of oil, gas and nuclear power.”
E&E News PM (subs. req’d) reported the following details of the bill, which leaked out from the Senators “closed-door meeting with major industry groups they are courting”:
According to several sources in the meeting room, the bill calls for greenhouse gas curbs across multiple economic sectors, with a 2020 target of reducing emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels and an 80 percent limit at mid-century. Power plant emissions would be regulated in 2012, with other major industrial sources being phased in starting in 2016.
In a bow to industry demands, the senators’ proposal would preempt U.S. EPA climate regulations under the Clean Air Act and halt dozens of state climate laws and regulations now on the books. Also, only facilities that release 25,000 tons per year of greenhouse gases must participate in the climate program.
Additional layers of certainty for industry come via a “hard price collar” that limits greenhouse gas allowances to between $10 and $30 per ton tagged to inflation, with an increase at a to-be-determined “fixed rate” over time. The legislation would also set aside a “strategic reserve” of 4 billion greenhouse gas credits that could be released into the market to help control price volatility fluctuations.
Well, I’m not a fan of a hard collar (i.e. a pure safety valve, with an unlimited amount of allowances sold if you hit the ceiling price) — but some sort of collar was inevitable (see How the Senate can fix cost containment in the climate bill with ‘price collar plus’). If the reserve is created from tons skimmed off of each year’s total allowances from 2012 to 2050, that is a good idea.
Also, if there is going to be a hard collar than the “fixed rate” of rise over time needs to be something like 6% plus inflation. The $30 starting price fora ceiling, presumably in 2012, isn’t that bad, but again, only if you are rising at a pretty rapid rate.
The floor price, however, is just too low. I’d want to start at least $12 if not higher. As an aside, I would strongly recommend starting the regulations in 2013 (or 2014), to give more time to set rules and keep this clearly away from the economic recovery. Also, the amount of allocations in the early years are likely to be too high anyway, thanks to the economic recession and the success of the stimulus bill, so you’re really not getting any environmental benefit from starting in 2012.
Preempting the EPA was inevitable if there is to be anywhere near 60 votes for this thing. [Pause for 10 seconds of angst, now get over it.]
Overall, the bill will include eight titles: Refining, America’s Farmers, Consumer Refunds, Clean Energy Innovation, Coal, Natural Gas, Nuclear and Energy Independence. And it will set up new nationwide standards for energy efficiency and renewable energy, as well as ideas on carbon market regulation crafted by Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine).
One can certainly make good use of the Cantwell-Collins idea of allowing only regulated entities to own permits.
The senators’ meeting included about a dozen top trade associations, including representatives from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Edison Electric Institute and American Petroleum Institute. Several of those officials left the meeting giving the three senators credit for their effort.
“Directionally speaking, the way they’re trying to conform and shape this bill I’d suggest is largely in sync with what most people in American industry think is the direction you’re going to have to go if you’re going to have a successful program,” said Bruce Josten, executive vice president for government affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “Now there’s a lot of ifs, ands and buts, but if you’re asking for a broad statement, that’s a broad statement.”
John Shaw, senior vice president of government affairs at the Portland Cement Association, called the meeting’s tone “very positive.”
“I think many of the industry sectors are willing to work with the senators to achieve positive public policy results,” Shaw said, “but the devil is in the details, and folks are very anxious to see those details.”
If the Chamber were to support this bill — or even if not actively oppose it — that would be a miracle, and I don’t really believe in miracles.
Right now, the conventional wisdom is the bill has a very, very, very hard climb to 60 votes. More on that soon.
Leaked document reveals Canadian federal climate scientists being muzzled from media contact | by Climate Progress | 17 March 2010, 09:38 PM
“The Government of Canada has cut virtually all programs aimed at funding climate science. I get the sense that they feel that science is a nuisance. They ignore science in their decision making; they muzzle their federal scientists by imposing impossible media-contact regulations; they cut programs designed to allow scientists to develop knowledge.” — Andrew Weaver, professor at the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria, and Canada Research Chair
That’s from “Troubling Evidence,” a startling new report from the Climate Action Network Canada. It was “released just days after a federal budget that effectively slashed funding for university-based climate science.”
A CAN Canada spokesman says of the Harper government, “they’re putting climate deniers in key oversight positions over research, and they’re reducing funding in key areas.… It’s almost as though they’re making a conscious attempt to bury the truth.”
The muzzling is quite extensive, as the Montreal Gazette reported Monday:
OTTAWA — A dramatic reduction in Canadian media coverage of climate change science issues is the result of the Harper government introducing new rules in 2007 to control interviews by Environment Canada scientists with journalists, says a newly released federal document.
“Scientists have noticed a major reduction in the number of requests, particularly from high profile media, who often have same-day deadlines,” said the Environment Canada document.
“Media coverage of climate change science, our most high-profile issue, has been reduced by over 80 per cent.”
The analysis reviewed the impact of a new federal communications policy at Environment Canada, which required senior federal scientists to seek permission from the government prior to giving interviews.
In many cases, the policy also required them to get approval from supervisors of written responses to the questions submitted by journalists before any interview, said the document, obtained in an investigation into the government’s views and policies on global-warming science that was conducted by Climate Action Network Canada, a coalition of environmental groups.
The document suggests the new communications policy has practically eliminated senior federal scientists from media coverage of climate-change science issues, leaving them frustrated that the government was trying to “muzzle” them.
Apparently Harper learned some tricks from Bush and Cheney.
A 2007 report by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee concluded: “The Bush administration has engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming.” The U.S. House Report found, “It was standard practice for media requests to speak with federal scientists on climate change matters to be sent to CEQ for White House approval. By controlling which government scientists could respond to media inquiries, the White House suppressed dissemination of scientific views that could conflict with Administration policies. The White House also edited congressional testimony regarding the science of climate change…. There was a systematic White House effort to minimize the significance of climate change by editing climate change reports.”
Sounds familiar:
Many (federal climate change) scientists are recognized experts in their field, have received media training, and have successfully carried out media interviews for many years,” said the document, leaked by an Environment Canada employee who asked not to be named.
“Our scientists are very frustrated with the new process. They feel the intent of the policy is to prevent them from speaking to media.”
The Environment Canada analysis noted that four prominent scientists, who regularly spoke for the government on climate change science issues, appeared in only 12 newspaper clippings in the first nine months of 2008, compared with 99 clippings over the same period in 2007.
“There is a widespread perception among Canadian media that our scientists have been ‘muzzled’ by the media relations policy,” said the Environment Canada document. “Media coverage of this perception, which originated with a Canwest story in February 2008, is continuing, with at least 47 articles in Canadian newspapers to date.”
Shame on the Harper government for trying to hide the truth from the citizens of Canada, especially when climate change is already hitting their country very hard:
jamesykwak | by The Baseline Scenario | 17 March 2010, 07:12 PM
By James Kwak
According to ex-Lehman executives interviewed by Max Abelson (hat tip Felix Salmon). To summarize, they say that using borderline-legal transactions to massage your balance sheet at the end of a quarter is completely normal, everyone does it, $50 billion is no big deal anyway, only “nonprofessionals” would even notice, and the only reason the bankruptcy examiner made so much noise about it was to justify the fee for his work. (Abelson does point out that, according to internal Lehman emails cited in the report, there were Lehman executives at the time who were worried about what they were doing and did not think it was standard practice.)
The unnamed sources may be right about one thing: it may be true that everyone was doing it, or at least something similar for the same purpose. One source said, “If Valukas went into Goldman Sachs, what do you think the report would look like? This would be a fairly tale compared to that.” In other words, Lehman simply had the misfortune to not be bailed out by the U.S. government, leaving its finances open for all the world to see.
But it’s not clear to me how this makes the situation any better. So instead of just Lehman cooking the books, the point is that everyone is cooking the books? And they are cooking the books more, so $50 billion is only chump change? Even if it’s legal, this seems like a problem. (And I don’t think you can resort to the argument that sophisticated money managers knew what was going on and weren’t worried, so therefore the rest of us shouldn’t worry either; if sophisticated money managers were so good, then the collapse of Lehman wouldn’t have had systemic consequences.)
The Lehman report could be interpreted two ways. One is that Lehman was a case of bad apples. If you had asked me before about fraud and the financial crisis, I would have said that there was probably some fraud around the edges, but it was unnecessary–the crisis could have been produced by entirely legal behavior, and probably was. But exposure of accounting fraud (or near-fraud) at Lehman could have the unfortunate effect of causing people to focus on fraud as an explanation of the crisis, implicitly letting all the other banks (and regulators) off the hook.
The other interpretation is that if Lehman was doing it, then probably everyone was, or at least a lot of people were. Maybe Goldman didn’t need to because it was shorting the housing market, but any other bank that was about to get blown up by its own toxic assets would have a strong incentive to push the limits of legal accounting as far as it could to buy itself a little more time.
The implication of Abelson’s sources is that the latter interpretation is correct.
On the Street.....via Manzoni, Milano | by The Sartorialist | 17 March 2010, 06:05 PM
письмово звернутися до НТКУ з проханням показати фільм "Бодетаун. Місто на ко... | by Successful - PledgeBank | 17 March 2010, 05:51 PM
'Я обіцяю письмово звернутися до НТКУ з проханням показати фільм "Бодетаун. Місто на кордоні" за умови, що 10 інших людей зроблять те ж саме.' -- Євген Вязалов, мешканець Києва
Autoplaying ads: an apology | by Futurismic | 17 March 2010, 05:49 PM
Hey, folks; I’ve had a few comments and emails from regular readers informing me that they were seeing ads on the site that were autoplaying video and audio, and which in some cases were hard or impossible to close down. I want to thank those of you who got in touch for doing so; Futurismic’s readers are its lifeblood, and I long ago vowed never to subject you to tacky crap ads of that sort.
Indeed, the agency now managing those ad blocks made a point of telling me that they don’t accept ads of that sort on their network, which is why I decided to start working with them and drop the old Project Wonderful slots (whose new geolocational bidding system had pretty much deep-sixed the tiny income they used to make for the site). I’ve now informed the agency of the problem, and they’re looking into removing the offending ads from their system forthwith.
In the meantime, please pipe up and get in touch if you’re still seeing them: what would be extra helpful is if you could let me know what browser you’re using when you see them, whereabouts you’re located in the world (i.e. which US state, or which smaller nation), and – most importantly – what the offending adverts are promoting.
Thanks again for your patience; normal service will hopefully be resumed very soon. 
Jimmy the German | by Mark McNulty Photography | 17 March 2010, 05:25 PM
This is Jimmy, he’s German and he lives in Austin and whilst we’re in town we’ve been lucky enough to hang out with him. He rides a Harley Davidson and as the banner says, he’s a son of anarchy. Jimmy lives in the house of Randy who’s a superstar in cut off shorts and who has very kindly opened his home to myself and the Nashville Liverpool Underground Medicine Show. You’ll be meeting lots of new people over the next few days!
Jimmy the German
Emergency: Liverpool Twestival seeks venue | by Liverpool Blogs | 17 March 2010, 05:20 PM
The Liverpool Twestival is happening next Thursday 25th but as was announced earlier on their twitter feed, the venue (who shall remain nameless) has dropped out.
If you are a venue that has a window next Thursday night and you think you can accommodate about a hundred Tweeters, a band, a raffle and other fun and games, please contact the Twestival organisers via their website.
Or their twitter feed. Or email me feelinglistless@btopenworld.com and I'll pass you on to the organisers. Thanks.
The Lightbulb Shop | by Mark McNulty Photography | 17 March 2010, 05:16 PM
So I’m in Austin , Texas for SXSW or at least a few things that surround it. It’s been a mad few days and I’m just starting to look at what I’ve been shooting though most of the work I’m doing is video based. I’m sure there’s gonna be a few post like the Lightbulb Shop and fingers crossed I get the chance to go back at dusk as they leave the lights on!!!
The Light Bulb Shop
Has The Time For Mobile Marketing Sailed By? | by onlineSpin | 17 March 2010, 04:45 PM
Do you ever get the feeling that the ship has set sail and you may have missed the boat? When I think about the mobile advertising space, I tend to feel that way -- at least a little bit. Based on the lack of standardization and the rapid growth of competing platforms, I am going out on a limb and may be the first person to say that mobile advertising has plateau-ed -- at least in its current iteration.
I Need Your Help.... | by The Sartorialist | 17 March 2010, 04:12 PM
...with the Celine Inspiration Book Give Away
The last two seasons Phoebe Philo/Celine created beautiful inspiration books that were placed on the seats of each person attending the fashion show. I assume these books are reasonably rare since I don't think you can get them in the shops or anywhere else.
Of course not everyone took their book so Garance and I picked up a few of the extras for you, but we can't figure out how to get them to you.
A contest?
A Ebay auction for charity?
A raffle?
Instead of letting another season go by without getting these books into the hands of real Celine/fashion fans, I thought we should just ask you for ideas.
The trick is to create something that can have everyone participate (like yesterdays "versus" post) AND be able to identify and verify the winners (not so easy)
Remember that the least complicated ideas are the best for everyone involved.
PS just to be clear...the ideas do not have to relate to Celine at all
Human skin as broadband data conduit | by Futurismic | 17 March 2010, 04:00 PM
Forget broadband-over-power-lines or wi-fi; how cyberpunk would it be to transmit 10mbps of data through the human body itself? Very cyberpunk, fo’ sho’.
The researchers placed two electrodes 12 inches apart on a subject’s skin and were able to clock data transmission rates of 10 megabits per second. The technology may pave the way for ultra-efficient implantable body monitors that cut energy needs by 90%.
Transmitting data directly through the skin is much more efficient than current wireless transmission technologies (bluetooth, wifi), since it requires much less energy. The body is an excellent medium for the transmission of signals, and researchers found that low-frequency electromagnetic waves encounter very little interference when sent through the skin.
It’s unclear how useful this research is for those of us living in the real world… unless, perhaps, you have a short Cat-5 lead at your LAN party, and a flatmate who’s willing to stand with one hand jammed in the router ports while the other one grips the stripped cable ends…
Large majority of Americans continue to believe global warming is real and trust scientists | by Climate Progress | 17 March 2010, 03:30 PM
After analyzing all of the data from 2009 survey, Krosnick and his Stanford colleagues concluded that the 5-point drop in the percentage of Americans who believe in the global warming was largely made up of people who both mistrust scientists and think that the Earth is cooling down naturally.
We’re subjected to many dubious claims about science messaging — stuff like, “the world’s scientists are struggling with the unsettling feeling that the more they talk about climate change, the less progress they make.”
Scientists may have that feeling, but it has little basis in fact. You can’t discuss this subject in a serious fashion without looking at key factors like the anti-science disinformation campaign, the he-said/she-said coverage by the media, the decision by many enviros to downplay talk of global warming, and, in the U.S., the relatively coolish temperatures of the past two years (see “The disinformers are winning, but mostly with the GOP“).
So I wanted to bring you further analysis by someone who has done actual detailed polling and research on the subject, Stanford communications expert Jon Krosnick. He has released an analysis of his latest survey of U.S. public opinion on global warming. Below is a synopsis, plus a video interview of Krosnick (with links to the analysis and working papers). His results indicate:
In late 2009, the credibility of climate scientists worldwide came into question when controversial emails from prominent researchers were leaked to the news media. That was followed a few weeks later by revelations of an erroneous forecast in a report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggesting that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. In this video, Stanford Professor Jon Krosnick explains what the American public really thinks about climate scientists based on a series of national surveys he conducted on behalf of the Woods Institute for the Environment.
Despite recent news reports questioning the credibility of climate science, the vast majority of Americans continue to trust the scientists who say that global warming is real, according to a new Stanford University study.
Those results come from a recent public opinion survey funded by Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment and the Associated Press (AP). According to Krosnick, the recent 5-point drop in the percentage of people who believe in global warming was entirely due to a shift in opinions among the minority of Americans who do not trust climate scientists. A majority of these individuals believe that the Earth has been warming over the long haul, but this majority has been shrinking, he said.
Krosnick, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Woods Institute, has been conducting national surveys on global warming for more than a decade, partnering with major media outlets, including the AP, ABC News, Time, New Scientist, and the Washington Post. To get a sense of how public opinion changes over time, many of the surveys have posed the same questions year after year. He presented his findings on March 12 at a climate briefing hosted by the American Meteorological Society in Washington, D.C.
“The 2009 Woods Institute-AP survey shows that Americans can be divided into two groups – 70 percent who trust scientists, and 30 percent who do not,” Krosnick said. “Our latest study illuminates how these two groups of people think differently about this issue.”
Trust in Scientists
For the 2009 survey, pollsters conducted telephone interviews with 1,055 adults from Nov. 17 to Nov. 29. During that time period, controversial emails from prominent climate scientists were leaked to the news media. The emails, which were hacked from a server at a British university, included vitriolic attacks on critics of global warming and raised questions about scientists manipulating climate data. The controversy, called “climategate” by global warming skeptics, soon made headlines around the world. But according to Krosnick, the effect on public opinion was minimal.
“Our research shows that the negative publicity surrounding climategate had no meaningful impact on public confidence in climate scientists,” he said. “In 2008, 68 percent of our respondents said they trusted scientists completely, a lot or a moderate amount. In the 2009 survey, the number was 70 percent Ð up two points.”
Climategate was followed by more negative headlines in December 2009. This time, the focus was on a 2007 forecast by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggesting that melting glaciers in the Himalayas were likely to disappear by 2035. That forecast turned out to be erroneous, which caused even greater turmoil among climate researchers. On March 10, 2010, in reaction to the growing controversy, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced the creation of an independent panel to review the work of the IPCC.
“The scientific community is overreacting to these events,” Krosnick said. “In theory, it’s possible that public regard for climate scientists has dropped sharply since our 2009 survey. But based on my 30 years of experience in this field, that’s very unlikely, because American public opinion, even on a highly publicized and frequently debated issue, changes very, very slowly. So in a two-month period, it’s unlikely that there would be a dramatic change. My guess is that relatively few Americans are aware of the media controversy or are paying attention to it, and even fewer are influenced by it.”
Changing weather
One factor that can influence opinion is the perception of local changes in the weather, Krosnick said. Using data going back to 1880, NASA scientists report that globally, 2000 to 2009 included nine of the 10 hottest years on record. However, below average temperatures in parts of the United States over the last two years have led some Americans to wonder if the Earth is actually getting cooler, Krosnick noted.
As a result, when the November 2009 survey asked if average world temperatures were higher or lower in the last three years than in
previous years, only 43 percent said higher, compared to 58 percent in the 2008 survey, which was conducted in the summertime.Climate stability can also play a role in people’s perception of global warming, he said. Since 2006, Krosnick and his colleagues have included the following question in their surveys: “Would you say that weather patterns in the county where you live have been more stable in the past three years than before that, more unstable or about the same?” In 2006, a year after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, 52 percent of respondents said that local weather patterns had become more unstable. By 2008, that figure had dropped to 43 percent.
“Katrina is a distant memory,” Krosnick said. “2008 wasn’t a year of giant-sized storms, but it was a year of lower temperatures. 2009 also saw the fewest storms since 1997. For some people – especially those who say that they have little or no trust in climate scientists – that’s real information. They see that the weather appears to be more stable and that temperatures are cooler, and their reaction is, ‘it stopped getting hotter, so maybe global warming isn’t happening after all.’”
Climate skeptics
After analyzing all of the data from 2009 survey, Krosnick and his Stanford colleagues concluded that the 5-point drop in the percentage of Americans who believe in the global warming was largely made up of people who both mistrust scientists and think that the Earth is cooling down naturally.
Where do those opinions come from? According to Krosnick, they are the result of successful efforts by climate skeptics to convince the public that there is disagreement among scientists about global warming. “This is where climate skeptics have been making some headway, because in reality, there is broad consensus among scientists that global warming is real and poses a serious threat for future generations,” he said. “But in our last survey, there was an 8 point decline in the percentage of people who think that most scientists agree on global warming, from 39 percent in 2008 to 31 percent in 2009. So the accumulation of skeptical evidence is finally adding up to success.”
Majority opinion
When respondents were asked to give their personal opinion in 2009, 75 percent said that global warming probably has been happening, and only 22 percent said probably not. “It’s really important to recognize that 75 percent is a huge majority of Americans, and 5 percent of Americans shifting is a pretty small movement,” Krosnick said.
According to Krosnick, it is important to take a long-term perspective on this and other global warming surveys. “Skeptics might look at this 5 percent dip in public opinion and conclude that Americans are finally waking up, that the critics are getting traction and that this is just the beginning of a downward trend – that 75 percent will soon drop to 50 percent, then 25 percent and eventually people will look back and say that climate change was a hoax, ” he said. “But the reality is, if the natural scientists are correct in saying that the cooler weather is just a temporary aberration, and that average temperatures will continue to rise from year to year, then this little downward trend will go away. My guess is that if warming and unstable weather increases, the public opinion numbers will bounce back up again.”
I suspect it will, too, although if the media coverage continues to feature even the most discredited disinformers, then large segments of the public will remain confused for a long time (see Boykoff on “Exaggerating Denialism: Media Representations of Outlier Views on Climate Change”).
It’s a Dusty Universe Out There | by Cosmic Variance | 17 March 2010, 03:25 PM
The primary goal of the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite is to provide a map of the cosmic microwave background with unprecedented precision. But along the way, you have to take into account that there is stuff in between us and the farthest edges of the universe — in particular, there’s all sorts of dust here in our home galaxy. You can even become famous just studying dust; one of the most highly cited papers in all of astrophysics is a 1997 map of galactic dust.
Dust isn’t only an annoyance — it’s also pretty. Planck hasn’t released any data about the CMB yet, but they just released a map of the cold dust in our local vicinity, looking for all the world like an abstract expressionist painting. (I want to suggest a particular artist, but my mind is blanking.) Click to embiggen.
It’s a false-color image, of course; the dust is very cold (tens of degrees above absolute zero), and the image is constructed from microwaves, not from visible light. You can see the plane of the galaxy, and the filamentary structures arising from all the churning of the interstellar medium from supernovae, star formation, magnetic fields, and so on.
Okay, pretty time is over. Let’s see the CMB.
2010 Winter Paralympics | by The Big Picture (Boston Globe) | 17 March 2010, 03:10 PM
Designing Streets in Northern Climate Cities | by The Copenhagen Bicycle Culture Blog | 17 March 2010, 03:06 PM
Danish architecture/urban planning firm Gehl Architects were at a conference in Montréal last month, at the Montreal Urban Ecology Centre. Here's a webcast of the presentations from the Gehl Architects chap, Kristian S. Villadsen.
All about Designing Streets as Public Spaces in Northern Climate Cities. Brilliant stuff.
If the embed code doesn't work the link to the webcast is right here.
Cambodia, Singapore heatwave and the importance of trees | by Cambodia Calling | 17 March 2010, 02:49 PM
I haven't been inspired to blog, or do anything, really, in this heat. According to the BBC it is 38 degrees today here in Siem Reap. And tomorrow. And Saturday. (Friday will be 37 degrees...)
I was watching Singapore news on telly the other day. Feb 2010 was the driest month in history. It was also the month with the lowest rainfall in 140 years. According to the NEA (National Environment Agency), February 2010 also saw the hottest day - 35°C on Friday, 26th. The NEA explains "February falls in the dry phase of the Northeast monsoon season when the rainbelt shifts southwards away from Singapore." But experts also point a finger at the El Nino effect (the irregular warming of surface water in the Pacific) which occurs every two to seven years, and is likely to last until May.
“We had to make this a First World oasis ... Without having to tell anything to the (foreign investor) CEO, I knew he would understand that ... this is a country where the administration works,” Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew recalled in a dialogue during the 150th anniversary of the Singapore Botanical Gardens last May.
“You just can’t plant a tree and walk away. The tree will die ... If you plant under a flyover, you’ve got to get forest shrubs that grow in shaded areas. It’s complex (maintenance) that all people who run big organisations will understand,” he said.
In other words, landscaping was to be Singapore’s hidden “green trump card”.
What up, girlfriends! Artblog Gets Knight Foundation Grant | by PW Style | 17 March 2010, 02:49 PM
Awesome news in our inbox this morning!
the artblog, written by Libby Rosof and longtime PW contributor Roberta Fallon (pictured),has been awarded a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
The money is slated to help Fallon and Rosof expand their site using new technologies, including a new podcast modeled on Fresh Air.
For those unfamilar, artblog is the only place on the Web worth visiting if you’re trying to make plans for First Friday. In addition to in-depth critiques and reviews, the site’s listings are beyond comprehensive. We’ve always admired Rosof and Fallon’s dedication to the local arts.
Congrats, ladies!
Full release after the jump.
PRESS RELEASE
Mar 14, 2010
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For more information contact Libby Rosof, 267 972 3617 or libbyrosof@gmail.com
Knight Foundation grant to artblog boosts Philadelphia art scene
artblog, the Philadelphia region’s oldest and most complete source of online reviews, discussion and opinion on the visual arts, has been awarded a grant by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
“Philadelphia is now one of the hip visual arts towns in America. You have Los Angeles and New York and Miami, where I live, but Philly is one of those towns, too,” said Dennis Scholl, program director for the Knight Foundation, which is based in Miami.
“artblog makes sure that anybody anywhere anytime can find out what’s happening in Philadelphia. Blogs are easy to do, but the question is which ones are special, which are more than just one person’s meditation. artblog is special.”
artblog was begun in 2003 by two collaborating artists, Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof.
“This money will give us a chance to reach a broader audience for Philadelphia’s fabulous art scene,” said Fallon and Rosof. “We will be using new technologies on artblog to help art lovers navigate to galleries and art events around town. We also will create a new series of podcasts modeled on our favorite radio talk show,’Fresh Air.’”
Fallon and Rosof also share English literature and writing backgrounds. They met in the mid-1980s and began working together as painters and sculptors. Despite grants, commissions and accolades, Fallon and Rosof were frustrated with how few people their art was reaching. So they took the art out onto the street where they gave it away. One of these giveaways is documented in Academy-award nominee Wendy Weinberg’s film “Art of Activism” (excerpt here).
That same activism spurred them to create artblog to fill a growing gap between the burgeoning art scene and the shrinking art coverage in the print media.
The Knight Foundation also recently gave grants in Philadelphia to the Galleries at Moore College of Art and Design, the Institute of Contemporary Art and Vox Populi Gallery.
The Philadelphia Foundation participated in the issuing of the Knight grant.
Obama's lost year and the secrets of political storytelling | by Neil Stockley | 17 March 2010, 02:04 PM
The New Yorker of 15 March has a fascinating article by George Packer, called “Obama’s lost year”. Packer traverses the political and strategic mistakes that the president has made, the opportunities he has lost over the past twelve months. [Sorry – there’s no hyperlink to the full article unless you’re a paying subscriber]
Inevitably, one of the issues that Packer discusses is Obama’s failure to craft a narrative and tell the American people a story about what he is doing, and why he is doing it.
“Phrasemaking, throughlines, frameworks and narratives simply aren’t the stuff of the Obama press office.”
Packer draws some important contrasts between Obama and Ronald Reagan, another president who ran into big economic and political problems in his first year. In so doing, Packer shows us what makes a political narrative work.
“Reagan could recover from battlefield setbacks because he was fighting a larger war. His talent for phrasemaking and anecdote derived from having a strong world view: unlike Obama, he began with a set of ideas and found the evidence to match them and the words to dramatize them.”
The article goes on to quote the leading Democratic political consultant, Paul Begala:
“[Reagan’s] point of departure was always philosophical. He explained how the world works. Roosevelt did the same thing.” [emphasis added]
Reagan blamed the nation’s woes on “decades of tax and tax and spend and spend”.
Later in the article, top Democratic pollster Geff Garin develops the same point and shows the crucial role that characters – heroes and villains –play in political stories.
“Reagan had a kind of robust narrative with real explanatory power for people. He had a political narrative that told people what he was doing and what the Democrats were doing: a narrative which is available to Obama: Jimmy Carter left the country in a mass, we’re making changes that are painful now but if we stay the course they’ll succeed, and why would anyone want to go back?” [emphasis added]
Notice also how Reagan’s story offered two alternative endings, one good, one bad, and left people to work the rest out for themselves.
During the last presidential election campaign, I wrote a lot on my blog about Obama’s gifts as a teller of stories. In fact, I unpretentiously named him the political storyteller of the year for 2008. But Packer is correct: as president, he has not rendered the country’s story in a way that is memorable and convincing. To quote Paul Begala: “[Obama] doesn’t situate it in a philosophy.”
No, a political narrative is not the same thing as an ideology. But the experiences of Reagan and Obama show that a successful narrative must be based firmly on a coherent set of ideas.
As Packer puts it:
“To be an effective communicator, a President needs a strong world view, a fundamental vision of why things are and the way they ought to be, which can be simplified into a few key ideas and images – in short, an ideology. For Obama and his advisers, there is no worse pejorative.”
The narrative, the story is the most powerful tool that a politician has to explain those ideas, convey the images and make them real to people.
Self-assembling silicon circuits | by Futurismic | 17 March 2010, 02:00 PM
Photolithography is running up against its limitations, as logic circuits become so small that the wavelength of light itself is too large to mask the patterns accurately. MIT boffins reckon they have a solution, though: self-assembling semiconductor circuits [via NextBigFuture].
Berggren and Ross’ approach is to use electron-beam lithography sparingly, to create patterns of tiny posts on a silicon chip. They then deposit specially designed polymers — molecules in which smaller, repeating molecular units are linked into long chains — on the chip. The polymers spontaneously hitch up to the posts and arrange themselves into useful patterns.
The trick is that the polymers are “copolymers,” meaning they’re made of two different types of polymer. Berggren compares a copolymer molecule to the characters played by Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin in the movie Midnight Run, a bounty hunter and a white-collar criminal who are handcuffed together but can’t stand each other. Ross prefers a homelier analogy: “You can think of it like a piece of spaghetti joined to a piece of tagliatelle,” she says. “These two chains don’t like to mix. So given the choice, all the spaghetti ends would go here, and all the tagliatelle ends would go there, but they can’t, because they’re joined together.” In their attempts to segregate themselves, the different types of polymer chain arrange themselves into predictable patterns.
Clever stuff, though still very much in the developmental stages. Maybe another new lease of life for Moore’s Law?
UK new car sales and the recession | by The Oil Drum: Europe | 17 March 2010, 01:50 PM
I just finished reading a book called Anatomy of the Bear where the point was made that rising new car sales are a leading indicator for the end of recession. No wonder then that many OECD governments introduced incentive schemes to boost new car sales following the dive off the cliff that accompanied the credit crunch (Figure 1). Cash for clunkers in the USA was called the Scrappage Scheme in the UK. No prizes for spotting when the credit crunch recession began in the UK. But what will happen now that the scheme is due to end shortly?
So why are new car sales of interest to The Oil Drum? Transportation is of course one of the main consumers of petroleum. But since the oil price spike of 2008, I think many have become aware of the links between economic growth, energy consumption, energy prices and how this impacts forward production capacity. It's a much more complex web than I ever imagined. New car sales are but one economic indicator of things to come.
The UK car scrappage scheme was introduced in May 2009 to rescue the auto industry from car sales that were plummeting in response to high energy prices and the credit crunch. Cars that were 10 years old or older, most of which would have no intrinsic value, could be traded in for £2000 part exchange for a new car. The government provided £1000 of this subsidy and the motor manufacturer the rest.
As figure 1 shows, this £2000 subsidy did the trick and car sales began to recover immediately. I personally took advantage of the scheme in December and discovered that the incentives on offer went way beyond the £2000 scrapage. As described below, Volvo made me an offer I couldn't refuse.
The government initially allocated £300 million to the scheme (300,000 cars) but in September 2009 the scheme was extended by £100 million which meant that it carried on into 2010. It should have ended at the end of February but has been extended again to the end of March and is therefore still active. I'm expecting car sales to decline once the scheme ends but April's statistics will come too late to influence the outcome of our General Election that will be held in early May. It is hard to not suspect some cynical electoral manipulation at work here.
Pre-recession, the UK car market was running at approximately 2.4 million units per year. Monthly sales are highly distorted by a quirk of UK license plate system where the first two numbers of the plate indicate the date of manufacture. This used to reflect an annual period, and motorists would wait to buy a car when the new annual plate was issued. Since this distorted the market, this was changed to a 6 monthly date mark, but the market is still hugely distorted. In March and September when the new license plates are issued sales are more than double the monthly means. In the preceding months, February and August, sales are less than half the monthly means, as motorists delay purchases in order to get the new license plate.
The other notable seasonal effect is that June is always the peak sales month outside of the March and September peaks.
Given the highly variable monthly sales figures, it is tricky to discern trends from the raw data, though the March and September peaks are clearly down in 2008 / 9 as a result of the recession. Hence, it is easier to view trends from the year on year (YOY) changes to monthly sales (Figure 1) but even these need to be viewed with caution since the spectacular rebound from July 2009 needs to be viewed against the very depressed sales figures from the previous year. Since July 2009, car sales are still running well below levels of two years ago.
As of 28 September 2009, 227,750 motorists had taken advantage of the scheme.
In the period June to September 2009, 768,348 new cars were registered, thus the scrappage scheme accounted for 30% of new car sales in this period. Of course we do not know how many scrappage buyers may have bought in any case, but as described in the box below my own decision to buy a new car was totally swayed by the discounts that were on offer.
In 1995, whilst I was still running a small business, I bought a new Volvo 850, 2.5 L estate car. My children then were 5 and 3 years old, and this car was to become a much loved family work horse. 15 years later, and with 140,000 miles on the clock, this old car still had much life left, but year on year was costing an awful lot to keep on the road. With the scrappage scheme knawing away at the back of my mind, I ventured up to the Volvo dealer mid December 2009, thinking about buying a second hand replacement. And there in the middle of the showroom was a spanking new Volvo V50.
I told the salesman I was wanting to buy a used car. He told me that in addition to the £2000 scrappage, Volvo were offering additional discounts to existing Volvo owners. At this time UK VAT (sales tax) was reduced form 17.5 to 15% and all in I was offered £5,500 discounts on the new V50 in front of me. Not only that, this 1.6 diesel model did over 60 miles per gallon and because it was so green :-) the annual road tax would only be £35 (compared with our other car that costs £220 to road tax per year). I thought about all of this for about 3 seconds, and told the salesman that the breadwinner would have to approve. We concluded the deal the same day. Without all these incentives I would have bought a used car.
On the back of £200 billion in quantitative easing (QE), the car scrappage scheme, a cut in value added tax (VAT) from 17.5 to 15%, reduction in tax on property transactions and running up mind boggling debt, the UK managed to squeeze out 0.3% growth in the 4/4 of 2009. QE has been suspended though looks likely to return, the VAT reduction has now been reversed and car scrappage is in its final month.
The impact of car scrappage looks like it peaked in the 4/4 of 2009 (Figure 1). Most of those who owned a 10 year old car and who felt inclined have traded already and the stimulus looks like it has run its course. When it ends, motor manufacturers will do what they can to fool the public with false bargains. I'd guess that by the 3/4 of 2010, when YOY growth will be compared against months with positive impact from scrappage, that contraction will return to the auto industry, and with it contraction in the UK economy as a whole.
The UK has a general election in May. A cynic may think that the recovery has been finely engineered to benefit the incumbent Labour Party. In my last post I gave a gloomy prognosis for the economy and energy prices and nothing has happened since then, apart from stubborn optimism in the markets, to make me change my mind.
Mr Brown does not seem to know his own banks | by John Redwood MP | 17 March 2010, 01:48 PM
Today was an unusual day. For the first time in years I won a PMQ in the weekly ballot for the opportunity to ask a question.
I decided to ask him what had happened to the £700 billion of assets that disappeared from the RBS balance sheet in 2009. You would have thought he might have noticed it and taken an intelligent interest in it. After all, £700 billion is more than the government spends each year, and is around half the national income. Now we own a bank on this scale, it would be nice to know the boss was in charge and knew the numbers and understood the strategy.
My purpose in asking was to highlight the conflict in current policy. The public sector is made to spend more and more to “keep the economy going”, whilst the private sector remains under an intense squeeze. RBS has been forced into collapsing its balance sheet by huge sums to meet new requirements for more cash and capital relative to the amount it lends and trades.
I am trying to find out if the government realises it is squeezing the private sector too hard and is doing it because it really does want an ever bigger public sector at all costs, or whether it does not realise that its Banking Regulator is holding back the recovery. I am none the wiser, but hope others may take up this important quesiton on the back of my PMQ. With major banks slimming this quickly it is no wonder mortgages and business credit are scarce and dear.
Global boiling: Freak storms on every continent - Second known tropical cyclone forms in "cooler" South Atlantic, while Red River braces for fourth "ten-year flood" in a row! | by Climate Progress | 17 March 2010, 01:48 PM
“I actually think the science around climate change is real. It is potentially devastating,” Obama told reporters Monday [March 24, 2009]. “If you look at the flooding that’s going on right now in North Dakota and you say to yourself, ‘If you see an increase of two degrees, what does that do, in terms of the situation there?’ That indicates the degree to which we have to take this seriously.“
The media love to focus on the few extreme weather events that they (mistakenly) believe are inconsistent with human-caused climate change [see "Was the 'Blizzard of 2009' a 'global warming type' of record snowfall — or an opportunity for the media to blow the extreme weather story (again)?"]. But will they keep ignoring all the extreme weather that scientists have been predicting for years would become more common as we pour more heat trapping gases into the atmosphere?
It will interesting to see the coverage this year of the impending crest of the Red River in Fargo, which smashed records last year (see Why the “never seen before” Fargo flooding is just what you’d expect from global warming, as Obama warns). It appears all but certain to be the fourth year in a row with at least a “ten-year flood,” the ninth since 1989. They just don’t make ten-year floods like they used to!
Besides Obama, the British and the Chinese understand global warming has driven their record flooding. The United States media? Not so much.
Brad Johnson of Wonkroom, notes “Record warmth on sea and land is helping to fuel extreme weather around the globe. As man takes over from nature as the primary driver of climate, the need to eliminate global warming pollution and mobilize for increased climate disruption grows.” Here’s his roundup of extreme weather:
SOUTH AMERICA Tropical Storm 90Q, also known as Anita, the “second known tropical cyclone to form in the cooler South Atlantic Ocean,” is circling off the Argentina coast. The first known South Atlantic tropical cyclone, Catarina, was in 2004.
The sea surface temperature threshold for powering up a hurricane is around 80°F, so as the oceans warms, South Atlantic hurricanes are likely to become more common. According to NASA, it was the warmest December through February on record (since 1880) for the southern hemisphere.
NORTH AMERICA Weeks after some of the strongest snowstorms ever to hit the East Coast, another powerful winter storm drenches the Northeast, kills eight people, and knocks out power for hundreds of thousands. Record warmth in North Dakota and Minnesota threatens another year of catastrophic flooding.
EUROPE “Hurricane-force winds and widespread flooding battered vast swathes of western France and left more than a million homes without power,” as the storm named Xynthia “killed at least 62 people across western Europe” in Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, and Germany en route to Scandinavia.
AFRICA The death toll has risen to 36 people “and nearly 38,000 left homeless when tropical storm Hubert smashed into Madagascar this week.” Last month, stormy weather wreaked havoc across Egypt, as twenty-foot waves crashed into Alexandria and a hail storm killed four people in Cairo.
ASIA “A severe sandstorm hit Xinjiang’s Hotan Prefecture in northwest China on Friday, reducing visibility to zero.” The sandstorms are sweeping across China, and “are expected to hit Taiwan Tuesday.”
AUSTRALIA-PACIFIC Tomas, a Category Four cyclone, is plowing through Fiji, forcing thousands to evacuate. A “beast of a storm” ripped through Melbourne, Australia last week, “bringing with it hailstones the size of tennis balls” and causing $200 million in damage. Meanwhile flooding “which has smashed all the records known” in Queensland peaked in the country’s northeast, “parts of which have been in drought for almost a decade.”
Jeff Masters notes, “The first Category 5 tropical cyclone of the year, Tropical Cyclone Uliu, has weakened from its impressive peak as a Category 5 storm with 160 mph winds to a low-end Category 4 storm with 132 mph winds.”
ANTARCTICA Okay, so Antarctica has enjoyed a sunny and balmy summer. Unfortunately, with the pleasant skies have come accelerated melting of the ice shelves, causing sea levels to rise, the U.S. Geological Survey and the British Antarctic Survey have found.
As for the science of intense precipitation, in 2004, the Journal of Hydrometeorology published an analysis by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center that found “Over the contiguous United States, precipitation, temperature, streamflow, and heavy and very heavy precipitation have increased during the twentieth century.”
They found (here) that over the course of the 20th century, the “Cold season (October through April),” saw a 16% increase in “heavy” precipitation events (roughly greater than 2 inches [when it comes as rain] in one day), and a 25% increase in “very heavy” precipitation events (roughly greater than 4 inches in one day)– and a 36% rise in “extreme” precipitation events (those in the 99.9% percentile — 1 in 1000 events). This rise in extreme precipitation is precisely what is predicted by global warming models in the scientific literature.
Even the Bush Administration, in its U.S. Climate Change Science Program report, Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate, acknowledged:
Many extremes and their associated impacts are now changing…. Heavy downpours have become more frequent and intense….
It is well established through formal attribution studies that the global warming of the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced increases in heat-trapping gases.… The increase in heavy precipitation events is associated with an increase in water vapor, and the latter has been attributed to human-induced warming.
Indeed, in the northern part of the country, we’re likely to see more snow — see Massive moisture-driven extreme precipitation during warmest winter in the satellite record and An amazing, though clearly little-known, scientific fact: We get more snow storms in warm years! Then we’re going to see earlier snow melts with intense rain storms. And that will inevitably drive more and more severe flooding.
Given that we’ve only warmed about a degree Fahrenheit in the past half century and much of this country projected to warm 9°F or more on our current emissions path, it’s hard to imagine the kind of extreme weather we will ultimately be seen.
Energy and Global Warming News for March 17: Clean-energy investments are moving ahead; Bill Clinton warns Senators U.S. may trail China in energy race absent a climate bill | by Climate Progress | 17 March 2010, 01:35 PM
Clean-Energy Investments Are Moving Ahead ‘Without Copenhagen’
Clean-energy investments are moving ahead even without an international agreement to limit carbon dioxide, Bloomberg New Energy Finance Chief Executive Officer Michael Liebreich said.
Investment last year in wind turbines, solar panels and other technologies that emit little or no CO2 pollutants declined 6 percent last year, Liebreich said today in a television interview at the start of a summit in London.
Bill Clinton rallies Dems on climate bill
Former President Bill Clinton urged Senate Democrats to pass a climate bill this year during their weekly luncheon on Tuesday, arguing that legislation would spur innovation and create new jobs.
Clinton aimed his remarks at moderate Democrats, who fear taking up another controversial bill in the midst of an economic recession and just months before the midterm elections. To reassure them, Clinton distributed polling data showing support for a comprehensive climate bill.
Clinton Warns U.S. May Trail China in Energy Race, Senators Say
Former President Bill Clinton told lawmakers the U.S. may fall behind China in the race to dominate the global market for clean energy unless Congress passes climate-change legislation, two senators said.
“There’s concern about whether America is going to remain the competitive economic force that we’ve been,” Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, told reporters today after Clinton spoke to Senate Democrats at the Capitol.
Virginia leaders express interest in offshore drilling
Never has the political climate in Virginia so favored offshore drilling.
Most Virginia leaders — regardless of their political party — have expressed interest in joining Alaska, Texas, Louisiana and other states in setting up offshore platforms to drill for oil and natural gas.
Gov. Robert F. McDonnell and fellow elected Republicans strongly back the proposal, as do most members of the state’s congressional delegation, including both U.S. senators, who are Democrats.
White House Officials Link Economic Recovery to CO2 Bill
Senior Obama administration officials say the nation’s economic recovery could stall if Congress doesn’t pass a climate bill this year.
The officials warn that investors are so uncertain about the future cost of emitting greenhouse gases that they are sitting on capital rather than pouring it into “clean” technology, new power plants or energy-intensive manufacturing.
Government Funding Fueled Clean Energy
Government stimulus funds will provide some needed fuel to a cleantech sector buffeted by the global recession and sharp declines in solar prices, says a new report.
Total investment in clean technology last year fell 6.5% worldwide to $145 billion, partly due to a weak market for initial public offerings and investment cutbacks by venture capital firms. So says the “Clean Energy Trends 2010″ report released Tuesday by research firm Clean Edge.
Senators pump gas fee into bill
Climate bill supporters are leaning toward exempting big oil companies from a broader cap on greenhouse gases as a way of winning critical support from industry players and key lawmakers.
The three co-authors of the Senate climate bill hope the proposal — backed by several large oil companies — will bring a new set of players to the negotiating table.
Governors prod Washington on renewable energy
A group of 29 state governors has for the first time submitted to the White House and Congress a list of recommendations to implement renewable energy nationwide. The move reveals growing impatience with Washington’s inability to put forward a new energy-climate bill to stimulate growth of solar and wind industry jobs.
With the capitol still consumed with healthcare legislation and the likelihood of a national bill that combines climate and energy dimming rapidly, many states with renewable energy in their backyards are agitating for job creation from wind, solar, and biomass energy development.
Florida students start the long road to their student green energy fund campaign | by Climate Progress | 17 March 2010, 01:25 PM
Green Fees are becoming more and more common on campuses all across the country. Today’s guest blogger, Dan Cannon, a Florida Organizer at the Southern Energy Network, has the story in this repost from It’s Getting Hot In Here.
A simple idea of young people putting their money where their mouth is by creating small campus fees that cumulate to eventually set aside millions of dollars to be spent only on “green” projects. Green Fees are a great way to encourage campuses to go green quickly and consistently, most campuses and students groups are managing to set up green fees on their campus in one semester or less. Unfortunately for Florida students, setting up a green fee on campuses is an extremely difficult process. Unlike most states and universities any and all Florida student fees must first be passed through state legislation. So in order for Florida students to pass campus “green fees” legislation must be passed through the state legislator.
Luckily students in Florida have not been discouraged by this long tedious process. Florida students have made their campaign the Student Green Energy Fund a top priority; they have been working on the campaign since 2007. This year Florida students from eight campuses (FSU, FIU, FGCU,NCF,UF, FAMU,UCF, USF) have come together to work collectively around passing this legislation (Senate Bill 778 and House Bill 505).
The Student Green Energy Fund campaign has really taken off this year, after failing in the Higher Education and appropriations committee last year students have organized a strategic grassroots, media and lobbying plan. With both a Florida Senate Sponsor (Senator Constantine (R)) and a Florida House Sponsor (Representative Schecnk (R)) Florida students are hopeful.
A little less than a month ago Florida Students had their first victory on what will be a very long legislative process. The Student Green Energy Fund went through its first senate committee hearing (Higher Education). With Senator Oelrich (D) a UF alum chairing the committee and our Senate Sponsor, Senator Constantine (R) sitting on the committee, students were fairly confident the bill would pass with no problem. However, also on the committee is Senator Lynn (R) who is the chair of the Senate Higher Education and Appropriations Committee, Senator Lynn is responsible for the bills defeat last year.
With a large amount of confidence it would pass through this particular committee students took this opportunity to target Senator Lynn. Three weeks before the hearing committee two students from UCF lobbied Senator Lynn. Two weeks before the hearing, UF students met with senate Oelrich’s office to confirm his support. A week away from the hearing students from all eight campuses started pushing for media support and gathered on their weekly call to set specific grassroots tactical goals targeting Senator Lynn specifically. These tactics included very specific messaging, phone calls, hand written letters, emails, and of course tons of photo petitions.
The Wednesday night before the meeting twelve students from six universities (UF, FSU, USF, NCF, UCF, FAMU) gathered in Tallahassee (some driving as far as five hours) to strategically write their individual public comments for the hearing.
The bill was introduced and not to students surprise, Senator Lynn had something to say, she claimed to be supportive of the the Student Green Energy Fund. She mentioned the lobby meeting and thanked students for their overwhelming turnout and support. She then went on to say she was not supportive of additional unrelated amendments Senator Constantine had added to the bill. She said because of this she did not plan on voting for the bill. Senator Constantine was quick to speak up and said his top priority for this particular bill was the Student Green Energy Fund and immediately had his staffers draft up amendments that removed the additional language on the spot (now that’s a good politician). With the bill now being a very “clean bill” that only deals with the Student Green Energy Fund, Sentor Lynn voted Yes!
This was just one victory within the Student Green Energy Fund campaign, florida students have a long road ahead of them. With the Florida Legislator officially started students are continuing pressuring decision makers, recently Tyler Offerman from FGCU got Representative Kreegel (R) to also co-sponsor the bill and students are starting to organize a large lobby day at the capital on April 8thand 9th. Students in Florida will be tying the student Green Energy Fund lobby day into Energy Action Coalitions Define our Decade campaign!
Check out some media hits the clean energy leaders worked hard to get!
FSU News: Green gains ground at FSU
WCTV6: Students Lobby for Green Energy Fund Legislation
The Voyager: This new fee is worth supporting
The Voyager: Green Fund gets second try
The Alligator: UF students express support for renewable energy fee
The Campus Sun: Students to Push for Green Energy
Places to learn how to sew | by PW Style | 17 March 2010, 01:00 PM
Oooh, Spool’s got their spring sewing class schedule up; you can learn how to make simple skirts, shirts and dresses to fit your particular measurements as well as various bags and the pretty quilted pillow above. I know watching Project Runway (yeah, I continue to watch it despite its constant disappointments) always makes me wish more than anything that I could sew as well as even the most Kors-excoriated (exKorsiated?) designers; perhaps this will be the year I take advantage of one of the many quality learn-to-sew classes here in Philly.
In addition to Spool, which has a bunch, there’s also Pterodactyl, all the way up by the Allegheny stop on the El, which has two sewing classes (including one promisingly named “Their pattern to your pattern,” which goes straight to the heart of my motivation, wanting to rip off things I can’t afford).
In Fishtown, there’s informal $10 classes at Piranha Betty’s every Monday night from 6-9.
If you have a car, there’s Cloth and Bobbin, all the way out in Narberth, and Making It Sewing, up past Pennypack Park, but the classes are pretty reasonably priced.
And of course a lot of the stores down on Fabric Row offer classes but aren’t quite up on the internet yet; for lessons from the old school, just take a walk down 4th Street past Bainbridge and keep an eye out for signs in windows.
One Not To Miss: Alexandros Vasmoulakis at LeBasse Projects | by Wooster Collective | 17 March 2010, 12:52 PM
Wooster fave Alexandros Vasmoulakis will have his first US solo exhibition open this weekend in Los Angeles at LeBasse Projects
Alexandros Vasmoulakis
Is Everyone Happy?
Opening Reception: Saturday March 20th at 7pm
LeBasse Projects
6023 W. Washington Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
310.558.0200
Masthead by M. Oanes | by Wooster Collective | 17 March 2010, 12:52 PM
Fresh Stuff From C215 | by Wooster Collective | 17 March 2010, 12:43 PM
For us, there's nothing more thrilling than seeing an artist whose work you love, push their work (and themselves) into new areas that (pardon the cliched phrase) takes things to a new level.
We felt just that thrill and excitement when we received a photo of the latest piece by C215.. We're thrilled to see that C215 has begun to find a new voice within his work. We can't wait to see what is to come.
simonhrjohnson | by The Baseline Scenario | 17 March 2010, 12:33 PM
By Simon Johnson
In its previous response to us, the the Bank of Italy pointed out that Mario Draghi (its current governor) did not join the management of Goldman Sachs until 2002 – hence he was not there when the controversial Greek “debt swaps” were arranged.
We agree that he joined Goldman only in January 2002 (this was in our original post). But the latest revelations regarding the Goldman-Greece relationship (on the Senate floor, no less) clearly indicate that Goldman was a lead manager of Greek debt issues in spring 2002, i.e., when Mr. Draghi was on board.
This raises three entirely reasonable and straightforward questions.
Keep in mind that Mr. Draghi is still regarded as a leading contender to become president of the European Central Bank – the most important policymaking institution in the eurozone. It will be hard for anyone to advance his candidacy without clear and public answers to these questions.
Chu explains the energy efficiency opportunity - "Regardless of what the skeptics may think, there are indeed 20-dollar bills lying on the ground all around us. We only need the will -- and the ways -- to pick them up." | by Climate Progress | 17 March 2010, 12:11 PM
Energy Secretary Steven Chu wrote an op-ed in this behemoth World Economic Forum report. HuffPost reposted it, and we repost them.
For the next few decades, energy efficiency is one of the lowest cost options for reducing US carbon emissions. Many studies have concluded that energy efficiency can save both energy and money. For example, a recent McKinsey report calculated the potential savings assuming a 7% discount rate, no price on carbon and using only “net present value positive” investments. It found the potential to reduce consumer demand by about 23% by 2020 and reduce GHG emissions by 1.1 gigatons each year — at a net savings of US$ 680 billion.
[JR: McKinsey report is here: "McKinsey must-read: U.S. can meet entire 2020 emissions target with efficiency and cogeneration while lowering the nation’s energy bill $700 billion!"]
Likewise, the National Academies found in 2009 that accelerated deployment of cost-effective technologies in buildings could reduce energy use by 25-30% in 2030. The report stated: “Many building efficiency technologies represent attractive investment opportunities with a payback period of two to three years.”
Some economists, however, don’t believe these analyses; they say there aren’t 20-dollar bills lying around waiting to be picked up. If the savings were real, they argue, why didn’t the free market vacuum them up? The skeptics are asking a fair question: why do potential energy efficiency savings often go unrealized?
I asked our team at the Department of Energy to review the literature on savings from home energy retrofits. We are pursuing energy efficiency in many areas — from toughening and expanding appliance standards to investing in smart grid — but improving the efficiency of buildings, which account for 40% of US energy use, is truly low hanging fruit.
In this review, we looked only at studies that compared energy bills before and after improvements and excluded studies that relied on estimates of future savings. We found that retrofit programs that were the most successful in achieving savings targeted the least efficient houses and concentrated on the most fundamental work: air-tight ducts, windows and doors, insulation and caulking. When efficiency improvements were both properly chosen and properly executed, the projected savings of energy and money were indeed achieved. In science, we would call the successful programs an “existence proof” that efficiency investments save money. Too often, however, the savings went unrealized, due to a number of reasons, including poor efficiency investment decisions and shoddy workmanship.
There are other reasons why energy savings aren’t fully captured. Market failures include inertia, inconvenience, ignorance, lack of financing and “principal agent” problems (e.g., landlords don’t install energy efficient refrigerators because tenants pay the energy bills). To persuade the skeptics and spark the investments in efficiency we need, the Department of Energy is now focused on overcoming these market failures.
First, the Department is working to develop a strong home retrofit industry. We are creating a state-of-the-art tool that home inspectors can use on a handheld device to assess energy savings potential and identify the most effective investments to drive down energy costs. We’re also investing in training programs to upgrade the skills of the current workforce and attract the next generation. The Department is also focused on measuring results — to both provide quality assurance to homeowners and promote improvement. For example, we’re pursuing new technologies such as infrared viewers that will show if insulation and caulking were done properly. Post-work inspections are a necessary antidote and deterrent to poor workmanship.
To address inconvenience and to reduce costs, we’re launching an innovative effort called “Retrofit Ramp-Up” that will streamline home retrofits by reaching whole neighborhoods at a time. If we can audit and retrofit a significant fraction of the homes on any given residential block, the cost, convenience and confidence of retrofit work will be vastly improved. Another goal of this program is to make energy efficiency a social norm.
To help pay for investments, we’re working with the Department of Housing and Urban Development to encourage new financing tools. For example, homeowners might pay back energy improvement loans via an assessment on their property tax bill. Out-of-pocket expenses are eliminated and energy savings will exceed the increase in property tax. Both the savings and the loan payments would stay with the house if the owners decide to sell.
Another opportunity comes when a property changes hands. Banks require a structural inspection and a termite inspection; they should also ask for the last year’s worth of utility bills, which speaks directly to the home’s affordability. If improvements are needed, the costs could be seamlessly tacked onto the mortgage.
The greatest gains can be realized in new construction. By developing building design software with embedded energy analysis and building operating systems that constantly tune up a building for optimal efficiency while maintaining comfort, extremely cost-effective buildings with energy savings of 60-80% are possible.
Regardless of what the skeptics may think, there are indeed 20-dollar bills lying on the ground all around us. We only need the will — and the ways — to pick them up.
This op-ed appears in a new report by the World Economic Forum and IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates entitled “Energy Vision 2010: Towards a More Energy Efficient World.” The full report can be found here.
Related Posts:
The Casting, Paris | by The Sartorialist | 17 March 2010, 11:04 AM
Last week I held a casting for "real girls" to be featured in an advertising project.
The young ladies that showed up were so cool I thought I'd share some of my reference photos. 
A brabhsálaí gréasáin ilteangach (or, a multilingual web browser) | by Official Google Blog | 17 March 2010, 10:52 AM
Since announcing the latest Google Chrome beta earlier this month, we've been excited to receive feedback from our beta users on the browser's new translation and privacy features. Today, we're introducing these features in the stable channel, so that they're widely available to everyone who uses Google Chrome on Windows.
Google Chrome’s translation feature is the latest step in the evolution of translation tools across Google. Just a few years ago, Google’s translation tools consisted of a site where you had to copy and paste text into a box — and it only worked for a handful of languages. Today, our translation technology works across 52 languages and can automatically detect and translate entire websites in less than a second. Chrome's translation feature automatically detects if the language of the webpage you're on is different from your preferred language setting, The browser will then display a prompt asking if you'd like the page to be translated using Google Translate. With one click, you can instantly translate the page, and all of its text will appear in your preferred language. Here's a demo of Chrome's translation feature:
Language detection happens only on your computer, so no information is sent to Google Translate until you choose to translate a page. You can read more about how this feature works on the Google Translate Blog.
In addition, we've introduced new privacy features in this stable release to give you even greater control of your privacy while helping to protect the information that you do decide to share online. You can now manage Chrome's privacy settings via the browser's Options dialog. From these settings, you can control how browser cookies, images, pop-ups and even JavaScript and plug-ins are handled on a site-by-site basis. For example, you can set up rules to allow cookies exclusively for sites that you trust, while blocking them from for untrusted sites. For the in-depth scoop, check out google.com/chrome/privacy or watch our video series on privacy and browsers.
For those of you who already use Chrome, go raibh maith agaibh! You'll soon be updated with these new features. And for those of you who haven't yet tried Google Chrome, download it at google.com/chrome.
Campaigning in Halewood | by Paula Keaveney (Liverpool councillor) | 17 March 2010, 10:03 AM
Spent part of the weekend campaigning with Lib Dem Councillors in Halewood. They've had quite a few campaigning successes although frustration with the Labour run Knowsley Council runs quite deep and there certainly seems to have been quite a bit of "foot dragging".
People who use buses a lot will recognise the name Ravencourt as one of the main bus stops or the end of the route. What you see if you get off the bus there though is a derelict shopping centre with one poor shop open.
It actually reminds me of some of the derelict centres in Liverpool in previous years. Lib Dem Councillors tell me that there has been huge amounts of delay on this and you do wonder why the Labour Council hasn't got its act together by now.
(In fact even my Labour opponent has criticised her own side for this - and she is right to)
Anyway, here is a picture of me canvassing in another part of Halewood, a rather interesting mobile home park.
India: Mumbai Traffic | by Global Voices (India) | 17 March 2010, 09:50 AM
Entrepreneur and blogger Rajesh Jain comments on the traffic in Mumbai: “from my own experience, average traffic speed has probably halved in the past decade.”
Liverpool must keep sight of what its neighbours are up to | by Liverpool Daily Post - Dale Street Blues | 17 March 2010, 09:29 AM
Yesterday I spent a little while at Manchester's stand at MIPIM. As I've mentioned in a previous post Manchester has camped out on Liverpool's cultutal lawn with a banner advert on the front of Cannes' conference centre that declares that...
[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]
Guest blog: Maggie Mullan says Liverpool must learn to use the buildings it already has | by Liverpool Daily Post - Dale Street Blues | 17 March 2010, 09:25 AM
When confronted by the development plans of so many ambitious cities it's a little ironic that you can find yourself thinking about older buildings and the infrastructure of yesterday. But that's exactly what comes to my mind at MIPIM, the...
[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]
25 million people have gone Google | by Official Google Blog | 17 March 2010, 09:03 AM
Over the past year, we've highlighted companies around the world who have switched to Google Apps. And that means more than 25 million people have "gone Google", including those at such globe-trotting organizations as Jaguar Land Rover and National Geographic. (You might have seen their Gone Google messages in print.)
Recently we visited one of our newest customers, Konica Minolta, to learn about why they decided to join us. Here's their story:
For those considering a switch to Google Apps, this updated resources page offers a variety of info such as customer testimonials, white papers, links to webcasts and more. Be sure to visit the Google Enterprise Blog and visit google.com/appsatwork, too.
If your company is already using Apps, join the Gone Google community. Put yourself on the map to share your experience and see who else has, yes, gone Google.
After you add yourself to the map, grab a laptop sticker that you can personalize. We're giving them away free for a limited time*. More details here.
*And our lawyers ask us to tell you that the "giveaway offer is void where prohibited and valid only while supplies last" — so hurry!
Mexico Bike Gang | by Copenhagen Cycle Chic | 17 March 2010, 09:00 AM
If I had to be chased by a girl bike gang for whatever strange reason, I'd like them to look like...
For the full photographic glory and the rest of the text, you know where to go. The Original Cycle Chic awaits.
Why news organizations should try publishing in linked data | by Media Standards Trust | 17 March 2010, 08:46 AM
[A version of this article was first published at PBS MediaShift IdeasLab]On a news organization’s list of priorities, publishing articles as ‘linked data’ probably comes slightly above remembering to turn the computer monitors off in the evening and slightly below getting a new coffee machine.It shouldn’t, and I’ll list 10 reasons why.Before I do I should briefly explain what I mean by ‘linked
Hedge funds as heroes | by Robert Peston (BBC business editor) | 17 March 2010, 08:32 AM
In the autumn of 2008, during the worst global banking crisis since the 1930s, I was interviewed by French television and asked to explain the malevolent role of hedge funds in causing the mess we were in.
When I said that hedge funds were really not at the heart of the matter, the interviewer was shocked and disappointed. She was in London on a mission to tell the truth to her viewers about the malignancy of hedge funds, and her script did not allow for a different version of events.
Some would say that the European Union's determination to drive through a directive regulating hedge funds and private equity is a manifestation of the same blinkered vision.
It's not that a bit of additional regulation might not be useful. More transparency about their activities, formal limits on the amount of debt or leverage they can take on, these could be sensible safety precautions, to limit their potential to wreak damage to the financial and economic system.
But there is a strong argument that proponents of the new directive are missing the big and important points by a mile. Which means that the passionate and obsessive determination of some EU members to see the directive enacted can be seen as a bit silly (at best) - especially at a time when the real flaw in the financial system, the structure and regulation of banks, is a long way from being fixed.
There are two important points.
First, the actual harm that hedge funds and private equity may have wreaked in the creation and course of the credit crunch could probably be much better tackled not by regulating them directly, but by new restrictions on the banks that service them and take credit from them, and on the financial markets where they trade.
There are five kinds of harm that hedge funds and private equity may have caused, all of which are fixable without a directive that imposes new direct constraints on hedge funds and private equity:
1) Some financial institutions, such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, became dangerously dependent on short term credit provided by hedge funds. But that's fixable by imposing tough new requirements on such investment banks to raise much more longer-term finance that can't be withdrawn on a whim.
2) Many believe that hedge funds have destabilised banks such as HBOS and even entire economies, such as Greece, disproportionately to the fundamental weakness of such banks and economies, by their ruthless financial speculation that such banks and economies were heading for the knackers. Now, to be clear, that hypothesis is by no means proven. Some would say that in such cases hedge funds are the public-spirited early warning system (please don't shoot your computer). But if you think that it's wrong to allow the mafia to take out an insurance policy on your house that delivers the mob a profit when your house burns down, which is how some would see naked CDS shorts on bank debt or government bonds, then ban those insurance policies, prohibit naked CDS shorts. But that's product regulation, not regulation of institutions such as hedge funds.
3) Hedge funds have provided a market for some of the newfangled financial products, such as CDO squareds and cubeds, that decimated the balance sheets of banks. But if you don't like the toxic new products, regulate their development or the extent to which banks can load up their balance sheets with them.
4) Banks have suffered big losses on their loans to businesses acquired by private equity firms. But that is eminently sortable by constraining banks' ability to lend to over-indebted companies and institutions.
5) Finally, the massive rewards earned by the partners in some hedge funds and private equity firms helped to encourage the spread of a pernicious short-term bonus culture in banks. But let's be clear about this. First of all most hedge fund and private-equity partners are at least putting some of their own money at risk (although some would say nowhere near enough), which almost never happens in banks. More germanely, hedge funds and private equity surely can't be held accountable for the abuse of their remuneration system by other institutions.
And then there's the humungous final point, which is the one that the proponents of the EU directive in the French and German governments simply don't wish to acknowledge. Which is that there is a powerful argument - if you believe in capitalism - that hedge funds are in one overwhelmingly important respect a model for how the banking system should be reformed, and absolutely not a financial tumour that needs cutting out.
The fact is that hundreds of hedge funds went bust over the past couple of years. And there wasn't a single one, for all the billions of dollars of investors' money they controlled, which needed to be bailed out by taxpayers.
Why was that?
Well it was probably not because of brilliant regulation by the likes of the Financial Services Authority.
The much more compelling explanation is that they were subject to the direct engaged oversight of their investors and creditors, which limited hedge funds' ability to take unaffordable risks. It never occurred to those providing finance to hedge funds and private equity firms that the state might provide them with a safety net. So those creditors and investors made sure that those hedge funds and private equity firms only speculated what they could afford to lose.
This is the important big contrast with banks, where investors and creditors knew that if everything went wrong, taxpayers would be there to pick up the bill. Which meant that those investors and creditors had less of an incentive to prevent banks from betting not only the farm but the entire landscape.
On that view, we would want banks to become more like hedge funds, not regulate hedge funds out of existence. Or to be more precise, the investment banking bits of the likes of Barclays, Deutsche Bank or BNP Paribas should perhaps be hived off and shrunk, so that there would be no reason for taxpayers to bail any of them out if they ran into difficulties.
Some would therefore argue that if the French and German governments really want to make the financial system safe, they would start by dismantling their enormous complex universal banks. The consolidating power of these sprawling banking conglomerates may pose much more of a threat to future financial stability than hedge funds.
Cut the propaganda paid for by taxes | by John Redwood MP | 17 March 2010, 08:13 AM
The Advertising Standards Authority were right to ban two of the government’s gobal warming ads. They attracted a record number of complaints from people who disagreed with their message.
It reminds us how there are some obvious spending cuts to make which would improve the quality of our lives. We do not need the government wasting our money trying to brain wash us into agreeing with their warped view of the world.
The BBC, ever faithful to Labour in its extreme global warming mode, told us this morning the government had had a “score draw” with the Advertising Standards Authority. I don’t think so. The government was judged to have run two misleading and politically biased adverts and told to stop running them. That is defeat for the government. We were told that there was just one word that was wrong – yes, the word that asserted a forecast and causation between global warming and other phenomena – a rather crucial word.
It’s not just the global warming ads that grate. This government bamboozles us continuously about lifestyle and taxation, spending much more than any previous government on “public information”. It stretches the limits of public information ever closer to political messages which should never be paid for out of tax revenue.
The government should do the decent thing and stop all this advertising in the run up to the election. A new government should make the ad budget one of the first targets for substantial reductions.
Apple puts social responsibility up front | by Police Inspector Blog | 17 March 2010, 07:52 AM
Anyone interested in the Apple iPad has no doubt been to the Apple homepage lately and discovered this nice surprise bottom-center:
That’s right. At a time when Apple could be cross-selling any number of their new offerings, they are using one of the four sandboxes on their homepage to share their supplier responsibility practices. You know, the info that’s typically buried in the “about us” section of a company website—if it exists at all.
Strategic posturing? Maybe.
But consider the timing: Apple is on the cusp of their biggest product launch since the iPhone.
And consider the real estate: Whatever the company puts on their homepage sells.
Apple realizes at a time when their fortunes are good and the stock price is up, maybe putting social responsibility up front just might the most responsible thing they can do.
That’s my take. What’s yours?
Interesting photos - 16 Mar 2010 - Flickr | by Daily interesting photos - Flickr | 17 March 2010, 07:49 AM
Boris Johnson claims London is the best big city in the world | by Liverpool Daily Post - Dale Street Blues | 17 March 2010, 07:24 AM
Yesterday I squeezed into the London pavilion along with hundreds of others to hear the city's mayor Boris Johnson address MIPIM. True to form Johnson entertained the crowd with his uniquely uplifting bombastic style. He told delegates about the "news...
[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]
The Cove | by Nat Friedman (Gnome) | 17 March 2010, 06:10 AM
We just got back to San Francisco. We rented an apartment for a month, and I’m stealing wireless from a neighbor. And I just ordered Mexican food.
On the flight here I watched The Cove. This is a really well-made documentary about a town in Japan called Taiji where local fishermen secretly slaughter tens of thousands of dolphins every year.
The filmmakers smuggled in hidden cameras and hydrophones and managed to capture the killings on camera, despite being dogged by the local police.
Last summer when Stephanie and I were scuba diving in Rangiroa, a pod of wild dolphins swam into our group. They hung out with us for a couple of minutes, swimming around and under and above us in tight, playful loops. It was obvious they wanted to hang out and they came back several times during the dive. I could hear their clicking noises and knew they were imaging me with their sonar.
We saw a lot of life under the sea but when a wild dolphin swims up to you, you get this instant sense that you’re looking at something person-like. It’s like the feeling when someone smart and charismatic walks in the room. It’s nothing like looking at a fish.
So The Cove moved me. Check it out.
Children showing their drawings - KG Uvira, Congo, Africa… | by Two Talk | 17 March 2010, 06:05 AM
SOS Children's Villages in DR Congo calm, but cautious
Numbers | by xkcd | 17 March 2010, 04:00 AM
How to make everything yourself - online low-tech resources | by Low-tech Magazine | 17 March 2010, 03:08 AM
Energy Bulletin pointed us to the website of Practical Action
(previously known as the Schumacher Centre for Technology &
Development), an online resource devoted to low-technology solutions
for developing countries. The site hosts many manuals that can also be of interest for low-tech DIYers in the developed world. They cover energy, agriculture, food processing, construction and manufacturing, just to name some important categories.
We would like to add to this the impressive online library put together by software engineer Alex Weir. The 900 documents listed here
(13 gigabytes in total) are not as well organised and presented as
those of Practical Action, but there is a wealth of information that is
not found anywhere else. The library is also hosted here (without search engine).
Other interesting online resources that offer manuals and instructions are Appropedia, Howtopedia and Open Source Ecology. These are all wiki's, so you can cooperate. The Centre for Alternative technologies has many interesting manuals, too, but the majority of those are not for free.
Previously: The museum of old techniques / A do-it-ourselves guide.
Is Kate Winslet's split more important than Michael Foot's funeral? | by Alistair Campbell | 17 March 2010, 02:38 AM
Like comments on blogs, sometimes the best 'Letters to the Editor' are the shortest ones, and I quote one such from today's Guardian, from Christopher Bell of Chorleywood, Hertfordshire.
'Thank you for Jonathan Freedland's moving account of Michael Foot's funeral. A shame, then, that the news on BBC1 failed to report the occasion. But then they had to find space for two David Beckham reports, plus coverage of Kate Winslet's separation.'
I had exactly the same thought watching Monday's main bulletin. Beckham's injury, its impact on the World Cup and his remarkable career - I buy that as a proper main bulletin story. Kate Winslet's separation - I'm not so sure.
To be fair to the BBC, and other media outlets, coverage of Michael's death was extensive and a lot kinder than the treatment he got from most when Labour leader. But like Mr Bell, I was surprised that the nation's public service broadcaster did not find a single moment's space to record an event at which a serving Prime Minister and a second former Labour leader spoke eloquently and movingly about their predecessor. Even the right-wing papers, broadsheet and tabloid alike, covered it properly.
In Maya, my novel about fame in the media age, one of my favourite scenes is when her marriage breaks up and the entire story is told through the mouths of journalists on Sky, which drops a planned 'special report on Robert Mugabe's finances' to keep the rolling news of a celebrity marriage break up going.
When I was at Sky to do an interview, one of the producers told me he would love to be able to say my description of the meltdown that occurs when a big celeb story breaks was over the top 'I'm afraid it was pretty much spot on,' he said.
So the worrying thing is less that the BBC bulletin editors did not cover Michael's funeral but that, once the Becks and Kate stories had broken, they probably didn't even consider it.
Ps. Good piece in the FT today on how Cameron is failing to win the support he needs up North, whilst he and his Party have given up on Scotland. As I keep saying to Fiona and our London-born and bred children, the further North you go, the brighter shine the lights inside.
*** Buy The Blair Years online and raise cash for Labour http://www.alastaircampbell.org/bookshop.php.
Georgia, Russia: Commentary on Imedi's Fake Broadcast | by Global Voices (Georgia) | 17 March 2010, 01:54 AM
Giorgi Kvelashvili of Jamestown Foundation Blog and Vadim Nikitin of Foreign Policy Association's Russia blog comment on the mock news broadcast on the Russian invasion of Georgia, aired on Imedi TV channel last Saturday.
A free software model for open knowledge | by Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog | 17 March 2010, 01:39 AM
Notes describing the talk on the work of the Open Knowledge Foundation given last week at Jornadas SIG Libre.
I was happily surprised to be asked to give this open knowledge talk at an open source software conference. But it makes sense - the free software movement has created the conditions in which an open data movement is possible. There is lots to learn from open source process, in both a technical and organisational sense.
In English we have one word “free” where Spanish like most languages has two, gratis and libre, signifying separately “free of cost” and “freedom to”. The Open Source Institute coined Open Source as a branding or marketing exercise to avoid the primary meaning “free of cost”. So whenever I say “open” I want you to hear the word “libre” [Later i was told that libre can have meaning in at least 15 different ways]
The best way to talk about the work of the Open Knowledge Foundation is to look at its projects, which form an open knowledge stack similar to the OSGeo software stack.
The Open Knowledge Definition is based on the OSI Open Source Software Definition (which OSGeo uses as a reference for acceptable software licenses). No restrictions on field of endeavour - non-commercial-use licenses are not open as in the OKD. An open data license will pass the cake test.
Open Data Commons is run by Jordan Hatcher, who started work on the Open Database License with support from Talis, later extensive negotiation with the OpenStreetmap community. ODbL is a ShareAlike license for data, that obviates the problems of inapplicability of copyright to facts, and greediness of the ShareAlike clause when it comes to use of maps in PDFs, etc.
PDDL is a license that implements the Science Commons protocol for open access data, explicitly placing it in the public domain.
The Panton Principles are four precepts for publishers of scientific research data who wish that data to be freely reusable. Being openly able to inspect, critique and re-analyse data is critical to the effectiveness of scientific research.
The Open Data Grid is a project in early incubation; based on the Tahoe distributed filesystem. It’s in need of development effort on Tahoe to really get going. Provide secure storage for open datasets around the edges of infrastructure that people are already running.
People are handwaving about the Cloud, but storage and backup are not problems that it is really meant to solve. People make different claims about the Cloud - cheaper, greener, more efficient, more flexible. Can we get these things in other ways?
There is a saying, “never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of DAT tapes”
CKAN is inspired by free software package repositories, perl’s CPAN, R’s CRAN, python’s PyPi. It provides a wiki-like interface to create minimal metadata for packages with a versioned domain model and HTTP API.
CKAN supports groups, which can curate a package namespace - e.g. climate data - and assess priorities for turning into fully installable packages.
CKAN’s open source code is being used in the data package catalogue for the data.gov.uk project, part of the Making Public Data Public effort in the UK.
The Debian of Data - datapkg takes Debian’s apt tool as inspiration for fully automatable install of data packages, with dependencies between them. This is currently in usable alpha stage with a python implementation.
The next challenge really is to bring the concerns and the solutions to a mainstream public. Agustín Lobo spoke of “a personal consciousness but not an institutional consciousness” when it comes to open source and open data. Media coverage, exemplary government implementations, help to create this kind of consciousness.
Pressure for increased open access is coming from academia - for the research data underlying papers, for the right to data mine and correlate different sources, for library data open for re-use. Pressure is also coming from within museums, libraries and archives - memory institutions who want to increase exposure to their collections with new technology, and recognise that open data, linked to a network of resources, will work for sustainability and not against it.
The next generation of researchers, who are kids in school now, will grow up with an expectation that code and data are naturally open. It will be interesting to see what they make!
Meanwhile OpenStreetmap is feeding several startups, and more commercial presence in open data space will be of benefit. Illustrative that one does not have to be proprietary to be commercial.
Now higher-profile government projects opening data are helping to mainstream. To what extent is open a fashionable position, to what extent is open reflected throughout the way of working?
Open process; early release, public sharing of bugs, public discussion of plans - everything in Nat Torkington’s post on Truly Open Data. The opportunity to fail in public, to learn from others’ problems, and self-interestedly collaborate.
I had a great time at SIG Libre 10. Oscar Fonts’ talk on OpenSearch Geospatial interfaces to popular services has me itching to add an OpenSearch +Geo interface to CKAN, as well as to work on getting the apparent version skew in the Geo extensions resolved amicably.
Genís Roca spoke thought-provokingly on Retorno y rentabilidad (there isn’t really an equivalent English word - “rentability” - less exploitative or focused than profitability). Rentability, especially for online services, can come in ways that sustain an organisation predictably, and don’t involve fishing in the pockets of ultimate end-users.
Ivan Sanchez showed areas of OpenStreetmap Spain with stunning level of detail, trees and fences, MasterMap-quality coverage. I’m inspired to pick up JOSM and Markaartor to add building-level detail from out of copyright 1:500 Edinburgh town plans at the National Library of Scotland’s map services.
Agustin Lobo talked about the distributed work and cross-institutional support and benefit of the R project, and the impact of open source on open access to data in science. He mentioned a Nature open peer review experiment that was discarded - am thinking it wasn’t curated enough. The talk helped me to connect the OKF’s work to the rest of the Jornadas.
The shiny slides prezi.com which many people asked for details of - this should show embedded in the page I hope. I stupidly forgot to put URLs on the slides which is partly why i have written this blog.
Related posts:
Only A Northern Soul | by round the merseyrail we go | 16 March 2010, 11:04 PM
This is my Mum on top of the Empire State Building.
Hello Mum.
She has gifted many things to me over the years. Ramrod straight hair (my brother got our Dad's curls). A love of Motown. A habit of sticking my bottom lip out under my top one. And outrageous, all-consuming snobbery.
I am a terrible snob, I admit it. I've already proved it on here. But my Mum takes that snobbishness to new, galactic levels at times.
One of her pet topics is how awful the North is. Every time she comes to visit - which isn't often - she'll marvel at some new element of terribleness that only exists north of the Watford Gap. To her, the North is where people who can't afford to move to the South live.
Example: on her first visit to Liverpool, she was shocked to see a BMW drive by. "How can someone round here afford a BMW?" she mused. "Perhaps he's a drug dealer."
Example: after taking her to the Pier Head, the museums, the Cathedrals, in a tour of the city's magnificence, the one element she chose to give a lengthy monologue on was the now-demolished footbridge over the Strand and how awful it was.
Example: she found Southport "surprisingly alright". "It's like a proper town."
Example: only last week, she watched a film set in Liverpool. "Of course, they tried to make it look nice."
"It is nice," I said. "It's lovely up here."
She snorted. "Someone still got mugged though."
See what I mean? I've lived here for fifteen years now, and she still can't quite understand why. There are some things she likes around here - she once saw Jimmy Corkhill coming out of the FACT - but all in all it's Just. Not. Good. Enough.
For myself, I'm sort of in a limbo between South and North. My accent gives me away every time - talking about "barths" instead of "baths" and "arnties" instead of "a(u)nties", and pronouncing "down" as "dahn". I have an outsider's perspective on some things - for example, I'd love to know how you decide whether to support Liverpool or Everton. I can't work out why people would support the Blues when they don't seem to win anything. But at the same time, I'm passionate about the city, and I'm full of pride about the beauty of the area. Where I live on the Wirral, within an hour's drive, I can be in the Welsh mountains, the throbbing heart of big cities, the Cheshire plains, or on a beach - where else in the country can you say that? I can't think of myself anywhere but here (with the obvious caveat that if Russell Tovey calls me up and invites me to share his flat in London, I'll be on a Virgin Train so fast I'll leave flames on the pavement behind me).
The reason for this lengthy preamble is that I was heading into Wigan, which is about as "Northern" as it's possible to get. I'm not sure how it's acquired this reputation, but if ever there were a town whose name reeked of whippets, flat caps and ee by gum it's Wigan. It's probably Orwell's fault. When he rode a train into the town, he talked about vast piles of slag by the side of the track, mountains of the stuff, and the grim, miserable lives of the put-upon inhabitants.
My ride into Wigan Wallgate, on the other hand, was marked by the view of the back of Currys Superstores and Carpet Warehouses, and by a large wide open expanse of green parkland. I had to stretch my imagination to see this black mountainous hell-hole. To me, it just looked like another little town.
The station was a neat little Victorian relic, nicely preserved, though in possession of one of the grimmest toilets I have ever had the misfortune to pee in. (Blocked urinal, ultraviolent anti-druggie lighting AND mashed up loo paper in the sink? Why Northern Rail, you are really spoiling us). At platform level, it was a bit better, and by the time I got up to the booking hall it was positively charming. I'll forgive anything if there's a porte-cochere. That's proper old-style railway architecture, that is.
I took the usual pic, with another boring GMPTE railway sign, and then headed into the town. The other train station in Wigan, North Western, is only fifty yards away, but I wanted to go into the town to have a wander round this haven of Northernness. To be specific, I wanted to have a pie.
Wiganers are called Pie-Eaters. The theory is that this came about following the General Strike, when the town's residents were the first back to work so they ate "humble pie". Personally, I just like the idea that they eat a lot of pies. Or that they're paying tribute to Dennis the Menace's pal. The town certainly holds a pie-eating championship, to which I say, well done, and I'll be sitting a few yards away feeling nauseous. For today, though, I wanted to go proper Northern, and have some proper pie in a proper Wigan pie eating place.
I thought there'd be hundreds of them. I thought it would be like trying to find a tea room in Devon, or a pasty in Cornwall. I thought there'd be people on the street waving photos of their baked goods at you as you passed, trying to seduce you with their crusty edges. I headed down the main street of the town, and it looked very pretty - there were some gorgeous arcades, real Victorian beauties, coming off the main street, and a thriving shopping centre. There was even a pub called The Moon Under Water, which was very tempting. After all, if there was going to be a place which embodied George Orwell's perfect boozer, wouldn't it be in Wigan? Then I spotted it was a Wetherspoons, and I realised that it was unlikely that it would be the alcoholic nirvana promised in the name. And an advert for free wi-fi didn't help add to that olde-worlde charm - I doubted it sold liver sausage sandwiches, anyway.
There was a couple of Greggs, and a couple of Greenhalghs, and a couple of Galloways, but all of them were takeaways. I didn't want to come all the way to Wigan and bite down on a steak and kidney pie sat on a bench surrounded by pigeons. I wanted a plate and a seat with my pie. Where could I go?
I came across this place and it seemed perfect. I mean, Lancashire Tea Room - & More. It's named after the frigging county, for goodness' sake. Inside, it was clean and modern. I went to the counter and asked for a meat and potato pie and chips.
"Do you want peas and gravy with that?"
Are you kidding? Of course I do! Give me the whole damn experience!
My tea came. There was a china cup, and a little stainless steel teapot, and it was beautiful. For all my love of beer and wine, there is nothing - nothing - as wonderful as a good cup of tea. If I end up on one of those fictional islands where you get a choice of beverages, I'll go with a teapot over a bottle of champagne any day.
Next came my lunch - or rather, since this is the North, my dinner.
Pie. Chips. Gravy. And the peas were mushy, something I hadn't requested but which came as a singular thrill. I laid in with gay abandon.
Reader: I was disappointed. I'm sorry. This might be my own fault, because, for me, the best thing about a pie is the crust. The crunchy, hard beauty of pastry, infused with the subtle juices of the pie inside, yet retaining its own structure, and a firmness between your teeth. I like to bite down on pastry and feel it crumble in my mouth. This pie, however, was soggy and unpleasant. Part of that was the gravy's fault, but part of it was down to the way it was cooked. It felt like a frozen pie that hadn't been cooked long enough, and was still in the process of defrosting. It was wet. I just couldn't get on board with it, and considering I had come all this way expecting the ne plus ultra of pies, it was a big let down. Still, the chips were lovely, drizzled with salt to give it a tantalising tingle, and the mushy peas slipped down delightfully.
I staggered out of the Lancashire Tea Room, stuffed - I'm not used to guzzling that much food in the middle of the day. I'd thought about going to Wigan Pier, to complete the Orwellian experience, but since George couldn't be bothered going there (he says in the book that it had been demolished, which wasn't true) I didn't see why I should bother. Besides, I'd been once before, about twelve years ago with some friends from Edge Hill. We went bowling, and I embarrassed myself by leaping about like a girl when I got a strike. So I considered Wigan Pier "done".
Which only left me with the seventh worst train station in Britain, Wigan North Western. After Wigan Wallgate's Victorian charms, a 1970s brick hole couldn't hardly compare. There was a very nice new multi-storey, recently built by Virgin, alongside, but the station itself is indeed a dump. What is it with the bricks made in the 1970s? Why do they age so badly? There are Victorian brick buildings that still look majestic, while buildings from the Seventies look like they've been built out of blocks of algae and despair. It's just plain nasty. Inside, it didn't get much better. I'd been here once before, about eight years ago for a training day, and they'd revamped it a bit since then. The main thing they seemed to have done was close the toilets.
I'd been to Euston and Lime Street in the preceding couple of days, so I knew what Virgin were capable of in terms of providing customer services. If this was a suburban station with a couple of trains a day, this was awful. For a station on the West Coast Main Line, with services to Glasgow and London and all points in between, it was dreadful, and completely unjustifiable.
What's worse, they had tried to make it look better by painting it lime green.
Note to any interior designers out there - lime green is not, and never will be, a colour to instil joy in all comers. It just makes you think of the 1970s all over again.
I'd been meaning to have a wander round the station, to fully evaluate its status as a bloody awful station. But I have to be honest, it was too depressing. The idea of waiting twenty minutes for the fast train was just too much to bear. I leapt on the slow train which might have taken a while to get to Lime Street, but at least it left Wigan sooner. Sorry - but my affection for all things Northern has its limits...
Michael Jackson in Body Worlds shock | by Knowing and Making (Leigh Caldwell) | 16 March 2010, 10:50 PM
This can't be right, can it?
An FT article about Sony's record-breaking $250 million settlement with Michael Jackson's estate says:
Unlike other headline-grabbing deals with artists from Madonna to Robbie Williams, it will not offer Sony any future revenues, such as those generated from merchandising and touring.I had not expected Michael Jackson to be doing any more touring in the circumstances.
India: The Rich Culture and unity of Mizoram | by Global Voices (India) | 16 March 2010, 10:03 PM
Musings of a Chakma informs that a total of 10,378 Mizo dancers performed “the largest and longest bamboo dance” in the world for eight minutes - a Guinness world record.
Meanwhile Back In CPH | by Copenhagen Cycle Chic | 16 March 2010, 08:58 PM
This morning on my way to work, I thought I should go catch a bit of that wonderful spring vibe I...
For the full photographic glory and the rest of the text, you know where to go. The Original Cycle Chic awaits.
The new Desig function | by Freesteel | 16 March 2010, 08:16 PM
I have a minimal library of trivial functions in my C++ code. Things like: inline double Square(double x) { return x*x; } inline double Len(const P3& a) { return sqrt(Square(a.x) + Square(a.y) + Square(a.z); } inline P3 ConvertGZ(const P2& a, double z) { return P3(a.u, a.v, z); } inline P2 operator*(const P2& a, double lam) { return [...]
On the Street.....The Artist, Paris | by The Sartorialist | 16 March 2010, 08:00 PM
Science Times stunner: “… a majority of the section’s editorial staff doubts that human-induced global warming represents a serious threat to humanity.” | by Climate Progress | 16 March 2010, 07:41 PM
Okay, it’s not a ’stunner’ for CP readers that the NY Times doesn’t get it. Still, it’s nice to see independent confirmation. What’s the point of having a blog if you can’t say, “I told you so”?
In an otherwise silly article criticizing efforts to improve climate science messaging, John Horgan, a former Scientific American staff writer who directs the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology, reports:
I teach at an engineering school, and about one third of my students identify themselves as global-warming skeptics. They tend to know more about global warming than students who accept it as a fact. Two sources at the Science Times section of the New York Times have told me that a majority of the section’s editorial staff doubts that human-induced global warming represents a serious threat to humanity.
And this guy argues that just telling people the science is all that is needed to persuade them!
Anyway, I would say it’s been a open secret for a long time that the NYT’s science writers and science editors don’t get it (see “And the 2009 “Citizen Kane” award for non-excellence in climate journalism goes to …“). The mere fact that they keep anti-science writer John Tierney on staff tells you everything you need to know (see “Tierney makes up stuff — does the NYT employ several know/do-nothing fact checkers” and “John Tierney IS the country’s worst science writer“).
The science could not be more clear cut that staying anywhere near our current path of unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases poses a multitude of threats that go far, far beyond serious – as can be seen from even a brief glance at the recent peer-reviewed literature and/or reports from leading scientists (see links below). So if you don’t understand that, it’s because you don’t know the science or you have been persuaded by the rhetorical strategies of the anti-science crowd.
Horgan is uber-naive if he thinks how one articulates a message has no serious impact on how it is received. As a 23-year-old Winston Churchill wrote in a brilliant, unpublished essay, “The Scaffolding of Rhetoric.”
Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory. He who enjoys it wields a power more durable than that of a great king…. The subtle art of combining the various elements that separately mean nothing and collectively mean so much in an harmonious proportion is known to very few…. [T]he student of rhetoric may indulge the hope that Nature will finally yield to observation and perseverance, the key to the hearts of men.
And yes, one can use rhetoric and still be scientifically accurate. Indeed, repetition is the core strategy of rhetoric, something most scientists simply don’t practice (see “Why scientists aren’t more persuasive, Part 1“).
Horgan repeats the tired pejorative that trying to explain science to nonscientists in a manner that they might actually understand and remember means you think they are “ignorant, irrational idiots.”
As naïve as this may sound, I believe environmentalists should try to influence public opinion by laying out the facts as clearly and honestly as possible and refraining from rhetorical trickery. Inconvenient Truth was a framing masterpiece, but Al Gore’s linkage of global warming to Katrina, however qualified, has made it easier for wackos to claim that single weather events, like the big blizzards that struck Washington, D.C., this winter, contradict global warming.
Yes, it does sound naive. Scientists have been telling us the science (poorly) with the proper qualifications for years. The “wackos” simply make persuasive-sounding stuff up and repeat it endlessly, no matter what scientists do. Even the prestigious journal Nature editorialized: “Scientists must now emphasize the science, while acknowledging that they are in a street fight.”
The fact is, rhetoric works. And it works not on “ignorant, irrational idiots,” but all people. Indeed, a rhetorician will always out debate a logician (see Why scientists aren’t more persuasive, Part 2: Why deniers out-debate “smart talkers”).
In his dialogue, Gorgias, about the master rhetorician, Plato gives him a speech that dramatized the awesome power of rhetoric over two millennia ago:
If a rhetorician and a doctor visited any city you like to name and they had to contend in argument before the Assembly or any other gathering as to which of the two should be chosen as doctor, the doctor would be nowhere, but the man who could speak would be chosen, if he so wished. And if he should compete against any other craftsman whatever, the rhetorician rather then any other would persuade the people to choose him: for there is no subject on which a rhetorician would not speak more persuasively than any other craftsman, before a crowd. Such then is the scope and character of rhetoric
A rhetorician could persuade any audience, no matter how intelligent, that he was more of a scientist than a real scientist!
To point out the irony (a rhetorical figure of speech), it is precisely because rhetoric works on everybody that Horgan’s attempt to pigeonhole good messaging — “to help the dim-witted public see the world in the same enlightened way that environmentalists do” — is completely backwards.
How is that “a majority of the [NYT Science] section’s editorial staff doubts that human-induced global warming represents a serious threat to humanity”?
They aren’t dumb. So either they they have been convinced by superior messaging (by the anti-science crowd and others) or they don’t actually know the science:
No serious threat there.
Brad Johnson has more in his Wonk Room post, “New York Times Science Desk ‘Doubts That Human-Induced Global Warming Represents A Serious Threat’,” including this chart:
He notes: “The editorial positioning of the stories was even more biased, as 28% of the Page 1 Science Times stories on climate were skeptical. The vast majority of climate science stories were buried, with two-thirds of the stories appearing either on Page 3 or Page 8…. In contrast, over 15% of stories on ScienceDaily.com, which produces a stream of science stories on all topics based generally on press releases from scientific organizations, were about climate science.
How clean cars and climate policy can create jobs | by Climate Progress | 16 March 2010, 07:26 PM
Reducing America’s dependence on imported oil will not only enhance our national security; it will create substantially more jobs than continuing on our current path of waste and unsustainable resource use. CAP has teamed up with the Natural Resources Defense Council and the United Auto Workers to produce a new study on the clean car revolution that is already underway. The executive summary is below, and you can access the full report here. In the photo, Workers in a Detroit, Michigan plant stand by a newly produced Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid electric vehicle.
Reengineering the U.S. automobile fleet to use energy more efficiently will require new investments in advanced technology, increasing demand for skilled labor. Instead of presenting a threat to the auto industry, reigning in reliance on oil and cutting pollution from fossil fuels can demonstrably create jobs, accelerate innovation, and increase demand for advanced manufacturing.
It is clear that increasing America’s fuel economy can create more jobs, but which nations will capture the economic benefits of this shift to a more fuel-efficient fleet has yet to be determined. How Congress chooses to address comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation will strongly shape whether American workers enjoy the good jobs, competitive advantage, and sustained economic growth that will come with the move to a new clean energy economy.
This study offers two key insights on the nature of clean energy jobs in the automobile sector, each with profound implications for policymakers and the economy.
First, this paper documents that saving oil will create good jobs, not in the abstract, but directly by driving demand for specific additional manufactured components. The move to greater fuel economy means greater labor content per vehicle and higher employment across the fleet. This will include new investment in a host of incremental improvements to conventional gasoline powered internal combustion engines, from new controls for valves and timing, to variable speed transmissions and advanced electronics. It will also include entirely new systems like hybrid drive trains and advanced diesel engines.
Together these investments add up. By 2020 this analysis shows that, all things being equal, supplying the U.S. automobile market with more efficient cars could provide a net gain of over 190,000 new jobs from improvements to fuel economy alone.
The second finding is equally profound. While it is certain that the production of new technology will create demand for workers, where those jobs are located will be the product of policy choices. Of the over 190,000 jobs anticipated by 2020, the number of domestic jobs created could vary greatly. Fewer than 50,000 jobs might go to American workers, or, with different incentives, more than three times that number, as many as 150,000 U.S. workers, could find employment as a result of new investments in the engineering and production of the technology needed to improve fuel economy. It’s up to us which path we take.
Many factors will shape where individual firms decide to produce fuel-efficient vehicles and their key components and whether this new demand will be met through domestic sourcing or imports. But it is clear that specific incentives can work to promote domestic production and drive new investment into existing plants and the skills of workers.
Strong comprehensive energy and climate legislation will ensure sustained reductions in oil use and carbon emissions. At the same time, it can capture economic growth through specific manufacturing conversion incentives funded through dedicated carbon allowance revenues. Legislation that sets a firm declining limit on global warming pollution is uniquely suited to this task for two reasons. First, it sends a critical message to markets and investors. Second, it provides a steady revenue source to drive long-term economic and environmental gains in the domestic auto sector and to assist in retooling assembly lines and retraining workers so that the United States continues to have a globally competitive auto industry that produces advanced clean vehicles. This integrated clean energy and jobs approach can expand opportunities for both U.S. firms and American workers, particularly in hard hit industrial states such as Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio.
It is also worth noting that while the analysis undertaken in this paper shows substantial positive economic and jobs impacts from pursuing improved fuel economy, many additional benefits of energy independence do not even figure in this calculation. Therefore, as positive as this opportunity looks on paper, the real benefits go further.
Avoided fuel costs put real dollars back in the pockets of consumers, increasing consumption and economic benefits. At the same time, reducing demand for oil helps buffer price volatility, while decoupling the growth of the economy from rising energy imports reduces vulnerability to price spikes and supply disruptions. And by pursuing the high-efficiency and low-carbon emission technology path outlined in this report, U.S. auto makers will preserve access for American-made cars to global markets, to serve the rapidly growing consumer demand for cleaner cars. As Americans use less oil to fuel our cars, we can also slow the flow of resources overseas to unstable and undemocratic nations, and invest instead in American jobs. By acting quickly, we can help to make the country less vulnerable to rising prices when global economic growth returns.
Clean energy manufacturing can drive the future prosperity of American workers if we creatively engage this opportunity. Our closest economic competitors in Asia and Europe are investing today in diversifying and expanding their manufacturing of clean energy technology. If the U.S. fails to make the same transition, we risk being left behind. However, climate legislation that includes manufacturing conversion incentives could help drive economic recovery and restore American leadership in the global automobile market and the global economy.
Which choice we make has yet to be determined. The future remains to be written.
For more information, see:
This report was prepared for the Natural Resources Defense Council, United Auto Workers, and Center for American Progress by Alan Baum of The Planning Edge and Daniel Luria of the Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center
jamesykwak | by The Baseline Scenario | 16 March 2010, 06:50 PM
The following guest post was contributed by Jennifer S. Taub, a Lecturer and Coordinator of the Business Law Program within the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (SSRN page here). Previously, she was an Associate General Counsel for Fidelity Investments in Boston and Assistant Vice President for the Fidelity Fixed Income Funds.
To the uninitiated, the term ‘Repo 105’ evokes the name of a basic finance course or perhaps an expensive perfume. However, the broader implication of Lehman’s corrupt accounting strategy is neither simple nor does it pass the smell test.
While hiding $50 billion off balance sheet is nothing to sneeze at, ‘Repo 105’ may be an unfortunate distraction. We should focus our attention on a far more mainstream and dangerous use of repurchase agreements backed by securitized bonds to grow balance sheets. This practice, enabled by a 2005 legal change, directly destabilized the financial sector and led to the ultimate credit crisis of 2008. In other words, the approximately $7-10 trillion repo financing market created what Gary Gorton and Andrew Metrick call the “run on repo” or what Gerald Epstein describes as a “run on the banking system by the banking system.”
A repurchase agreement or “repo” is a two-part arrangement. The seller (cash borrower) agrees to sell securities at a slight discount to a buyer (cash lender). Under that same agreement, that original seller agrees to buy them back at a future date at a higher price. The securities are known as “collateral.” The discount is known as the margin or a “haircut.” The ratio between the increase in price and the original price is known as the rate.
With ‘Repo 105,’ Lehman, according to volume III of the examiner’s report, acting as a seller (cash borrower), treated $50 billion in repo transactions as sales instead of financing transactions. Lehman did not reveal to investors that it was doing so. In contrast, standard practice was to record these transactions on balance sheet by increasing both cash (assets on the left side) and collateralized financing (liabilities on the right side). Thus a properly recorded repo transaction results in both a larger balance sheet and also higher leverage ratios.
Not wanting to issue more equity to boost leverage ratios, Lehman instead chose a cosmetic solution. With ‘Repo 105,” near the end of a reporting period, Lehman treated the transactions as sales and used the cash proceeds to pay down other liabilities. This made the firm appear to have a smaller balance sheet and less leverage than it truly had. The transactions were called ‘Repo 105’ and ‘Repo 108’ in reference to the size of the haircut. In other words, for ‘Repo 105’ transactions, Lehman would provide collateral purportedly worth 105% of the amount of cash it received.
As we blame the bad apples at Lehman, we fail to see how recent legal changes brought about bigger problems in the repo markets and how instead of reversing these missteps, the law may instead amplify it. Indeed, as discussed below, language in the Dodd draft released Monday, March 15th suggests we have not learned some basic lessons.
Lehman’s ‘Repo 105’ was blessed under UK law by a perhaps questionable legal opinion from the Linklaters law firm. However, the transformation of the broader repo market, from one backed by largely US Treasury and agency collateral to one backed by securitized bonds, was enabled by US law. As detailed below, changes to the Bankruptcy Code, through BAPCPA in 2005, expanded this vital financing market and made it far more unstable.
Repos have been called the “oil in the industry of Wall Street” largely because, prior to the global financial crisis, investment banks financed up to 50% of their assets in the repo markets. One bank analyst notes that “repo markets are only one channel linking the “shadow banking” sector to the broader economy.” Given its size and importance, the repo market is surprisingly obscure.
At its peak in 2007, the repo market in the US was estimated to be between $7 trillion to $10 trillion. Outstanding US repos today are estimated to be in the $3.8 trillion to $4.27 trillion range. Buyers (cash lenders) in the repo market are typically institutional investors like pension funds and mutual funds who need a liquid but relatively safe place to invest cash for the short term, often overnight. Buyers also include broker-dealers and banks that need securities to cover short positions. Sellers (cash borrowers) in the repo market are often broker-dealers and banks who use these arrangements to finance asset purchases and to leverage. With a matched-book repo, a dealer will act as buyer, bringing in collateral, then will with the same collateral act as a seller with a different counterparty, profiting on the spread.
Gorton observes that “The current panic centered on the repo market, which suffered a run when lenders [whom he likens to depositors during Depression-era banking runs] required increasing haircuts, due to concerns about the value and liquidity of the collateral should the counterparty ‘bank’ fail.” These repo lenders also refused to rollover existing repos. Both actions created “massive deleveraging . . . resulting in the banking system being insolvent.”
To be clear, though, the run did not appear to be on the whole repo market, but rather on repo agreements backed by non-government collateral–in particular, repo backed by securitized bonds. In other words, repo backed by Treasuries did not experience a run. Cash-rich buyers sought out opportunities to loan against US Treasuries. Perhaps the buyers did not trust the valuation of the securitized debt, including mortgage backed securities. Thus, it follows that haircuts got larger for non-government collateral – the amount of collateral posted for a loan escalated. And ultimately, some collateral simply could not be used at all. The average haircut on structured debt, according to Gorton and Metrick went from zero in early 2007, to 10% by March of 2008. In September 2008, the rate shot up from 25% to 45%.
Questions have arisen as to the wisdom in allowing a vast range off collateral to back repos. Some argue that the market needs more than Treasuries and agencies because of the demand for Treasury and agency bonds as collateral for derivatives trades. This, of course invites the question of whether a side-benefit to shrinking the derivatives market would be to make Treasuries more available for repo. For example, approximately 80% of the approximately $28 trillion credit default swap market (once closer to $57 trillion) is said to be contracts where the insured party did not own the underlying reference credit. Shrinking the derivatives market might decrease the demand for Treasuries, thus decreasing the reliance on riskier, less secure repo financing that is prone to dry up when asset values decline.
What enabled the tremendous expansion of outstanding repos were amendments to the US Bankruptcy Code in 2005 through BAPCPA. Prior to these amendments, it was clear that if a debtor filed for bankruptcy, a lender who had Treasury collateral, agency, commercial paper and certain bankers acceptances could hold onto that collateral. Unlike most parties with contracts with a debtor that have not been completed, the repo lender would not be subject to the automatic stay.
However, prior to the amendments (notwithstanding another possible provision to rely upon in the Code), it was not clear what would happen to the repo lender who had other types of collateral, in particular mortgage-related securities. BAPCPA made certain to protect these creditors who took in a new list of collateral types, including mortgage loans and interests in mortgage-related securities. It also was expanded to include foreign sovereign debt. These new types would also be free from the automatic stay. In addition interest paid on the repo would not be clawed back as a preference. This was affirmed in a subsequent court decision in early 2008 in the wake of the subprime crisis. Outstanding repos grew from $4.9 trillion in 2004 to $5.6 trillion in 2005 and ultimately to $7 trillion by first quarter 2009.
Repo contributed heavily to the maturity mismatch and interconnectedness at the center of the crisis. Maturity mismatch was at the heart of crisis as corroborated by investment bank leaders. For example, in the January FCIC hearings, Goldman Sachs CEO, Lloyd Blankfein noted that:
“Certainly, enhanced capital requirements in general will reduce systemic risk. But we should not overlook liquidity. If a significant portion of an institution’s assets are impaired and illiquid and its funding is relying on short-term borrowing, low leverage will not be much comfort.”
Little has been done to address the maturity mismatch associated with the use of short-term (overnight) repo funding by banks to finance longer term assets. Moreover, the recently announced SEC rules affecting mutual funds will only send more cash into repurchase agreements. This will likely increase now that the SEC is requiring taxable money market funds to hold 10% of total assets in instruments which the fund has the right to receive cash with one day’s notice and 30% that give the fund the right to receive cash in five business days.
Finally, language in the Senate financial reform bill, the “Restoring Financial Stability Act of 2010,” (see page 203, beginning on line 12) introduced on March 15 by Senator Dodd, appears to expand even further the rights of repo buyers (lenders) if a financial company is under an FDIC receivership. In the words of President Bush, “Wall Street got drunk.” The bartenders pouring the drinks were repo market buyers (lenders). We should impose some liability on these bartenders for the leverage and liquidity problems to which they contributed. However, instead, it appears we are going in the opposite direction.
This is What Observing Feels Like | by Cosmic Variance | 16 March 2010, 06:26 PM
Very lovely time lapse video from Mauna Kea, home to many of the world’s best optical telescopes:
The White Mountain from charles on Vimeo.
For me, it really captures the best parts of how observing feels.
It misses the not-so-good parts, where the instrument breaks, or you’re shut down for wind in perfectly clear weather, or you’re trying desperately to stay awake on a diet of nothing but reheated bagel dogs.
I suppose I’m feeling rather maudlin about it, because its now been years and years since I’ve set foot at an observatory. During the past decade, almost all of my data has been ordered up from satellites or the observing queue, in contrast to my years at Carnegie, where I was observing for more than a month each year. My scientific life is much more “family friendly” as a result, but I still do miss the cold nights and big skies.
(h/t Andrew Sullivan)
el-e-va-tion (not u2). | by HI | 16 March 2010, 06:18 PM
elevation for the house.
doug life. | by HI | 16 March 2010, 06:09 PM
i made this last night of my studio mate doug.
get it?
DOUG LIFE.
glow bath. | by HI | 16 March 2010, 06:04 PM
Who for such dainties would not… stoap? | by PW Style | 16 March 2010, 06:02 PM
Soap of the evening, beautiful soap!
Sorry about the terrible rhyme. Such gorgeous packaging on these Lucia soaps! I’m such a sucker for pretty patterns, I hardly even care what’s inside. You can get ‘em as an early momgift at Petulia’s Folly at 17th and Sansom.
Will March Madness Bring Sanity To Digital Media? | by onlineSpin | 16 March 2010, 06:00 PM
The lack of parity between online and offline media buying has made the consumer shift to digital media consumption a very bumpy ride: And yet despite all the pain for media companies, and falling prices for online display advertising, there are still signs that digital revenues will eventually support quality content. The latest sign of digital's evolution is CBS Digital's coverage of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament, and the impressive amount of revenue this move will generate.
Welcome to the Dropout Economy | by Futurismic | 16 March 2010, 06:00 PM
This one’s doing the rounds everywhere at the moment (I spotted it thanks to Chairman Bruce and John Robb), and with good reason: it’s a provocative piece, especially coming from Time Magazine. Welcome to the Favela Chic future, American style:
Middle-class kids are taught from an early age that they should work hard and finish school. Yet 3 out of 10 students dropped out of high school as recently as 2006, and less than a third of young people have finished college. Many economists attribute the sluggish wage growth in the U.S. to educational stagnation, which is one reason politicians of every stripe call for doubling or tripling the number of college graduates.
But what if the millions of so-called dropouts are onto something? As conventional high schools and colleges prepare the next generation for jobs that won’t exist, we’re on the cusp of a dropout revolution, one that will spark an era of experimentation in new ways to learn and new ways to live.
Go read the whole thing, and see Reihan Salam predict the rise of roll-your-own web-based homeschooling, resilient sub-communities based on the exchange of labour rather than money, backyard farming and permaculture, mend-and-make-do and hardware hacker attitudes, and a complete volte-face away from institutional politics.
Exaggerated for controversy and effect? Almost certainly… but grown from more than a single grain of truth, I think, and just as likely to happen over here in the Eurobloc, though maybe not so soon or so hard. [image by emseearr]
Urban Research | by BLDGBLOD | 16 March 2010, 05:28 PM
[Image: San Francisco, as seen from the cockpit of a 747; photo by Olivier Roux].
The last few days have been pretty awesome. We've been road-tripping up from Los Angeles to Reno for a dinner with author William Fox, Matthew Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, landscape activist Lucy Lippard, Land Arts of the American West co-founder Bill Gilbert, cultural programmer Dorothy Dunn, Steve Wells of the Desert Research Institute (DRI), and the staff of the Nevada Museum of Art's Center for Art + Environment; we spent the day yesterday on a tour of the DRI's ice core research facilities, its micro-atmospheric testing rooms (like characters in a Borges story, they once used their equipment to test the metal content in the ink letters of a Gutenberg Bible in order to identify those letters' near-millennium-old liquid chemistry), and the DRI's full-scale virtual reality room.
I have some hilarious and amazing photos of Matthew Coolidge wearing black VR goggles, holding remote controls in each hand, while Bill Gilbert and Lucy Lippard look on, equally engoggled and optically stunned, flying helter-skelter over virtual terrains to chase simulated forest fires up canyon walls, the replicant ground dropping out from beneath them as we ran straight off a cliff, and I hope to post those here soon.
We had amazing conversations, as well: we're all gearing up for a big conference next year in Reno, hosted by the Center for Art + Environment at the end of September 2011. That will definitely be something to keep your eye on if you're at all interested in landscapes, the hydrosciences, water rights, mythology and the American West, archaeoastronomy, the contested history (and future) of weather modification, offworld exploration, the anthropology of mining, nature writing in its broadest possible sense, and much more. We're putting together something really fantastic, to be honest, and you have 18 months to make plans to be there.
Even better, Nicola Twilley from Edible Geography and Mark Smout of Smout Allen were also on hand, winning stuffed animals together in the Circus Circus casino (Mark quipped that the casinos were simply "giant, ugly buildings with jewelry stuck on them, like earrings"), and so the three of us are now down in San Francisco, where we'll be picking up Sarah Rich tomorrow to drive down to LA—and I can hardly imagine a better group of people to hit the Californian road with. The roads outside Reno were eight-foot canyons of plowed snow till we hit the Bay Bridge and drove past Alcatraz blinking in the darkness. 
[Image: Photo by George Steinmetz/CORBIS for National Geographic; via @stevesilberman].
In any case, if you're near San Francisco tonight, Tuesday, March 16, I'll be giving a talk at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) starting at 6pm. It costs $5, unfortunately, but it should be fun, and I'm looking forward to seeing a lot of old friends and colleagues again; as all of those friends and colleagues know, I wasn't a huge fan of San Francisco when I lived here, but it's good to be back in this rolling city of fog lines, abandoned bunkers that look like hills, tectonic trembling, lost ships, ghost streets, buried dunes, vinicultural microclimates, chemical weapons, a suicide bridge, and its artificially shrunken bay. I'll be talking about quarantine, The BLDGBLOG Book (which I'm thrilled to say has just gone into a second printing), the "Glacier/Island/Storm" studio and its accompanying blog-week experiment, blackouts, and more.
Is human-caused climate change killing the great forests of the American West? - Montana entomologist on bark beetles: “A couple of degrees warmer could create multiple generations a year. If that happens, I expect it would be a disaster for all of our pine populations.” | by Climate Progress | 16 March 2010, 05:21 PM
Climate change inherently favors invasive pests. On the one hand, milder winters since 1994 have reduced the winter death rate of beetle larvae in places like Wyoming from 80% per year to under 10%. On the other hand, hot-weather uber-droughts — aka “global-change-type droughts” — have made trees weaker, less able to fight off beetles.
Forest Ecology and Management just published a major new study by 19 researchers around the word, “A global overview of drought and heat-induced tree mortality reveals emerging climate change risks for forests.” Its key conclusion — that human-caused climate change is already killing forests, releasing carbon, and amplifying warming — will be a shock only to the anti-science crowd:
… studies compiled here suggest that at least some of the world’s forested ecosystems already may be responding to climate change and raise concern that forests may become increasingly vulnerable to higher background tree mortality rates and die-off in response to future warming and drought, even in environments that are not normally considered water-limited. This further suggests risks to ecosystem services, including the loss of sequestered forest carbon and associated atmospheric feedbacks.
Indeed, a 2008 Nature study looked at the beetle’s warming-driven devastation in British Columbia and concluded, “This impact converted the forest from a small net carbon sink to a large net carbon source.“
Much of the media has been covering only half the story, focusing on the devastation from the bark beetle but ignoring human-caused climate change (see “Signs of global warming are everywhere, but if the New York Times can’t tell the story (twice!), how will the public hear it?” and “NBC News ignores climate change, blows the bark beetle story“).
So, as part of the Climate Science Project, I’m reposting an excellent piece on the study by Montana journalist Jim Robbins in its entirety. It was first published at Yale’s Environment 360 online magazine.
For many years, Diana Six, an entomologist at the University of Montana, planned her field season for the same two to three weeks in July. That’s when her quarry — tiny, black, mountain pine beetles — hatched from the tree they had just killed and swarmed to a new one to start their life cycle again.
Now, says Six, the field rules have changed. Instead of just two weeks, the beetles fly continually from May until October, attacking trees, burrowing in, and laying their eggs for half the year. And that’s not all. The beetles rarely attacked immature trees; now they do so all the time. What’s more, colder temperatures once kept the beetles away from high altitudes, yet now they swarm and kill trees on mountaintops. And in some high places where the beetles had a two-year life cycle because of cold temperatures, it’s decreased to one year.
Such shifts make it an exciting — and unsettling — time to be an entomologist. The growing swath of dead lodgepole and ponderosa pine forest is a grim omen, leaving Six — and many other scientists and residents in the West — concerned that as the climate continues to warm, these destructive changes will intensify.
“A couple of degrees warmer could create multiple generations a year,” she said, as she chopped off a piece of bark on a dead lodgepole pine to show the galleries of burrowing larvae. “If that happens, I expect it would be a disaster for all of our pine populations.”
Across western North America, from Mexico to Alaska, forest die-off is occurring on an extraordinary scale, unprecedented in at least the last century-and-a-half — and perhaps much longer. All told, the Rocky Mountains in Canada and the United States have seen nearly 70,000 square miles of forest — an area the size of Washington state — die since 2000. For the most part, this massive die-off is being caused by outbreaks of tree-killing insects, from the ips beetle in the Southwest that has killed pinyon pine, to the spruce beetle, fir beetle, and the major pest — the mountain pine beetle — that has hammered forests in the north.
These large-scale forest deaths from beetle infestations are likely a symptom of a bigger problem, according to scientists: warming temperatures and increased stress, due to a changing climate. Although western North America has been hardest hit by insect infestations, sizeable areas of forest in Australia, Russia, France, and other countries have experienced die-offs, most of which appears to have been caused by drought, high temperatures, or both.
One recent study collected reports of large-scale forest mortality from around the world. Often, forest death is patchy, and research is difficult because of the large areas involved. But the paper, recently published in Forest Ecology and Management, reported that in a 20,000-square-mile savanna in Australia, nearly a third of the trees were dead. In Russia, there was significant die-off within 9,400 square miles of forest. Much of Siberia has warmed by several degrees Fahrenheit in the past half-century, and hot, dry conditions have led to extreme wildfire seasons in eight of the last 10 years. Russian researchers also are concerned that warmer, dryer conditions will lead to increased outbreaks of the Siberian moth, which can destroy large swaths of Russia’s boreal forest.
While people in some places have the luxury to doubt whether climate change is real, it’s harder to be a doubter in the Rocky Mountains. Glaciers in Glacier National Park and elsewhere are shrinking, winters are warmer and shorter, and the intensity of forest fires is increasing. But the most obvious sign is the red and dead forests that carpet the hills and mountains. They have transformed life in many parts of the Rockies.
It has hit home for me on a personal level. Virtually every one of the hundreds of old-growth ponderosa pines on the 15 acres of land where I live near Helena, Montana is dead, and we are surrounded by a valley of dead and dying forest. Most trees have been logged and taken to a pulp mill, where they were turned into cardboard for boxes.
University of Montana ecologist Steve Running says warmer temperatures in the Rockies bring spring earlier and fall later, each by about a week, yet precipitation has remained about the same. That translates into a drought, and stressed trees are highly susceptible to beetle infestations. Wintertime minimum temperatures in the 1950s, meanwhile, ranged from 40 F to 50 F below zero. That’s risen to the 30-below range, and there are fewer days when minimums are reached. It’s not getting cold enough anymore to kill the beetles, which over-winter in their larval stage and survive the milder temperatures because they are filled with glycol, a natural anti-freeze.
In addition, the past suppression of fire and the fact that many Western trees are reaching the age at which beetles target them — 80 to 100 years — are also factors in the widespread loss of forests.
So the forests across the West are dying, in such large numbers that U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar called it the West’s Hurricane Katrina. In Colorado and southern Wyoming, the U.S. Forest Service has created an emergency management team to cut down dead trees around towns and along roads and power lines. Forest Service campgrounds and trails have been closed because of the hazard from dead trees, and communities surrounded by dead forests have drawn up emergency evacuation plans for residents.
Large-scale die-offs have occurred in the past. Mountain pine beetles are native to the West and are part of the ecosystem. Lodgepole forests regenerate through large-scale “stand replacing events,” which include fire and insects. The die-offs now, though, are on a scale unprecedented since the West was settled and are so big that they are having unusual impacts on ecosystems. The whitebark pine, once largely protected from the beetles because it grew at high altitudes and was shielded by cold, is functionally extinct and may no longer be able to feed grizzly bears and other species that love its high-fat nut. In Mexico, bark beetles are beginning to kill oyamel fir trees in a rare 139,000-acre biosphere preserve where the majority of North America’s monarch butterflies travel each fall to spend the winter. So far, about 100 acres in a core area of 33,000 acres have been killed by bark beetles.
Tree-killing bugs aren’t the only problem. In 2005 Colorado researchers noticed that aspens were suddenly dying in large numbers. That year they found 30,000 acres of dead aspen forest. The next year there were 150,000 acres, and in 2008 it had soared to 553,000. The die-off is called Sudden Aspen Death, or SAD. “It’s growing at an exponential rate,” said Wayne Shepperd, who researches aspen for the Forest Service. “It’s pretty sobering when you see a whole mountainside or whole drainage of aspen forest dead.”
Groves at low elevations and facing south are dying fastest, and scientists believe the cause is hotter temperatures and drier weather. It’s not only killing mature trees, but the root mass as well. An aspen grove is the offspring of a large single underground clonal mass, which sends up shoots. “The whole organism is disappearing and it has profound implications,” Shepperd said. “When the roots die, groves that are hundreds or thousands of years old aren’t going to be there anymore.”
If the die-offs continue, the loss of the aspen trees would be a blow to goshawks, songbirds, and a number of other species that find food and refuge in the groves.
Perhaps more than anyone, Craig Allen is familiar with these large-scale forest die-offs. A forest ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Jemez Mountain Field Station in New Mexico, not only are his office and home surrounded by a pinyon die-off, he also is the lead author of the paper — with 19 other authors —published in Forest Ecology and Management, which sought to document and begin to understand what is happening to forests in North America and around the world as the result of climate change.
Coming up with a definitive understanding at this point is impossible, Allen says. Forests are complex, and unfortunately, woefully understudied, and there isn’t nearly enough data to draw a conclusion about the reasons behind forest die-offs globally. “There’s huge information gaps and uncertainties,” says Allen.
What contributors were able to do in the paper is collect anecdotal reports of broad-scale forest mortality from around the world. “The point of this paper is to connect the dots, at least the ones we can connect,” says Allen. “We can’t even tell you for sure if there’s more forest mortality. There’s not consistent monitoring.”
In 2005 a strong El Nino caused a dramatic drought in the Amazon. It killed forest across the region and is extremely well documented because so many researchers had existing plots there. “The heart of the biggest rainforest in the world turned from a carbon sink to a carbon source,” said Allen. “If you have long-term drought you can bleed a lot carbon into the atmosphere.”
A lot of beetles can also turn vast tracks of forest from carbon sinks to carbon sources. Take British Columbia, which is ground zero for the mountain pine beetle infestation in North America. Some 53,000 square miles of mature pine forest is dead and the province is projected to lose 80 percent of its mature trees by 2013. The second largest known die-off there occurred in the 1980s and claimed just 2,300 square miles. Bill Wilson — the province’s director of Industry, Trade and Economics Research — said he has flown in a plane for hours over the province and seen nothing but dead forest the entire time.
In 2008, so much of British Columbia’s forests had died they also went from being a net carbon sink to carbon source.
Diana Six works in Africa where she has seen other die-offs first-hand. “In Africa where I work, suddenly whole hillsides are dropping dead,” she said. “It’s happening so fast people are in shock. It’s a tragedy.” Species include the quiver tree, camel-thorn, and the giant euphorbia, a 30-foot-tall succulent. The causes are not known, but the suspects are hotter and drier weather, or shifting rainfall patterns.
All told, the paper that Allen co-authored describes 88 well-documented forest die-offs around the world, going back as far as the 1960s and 1970s, although most are in the 1990s and 2000s.
If there was a way to predict die-offs, Allen said, land managers could take preemptive action, such as mechanical thinning or prescribed burning to increase the vigor of forests.
What gives researchers pause is that many of these large die-offs have occurred with minimal warming, in just a few years. In the West, for example, the average temperature has warmed on average 1.8 F over the past century. “This is before we put two to four degrees centigrade (3.6 F to 7.2 F) into the system,” said Allen, referring to forecasts for warming by the end of this century. Trees across the world are stressed already from fragmentation, air pollution, and other problems, he said. “I don’t know how much stress the forests of the world can take,” said Allen.
JR: One final point: This catastrophic climate change impact and its carbon-cycle feedback were not foreseen even a decade ago — which suggests future climate impacts will bring other equally unpleasant surprises, especially if we don’t reverse our emissions path immediately.
Related Post:
Ten books that influenced me most | by Knowing and Making (Leigh Caldwell) | 16 March 2010, 05:05 PM
Tyler Cowen was prompted by a reader question to offer his ten most influential books. He challenged other bloggers to do the same, so here are mine (as for Tyler, this is my "gut list" though informed by a pleasant half hour looking through my bookshelves to prompt my memory). It surprises me how few economics books are here - but then I didn't do much formal economics study at the time of life that one chooses influential books:
Google Code turns five | by Official Google Blog | 16 March 2010, 04:33 PM
At age five most kids can hop, skip and tie their shoes without help. Google Code turns five this week, and while we’re still working on the shoelaces thing, we’ve grown from a simple site for hosting a couple of APIs into a destination for developers to prototype their ideas in a Code Playground, host all kinds of open source projects and find out about our growing family of APIs and products like App Engine, Google Web Toolkit and Android.
To learn more about how code.google.com has come alive over the past five years, check out our post on the Google Code Blog.
Bewitched | by Only In It For The Gold | 16 March 2010, 04:16 PM
More on Samanta et al. following up on Loose Cannon in the Press Office? I wrote the following as a comment on the RealClimate article.
The contents of the press release are not remotely supported by the publication.
It is clear that the political process is much more concerned about press releases than about the underlying work. Consider the McLean/de Freitas El Nino paper and its subsequent spin.
http://deepclimate.org/2009/07/30/is-enso-responsible-for-recent-global-warming-no/
The relationship between scientists and their respective press offices is no longer the trifling matter that many scientists would be inclined to expect, if indeed it ever was so.
As matters stand Dr. Samanta or someone claiming to behimher (did RC verify it washimher?) stands by the press release. This thus becomes less of a process issue; we do not need to establish how this nonsense got past the press office if Samanta is willing to sayheshe approves it. Assuming the attribution is correct, it now becomes Dr. Samanta’s responsibility to defend the argument implied inhisher comment #27 above, which is hardly less tendentious than the press release.
The IPCC WG II comment that “up to 40% could react drastically” simply expresses a concern. There is no implication of certainty; indeed it implicitly states that “at least 60% is unlikely to react drastically” which could be taken as reassuring. In any case it would be difficult to refute.
As has been discussed at length in the parent article and the comments, the quoted research does not constitute a refutation of that position in the slightest, but rather is a detailed refutation of the contrary and counterintuitive paper byAragaoSaleska et al (Corrected. Thanks Kooiti Masuda!) that seemed to claim that rain forests love drought. This is a case where you don’t need a weatherman to say which way the wind blows. If tropical rainforests were so fond of drought, they would be growing in dry places. However, Samanta et al did the service of refutingAragaoSaleska.
It is far from obvious how Samanta disputes Rowell or the IPCC. Many of us who have taken a first look at the matter believe that it does not.
A couple of additional points remain to be resolved here. How did a press release which is perfectly attuned to what the doubt merchants might want it to say, and almost perfectly tangential to the actual results of the study, come out of the press office? This, it seems to me, remains a matter for the university to investigate.
Second, it is important to note that if a paper were to come out that actually did refute Rowell 2000, it would not constitute any indication of a flaw in the IPCC process, nor an error in any sense. Questioning the conclusions of IPCC is necessary, else the first report would suffice.
Science progresses. The idea that a refinement or even a reversal on a particular point in the consensus report constitutes evidence that the consensus process is flawed is hopelessly pernicious. It puts science in a perfect bind.
But we need to cross that bridge in cases where the science has actually progressed. The distinction between a one-year drought and a persistent decline in precipitation ought to be obvious to a person working in the field. It is less obvious to the rest of us. If there is a case to be made, it was not made in the peer reviewed publication, but rather only in the press release.
I have not been alone in spending a lot of time worrying over the badly damaged links between science and the press and writing about it. But so far as I know, little has been written about the connection between scientists and the institutional press offices that are supposed to serve scientists. The Samanta et al. story makes it clear that this relationship can’t be taken for granted.
Celine vs Louis Vuitton - Ladies & Gentleman | by The Sartorialist | 16 March 2010, 04:03 PM
Orbital Legislation 101 | by Futurismic | 16 March 2010, 04:00 PM
Via BoingBoing, The Guardian highlights a new module available to law students at Sunderland University on “law and the legal system beyond Earth’s atmosphere”:
Topics already arising in the field include gaps in health and safety for potential space tourists, and damage to satellites from other objects orbiting the Earth. Looking further ahead, some lawyers have raised questions about land titles on the moon or other planets.
Chris Newman, one of the lecturers who will be teaching the module, said: “It is a growing area which has relevance across commercial, company, property, environmental, intellectual property and IT practice sectors. We think that our qualification will offer valuable knowledge in a fascinating area.”
[...]
The syllabus is likely to draw on earlier attempts to extend legislation into uncharted areas, such as the arguments between nations over huge sections of Antarctica. There are no plans as yet to test students on how they would make a case for Earth law against that of other civilisations, should any be discovered.
It’s easy to scoff and file this among the mass of pointless degree topics available to UK undergraduates, but with commercial space operations coming up close behind the nation-state space programs, it’s not going to be all “territory held in mutual trust for the good of all mankind” up there for long. Mix this module with a few more covring squatter’s rights, the successful defense of minerals claim-jumping and some basic tort law, and your new-frontier legal practice is ready for business…
Cuba: Surviving the Deluge | by Global Voices (Cuba) | 16 March 2010, 03:47 PM
“A deluge of events is falling on Cuba”: Generation Y explains.
From Eternity to Book Club: Chapter Ten | by Cosmic Variance | 16 March 2010, 03:35 PM
Welcome to this week’s installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. This is a fun but crucial part of the book: Chapter Ten, “Recurrent Nightmares.”
Excerpt:
Fortunately, we (and Boltzmann) only need a judicious medium-strength version of the anthropic principle. Namely, imagine that the real universe is much bigger (in space, or in time, or both) than the part we directly observe. And imagine further that different parts of this bigger universe exist in very different conditions. Perhaps the density of matter is different, or even something as dramatic as different local laws of physics. We can label each distinct region a “universe,” and the whole collection is the “multiverse.” The different universes within the multiverse may or may not be physically connected; for our present purposes it doesn’t matter. Finally, imagine that some of these different regions are hospitable to the existence of life, and some are not. (That part is inevitably a bit fuzzy, given how little we know about “life” in a wider context.) Then—and this part is pretty much unimpeachable—we will always find ourselves existing in one of the parts of the universe where life is allowed to exist, and not in the other parts. That sounds completely empty, but it’s not. It represents a selection effect that distorts our view of the universe as a whole—we don’t see the entire thing, we only see one of the parts, and that part might not be representative. Boltzmann appeals to exactly this logic.
After the amusing diversions of the last chapter, here we resume again the main thread of argument. In Chapter Eight we talked a bit about the “reversibility objection” of Lohschmidt to Boltzmann’s attempts to derive the Second Law from kinetic theory in the 1870’s; now we pick up the historical thread in the 1890’s, when a similar controversy broke out over Zermelo’s “recurrence objection.” The underlying ideas are similar, but people have become a bit more sophisticated over the ensuing 20 years, and the arguments have become a bit more pointed. More importantly, they are still haunting us today.
One of the fun things about this chapter is the extent to which it is driven by direct quotations from great thinkers — Boltzmann, of course, but also Poincare, Nietzsche, Lucretius, Eddington, Feynman. That’s because the arguments they were making seem perfectly relevant to our present concerns, which isn’t always the case. Boltzmann tried very hard to defend his derivation of the Second Law, but by now it had sunk in that some additional ingredient was going to be needed — here we’re calling it the Past Hypothesis, but certainly you need something. He was driven to float the idea that the universe we see around us (which, to him, would have been our galaxy) was not representative of the wider whole, but was simply a local fluctuation away from equilibrium. It’s very educational to learn that ideas like “the multiverse” and “the anthropic principle” aren’t recent inventions of a new generation of postmodern physicists, but in fact have been part of respectable scientific discourse for over a century.
It’s in this chapter that we get to bring up the haunting idea of Boltzmann Brains — observers that fluctuate randomly out of thermal equilibrium, rather than arising naturally in the course of a gradual increase of entropy over billions of years. I tried my best to explain how such monstrosities would be the correct prediction of a model of an eternal universe with thermal fluctuations, but certainly are not observers like ourselves, which lets us conclude that that’s not the kind of world we live in. Hopefully the arguments made sense. One question people often ask is “how do we know we’re not Boltzmann Brains?” The realistic answer is that we can never prove that we’re not; but there is no reliable chain of argument that could ever convince us that we are, so the only sensible way to act is as if we are not. That’s the kind of radical foundational uncertainty that has been with us since Descartes, but most of us manage to get through the day without being overwhelmed by existential anxiety.
Spring Awakening | by round the merseyrail we go | 16 March 2010, 03:31 PM
I was typing in my pin at the MtoGo in Central when the girl at the next till said, "I hope you're going to write nice things about us."
At first, I didn't really process it - I thought she was talking to the customer at her till. Then I realised that she didn't have a customer. She was talking to me! She was talking about the blog! I had been recognised! I said, in a moment of suaveness and wit that 007 would be envious of, "Erm, yeah. Course I will."
"I was only talking about your blog the other day."
"Good things I hope?"
"Of course!"
"Glad to hear it."
And that, ladies and gents, was my first brush with fame. I feel like Nicole Kidman. So yes, Rachael at MtoGo, you and your colleagues were all very good. The service was brisk, the store was clean and tidy (I had a better look round than, ahem, the last time I was there) and the staff all looked lovely in their little grey and yellow ties. Marvellous.
Oh, and Rachael? I do normally buy really cool magazines, like Stuff and Attitude and GQ and things. My purchase of Doctor Who Magazine this morning was a total aberration. Cough.
Blushing furiously, I made my way down to the platforms for the Kirkby train. Yup, it was time for another day's tarting, and it was another attempt to slice a whole line off the map in one go. Now that the weather had been relatively fine for a couple of days, I felt brave enough to plunge into the countryside and have a crack at the Kirkby to Wigan branch line.
The line's another of those "almost, but not quite" Merseyrail stories. Electrification to Kirkby was done pretty quickly, with the obvious intention to send the trains onwards to Wigan. Then - nothing happened. For thirty odd years, passengers wanting to carry on into Lancashire have been forced to get off the train at Kirkby and walk along the platform, past a buffer stop, to catch a different train. It's a daft arrangement, and one that's obviously unsatisfactory for everyone, but until the money's there not much is going to happen.
Merseyrail do have plans to build a station a little further along, at Headbolt Lane in Kirkby, and as my Northern Rail train moved through the town en route to Wigan I could see how there would be demand for it. The suburbs stretched way beyond Kirkby station, and they looked like a new service direct to the city centre would give them a valuable economic boost. Then the houses fell away and we were surrounded by fields and trees.
We were still in Merseyside - just about. The "County" boundary extends out beyond Kirkby to take in the little town of Rainford, our next stop, meaning that the station there is one of those curious outposts like Heswall and Meols Cop - on Merseyside, but not claimed by any of the "coloured" lines and left stranded on a grey one. I can see how it can be overlooked. It's a proper country station, previously called Rainford Junction as there was a long-gone line to St Helens here, with a pub opposite and even a signal box. It certainly didn't feel like your usual Merseytravel station. Perhaps that's why they haven't installed a yellow and grey sign here: they don't want to break the spell.
The soundtrack for this part of the trip, incidentally, was Kylie Minogue's Kylie. At the weekend I was in the studio for the UK's Eurovision selection, and I wanted to remind myself of happier times when Stock Aitken and Waterman produced nothing but pop gold.
With Je Ne Said Pas, Pourquois's tinny synth in my ears, I crossed the railway bridge and headed down a side track onto a public footpath. I was using my crumpled Ordnance Survey map to guide me between stations, mashing it into shape so that I could easily get to the bit I needed, and the path tracked the railway line for a while before heading off into the fields.
It was coming up to ten o'clock, and there was a stillness in the air, the feel that spring was gathering itself ready for an onslaught. The fields around me were freshly turned, the earth rich and brown in deep valleys, and the trees seemed to be ready to burst into life. By the end of the day I would see my first crocuses, but here it was just a promise; a deep sigh of relief that the snow and ice were finished with.
The path was straight, and uncomplicated, following the edges of the fields. Normally I'd begin to get bored of it, but there was just something about it that kept me feeling up. Perhaps it was the warm sunshine, or perhaps I was just happy to be out and about, Tarting. Strange though it might seem, I do miss it sometimes.
With a detour around what I can only describe as a massive heap of shit, I soon began to see the end of the countryside looming up ahead. The pretty fields ended abruptly in walls of corrugated steel and fences, as I arrived in the comically named district of Pimbo. Let's be honest: that's not a geographic location, it's a character from In The Night Garden. And strangely for such a cuddly-fuzzily named place, it's utterly charmless. Pimbo is a huge industrial estate, just to the south of Skelmersdale, and so it's just a load of shapeless warehouse blocks and HGVs and wide ugly roads. In an effort to make it a bit more human, the Council had ambitiously laid out pedestrian footpaths - but these were broken up, and full of weeds. I guessed that no-one used them to commute to work.
Pimbo was ugly, just functional, without any human elements to blunt the edges. I suppose it's an industrial estate next to a motorway, not the Lost Gardens of Heligan, but still, it just felt unpleasant and boring. I got out of the pedestrian network so I could stay close to the railway line, to keep my bearings, and found that I'd have to trudge along grass verges without pathways while the factories showed me their faceless rears. There was a burger van, tethered behind a Ford Escort in a layby and doling out a slab of grease; I shuddered at the thought of working out here in this no-man's land, spending eight hours a day miles from anywhere.
A pathway took me away from the road and to Upholland station, clinging to the side of a railway bridge. I was pleased to see that I was back in the land of the Red Rose railway signs for Lancashire County Council, though there was no station building of course, just a couple of bus shelters either side of the line. I was the only person to get on or off at Upholland, and I almost felt embarrassed for making the train stop in such a quiet backwater.
Again, there are plans on the table for Upholland to take on a greater prominence - someday. Skelmersdale, just to the north of here, is a large town with no rail link at all, and the County Council has suggested that Upholland would be the spot to send a branch line into the town centre. However, there's a rival scheme, from Network Rail itself, which would see services extended from Ormskirk down an old branch line and coming at the town from the north. Both plans are full of ideas for park and ride and so on, but frankly, I'll believe it when I see it. In the meantime, I jumped on the train and took it through the Tontine Tunnel (another children's TV character, surely?) and onto Orrell.
Steel yourselves, folks: take a deep breath. In fact, fetch yourself something boozy. Because getting off at Orrell meant I was taking my first Round The Merseyrail We Go excursion into Greater Manchester. Previous trips into the city itself had been whims, and valueless; Orrell was on the map, though, so it had to be collected, despite it belonging to Merseytravel's mortal enemy - the GMPTE. In fact I have to applaud Merseytravel's restraint on the map - you'd have thought they'd have stuck a "Here be dragons" or "Enter at your own risk!". The hatred between Manchester and Liverpool is one of those ancient rivalries that will never be resolved. Liverpool hates Manchester because it's bigger and richer and more brash nowadays, while Manchester hates Liverpool because it's classier and more beautiful and more famous. Manchester has dark Satanic Mills; Liverpool has the Three Graces. Case closed. (As you can tell, I'm not entirely unbiased).
And even though I am biased, I have to say that Merseyrail treat their stations a lot better. The building was boarded up, access was round the side, down an alleyway, and there was a large sign on the platform warning that there was No Loitering Allowed. In addition, the station sign was just rubbish. It was basically a bus stop sign on a twenty foot pole, far above the head of any normal person and barely discernible. Ok, in its favour, GMPTE uses a lovely font, but that can hardly compare with the Merseytravel box signs, can it? Of course not.
The path onward was another off-road affair, but I made a minor detour. It was on the route anyway, but I took a chance and loitered outside the gates of the Co-operative Community Stadium, home to the Wigan Warriors' Rugby team's training ground. Well, you never know, do you? There may have been a slight chance that there would have been dozens of burly men there, working out. Or possibly they were all in the showers, when an unexpected fire alarm forced them to all run out into the car park, naked and soapy... Sorry. Distracted myself with Dieux du Stade type fantasies there. Sadly, there was no sign of the Warriors, so I disappointedly trudged away down the footpath.
After a while walking alongside the railway tracks, the path took an upward turn, heading into a little copse and then into a field punctuated by a winding stream. For the first time in this relatively flat landscape I found myself climbing a hill, up and up, while ahead of me the distant roar grew louder until I could see it: the M6.
It's strange standing by the side of a massive, fantastically busy motorway, with just a few planks of wood separating you from the carriageway. I walked right up to the fence and watched the traffic speed by. The field was at the spot where the M58 diverges from the main route, and there were all sorts of manoeuvres and interweaving of traffic. I stood there for a while, then realised that my presence might be a distraction for the drivers - they might have thought I was contemplating topping myself under the wheels of a Tesco lorry, or something - so I backtracked. Besides which, I had to find a way to cross the thing.
Tucked away to one side was a series of grim, graffiti-soaked concrete steps, which took you down below the roadway. At the foot of the steps was a melted rubber tyre, and a couple of smashed beer bottles, and then you were plunged into complete darkness for the tunnel. With metal bars either side of me, and the constant thud of the traffic overhead, it was a bit like being stuck in a particularly cruel game on the Crystal Maze. I was waiting for Richard O'Brien to pop up alongside me with a harmonica. If I'd have been in an inner-city somewhere, I would no doubt have been fretting about what was at the other end - smackheads, or muggers, or worried that I might tread on a needle. But I was miles from anywhere. The graffiti artists probably had to make a special trip.
With the tunnel safely conquered I could continue towards the edge of Wigan and the beginnings of the town again. For the first time, I shared the path with someone else, a middle aged woman who shamed me for my lack of exercise by jogging past at speed, and the fields began to close up with trees. I was accompanied by a stone wall for a while, and a broken down part led temptingly into the woods, except there was a giant Strictly No Trespassing sign posted at eye level that I couldn't in all conscience ignore. So instead I carried on, acquiring a couple of dog walkers on the way, until I climbed a slope and entered Pemberton, once a town in its own right but now just another district of Wigan.
I was in true suburbia now. The houses and the curved streets were exactly the same as the estate I'd grown up in, two hundred miles south. Little cul-de-sacs named after birds (it was hills where I grew up), neat paintwork, gardens that had been tastefully block-paved or concreted to accommodate a second car. A man was up a ladder, fixing a Sky minidish (down the side of the house, not at the front, naturally) while the postman trotted back from front path to front path. It was so familiar, and so boring. I remembered growing up in the suburbs and how quiet and safe it was, and how I'd just accepted it as being the norm. It was only when I started to venture out on my own, on trips to London and so on, and I realised how much more was out there than a three bedroomed house with integral garage. That was all very nice, but I wanted something else.
Having said that, Pemberton grew more interesting as I headed towards the station, and encountered a pretty church and a couple of old pubs. The weather had turned a bit grey though, and I think it soured me to the place - I just wanted to get away.
Pemberton's station sign was better than Orrell's, I'll give the GMPTE that. It was still just another station sign though, and I refuse to get excited about it. Poor Pemberton. It had the feeling of having once been loved, but then got chucked for someone more interesting. There was a sad little bit of concrete art, with Pemberton picked out in pink, but which had been allowed to fade. Aw.
I suppose, with their gleaming tram network (grrr) Manchester's transport peeps have more important things on their mind than a few boring old train stations. Which is a shame. On the plus side though, it means Merseytravel win on points...
Precision Ironing | by PW Style | 16 March 2010, 03:30 PM
I get a strange sense of accomplishment and enjoyment from ironing clothing. It started about three years ago when I took on a job working the front of house at a theatre and had to dress to impress six days a week. Basically, I suddenly found myself dusting off my iron and eventually growing to love the act of smoothing out the wrinkles in my favorite skinny black sailor pants, high-waisted pencil skirts and silk tie-collar blouses. This video over at On and Beyond documents a man as he takes a shirt from rumpled mass to pristine wrinkle-free folded perfection in three minutes. Gentlemen, take note, this man knows what he’s doing and you will definitely learn a thing or two. He’s so deliberate and swift with each move of his iron that for a gal like me with a jones for crisp corners and smooth collars, it’s practically sexy.
Climate Crock video on Flogging the Scientists | by Climate Progress | 16 March 2010, 03:23 PM
The anti-science crowd isn’t satisfied with merely spreading disinformation about climate scientists (see “Error-riddled articles and false statements destroy Daily Mail’s credibilty“). Now many, like Marc Morano, are unrepentantly calling for violence against them (see The rise of anti-science cyber bullying: Morano says climate scientists “deserve to be publicly flogged“).
Peter Sinclair, our favorite climate de-crocker, has a new video on the subject:
Sinclair, of course, is the guy who proved former TV weatherman Anthony Watts knows as much about copyright laws as about climate science.
More “Climate Crock of the Week” videos here.
Energy and Global Warming News for March 16: Chinese to build NV wind factory, create 1,000 jobs; UAW tells Congress not to block EPA climate rules; Americans can cut emissions 15% with simple actions | by Climate Progress | 16 March 2010, 03:02 PM
Nevada Wind Turbine Factory to Create 1,000 Jobs, Backers Say
A consortium of Chinese and American renewable energy firms said last week that they had chosen Nevada as the location of a 320,000-square-foot wind turbine manufacturing and assembly plant.
The turbine plant, whose precise site has yet to be announced, will create an estimated 1,000 long-term manufacturing jobs in the state and is expected to be up and running by 2011.
Two companies leading the development of the Nevada facility, A-Power Energy Generation Systems, a Chinese renewable energy technology manufacturer, and the U.S. Renewable Energy Group, a private equity firm, are also key players in a controversial $1.5 billion, 600-megawatt wind farm project under way in West Texas.
That project, announced last year, came under fire after it was revealed that its backers planned to tap $450 million in grants from the economic stimulus package, even though the turbines would be manufactured and assembled in Shenyang, China.
The companies subsequently said that at least 70 percent of the turbine components for the Texas wind farm would be manufactured in the United States.
Now it appears some turbines for the Texas project may come from the Nevada facility.
“If the Nevada plant is operational before all the turbines for the 600-megawatt Texas wind farm have been delivered, the remaining turbines could be supplied from the Nevada plant,” Ed Cunningham, managing partner of the U.S. Renewable Energy Group, said in a statement.
Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, along with three other Democratic senators, recently introduced legislation that would apply a so-called “buy American” standard to all renewable energy projects that seek stimulus funds, requiring them to rely on goods manufactured in the United States.
Currently, this provision applies only to government-sponsored projects. As a result, roughly three-quarters of the stimulus’s $1.9 billion in wind-energy grants distributed so far have gone to foreign-owned companies, according toan analysis by the Investigative Reporting Workshop, a nonprofit journalism program affiliated with American University.
Matt Rogers, a senior adviser to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, confirmedthat this analysis was likely accurate, but said that although the stimulus funds may have gone to foreign companies, the funds created 17,000 United States jobs and supported investments in the United States worth roughly $10 billion.
The Nevada project does not appear to be seeking stimulus funds, with its backers stating that it will be built using private financing.
A spokesman for A-Power and the U.S. Renewable Energy Group also said the companies had not yet received — or even applied for — any stimulus funds for the West Texas wind farm project.
Governors seek wind energy boost
A coalition representing governors of 29 states is urging the federal government to take steps to boost wind energy, such as a renewable energy standard requiring utilities to produce at least 10 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2012.
The bipartisan Governors’ Wind Energy Coalition plans to make the recommendations Tuesday in a report to Congress and the White House. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the report ahead of its official release.
The report comes as Senate sponsors of a climate bill prepare to unveil their legislation, perhaps as soon as this week.
“We offer our assistance in working with Congress and the administration to achieve one of the nation’s principal energy goals, energy independence, and increasing the role that wind energy plays in meeting that challenge,” wrote the coalition’s chairman, Iowa Democratic Gov. Chet Culver, and its vice chairman, GOP Gov. Donald Carcieri of Rhode Island, in a letter to congressional leaders. A nearly identical letter was sent to President Barack Obama.
The governors said that although the House began to address increasing wind power’s role in climate legislation it passed last year, they are anxious to see the Senate follow through.
Drew Hammill, a spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said that the House bill “includes many key provisions, including a renewable energy standard, that would boost renewable energy sources and create thousands of new jobs in this sector. The speaker looks forward to the Senate moving forward on comprehensive energy and climate legislation, so that a bill can be sent to the president this year.”
The office of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., declined to comment. The White House had no immediate comment.
The report, titled “Great Expectations,” noted that some states have renewable energy standards but others don’t.
“These standards vary considerably from state to state, complicating compliance by the electric-power and renewable-energy industries,” the report said.
Other recommendations by the group include:
_Developing new infrastructure for electricity transmission to provide access to renewable energy resources.
_Funding technology to develop wind energy in “wind-rich” coastal areas.
_Streamlining the permitting process for wind energy projects.
_Extending an economic stimulus grant program for wind projects, and providing a long-term extension of a wind energy production tax credit.
Investing in Our Renewable Future
Today, standing under the sun-filled skies of Los Angeles, a large coalition of business, labor, and environmental leaders launched a renewable energy plan that will change the way we achieve our green energy goals.
We unveiled our Carbon Reduction Surcharge proposal that will raise close to $170 million for investment in green energy and energy efficiency programs. Every penny will be placed into a Renewable Energy and Efficiency Trust Fund – a lock-box that will not only provide dedicated revenue for clean energy, but create a level of transparency and accountability that has been missing.
Get the facts about the new rates and the Carbon Surcharge plan
For the first time, Angelenos will know exactly how much they are investing and exactly what they are getting for their investment. The Carbon Surcharge will be added to a new rate structure at our Water and Power department. Because the price of energy has been rising, our Water and Power department needs a significant rate increase to keep the lights on and to get out of a financial hole. But raising rates only to continue to invest in dirty fossil fuels that we know are only going to become more scarce and more expensive makes no sense.
Our new rate structure will include the Carbon Reduction Surcharge to begin to wean Los Angeles from its dependence on fossil fuels. The good news is that for the majority of ratepayers, the monthly bill will only increase by roughly $2.50-$3.50. Efficient users will pay less. Wasteful users will pay more.
Our renewable plan will be the cleanest, greenest, most transparent jobs program in the country. This is an unprecedented, crucial step towards addressing both the long-term crisis of climate change and our dependence on fossil fuels, and the short-term crisis of this recession and the dire need to create jobs in Los Angeles.
UAW to Congress: Don’t block EPA climate rules
The United Auto Workers is pressing Congress to oppose resolutions that would nullify EPA’s “endangerment finding” that greenhouse gases threaten human health. The union has the ear of Democrats in states with a heavy auto industry presence such as Michigan and Ohio.
The endangerment finding isued late last year is a precursor to upcoming climate change rules. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) thus far has 40 cosponsors for a filibuster-proof resolution that would overturn the finding. House versions have also been introduced. Murkowski and her supporters fear the effects of EPA rules on stationary sources like power plants and factories.
But the UAW, echoing White House concerns, said in a letter to Congress Monday that the resolutions would upend a pending national auto mileage and emissions standard. This would end up “subjecting auto manufacturers to all of the burdens that the one national standard was designed to avoid,” the letter states. Automakers have also said they want the national plan to proceed.
The science continues to point to the cold, hard fact that global warming is happening and will get worse, but the number of people who believe this scientific certainty has declined over the past year, leaving environmentalists and climate scientists scratching their heads in disbelief.
The reason for all of this uncertainty, argues James Hoggan, author of Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (Greystone Books, $15), is a concerted effort by public relations professionals to undermine climate change science and create uncertainty among the public — all to please clients who would be negatively affected by meaningful carbon legislation to curb emissions.
So how does Hoggan know all this? As a public relations professional himself, he has seen it with his own eyes.
As president of a successful public relations firm and co-author of the DeSmogBlog.com, which reports on PR pollution that clouds climate science, Hoggan works with Richard Littlemore to ruthlessly report on his industry’s ingenious tactics to hijack the global warming debate — all with the compliance of media and leaders in government and business.
To give readers a clear idea of how badly some PR firms and their clients have muddied the global warming debate, Hoggan goes back to 1988, when the great scientific bodies and even politicians were both convinced that humans were causing climate change and concerned enough to do something about it.
Three decades later and people are still debating the science. Meanwhile, the Earth continues to warm.
So what happened? According to Hoggan, public relations firms have been hard at work, using a number of schemes to insure that climate change remains a debate.
For example, over the years there has been an explosion in the number of think tanks and organizations like The Heritage Foundation, Friends of Science and Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, which all have the common goal of countering any progress toward changing the way we create and consume energy.
Another common tactic used by public relations firms is to recruit and promote so-called “experts” who will debate scientific facts published in peer-reviewed journals. Upon further scrutiny, these experts usually lack scientific credentials or they are funded by groups that raise questions about their impartiality.
But by far one of the most frustrating tactics used by PR firms is to systematically dissect all reputable conclusions on climate change to emphasize that there is not 100 percent certainty that global warming is occurring; therefore, we shouldn’t do anything about it.
However, as Hoggan brilliantly points out, this logic is inherently faulty when applied to other situations.
For example, “If scientists told you there was a 90 percent likelihood that your plane would crash, you would assuredly forgo the trip,” he writes.
It is this kind of common sense logic combined with in-depth, investigative reporting that makes Climate Cover-Up well worth the read. After all, if people are made aware of the tactics being used to keep the climate issue a “debate,” hopefully that information will help arm them against future dishonest claims about climate change.
Americans Could Reduce Emissions 15% Through Simple Actions
Two new studies highlight the disparity between what the public can do, and wants to do, to address energy issues and carbon emissions resulting from lifestyles.
An analysis released by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) finds that Americans can reduce U.S. carbon pollution by 15%–or one billion tons of global warming pollution–through collective personal actions that require little to no cost.
Suggested behavioral changes in the study include: reducing unwanted catalog subscriptions, decreasing vehicle idling, using a programmable thermostat, replacing seven lightbulbs with CFLs, setting computers to hibernate mode, shutting off unused lights, and eating poultry in place of red meat two days per week. All of the recommendations offered in the study are available to be adopted immediately, at little or no cost, and will reduce not only emissions, but home energy, transportation and food costs as well.
The analysis details how each of the common sense actions can result in significant emissions reductions when implemented across the country. For example, if Americans collectively cut personal food waste by 25%, the nation could eliminate 65 million tons of greenhouse gases, which is approximately the emissions generated from 11 million cars–or roughly all the cars in New York and Missouri combined.
The findings were presented this week by NRDC executive director Peter Lehnerat at the Garrison Institute’s Climate Mind and Behavior symposium, which convened leading thinkers and practitioners in the fields of climate change and environmental advocacy, neuro-, behavioral and evolutionary economics, psychology, policy-making, investing and social media.
Participants in the symposium were tasked with working together on ways to get individuals to shift behavior on a large scale, and sketched out dozens of new collaborations, from community organizing to building management to communications and social networking–all designed to actualize the massive potential for positive climate impacts through individual choices and behavior shifts.
“Neo-classical economics provides a powerful model for thinking about the world, but new research in behavioral economics highlights the ways in which neo-classical economics only give us a partial view,” said Rebecca Henderson, co-director of the Harvard Business School’s Business and Environmental Initiative and a participant in the symposium. “Behavioral economics may be able to help us make progress on meeting the challenges of climate change; the new research points out how our decisions are driven not only by self-interest and the dynamics of the market but also by our emotions, by our commitments to the communities of which we are part, and by our innate sense of fairness. I think this work has the potential to help us design and implement large-scale behavioral changes, not only on the individual level, but in organizations, policies and markets.”
On The Flip Side
Three out of four consumers are concerned by energy and climate change issues, but nearly two-thirds say that using less energy is not the answer to reducing reliance on fossil fuels or foreign energy supply, according a survey of 9,000 individuals in 22 countries.
The survey by Accenture (NYSE: ACN) also shows that almost nine out of ten consumers want more government intervention in the energy market.
“We cannot address climate change or energy security unless we both create new sources of clean energy and reduce consumer demand,” said Sander van ’t Noordende, Group Chief Executive of Accenture’s Resources operating group. “But our survey shows that consumers do not think lower energy use is a priority. It will take many years before renewable alternatives come fully on stream. Until they do, governments and energy companies will have to find creative ways to transform consumer habits and improve energy efficiency.”
Some survey highlights:
- 90% of consumers are concerned or extremely concerned by rising energy costs and 76% by the prospect of energy shortages
- 89% think it important or very important to reduce their country’s reliance on fossil fuels. However, only a third of respondents say cutting energy should be the top priority in addressing energy issues.
- Only 22% of consumers surveyed unreservedly trust energy companies to take actions to address energy challenges.
- Almost a third (32%) do not trust them to do so and 46% trust them only if they have direction from governments.
The Accenture survey also found that consumers prefer energy to be provided from domestically owned companies. Nearly three quarters (72%) are not comfortable with energy companies being owned by foreign owned companies. Sentiment against foreign ownership is strongest in the Netherlands (88%), followed by the United States and Italy (81%). Consumers in Spain (60%), the Middle East (53%) and India (33%) are least worried by foreign ownership.
Progressives leaders look to industry for help in climate bill
As he toured union halls and factory floors in his 2006 Senate campaign, Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown repeatedly railed against the “prescription bill the drug companies wrote,” the “energy bill the oil companies wrote” and all the other policy decisions dominated by special interests.
Now halfway through his first Senate term, Brown seems to see at least one major Washington policy push differently.
Brown is one of a handful of senators trying to line up support for a climate bill that would put new limits on greenhouse gas emissions and spur production of renewable energy.
And surprising as it may seem, the heart of those senators’ strategy is to woo special interests — major electric utilities, steel and cement producers, farmers and coal and oil companies.
“I know, it doesn’t sound like me,” Brown conceded on a recent afternoon. But in his own defense, he added, “I really do think this is different. I think people understand that if industry doesn’t — if this doesn’t work for them, if this doesn’t keep them in business . . . it hurts the country.”
Whatever else, it’s the education of a junior senator.
Brown, along with Senate climate negotiators and the Obama administration, has embraced one of Washington’s enduring realities: It’s easier to get agreement on a major policy issue if powerful business groups are inside the tent helping to shape the decisions, instead of outside the tent working to blow it down.
In the case of efforts to craft a climate bill, business support is deemed so crucial that, before meeting with President Obama and some swing-vote senators at the White House last week, the bill’s architects sat down with a group of industry lobbyists who are members of a U.S. Chamber of Commerce energy committee.
White House Green Trade Agenda an Opportunity for Global Leadership
If President Obama is to deliver on his ambitious goal of doubling U.S. exports in five years, it will be essential for the United States to pursue an aggressive strategy to help American businesses access international markets. One promising place to begin is at the intersection of trade and the environment.
On the heels of the announcement by Wal-Mart Stores that it will push carbon out of its supply chain, the Obama administration sent new signals this month in its annual trade policy agenda that it will use some government muscle to advance a series of environmentally-friendly trade policies. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative set out an ambitious plan to open foreign markets for U.S. exports, which includes significant mention of policies designed to open and regulate trade for environmental purposes.
One of those efforts is to lower or eliminate barriers to environmentally friendly goods and services. The Obama administration indicated that it would seek “to fast-track the elimination of tariffs on goods directly relevant to addressing climate change, such as solar panels and stoves, and wind and hydraulic turbines,” breathing life into an effort that has been languishing in Geneva as part of the long-stalled Doha Round of global trade negotiations. USTR’s indication that it would work with “like-minded and ambitious WTO members” suggests they may move forward on a green trade agreement even without the rest of the Doha Round, a move that the National Foreign Trade Council supports.
The administration has also focused on promoting American ideas and protecting the intellectual property behind U.S. clean technologies. Making sure U.S. trading partners enforce IP rules overseas helps spur investment and jobs in the United States and creates the conditions which can facilitate research and sharing of technologies with other countries.
One potential deliverable in this area this year is the establishment of a technology cooperation mechanism, which was written into the Copenhagen climate accord. As negotiators seek to flesh out the idea, U.S. trade policymakers will be called on to propose new forums and financing mechanisms to build trust and spur collaboration between U.S. companies and researchers and counterparts in developing countries. Devising a mechanism which relies on the current system of intellectual property rules, and which uses financing to make up funding gaps and strengthen legal protections abroad, would benefit U.S. exporters and our partners in the developing world.
The trade policy agenda also highlights a host of other environmentally-oriented trade priorities, from promoting sustainable tropical timber trade to reducing subsidies that contribute to overfishing. On paper, the environment is clearly an important part of the administration’s trade agenda.
Environmentally-friendly trade policies should be a high priority for the administration this year. Securing access to international markets would help create clean energy jobs in the United States. Lowering trade barriers would reduce the cost of environmental technologies globally and increase access to those technologies, particularly in developing countries where trade barriers are often the highest. Promoting global enforcement of intellectual property rules – and developing new structures that support research collaboration based on compliance with those rules – could benefit U.S. innovators and facilitate better commercial relations between the United States and partners around the world.
Green trade is also bipartisan. Lowering barriers to clean technologies and protecting and promoting U.S. innovation are as American as apple pie. These initiatives enjoy support from a diverse group that includes Senators John Kerry and Richard Lugar and Congressmen Kevin Brady and Rick Larsen. Delivering on a green trade agenda would provide an opportunity to lead on trade without the partisan baggage that is attached to much of the trade agenda.
In a year where progress on domestic carbon-pricing legislation or in global climate negotiations may be slow, green trade also offers chances to demonstrate global leadership on the environment.
This is not to say that fulfilling such an agenda will be easy. Negotiations for a green trade agreement will present a host of complicated questions for the Obama administration, including whether to negotiate lower barriers to sensitive imports like ethanol and automobiles. Collaborating on clean technology development and deployment may require new sources of financing and delicate negotiations with partners in the developing world.
Defending U.S. interests internationally will also be a challenge, given the importance countries like China have placed on developing local industries through a mixture of tariffs, subsidies and standards. (The National Foreign Trade Council today released a lengthyreview of China’s renewable energy sector, which details promotional measures its government has taken “by directly or indirectly stimulating demand for Chinese-made renewable energy equipment.”)
But as the United States seeks to rely less on the U.S. consumer to drive economic growth, the administration will need new mechanisms to help U.S. businesses export more of what they produce. Environmentally-friendly trade policies offer fresh opportunities to deliver benefits for American businesses and workers, provided that the administration is willing to spend some serious time and energy to see them through.
Ye Cracke – ‘All bound for MuMu land’ | by Hope Street, Liverpool | 16 March 2010, 02:44 PM
Ye Cracke – ‘All bound for MuMu land’ by Nick Jones. New exhibition at Ye Cracke opens on Friday. ‘All bound for MuMu land’ by Nick Jones 19 March – 18 April 2010 Strange Attractors presents an exhibition featuring original paintings by local artist Nick Jones who creates bright, accessible paintings with a darker edge. His main [...]
REMINDER: Hope Street Visitor Economy Group Seeks Your Views | by Hope Street, Liverpool | 16 March 2010, 02:42 PM
Still places available for this – if you’re going, bring a friend Hope Street Visitor Economy Group Seeks Your Views From: Hope Street Visitor Economy Group We are looking for users/potential/non-users of Hope Street to come along and participate in focus groups, to discuss your experiences and perceptions of the Hope Street area in Liverpool. It [...]
Capitulation? No Thanks. | by Freedom in Education Under Threat | 16 March 2010, 02:09 PM
Two words I particularly dislike:
Pragmatism: "Pragmatism is a philosophical movement that includes those who claim that an ideology or proposition is true if it works satisfactorily, that the meaning of a proposition is to be found in the practical consequences of accepting it, and that unpractical ideas are to be rejected."
and
Capitulation: "A military term. Capitulation refers to surrendering or giving up.
In the stock market, capitulation is associated with "giving up" any previous gains in stock price as investors sell equities in an effort to get out of the market and into less risky investments. True capitulation involves extremely high volume and sharp declines. It usually is indicated by panic selling."
Now I have been told that the reason for my dislike of these particular words is that I am an idealist, as though idealism were a bad thing; a childish fantasy; a silliness not to be entertained by proper grown up people. I disagree, obviously.
There is much talk of the war against Home Educators continuing after the election, no matter which party *wins*, because the LAs are going to keep on pushing the powers that be for more and more power over us, so we'd better brook a deal, hadn't we?
Why?
Because it's the pragmatic thing to do of course.
No. making deals with other people's freedom is wrong. We have no right to give up this fight for the sake of a bit of peace. If anyone seriously believes that we will achieve that longed for respite from the fighting by capitulating, then frankly they need their heads read. A timely reminder of the attitudes we are up against can be found here over at Douglas Carswell MP's blog.
Do you honestly believe that if these people have more power they will respect us? Treat us and our children well? Give us that longed for peace we all desire? They are incapable of using the powers they already have for goodness sake.
Those in parliament have no respect for the rule of law, let alone those who they are supposed to be there to serve. Can any of you honestly say that watching the performances in the houses of parliament - that most ancient and revered of political institutions - filled you with pride and honour? That you felt respected as sovereign beings? That your children would be safe in the hands of these twisters of words? Or did you feel like me and my family did - horrified that this was how our laws are made? That this was surely a farcical pantomime not the workings of government? That there was no way that lot are to be trusted to do what is right and just?
Once upon a time many of us would have recoiled in horror at the idea of being considered anarchists, but the truth is that more and more of us are now finding we have anarchist leanings and the government have only themselves to blame for that.
I, along with other HEing friends, eagerly tuned into Newsnight to watch Balls, Gove and Law discuss education. What a great debate that would be I thought, we might see some real discussion; some real ideas; some real movement forward. What a bloody joke. It was playground behaviour, political point scoring in the run up to the election. Well it's just not good enough. This is the education of our children they are playing silly buggers with, and bickering will not come up with a solution to the problem. If they can't get their act together how can they expect parents to blithely accept what the state provides? Why are more and more parents turning to Home Education? Because the state is failing the country's children and parents are (in the most part) hard wired to do what is best for their own children. As Heidi so brilliantly points out:
"A parent is biologically and psychologically designed, programmed, conditioned – call it what you will – to care deeply about the wellbeing of their child. If the child is threatened, or the parent’s ability to nurture the child to the best of their ability is threatened, the parent cannot help but defend themselves, their children and family. Moreover, the parent is unable to be motivated by, and give a normal response to, needs that come higher up the hierarchy until this fundamental need has been satisfied."
Our children come first. They are our main priority. We must do our damnedest to preserve and protect their freedoms, they will not thank us for capitulating. Those who think they know better, who meet behind closed doors, who value pragmatism over idealism, who think they can make deals on our behalf, ought to know that this is not acceptable. They have no more authority to do this than the LAs and the government and they will look very foolish when we all JUST SAY NO! No one says it will be easy, but we have come this far, why on earth would we back down now?
Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. ~Woodrow Wilson
Happiness and a better Enterprise Software Data Model | by Sigurd Rinde | 16 March 2010, 02:06 PM
Funny thing, seems the human brain uses same tricks as Enterprise Software to save disk space :)
Thanks to Zia I found Daniel Kahneman at Ted's site (go see):
Kahneman's premise being "confusion between experience and memory: basically it’s between being happy in your life and being happy about your life or happy with your life”.
Expanding on that he uses an example "about a person who listens to 20 minutes of glorious symphony music yet at the very end there is a dreadful screeching sound. In reporting this incident the listener said that the screeching sound had 'ruined the whole experience'. Still he had had the experience of 20 minutes of glorious music. But now that counted for nothing because he was left with a memory of the end; the memory was ruined, and the memory was all that he was left with."
That reminded me about data models for Enterprise Software: Save the "sales figures for March", forget, or even better, don't even bother capture the total of raw data that could have been captured in the sales process.
It's, like in Kahneman's issue, an issue about direct or indirect representation of reality. The indirect in his meaning I would presume "memory", while the direct being the "experience". Or slightly different; (indirect, manipulated) "presentation" being "memory", (direct) "representation" being "experience".
[Objects, now use your own imagination and create the story...]
Thanks to our paper based past we're still sticking to "presentation" being used to "represent": Documents being the perfect example, any write-up represents multiple real world objects, and often with events all mashed together with a dollop of the writer's own logic thrown in. In the days of handwritten scrolls it made sense to capture reality onto a form that could be used unaltered as a presentation. Ditto with double entry book keeping, decide at the point of capture what "it is", let a receipt "be" the "sale". Keeping the memory of the transaction and not the actual events with all it's little details that comprises what one calls a "sale". Did the customer smile? No data about that in the receipt I'm afraid.
And it seeps through in all our ways and keeps those not present from seeing the reality as it was, re-experience it to allow for new views. The "data" we're stuck with in Enterprise Software are "stories", already manipulated and far from reality, a "memory".
So this is what we must do, and Enterprise Software vendors, take note: Keep experience and memory apart as much as presentation and representation should be separates. See it for what it is, not what it presents. Add the colour and interpretation yourself, but for that you need the direct, "experiencing" data free of any previous manipulation. In practice one must capture all data, important or not is for somebody else to decide, by running all activities in process based systems, keep the raw data and apply logic only when in need of "presentation" (reports).
Yet again, the basis for all Enterprise Software must be process engines, unless "you're there" you cannot "experience". But alas, most Enterprise Software are capture-tools and process free, or at best, DIY process.
If your argument is that such models would create too much data I would say: Raw data takes minimum space, manipulated and formatted data takes much more space. Add that my brain is limited to hat size 61 but there are no hat size issues in the cloud.
And the last nail; Kahnemann suggests "that we think about future not as anticipated experiences but anticipated memories." And that is how planning is in the Enterprise, based on extrapolation of manipulated data with little context visible. Enterprise Planning is based on the logic of whoever wrote the reports or chose what account to add an item. Not smart.
Why new Doctor Who directors are more interesting than its writers | by scyfilove.com (Liverpool) | 16 March 2010, 02:05 PM
Does Steven Moffat's choice of directors reveal a change in tone for Doctor Who?
Why new Doctor Who directors are more interesting than its writers has just flown in from scyfilove.com - click through for the rest of the good stuff
From King’s Cross to Beijing by rail | by Futurismic | 16 March 2010, 02:00 PM
I love to travel by train, me. Though a habit born of necessity in my case (I never took my driving test), there’s so much to recommend it over cars or flying. Especially flying. [image by Let Ideas Compete]
Well, the far edges of my potential-destinations sphere is going to grow considerably in the next ten years or so. Did you know China are the world leaders in high speed train technology? Well, apparently they are, and they’re involved in serious talks with neighbouring nation-states aimed at linking the Chinese rail system to the European one and extending it down onto South East Asia, with China footing the infrastructure bills. Once it’s all done, you could ride from London to Beijing without once needing to take a car, boat or plane… and that’s a journey I’d love to do*.
Interestingly enough (though not surprisingly) there’s more to China’s plans than some sort of idealistic Victorian-era notion of rail travel as symbolic of progress and industrialisation. Indeed, it’s something far more blunt: in exchange for adding considerable value to its partners’ rail networks, China is cutting preferential deals with them on raw materials that it can’t source locally. Remarkably capitalistic thinking for a nominally Communist nation, eh? Talk about moving with the times… might as well make hay while the sun shines, especially if everyone else is waiting out the rain.
[ * - Seriously, if any publishers out there are willing to make a promise to buy the resulting work for a large four-figure sum plus research expenses, there's a great book to be written once that network is complete, and I'm definitely the guy for the job. Market me as the new (and scruffier) Paul Theroux, perhaps - hell, I've got all the cynicism about human nature you'd need to fill his shoes. I might need to work on amping up my condescension toward other cultures, though... ]
EIA FAQ on CO2 emissions | by Climate Progress | 16 March 2010, 01:59 PM
I came across these answers to frequently asked questions from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. There’s some good information on emissions and conversion factors:
How much carbon dioxide (CO2) is produced when different fuels are burned? How much CO2 does the United States emit? Is it more than other countries? What are the largest sources of total greenhouse gas emissions by sector for the United States? Where can I find emission factors for greenhouse gases and air pollutants? How much of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are associated with electricity generation? What are the largest sources of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions by fuel? What are greenhouse gases and how do they affect the climate? Why do carbon dioxide emissions weigh more than the original fuel? Does EIA report water vapor emissions data? How does the hole in the ozone layer affect global warming? How do I convert between short tons and metric tons?
Flashback: Carly Fiorina said cap-and-trade “will both create jobs and lower the cost of energy” - Campaign ad created by Inhofe's nephew (!) mocks notion that climate change is a national security threat | by Climate Progress | 16 March 2010, 12:50 PM
In pursuing the California GOP’s nomination for the 2010 Senate, Carly Fiorina has become a world-class flip-flopper. Following the endorsement of Senator Jim “the last flat-earther” Inhofe (R-OIL) in November, she challenged climate science — unlike the company she once ran. Now she’s abandoned her support for cap-and-trade legislation, as Brad Johnson discusses in this repost.
The former Hewlett Packard executive hopes to unseat Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), who has championed clean energy legislation as the chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee. In a new online advertisement created by Sen. Jim Inhofe’s (R-OK) nephew Fred Davis, the Fiorina campaign portrays Boxer as a giant floating head ominously looming over California. A gravel-voiced narrator claims that Boxer is “indifferent” that her climate policies “would take already painful jobless numbers and make them dramatically worse”:
NARRATOR: Proclaiming a cap-and-trade bill would clean the environment, indifferent that it would take already painful jobless numbers and make them dramatically worse.
BOXER: “That’s where you’ll have a little bit of an increase in electricity prices…”
NARRATOR: Even President Obama says electricity rates will skyrocket. And the Wall Street Journal says it is likely to be the biggest tax increase in history.
However, less than two years ago, Fiorina was singing a different tune. Speaking at the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, MN, she praised Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) cap-and-trade plan as something that would “both create jobs and lower the cost of energy”:
I know John McCain. And in 2013, America will be more energy-independent because of his determination that we must power our own country, and his long-standing commitment to protecting our environment. John McCain will create a cap-and-trade system that will encourage the development of alternative energy sources. He will help advance clean coal technology, and nuclear power. And all of this will both create jobs and lower the cost of energy.
Watch a montage:
Like McCain’s plan, Boxer’s climate legislation marries a market-based cap on carbon pollution with support for alternative energy sources, including nuclear power and advanced coal technology. The revenues generated from a cap on carbon pollution will protect electricity consumers from the cost of investing in new jobs and ending dependence on oil, as Boxer has explained last year:
We must get these greenhouse gas emissions out of the air because if the planet continues to warm, we’re in a whole lot of trouble. Pretty much everyone agrees on that. Now, that means we have to move to clean energy and away from imported oil and those Middle East dictators. That’s good. We’ll move to clean energy. It will be better for our health and our families. That’s good. What about this transition period, as we move away from the dirty fuels and dirty coal to clean coal, to clean fuels, to solar, wind and geothermal? That’s where you’ll have a little bit of an increase in electricity prices. However, with a cap-and-trade system, you will have an incoming stream of revenues just as you do from the acid rain program, an incoming stream of revenues. And those revenues will make consumers whole. They will never pay any more. And that’s just the facts.
Analyses by the Environmental Protection Agency, Energy Information Administration, Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Congressional Budget Office show that Boxer (and Fiorina circa 2008) is indeed telling the facts.
However, Fiorina 2010 seems to have decided to get her policy advice from one of her first endorsers, global warming denier Jim Inhofe.
– Brad Johhson
JR: The rest of this post is written by me.
Fiorina’s new ad also mocks Boxer for saying “One of the very important national security threats we face right now is climate change.” Fiorina was CEO of HP, until, Wikipedia notes, “In 2005, the Hewlett-Packard board forced Fiorina to resign.” Ironically, HP itself has been unequivocal about climate science. This is from their Global Citizenship Report 2008:
Our planet’s climate is changing, and scientific consensus is that greenhouse gas (GHG)1 emissions are the main culprit. The effects are forecasted to be far-reaching and substantial. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, published in 2007, warned that unmitigated climate change would likely trigger a range of environmental problems threatening agriculture, natural habitats and communities in low-lying coastal areas.
The economic toll will be high as well. The cost of responding and adapting to unmitigated climate change could reach between 5 and 20 percent of annual global gross domestic product (GDP), according to the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. Released in 2006, the report also estimates that mitigating climate change instead would cost approximately one percent of global GDP each year. To stave off these potential issues, negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change are aiming for an agreement in 2009 to reduce global emissions by at least 50 percent (compared with 1990 levels) by 2050….2
Hmm. I wonder what conservative intellectual leader Newt Gingrich would say about HP having a Global Citizenship Report? — see Gingrich sums up conservative ethos: “I am not a citizen of the world! I think the entire concept is intellectual nonsense and stunningly dangerous.” But I digress.
Kinda sad when a corporation understands the threat to our national security from unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions more than the person who once ran it.
Related Post:
Michael Alan - An Introduction | by Wooster Collective | 16 March 2010, 12:48 PM
DRAW-A-THON: featured in NY Times from Michael Alan on Vimeo.
Seen On The Streets Of Jacksonville Florida: "Hello From Below" | by Wooster Collective | 16 March 2010, 12:45 PM
LEDs! | by Earthly Comics | 16 March 2010, 12:43 PM
Escif Shows Us How It's Done | by Wooster Collective | 16 March 2010, 12:33 PM
Original music by Cuneta.
More from Escif here.
Newspaper Club “stupidly exciting” says BBC | by Newspaper Club | 16 March 2010, 12:27 PM
While the Newspaper Club team is Stateside, business continues as normal (more or less) back at the UK ranch. We got a nice bit of publicity on BBC News the other day. Media tycoons wanted: Make your own newspaper gives a pithy overview of how Newspaper Club started and what it has achieved so far. Ben Hammersley, Editor at Large of Wired magazine describes us as “stupidly exciting” which is nice, and our Russell (Sales & Marketing) claims that print isn’t dead. If you’re wondering what we’re all about it’s a good place to start.
We’ve had a lot of enquiries because of it (hooray!) and are printing and quoting like mad. If you’ve asked for an invitation we’ll get one out to you as soon as we can - within 48 hours or so. If you’ve been waiting any longer than that please check your spam folder as chances are it’s in there.
Tuesdays are Print Deadline Days (2pm to be precise) so hurry, hurry if you want to make this week’s run. If you don’t, don’t worry – there’ll be another one along next week.
Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who is just 18 days away, but 15,000 days in the making | by scyfilove.com (Liverpool) | 16 March 2010, 12:22 PM
Counting down the days and numbers - 15,000, 33, 757, 18 - that go into Steven Moffat's Doctor Who, starring Matt Smith.
Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who is just 18 days away, but 15,000 days in the making has just flown in from scyfilove.com - click through for the rest of the good stuff
simonhrjohnson | by The Baseline Scenario | 16 March 2010, 12:15 PM
By Simon Johnson
Did big banks break the law during our recent global debt-fuelled boom? The usual answer is: no – they just took advantage of loopholes and captured regulators. The world’s biggest banks are widely supposed to be too sophisticated to be tripped up by the legal system.
But is this really true? The new Valukas report on Lehman suggests there are grounds for civil action, i.e., people can sue for damages. News reports give no indication of potential criminal charges, but this may change soon. The hiding of Lehman’s true debt levels – through the so-called “Repo 105” structure – is strikingly reminiscent of how Enron’s balance sheet was disguised through fake asset “sales” (as Senator Kaufman now points out).
And, of course, the people who ended up facing criminal charges and – in some prominent cases – going to jail, included not only Enron executives, but also responsible bankers from Merrill Lynch (see The Smartest Guys in the Room, Chapter 13). Arthur Anderson, Enron’s accountant, was also effectively broken by the scandal. It is a serious crime for professional advisers and financiers to assist in securities fraud.
The failure of Lehman therefore opens a can of worms for close and potentially productive examination in coming weeks. But so does the issue of Greek government debt in April 2002.
According to an offering circular dated 22 April 2002, The Hellenic Republic offered 3.5 billion of bonds, due 22 October 2022, that “will bear interest from, and including, 24 April 2002 at the rate of 5.90 per cent”. The joint lead managers include, from the international side, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Deutsche Bank.
Goldman has, of course, admitted it helped manage down reported Greek debt levels through off-balance sheet transactions in 2000 and 2001. Gerald Corrigan, a senior Goldman executive, speaking before the UK Treasury Select Committee recently, said that the reduction in reported Greek debt was “small but significant”; in fact, it was around 1.6 percentage points of GDP, which is not small.
(From the Bloomberg story on Corrigan’s testimony: “The transactions reduced the country’s deficit by 0.14 percentage points and lowered its debt as a proportion of gross domestic product to 103.7 percent from 105.3 percent, according to Goldman Sachs.” See also the less forthright Goldman Sachs statement on the company’s website.)
The April 2002 offering circular did not disclose the debt swaps. There may have been other documentation available to investors that did reveal true Greek debt numbers – and perhaps these were discussed in the relevant road shows. We are not here taking a position on what was and was not disclosed; this is a matter for a proper official investigation. We also do not know what the other involved banks knew and when they knew it.
If it were the case that Greece’s true debt levels were known and not disclosed by the investment bankers involved, any reasonable investor – or the sovereign debt experts with whom we have discussed this matter – would regard this as withholding adverse material information.
Gerald Corrigan, who is also former head of the New York Fed, argued that Goldman did “nothing inappropriate” – but he was referring to the off-balance transactions of 2000-2001. He has not yet spoken in public about the potential nondisclosure of material information in April 2002 (and perhaps at other dates after the Greece-Goldman swaps).
As Senator Kaufman points out in his latest speech, there is nothing necessarily illegal about any non-disclosure in Europe – these bonds were issued under Greek law. And these bonds were definitely not registered under the US Securities Act of 1933; this is clear in the prospectus.
However, if any of these bonds were sold in the US to “qualified institutional buyers” (QIBs) under rule 144A (an exemption to registration requirements under the 1933 Securities Act), there is a potential legal issue (here I’m just rewording what Senator Kaufman said). Rule 10b-5, under the 1934 Securities Exchange Act, definitely applies to securities sold under 144A – i.e., selling securities to anyone in the United States while deliberately withholding material adverse information is not allowed.
Some people in the market think that around 10 percent of this Greek debt issue was sold under Rule 144A to QIBs; such sales may or may not have been handled by Goldman. Again, this can only be determined by an official investigation – hopefully the Senate Judiciary Committee, on which Senator Kaufman serves, can take this up.
Goldman could be sued by investors who feel they were misled in this fashion – although, realistically, it would only happen if the bonds default; the cost of annoying Goldman otherwise is too high. Most likely Goldman will reach an amicable agreement with any aggrieved parties. (Merrill’s problem was that Enron failed – as with Lehman, this launched an extensive set of enquiries).
Whether the SEC or any attorney general (e.g., in New York) will take any action, civil or criminal, remains to be seen. It is obviously hard – for legal and political reasons – to take on and prevail against one of the world’s biggest and most powerful banks. Too big to fail banks are also too big to sue successfully – unless they collapse (which is why we keep coming back to Lehman). (Among other things, in the Greece case there would likely be a big argument about whether the Statute of Limitations applies and to whom.)
In any case, it is time to close the loophole that effectively allows deception regarding securities sold into the United States. Rule 144A should be abolished — US residents (individuals and institutions) should only be allowed to buy securities that are properly registered with the SEC.
If other countries are willing to have their people buy fraudulent securities, that is their problem. This is no longer acceptable in the United States.
Another SXSW award for Six to Start | by Knowing and Making (Leigh Caldwell) | 16 March 2010, 12:14 PM
They keep on doing it! Our friends (and now clients) at Six to Start have won another South by Southwest award - this year it's Best Game.
The prize is for Smokescreen, "a cutting-edge game about life online", developed with Channel 4. The credits are about four pages long, but congratulations particularly to those I know personally: Adrian Hon, Dan Hon, Claire Bateman, Margaret Robertson, Lisa Long, Dave Aldhouse, Heather Tyrrell and Alex Chapman. One prize might be regarded as fortune...to win two looks like carefulness.
I'm sure many of you will enjoy the project we're doing with Six to Start if it does go into production. I'd love to tell you about it but then I'd have to...send you to this xkcd cartoon.
How to be as persuasive as Abe Lincoln and Marc Antony, Part 2: Use irony, the twist we can’t resist | by Climate Progress | 16 March 2010, 11:53 AM
I almost let the Ides of March slip by without reexamining Marc Antony’s “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” speech. It is a model of rhetorical brilliance — and a model for “The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President.” Both speeches were built around one of the most important figures of speech: irony
Irony derives from the Greek eironeia (”dissimulation”), the term given to the action and speech of the eiron, or “dissembler,” a stock character in Greek comedy. The first recorded use is the Republic by Plato where “Socrates himself takes on the role of the eiron” and feigns ignorance as he asks “seemingly innocuous and naive questions which gradually undermine his interlocutor’s case,” trapping him “into seeing the truth.” Many Greeks did not see the truth the way Socrates did-they put him to death-so eiron also carries the sense “sly deceiver” or “hypocritical rascal.”
I have previously written about Socratic irony–whereby an eloquent, sophisticated speaker pretends to be a blunt everyman (see Why scientists aren’t more persuasive, Part 2: Why deniers out-debate “smart talkers”).
Eirons are a stock character in popular culture, most commonly found on police dramas — think Peter Falk’s Lt. Columbo. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Marc Antony takes on the role of the eiron when he pretends to praise those who killed Caesar even as he whips up the Roman crowd against them after Caesar is assassinted on the Idea of March. Antony says “I am no orator, as Brutus is, But–as you know me all–a plain blunt man.” It is a mark of eirons and wily orators that they accuse their opponents of being rhetoricians.
Lincoln opened his masterful February 1859 Cooper Union speech echoing Shakespeare’s Antony: “The facts with which I shall deal this evening are mainly old and familiar; nor is there anything new in the general use I shall make of them.” (In Antony’s own words, “I only speak right on; I tell you that which you yourselves do know.”)
VERBAL IRONY
A second type of irony is best called “verbal irony.” For the Roman rhetoricians, such as Cicero, ironia denoted a rhetorical figure of speech “in which, for the most part, the meaning was contrary to the words.” To borrow a chiasmus from A Dictionary of Literary Terms, “at its simplest, verbal irony involves not meaning what one says, but saying what one means.”
The first mention in English is in 1502: ‘yronye … by the whiche a man sayth one & gyveth to understande the contrarye.” Verbal irony is a trope, from the Greek for turn, since it is a figure of speech that turns or changes the meaning of a word away from its literal meaning (like metaphor).
Verbal irony is an essential element of certain kinds of speeches, especially those that occur in a debate or are similarly aimed at disputing a point or rebuking an opponent. Using verbal irony is a powerful means of turning your opponent’s argument against him or her, by revealing a deeper truth that utterly undercuts that argument. Verbal irony is the way to call your opponent a liar without calling your opponent a “liar.”
Two speeches capture the essence — and importance — of irony better than any other. The first is by Shakespeare, the second by Lincoln. Marc Antony’s “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” speech in the Roman Forum is a model of rhetorical brilliance — and was a model for Lincoln.
Brutus, in his Forum speech, had just convinced the crowd the assassination of Caesar was justified. He convinced them so well that some citizens were persuaded, ironically, that he should be the new Caesar. In making his case, Brutus used the word “honor” four times. Since Brutus was widely respected for his honor, since he directly links the citizens’ belief in him to that very honor, Antony needs to attack that quality in him, but do so indirectly, since Brutus has won the crowd completely over.
Cleverly, Antony himself uses the word “honorable” ten times in this one speech. He repeatedly says Brutus is an honourable man and that all of the conspirators are honourable. His irony is increasingly blatant:
When that the poor have cried, Cæsar hath wept;
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
With this drumbeat, Antony convinces the crowd that there was no justification for killing Caesar, which in turns means the murder was a dishonorable act. For a final knockout punch, Antony reveals the existence of Caesar’s will to the citizens, showing them the parchment he describes as the final testament of Caesar’s love for them. The citizens beg him to read the will. Antony slyly says
I have o’ershot myself to tell you of it.
I fear I wrong the honourable men
Whose daggers have stabb’d Caesar; I do fear it.
The crowd is now his. One citizen shouts, “They were traitors,” and then spits out, “Honourable men!” This speech is a treatise on verbal irony.
Irony is about having the actual meaning of the words turn out to be the opposite of their literal meaning. Antony uses irony to negate the meaning of “honor” and “honorable” as it applies to Caesar’s murderers, using verbal daggers to repeatedly stab Brutus’s reputation. His speech is aimed at stirring the Roman citizens to revenge and murder. It works.
In his crowd-pleasing and career-making Cooper Union speech, Abraham Lincoln used the same rhetorical strategy as Antony-ironic repetition. Much as Antony was not directly debating Brutus, but giving a speech right after him, Lincoln was not directly debating Stephen Douglas, but giving a speech a few months after him. He was offering a very different answer on the crucial “question,” as Douglas called it: Is the federal government forbidden from controlling “slavery in our Federal Territories”? Lincoln starts by quoting Douglas for his New York audience:
In his speech last autumn, at Columbus, Ohio, as reported in The New York Times, Senator Douglas said:
“Our fathers, when they framed the Government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now.”
I fully endorse this, and I adopt it as a text for this discourse.
“What is the frame of government under which we live?” Lincoln asks rhetorically, as if to clarify Douglas. He immediately helps the audience, “The answer must be: ‘The Constitution of the United States.’ ” He does this so that he can define the “our fathers” in Douglas’s speech as the thirty-nine men who signed the Constitution: “I take these ‘thirty-nine,’ for the present,” Lincoln says, “as being ‘our fathers who framed the Government under which we live.’ ”
Then Lincoln begins his brilliant analysis to show that Douglas’s words were, in fact, ironic. Douglas had said plainly that the framers of the U.S. government not only understood the slavery issue better than the people in the mid-1800s, but also that they agreed with Douglas. Lincoln grants that the framers understood the slavery issue better but proves that they agreed with him. He examines the voting record of the thirty-nine framers of the Constitution to show that
… twenty-one–a clear majority of the whole–certainly understood that no proper division of local from federal authority, nor any part of the Constitution, forbade the Federal Government to control slavery in the federal territories; while all the rest probably had the same understanding. Such, unquestionably, was the understanding of our fathers who framed the original Constitution; and the text affirms that they understood the question better than we.
Just as Antony threw Brutus’s words back in his face, so, too, does Lincoln with Douglas’s words. In a masterpiece of ironical repetition comparable to Antony’s more famous speech, Lincoln repeats the word “fathers” thirty times, repeats the number “thirty-nine” twenty times, and repeats the entire phrase “Our fathers, when they framed the Government under which we live” and the phrase “better than we,” a remarkable twenty-two times, presumably with a more ironic tone of voice each time (just as a great actor playing Antony would with the word “honorable”), drawing considerable laughter and applause. This is the speech of a man who read Shakespeare often–and aloud.
With a single electrifying speech, masterfully using Socratic irony and verbal irony, as well as a number of other figures, Honest Abe jump-started a campaign that would win him the Republican nomination and ultimately the presidency.
The Cooper Union speech is not as well known to the public as many of Lincoln’s as other speeches, but it is as brilliant and as important to his career as any. The discussion here draws on Harold Holzer’s book, “Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President,” a must read for students of Lincoln or rhetoric.
Related Posts:
From water container to cutlery | by Green Futures | 16 March 2010, 11:52 AM
Designer Oscar Diaz has found something beautiful in the banal by transforming recycled plastic bottles into elegant cutlery. Working as “more of an editor than a designer”, Diaz used the bottles’ inherent curves to create naturally ergonomic utensils. Considering that 22 billion plastic bottles are thrown away each year, the environmental benefits of ‘found design’ could be huge. – George Wigmore
Updated using Planet on 17 March 2010, 11:52 PM
