Bruce Sterling's Problem

People who have no property don't seem to register as extant.

The "Exotic Enemies Do Get Married" Campaign

by Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic

Surprising news has just arrived for us at our American home address. Although we have been married for four years now, the American Immigration services can't find any paper trail for the two of us.

We have no joint bank account, no insurance accounts and no joint children. The authorities therefore suspect that our marriage is a phony "Green Card marriage," and they would like to have Jasmina deported from the USA.

This is not too entirely surprising a mistake, since we're an Internet couple. By our nature, we just don't generate much paper.

We use electronic banking. Bruce uses American banks, while Jasmina uses Serbian banks. Why would anyone want to make his or her alien spouse use an American or Serbian bank?

There's no reason for us to jointly speculate in American real-estate, since we each already own places to live. No sane European would ever want American health insurance. And so forth.

Like a lot of geek couples, we live out of our cellphones and laptops. Furniture, wedding china, massive home improvement loans: we don't even go there. We have a light material footprint that'll generally fit onto a couple of rollaboards.

We're nevertheless a genuine married couple. Any reasonable Internet person would recognize this fact in two minutes.

It's one thing to have to establish a credit rating to buy a house; it's another to have to do so to establish existence under the law. Presumably, because Bruce is well-known and will find lots of people to attest to his marriage, he and Jasmina will prevail.

Now you can't accuse Bruce of really living lightly on the earth; he spends a lot of time on long distance airlines and his carbon footprint is not the daintiest. But the implications for less well-connected and greener folk are a matter of concern. Participate in the consumer economy. Or don't travel, lest you fall in love. Otherwise the law will separate you from your family. Charming.

Legal rights should not be tied to commercial activity. Doesn't a free market include the freedom not to participate?

Hockey Stick

(The reference in the image is broken. I found the image here. There are lots of versions about.)

Hopefully you've seen this before, but it's worth contemplating now and again.

I also liked this version, though it's more schematic (I don't think it shows real data in detail, but it offers another aspect of the situation to contemplate).

I wonder that anybody is surprised that other hockey stick graphs show up on this time scale. I'm surprised when global trends aren't hockey sticks.

Raindrops on Roses, Whiskers on Kittens

A few of my favorite things, courtesy wordle.net :


That "Revkin" thing looms just a little too large, perhaps...

Wilkins Ice Shelf Disintegration proceeds

The narrow ice bridge that was all that was attaching the Wilkins Ice Shelf to Charcot Island has apparently cracked all the way through, though not in the intuitively obvious place, and large areas of the ice sheet are breaking off and forming icebergs. This is the second such event that has been observed, the precedent being further equatorward at the Larsen B site. While thus far the present event has been somewhat less abrupt than its predecessor, it is now comparable in scale and may continue deeper into the embayment now that the neighboring island no longer acts as a buttress.

(Most readers who follow the climate system will recognize that this does not contribute to sea level directly but will reduce the flow resistance of neighboring glaciers and thus will contribute to sea level rise in the future.) (Update: it actually does contribute a little bit.)

There are spectacular satellite photos of the event at the European Space Agency site.

Hat tip to Huntsville, Alabama's WHNT TV meteorologist Dan Satterfield.

Zeitgeist

Looking back, I see I was a Jay Rosen replacenik before I had any idea of the extent of the angst in the newspaper business. What's really astonishing is to recall Andy Revkin saying some of the same things I have been saying, but missing the extent to which the media shift changes the rules.

Economics survey

I'm looking over the blog from last year to see if I have anything worth nominating as a "best science blog" entry of the year. So far, well, no.

But I find this comment submission from Tidal which I probably didn't give its due at the time well worth highlighting:

This will be a bit of core dump, but I wanted to engage this discussion.

Even "mainstream" economics is struggling with it's evident shortcomings:
Robert Solow: Economic History and Economics
"modern economics has an ambition and style rather different from those I have been advocating. My impression is that the best and brightest in the profession proceed as if economics is the physics of society. There is a single universally valid model of the world. It only needs to be applied. You could drop a modern economist from a time machine-a helicopter, maybe, like the one that drops the money-at any time, in any place, along with his or her personal computer; he or she could set up in business without even bothering to ask what time and which place... We are socialized to the belief that there is one true model and that it can be discovered or imposed if only you will make the proper assumptions and impute validity to econometric results that are transparently lacking in power.... Of course there are holdouts against this routine, bless their hearts... Let me recapitulate. If the project of turning economics into a hard science could succeed, it would surely be worth doing. No doubt some of us should keep trying... There are, however, some reasons for pessimism about the project. Hard sciences dealing with complex systems-but possibly less complex than the U.S. economy-like the hydrogen atom or the optic nerve seem to succeed because they can isolate, they can experiment, and they can make repeated observations under controlled conditions. Other sciences, like astronomy, succeed because they can make long series of observations under natural but essentially stationary conditions, and because the forces being studied are not swamped by noise. Neither of these roads to success is open to economists. In that case, we need a different approach."

Or Joseph Stiglitz: There is no invisible hand "Adam Smith's invisible hand - the idea that free markets lead to efficiency as if guided by unseen forces - is invisible, at least in part, because it is not there.... That such models prevailed, especially in America's graduate schools, despite evidence to the contrary, bears testimony to a triumph of ideology over science. Unfortunately, students of these graduate programmes now act as policymakers in many countries, and are trying to implement programmes based on the ideas that have come to be called market fundamentalism... Good science recognises its limitations, but the prophets of rational expectations have usually shown no such modesty."

Two branches of the "holdouts", as Solow refers to them, would include "ecological economists" (Daly, Costanza, Ayres, Farley... I recommend Michael Common's text

More radically, you have the Post-Autistic Economics folks.

Nevertheless, this stuff is so radical compared to today's social memes, etc., it's hard to imagine their broad adoption on the timescales required... Part three of Climate Code Red posits that until we start acknowledging the "problem" as an emergencychallenge we are not likely to get much traction in changing our institutions/policies... Some of Ian Dunlop's quotes are particularly good: "we have created a political and capitalist system which has proved incapable of recognising that the most important factor for its own survival is the preservation of a global biosphere fit for human habitation. Our institutions are totally short-term focused; politically due to the electoral cycle and corporately due to perverse incentives. Thus we are uniquely ill-equipped to handle these major problems, which are all long-term.
Our ideological preoccupation with a market economy based on short-run profit maximisation is rapidly leading towards an uninhabitable planet. As inconvenient as it may be politically and corporately, conventional economic growth and rampant consumerism cannot continue. Markets are important, but they operate within rules. Henceforth, the rules must change to ensure long-run sustainability.
Nationalism and short-term vested interests have so far prevented the development of a global governance framework capable of handling this “Tragedy of the Commons”. However, the issue of global sustainability is now much bigger than any nation state. Global warming, in particular, is moving far faster than the scientists had predicted, to the point where we are already in the danger zone.
The stark fact is that we face a global sustainability emergency. But it is impossible to design realistic solutions unless we first understand and accept the size of the problem. We know those solutions; what is lacking is the political will, firstly to honestly articulate the problem and secondly to implement those solutions."

The first two sections of that report (which were previously published separately last year as "The Big Melt" and "Target Practice") make the case that we are already in emergency mode. And it discusses how reticent most of us are to adopt this position for fear of being seen as "alarmist" or "crazy" or "not practical"... I can certainly relate to those feelings... But the case they make for the status quo continuing unless we collectively frame this as an "emergency" is persuasive... Unfortunately, I have trouble imagining the "Pearl Harbour" that will trigger that mindset shift "in time"... if the Arctic melt in '07, or Katrina '05 aren't enough, what will be?

But on that point, much of the third part of "Code Red" uses military metaphors... one quote is from Admiral Stockdale, a "Hanoi Hilton" POW: "you must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end - which you can never afford to lose - with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be"

Well, like I said, a core dump... But I really think that this is the next big issue... The "science" has done its part... Now it is up to society to implement policies to deal with the crisis... The question is whether we can do so within the current economic and institutional paradigms, or do we have to fix both issues at the same time? I certainly hope the existing paradigms are up to the challenge, because that would reduce the overall challenge... but I fear that they are not...

Low Hanging Fruit - Black Carbon in Arctic

Another useful INECE/IGSD press release via Alexandra Viets, verbatim:

New Study: Black Carbon Responsible for Half of Arctic Warming

Washington, D.C., April 2, 2009 – An article published this week in Nature Geoscience shows that black carbon is responsible for 50 percent, or almost 1˚C of the total 1.9˚C increased Arctic warming from 1890 to 2007. The paper by Drew Shindell of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space (GISS) and Greg Faluvegi of Columbia University also notes that most of the Arctic warming – 1.48˚C of the 1.9˚C – occurred from 1976 to 2007. The study is the first to quantify the Arctic’s sensitivity to black carbon emissions from various latitudes, and concludes that the Arctic responds strongly to black carbon emissions from the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes, where the emissions and the forcing are greatest.

Black carbon is an aerosol produced from the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and biomass and is estimated to be the second or third largest contributor to climate change. Its emissions cause damage in two ways: while in the atmosphere, the dark particulates absorb sunlight and emit it as heat; when it falls back to earth it can darken snow and ice, reducing their reflectivity and accelerating melting.

Arctic warming is more than twice the observed global average surface warming of 0.78˚C above pre-industrial levels. According to another study published by Lenton, et al. in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year, this increased warming may soon lead to the disappearance of the Arctic summer ice, which would in turn accelerate Arctic warming by exposing darker heat-absorbing water now covered by heat reflecting ice. This would also increase the risk of releasing methane and other greenhouse gases from permafrost and from methane hydrates in the ocean, which could lead to a runaway feedback process.

“Climate conditions in the Arctic are rapidly deteriorating,” said Rafe Pomerance, president of Clean Air - Cool Planet. “This study reinforces the opportunity to control short-lived forcers of global warming including black carbon, methane and tropospheric ozone in order to slow the rate of warming in the Arctic. We cannot afford to allow the shrinkage of the Greenland ice sheet to accelerate.”

Because black carbon only remains in the atmosphere for several days to weeks, reducing it can bring about almost immediate mitigation of warming, whereas decreases in temperature lag reductions in CO2 by 1,000 years or more.

“We need to broaden climate policy to include reductions in black carbon, given its critical role in Arctic warming and overall global warming,” said Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development. “Black carbon is part of a package of fast-action strategies that can achieve mitigation in the near term and slow Arctic warming, including targeting short-lived, non-CO2 climate forcers such as HFCs, methane, and tropospheric ozone, as well as increasing carbon sequestration through forest protection and production of biochar.”

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The image is from a student science journalism site. The map makes clear something that the text does not: most of this source of global warming is sourced in the rapidly developing economies of south and east Asia. I'm not sure why people feel a need to dance around this fact. Anyway, the good news is that this problem goes away with further development and conventional pollution controls, and that the residence time for the particulate carbon is short. Arctic warming is sensitive to this input and responsive to it on a short time scale. On a global view it would be sensible to address it urgently.

Recall Chip Levy's presentation from a year ago: according to GCM studies the most robust climate impact of east Asian particulate emission is increased temperature and decreased precipitation in the central United States.

Sustainable Science Journalism Toward a Sustainable World

This is something of a rant about science journalism and my place in it. 

The core of the matter is this.

In our peculiar circumstances, science writing has an ethical component.

Although speech is free in a free country, individuals or corporations aren't free of ethical responsibility for what they write. The problems we face these days are so vast, the decisions we collectively make so consequential, that the ethical responsibility is greatly magnified. 

That said, here is the problem.  I heard Clay Shirky say this at the ill-fated #sxswbp: filtering (editing) is everything. "The filter is the single most important function on the internet today."

Before the internet, anybody could say anything, but nobody could get anybody to listen. The Brits maintained their soapbox tradition in Hyde Park, I imagine, but I doubt anybody gathers much of an audience that way anymore. The action, for almost a century now, has been in the mass media. Consequently, for the lifetime of everybody living and until just a few months ago, it was the moneyed interests who decided who would speak and who would be silent.

This broke down a bit in the period of 1966-1974, often called "the sixties", a brief period when radicals understood media better than the people who owned them. Soon enough everything interesting about that period was sanitized, obfuscated and duly forgotten by everybody who wasn't privileged to come of age exactly at that moment.

Control of intellectual input by the corporate sector is totally shattered now. There is no governance on the internet. It's totally mob rule, as a Google search on "global warming consensus" will instantly reveal. The corporations run a bigger chunk of the economy than ever; even our barristas are publicly traded. But they have lost control of the media in a way that makes the revolution of the sixties look like a fraternity prank. (Which, in a way, it was, come to think of it.)

The corporate control of the Overton window (thanks to Eli for teaching me the concept) was already weakening before the great AIG screwup proved what many of us had always suspected about the Phil Gramms of the world. Now it's hopeless. Speech is uncontrolled but it doesn't matter very much, because nobody trusts anybody anymore.

This is both very good news and very bad news. Freedom is the good news. If you have something interesting to say, you can find the audience to whom it is interesting. There is much more interesting stuff to read nowadays. 

Unfortunately, we also have the bad news. Lies are cheaper than truth, vague misgivings cheaper than balanced analyses, and wild-ass guesses cheaper than interview and investigation. In short, noise dominates signal. As things stand, most people lack effective filters. 

An important function that the corporations used to provide for us, and before that the culture and the churches, was to provide a sense of what was reasonable and what was outlandish, what was worthy of polite conversation and what was certifiable. As we lose this imposed sense of propriety, we are in desperate need of filters, of reliable mechanisms to connect the people who have lost faith in every institution to the people who really do mean well and really do know what the f*** they are talking about.

Now, one could argue (I used to argue this more vehemently) that science at least provides a model for how this could be done. It turns out that for a vast range of reasons, that science is struggling to scale up to its modern circumstances as well.

Instead, it surprisingly appears that the most functional corner of civilization nowadays is the software design community. (The reasons for that could fill books, and better books need to be written on the subject.) Many people are already  looking to the software community, particularly the open source community. for models of how to better organize ourselves at scale. This is promising, one of the few trends that is promising. And indeed, that model may solve science's internal communication and validation problems as it tries to scale to unprecedented complexity. That isn't the problem that has been occupying me, though.

The problem that suddenly fell into my lap was not that of George Will, nor of Roger Pielke Jr., nor of Mark Morano, nor Glenn Beck (nor Laurie David or James Kunstler either). These people's successes and failures all shine some light on our collective dysfunction in one way or another, but the moment I slapped my forehead and said, that's it, I'm in the wrong game, something has to be done, was specifically in reference to Andy Revkin.

Three things, to me, are fairly obvious about Andy Revkin:

• 1) he has a wonderful job and enjoys it and does it competently and successfully
• 2) he thinks he is helping
• 3) he isn't.

And it's point three that specifically galvanized me into rethinking whether this blog is really a hobby.

 It started with removing Revkin from my blogroll, but of course I don't think he cares. At worst it will cost him a handful of hits a month, and honestly, I am not going to stop reading it. To his credit, despite the extent to which I am on his case, Revkin still takes my comments, too. Delisting him on my humble little blog seems a pathetic and futile gesture, and maybe it will turn out to be. It's meant as a gesture. What matters in substance is replacing the Times as an authoritative source for scientific reporting. If Revkin thinks his family's comfort is more important than the survival of the planet, if he doesn't have the cojones to stand up to the publisher and say "kill the Dyson crap or I am out of here" or something like that, he is not doing us much good. As my good friend John M says, "you can't achieve anything if you're not willing to quit your job over principle".

Revkin might say that somebody else will be glad to do his job at the Times. A problematic excuse, of course. One thing you can easily say is just, yes, Andy, but not as well. We need you telling the truth full time, not 50.00% of the time.

The problem, of course, is that the Times is a pre-internet institution, and is incapable of blunt honesty that might be inconvenient for its owners or its advertisers. This is just a human foible under ordinary circumstances, but the time for hemming and hawing is over. The world is changing in ways that are casually obvious and are likely to become overwhelming if not grappled with soon. If these ways are embarrassing to the corporations that own newspapers, they simply must be replaced. I know that sounds grandiose, but I am not just windmill-tilting here. The Times is not serving effectively in science journalism of policy consequence. (The same phenomenon likely applies to the rest of their reporting, but that's not my topic here.)

In the huge tangled quandary that the world faces today truth is the commodity in most desperate shortage, and its lack is traced to the lack of its raw material, trust.

So what will replace the Times given that the Times has gone out of its way to prove that we cannot actually trust the Times?

A good place to start is from analyses of the future of the press in general, and Steven B. Johnson has that one right. And here is his figure, which I am lifting from his sxsw talk.



It seems that there must be a role for me in developing some corner of Johnson's model for scientific communication to the general public. But what? What's the business model? It's obvious to me that filtering is crucial.

The issue in scientific reporting is about trust. One has to create mechanisms for individual science writers to establish trust with their audience. This isn't without precedent. I trusted Asimov, I trusted Sagan, I trusted Gould. Didn't you? The writer is the brand. It is only with the individual human voice that trust develops. I read those guys because I trusted them. I trusted them for at least three reasons:

• they wrote things I could understand,
• they were close enough to science to know how it works,
• they spoke with their own voices in ways that average everyday people around me never seemed to manage.

The great pop science writers of my youth were lucky to be on relatively uncontroversial turf (less so Gould, I guess, but I always found doubts about evolution to be laughable.) Nowadays though, I just discover someone like the unspellable Hrynyshyn and find myself trusting him, whether he is being controversial or not, whether I agree with him or not. When I take the time to read Hrynyshyn I get something out of it; it alters my point of view. When I read Revkin, I expect him not to get the facts wrong, but now that I understand what he does better, I am very surprised if the experience affects my behavior or beliefs in any way. Revkin is not wrong, usually, but a scientist is usually right, and usually in a non-obvious way. There is a difference. And in the quandary we are all facing, that is the difference we desperately need.

In the course of becoming a not entirely anonymous blogger I've met a couple of science journalists in person, some of whom I admire more than others, some of whom are quite commendable. I hope I'm not out of line in singling out John Fleck as a standout. But unfortunately he also seems to me still something of an exception. For the most part, I get a lot more out of reading scientists, or journalists who were trained as scientists, on science than I do from reading trained journalists on science, even if that's their beat. Don't you?

(Less profoundly and with more exceptions, but still strikingly, I get more out of reading scientists on politics and economics than I do journalists, politicians and economists. For instance, Steinn Sigurdsson has been "indispensible" on the Iceland story, but has opened my eyes to many other aspects of the economic crisis as well. Steinn is an astronomer.)

It doesn't matter what level of sophistication the article is pitched at. Scientists writing at the 11th grade level are usually much more interesting to me than journalists writing at that level. See Grumbine, for instance, or my scientific colleagues on the imperfect but lamented Correlations blog.

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So, let's pretend a business model has emerged in my fevered brain out of all these constraints. What would it be like?

What I'm willing to say about it:

• reporters must own their content and be their own brand
• filtering is crucial and must be achieved by a collaborative infrastructure
• new software is involved
• I think I see how the people who work hard enough and produce a good enough product can get paid even though the content will be free. Anyway after pondering it intensively for six weeks, I have an idea worth considering.
• Science journalism is my target, but the core idea will probably work for some other branches of reporting.
  

I'd like to talk this through with someone willing to confer in confidence. I need allies to make this work (even as a nonprofit, which is definitely a consideration). Which is really the point of this great long rant. I am looking for somebody to talk business who understands the nature of the problem, something about how the web works, and a little bit about making a business concern go. 

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The business model chart, as I said, is lifted from the linked Steven B Johnson article

The comic clippings are from an episode of Tom the Dancing Bug

I thought Bora Z might be having some similar thoughts so I deliberately avoided reading his recent article on science journalism until I got this out to avoid undue influence. So finally I looked at it. He did indeed say some similar things among many ideas. His recent article on blogging, journalism and science is excellent indeed and very highly recommended for those who care about communicating science.

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Open Thread 3

Are they gone? Are they coming back?

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Suggested topic: somebody please explain to me what "cap and trade" is and why it is supposed to be a better idea than a simple carbon emission tax/sequestration subsidy scheme. It seems I am supposed to believe it but I don't even get it.

Texas Education - Opportunity for Climate Science

As is well known, recently the State Board of Education of our Great State of Texas met in pursuit of the Scientific truth, in order to decide what to impart to our youth via the High School curriculum.

They began with a document crafted by professional "teachers" and "scientists", who freely admit to having a so-called "teaching real science" agenda. The Board, in its wisdom made a number of last minute Amendments to the proposed policy. These will affect classroom practice in our Great State and will have a strong effect on textbook publishers nationwide.

A great deal of national attention has been directed toward these Amendments, particularly as they affect biology, but as a climatologist practicing out of Texas I was gratified to see that they had not left our humble science out of the picture entirely.

As stated in a press release by the Environmental Defense Fund:

"Surprising environmentalists, the board’s last-minute decision Wednesday changed the language in a school textbook chapter on Environmental Systems to include the phrase “analyze and evaluate different views on the existence of global warming.”

It is gratifying to have the vast platform of the Texas Public School System to advance alternative theories about Global Warming. The media along with certain elements based in East Coast cities as well as Hollywood and San Francisco have been effectively promoting a flawed theory involving something they call Greenhouse Gas Theory.

The many flaws in Greenhouse Gas Theory do not typically get aired. Alternative views have been given altogether too short of a shrift.

Therefore I call on my fellow scientists to do everything possible to create a fair presentation of the main alternative hypothesis, the hypothesis of Interventionist Carbohydrates. (Now, that is quite a mouthful, so we can call it "IC" for short.)

Here is a graph showing how the flawed Greenhouse Gas Theory fails to account for observations:



In that graph, the red line corresponds to Greenhouse Gas Theory Gases, and the green line to global mean surface temperature as measured in the central location of Abilene TX. As you can see, Texas temperatures are not predicted by the Greenhouse Gas Theory Gases (GHGTGs).

On the other hand, consider the following graph, which indicates the number of Pirate Attacks, versus the global mean average surface temperature of the great state of Texas, again, as measured in Abilene. You will see that it is a very good predictor, going up when the temperature goes down, and down when it goes up. Unlike the GHGTGs, where there is no match that can be seen, in this case the match is perfect, as one would expect from good science.



There is a Scientific Explanation for this.

You see, it appears that there is a great carbohydrate-based presence in the sky that thrives on heat, water and salt. It gets all the water it wants from the clouds, but its need for salt is crucial. And it is the salty language and demeanor of sea pirates that gives it salt which it needs.

Fortified by the salt, the great carbohydratic presence is able to intervene in earthly matters, soaking up the great heat particles (warmons) and also the lesser ones (warminos) from the skies over Texas, and Oklahoma and Kansas too! This protects our land from the fierce summer heat of all those warmons and warminos.

Unfortunately, the advance of civilization has led to a decrease in the population of pirates, which has led to an increase in warmons and warminos, causing some discomfort, especially in August and September when we are really tired of it.

There are those who complain that our position is a disguised argument in favor of a dogmatic religious sect. Far from it. We are merely pointing out the evidence, and the evidence says there is an ethereal carbohydrate presence protecting us from the sun's heat best when there are pirates.

While many of the advocates of Interventionist Carbohydratism happen to be members of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or pastafarians, not all of us are. Far from it! There is for example the example of non-pastafarian Richard Lindzen of the atmospheric science department at M.I.T., whose meteorological publications have long been entirely consistent with Interventionist Carbohydratism.

The core of IC investigates how and why the connection between temperature and pirates is due to the ineffable presence of an animated carbohydrate presence. Whether that presence is constituted by, say, intelligent potatoes or biscuits or pasta or even turnips is a matter for the individual's conscience; the state indeed has no business making such a distinction. (We have, however, ruled out corn, field corn, and hominy.)

Now that we understand about IC, what should we do about the pirate crisis? Should we reconstitute the Texas Navy, forcibly boarding and looting the ships of other nations and northern states? No, of course not. We Texans are an honorable people, and we do not force our will upon random foreigners, at least not without a fairly strong suspicion of reasonable cause.

Fortunately it turns out not to be necessary. The Carbohydrate Intervention process is mediated not by piracy itself but simply by the salty language, dress and demeanor of the pirates. Accordingly, as part of the high school instruction in Carbohydragenic Global Warming we will train the students to sing and perform a vast collection of dirty limericks and bawdy drinking songs. The provision of these materials in pilot classrooms in various sophomore and junior level high school classes has been met with great enthusiasm by most of the students. We look forward to educating many more of our state's teenagers, in service to the environment, to set them off on the right foot in their stewardship of the mighty Texas land.

Now THAT, not the tiresome and flawed correlations of the teachers and professors, that my friends is real Science, Texas style!

Make no mistake. Our position is for Science, about Science, and through Science. We will follow the truth no matter where it leads. And it leads to giant plates of carbohydrates of some sort. Possibly pasta, as some of us believe within the privacy of our own homes and houses of worship, but that is not for us curriculum developers to say.

Indeed, it is our opponents, in their arrogant refusal to consider the piracy data, who have become so stubborn, so dogmatic, so intolerant of opposition, that it is they, not we, who represent the injection of religion into the classroom. They should be grateful for our generosity in not trying to force their Greenhouse Gas Theory out of the curriculum altogether. Unlike our opposition, though, we believe that every scientific viewpoint, no matter how peculiar or unfounded, deserves the time for a fair hearing in the classroom. Anything less is a betrayal of our youth.

It is wonderful that our great State is finally opening the door to examination of this long-suppressed theory and many other scientific theories of comparable value. That is something that Texans of all backgrounds, be they Aggie, Longhorn or Raider, can reflect upon with great Texas Pride. Arrr!

Update: I am very pleased to note how many people apparently have read this article and been swept up by the power of its Scientific Evidence. Several important Greenhouse Gas Theory websites have folded up their tents today and can now be counted as among the 450 PhD's supporting Carbohydrate Interventionism: Gavin Schmidt et al. at RealClimate, James Hrynyshyn (hope I spelled it right that time) and Rajenda Pachauri can now be added to the list of CI supporters and sympathizers. Most remarkably, there is the confession from Al Gore. It is worth noting that none of them is a practicing pastafarian.

Truly the first day of April in 2009 is a date worthy of note in the history of scientific progress! All hail Flying Spagh... er... hurrah!