Fracking Question

Q: What is the picture for long-term methane leakage from tapped out fracking operations? Pondering it spooks me. Any science on it?

Social media postscript: asked here, on Twitter, on Google+, and on Quora. Apologies if you see it more than once. (Not bothering with Facebook.)

Toward Competent Reporting

The Beeb:

Although a normal monsoon has been forecast for South Asia this year, and rains have begun normally in many parts of the region, people are still anxious about the rainy season that lasts for four months.

Their anxiety has to do with the uncertainties surrounding the timing of the monsoon in recent years.

While the debate continues over the role of climate change, scientists have also been looking at the possible role of soot and urban smog pollution in disrupting this weather system.

Emphasis added. Paraphrase: "Scientists have been debating the respective roles of certain climate forcings and climate change in this instance of climate change."

OK, everybody. These things have different meanings:

anthropogenic climate change
anthropogenic climate forcing
anthropogenic global warming
carbon cycle
carbon dioxide
climate change
global climate change
global change
global warming
greenhouse effect

The best name for "the problem" is "climate disruption", which is shorthand for "dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system".

I am not sure I know how to reframe the offending sentence. Admittedly (if I understand their meaning) it is awkward. Perhaps:

"While climate change on the global scale may play a role, scientists have also been looking at the role of local mechanisms such as soot and urban smog in disrupting the monsoon."

The use of the word "debate" was presumably unnecessary and feeds right into denialist tropes.

Another howler:

Ramanathan's result suggested a large reduction of solar radiation at the Earth's surface simultaneous with the warming of the lower atmosphere increases atmospheric "stability". It also slows down the hydrological cycle and reduces rainfall during the monsoon.

"Also"? What does "stability" mean in this context? Oh, I have no idea so I'll put it in quotes.

This is the worst of it though:

"The consequence of these contrasting processes needs to be understood before arriving at conclusions on the aerosol impact on a regional climate system," the INCCA said in its statement.

But one of the experts in the recent UNEP/WMO report, Chien Wang of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) said there was no confusion on the issue.

"I have to indicate that the basic conclusion that black carbon aerosol forcing over South Asia is large enough to perturb the monsoon system is reached by all the studies so far, therefore there is no different opinion here," he told BBC News.

The basic mechanism is agreed, and there is work to be done on quantifying it. There is nothing here resembling what a journalist would call a "debate" which is Wang's point. Such debate is rare in research meteorology. This is not because meteorologist march in lock step on pain of excommunication. It is because meteorology is actually a mature science.

The point about monsoons and aerosols is interesting, but WTF?

Increasingly I think journalism is too important to leave in the hands of journalists.

A Headscratcher

from Watts, in response to "Now it is clear why people with little training are so easily confused." justthefacts replies:

I question whether “training” is the best way to learn about Earth’s Climate System. I think it’s better to actively identify the gaps in your knowledge and seek to fill them. With access to much of written human knowledge in a matter of a few keystrokes and some great professors hanging out in places like WUWT, one isn’t reliant upon trainers. Furthermore, a diversity of sources and opinions is advantageous when studying such an uncertain subject. I think it is better to be well researched, well read, well taught and well learned, than it is to be well trained…

At first it sounded ludicrous to me. Obviously this is a person who does not Get It. But there's something to think about here.

"a diversity of sources and opinions is advantageous when studying such an uncertain subject" is the nut of the question. How do you know that the subject is uncertain? The more diverse your sources the more uncertain you will be, but what does that actually tell you? What you need is to know the diversity of reliable sources, and coming in fresh, you do not know who the reliable sources are.

It seems to me, actually that "training" is not exactly the issue. Many an undergraduate is highly trained in mathematical methods but doesn't understand research; that is the recruiting ground for skeptics and denialists, and the place where the defense of science has been shockingly weak.

The best way to understand research is to obtain a new fact or two that is more or less recognized as such. Those who haven't achieved this are at a disadvantage in identifying where to cull the input on a question in which they take an interest. Perhaps there is some way to make the real intellectual hierarchy more apparent.

How the scientific community winnows and sifts ideas and settles on theories, that is, the details of the social mechanism, changes over time and with the technological and social context. It is in some turmoil right now, as is any communication-intensive pursuit.

The recent process has largely been invisible. It is designed to protect the egos of marginal players. This is why peer review tries to be anonymous and private. But there may be more important goals now.

The appearance of suspicious/hostile amateurs at various levels of competence and seriousness changes the balance of power quite a lot. It may be necessary for scientists to drop all the formal circumspection and be as frank (or "arrogant") in public as they are in private. This is not a time for waffling.

Almost everything is wrong. The superpower of science is the ability to say something is wrong. Jim Bouldin suggests that Wit's End is wrong about tree mortality. I wondered about that. I smell expertise here and so be it; I don't choose to argue the point. It's sort of funny but in a way his response is far more convincing to me than chapter and verse would be. Of course, and this is the point, your mileage may vary.

My Economic Theory in a Nutshell

The graph of globally aggregated economic activity vs globally aggregated welfare is concave downwards.

Under present circumstances, the harder we collectively work, the less we will collectively prosper.

Employment infographics.

This one's different. Here's a couple of graphs that came out today.

US employment compared to other recessions:




Fastest growing and fastest shrinking categories below. "Other Information Services" includes “publishing and/or broadcasting content exclusively on the Internet”.



Bodes ill for America, but nicely for Texas, don't it? Well, for a few years, anyway. (Where would we be without fracking? And where will we be once we're all fracked out?)

Does anyone seriously those yahoos in the other party could do better? I seriously doubt it - they're the ones that kicked us off the cliff in the first place, remember?

Growth is over, I think. Back to the drawing board.

Rent Seeking, Corruption and Madness

I think that anyone defending climate science occasionally runs into an economist type who accuses those of us who would like to limit CO2 emissions of "rent seeking". There is more than a whiff of contempt usually associated, which is peculiar, because the contempt tends to come from someone who (like most people) would not hesitate to rent out surplus space at the highest rate they could get.

Wikipedia to the rescue:

"rent-seeking is an attempt to derive economic rent by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by adding value. An example of rent-seeking is the limitation of access to skilled occupations imposed by medieval guilds."

And here is a case in point:

Washington, D.C. is considering a bill that would require every cab driver in the city to own a special permit called a medallion. The total number of medallions would be capped at 4,000, which would reduce the current number of cabs by more than one-third and put thousands of drivers out of business. (The city government has no idea how many licensed cabs are in the district, though estimates range from 6,500 to 10,000.)

If that weren't bad enough, most drivers wouldn't have the option of buying a medallion. The first set of medallions would be offered for sale to the minority of cabbies who have been driving for at least five years and who live in Washington D.C. (Again the city government has no idea how many current drivers meet this criteria, but rising real estate prices and weak city services have led many drivers to leave the district.)

Who will be offered the next set of medallions, according to the bill? That would be cab companies, who could then rent medallions to drivers. This system would destroy the relatively open-access taxi industry in D.C., in which the majority of drivers are owner-operators free to make their own schedules and keep whatever money they earn on the job. In cities such as New York and Boston, drivers pay upwards of $800 a week to rent their medallions.

A libertarian blog comments:

You can think of two theories of government. One theory is that government exists to correct externalities and provide public goods. The other is that government uses the language of helping people to justify giving stuff to the politically powerful out of the pockets of the rest of us. Here’s some evidence for the second theory.

My sympathies are entirely with the small-timers who choose their own hours and can scale their efforts informally to match available demand. Here is a case where the diseconomy of scale is absolutely obvious.

The video implies that the governmental process is corrupt and that there is no legitimate reason for medallions. I don't know about that, though to be honest I can't really think of one. But I know this is another example of pressure to increase the minimum amount of work people have to do to participate in the economy. As such, it is clearly retrograde to the world of leisure that has been stolen from us for no good reason and replaced by a frantic false scarcity.

And the video, amidst the innuendo, does at least sketch the case for how the process might be corrupt.

So when people for whom limits to growth and limits to carbon emission treat us with suspicion and hostility, and bandy this "rent seeking" term around, it's important to remember that such a thing can conceivably happen. That is, we are making business more difficult for them, and the first question on their mind is "follow the money". How they get to us is perfectly silly, though Dick Lindzen is happy to spin crazed fantasies about it.

But this is the kind of thing they are worried about.

In this particular case, I have nothing to say about the corruption angle.

I very strongly think cutting people off from part time and informal income is just generally anti-resilience. Some will see it as abuse of the public by government, others as abuse of government by big business. But in any case, it concentrates wealth and increases stress, exactly the opposite of what ought to be happening. I wonder if there isn't some common ground to be found here with libertarian types.

Taking 10,000 people working half time, turning them into 5,000 people working full time and splitting their take with the people who have the capital to snap up all the medallions, is just the sort of lunacy that the anti-leisure economy foists upon us. This, as Shrek would say, is the opposite of helping.

Heartland Musings

Two very interesting essays at least as a result of the Heartland SICCC.

I thank Willard for pointing me to a moving piece by Wit's End: "Beware the Banality of Evil - Heartless at the Heartland Institute SICCC"

and Brian Dupuis for alerting me to Chris Mooney's "In the Climate Debate, the Misunderstanding is Mutual", along with (so far) two very interesting replies in the comments thereto.

I'll be responding to the latter myself, shortly. Any others?

Japan national record high for June broken

h/t James from an interesting piece about Fukushima, Japan, and nuclear power. 40 C is 104 F, to save you the trouble.

Sataima sees 39.8 C as heatwave covers Japan

Temperatures soared across the Japanese archipelago Friday [June 24 2011], with the mercury reaching 39.8 C in Kumagaya, Saitama Prefecture, a record high for June, due to hot and humid wind flowing from the south, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.

The scorching heat observed in Kumagaya at 2:20 p.m. exceeded Japan’s previous record for June of 38.3 C logged on June 27, 1991, in Shizuoka city, Shizuoka Prefecture.

The Requisite Kluge

Following up on my economics series. Previous installments:

The Missing Automation Crisis

and

The Leisure Crisis, Feminism, and Overwork

and

Divide and Conquer or Multiply and be Fruitful

and

Is Full Employment Good Policy?

---

Essentially, I have been looking at the growth economy from the point of view of employment. We have found that, contrary to the expectations of improved efficiency, employment went up during the late part of the twentieth century, especially in America. I argue that this is because of the individualist perspective of Americans, ironically promoted by corporate interests, whereby it was impossible for wage earners to hold onto their gains in the face of a growing wage-earning population. Accordingly, a sort of cheap-labor economy emerged that centered on replacing housework with low-skilled services (cheap restaurants) and retail positions.

The problems of success did not end there, though. The creative foment of capitalism found ways to replace more jobs with machines (as expected) or to ship jobs overseas (perhaps less expected) thereby weakening demand for labor (and crippling the power of private-sector labor unions). At this point, the expectation of one job per household was breaking down, and an expectation of two or even three jobs per household was emerging. Social pressures weren't just limited to the approval or admiration of neighbors - living in a less desirable neighborhood meant sending your children to incompetent and dangerous schools, putting massive pressure on their future earnings. The demand for income was tied into the safety and prosperity of offspring. It wasn't optional for most people. Note that this is tied directly into inadequate delivery of social services, specifically education. Demand for cars and various support services also can be stimulated by locating the best neighborhoods far from the best jobs. And of course, this can be taken further by rolerating collapse of urban cores, forcing populations outward, and thereby encouraging new construction employment.

So it was that the "morning-in-America" years of the Reagan administration in combination with the entrance of women into the marketplace began the break between the period of growth due to demand to the period of grow-or-suffer. People no longer climbed the ladder out of ambition or desire. People climbed the ladder for fear of being crushed in the chaos below.

America thus began its descent into third-world status; the first modern country in which civilization actually declined. The re-emergence of superstitious, backwards literalist religions such as one expects from the rural backwaters of the tropics coincided, but perhaps was no coincidence. Voodoo economics brought back voodoo itself. The use of abortion as a tool of moralist absolutism was instrumental in distracting the population from its own interests. (See "What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America" by Thomas Frank)

So employment was driven to a large measure but by a frenzied demand for employment by employees; this in turn because of the deliberate fraying of the social safety net, which was in turn achieved by distracting the middle-American public from their own interests with manipulative and symbolic issues, a mostly shallow and retrograde religiosity, and fear of association with aliens, racial minorities, and some sort of caricature of beatnik-delinquent "liberals".

For a generation, this dynamic has spun out of control, with nobody further left than Bill Clinton or Barack Obama in the white house. (Which is to say, uninterrupted control of economic policy by moneyed interests.) The public demands "growth" as loudly as the corporate sector does. The corporate sector, because it is a machine designed to maximize profit. The public, essentially because it has been tricked by the corporate sector into lacking the imagination for a world where anything less than extremely hard work will keep your kids from falling into bad company and a career as a consumer of the criminal prosecution and imprisonment service sectors.

Of course, this unrelenting pressure gives America a competitive advantage over countries where workers did establish rights. Some aspects of the underlying ideology have been successfully exported as well. And some of America's issues with a racially distinct lower class have been exported to other western countries as well. So all these trends have, under American economic and social pressure, emerged in many other countries. Those countries would do well to reconsider.

But what was all this "work" about? If you looked around in the 1980s, you would find that most "jobs" were in retail, sales, or marketing. My brother-in-law, a machinist, had a little blue collar factory business in Chicago during this period where he outcompeted overseas competitors on agility. He could turn product around very quickly. What product was that? Custom plastic doodads for large corporate retailers!

If one person spends their life trying to convince you to buy Coke instead of Pepsi, and another does exactly the reverse, how is this different from the old public sector Keynesian ploy of

having one team dig ditches and another team fill them in? Clearly, no real value is added in either case. The only difference is that in one case the government is not directly involved. So according to the prevailing ideology, it is okay.

Whence the Red Queen's dictum: "Around here it takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place".

It was way back in my undergraduate days that, in thinking about this, I came up with "Tobis's Theory of the Requisite Kluge".

King of the Road will be able to picture the scene without any difficulty. I was sitting around Joe Galvin's room doing the usual sort of thing we did in Joe Galvin's room. I recall running the theory by Joe twenty years later and he saud he remembered the conversation much as I did.

I noted that recessions were being described as a "weakness of demand" and resulted in "excess unemployment", and that all it takes is a tolerance of absurdity to kill both birds with one stone. I imagined some national specification for a bizarre decorative gizmo, which changed annually. Everybody would be required to buy one and display it, on their lawn if possible, or in the apartment courtyard or on the roof if necessary. The entire streetscape would be festooned by silly things; say steam-powered flagpoles or pedal-inflated singing balloons or whatever. In years when employment was otherwise lax, the standards could be made more demanding. Voila! Full demand and full employment via a Requisite Kluge!

What I didn't reckon with was the genius of the marketplace. It turned out that government intervention was altogether unnecessary. Instead, the Kluge was developed and marketed without the necessity of the requirement. The enormous prosperity of the 1990s was largely based on the incompetence of Microsoft.

Note that if Microsoft had done a better job (and this will come back into our story in the obvious way with Microsoft's final, merciful decline in the 2010s) the 1990s boom would not have been as strong. Much of what you had to buy in the 1990s was workarounds and defenses for Microsoft's grotesque and bizarre design and engineering. Antivirus programs. Substitute shells. And even the stuff you didn't have to pay for chewed up your productivity (Trumpet Winsock! Yes, a miracle it worked, but how many hours did you sink into it before it did?) And of course, the things failed, and failed to keep up with increasing technology. I spent twenty dollars on a gizmo from Disney of all people to work an audio output through my parallel port. It eventually worked! But then it went off the market,and somebody else had the equivalent for two hundred. And on and on, one silliness and half-failed goofy external device or software patch after another. So why am I looking on this horror with such nostalgia now?

Because those were the boom years! Everybody was doing this nonsense. Even though there was no internet worth mentioning, we were fussing with Eudora. Gates thought TCP/IP was a weird protocol and he resented having to support it. It was hidden under several layers of whatever proprietary crap networking options Microsoft was offering at that time! It wasted time and money! And it was great! People were getting rich left and right. It was the triumph of the Requisite Kluge!

Things started to go sour in 2001 with the release of Windows XP, which was, while a fairly repulsive visual design, and somewhat oily and smarmy in its dialogs ("Would you like me to hold your hand?[OKAY!] [No, thanks, maybe later!]") actually usable as a computing device and an internet tool. Despite the attempt to revert to the lack of quality of Windows 3 with the later release of Vista, the emergence of actual useful things to do with the machine along with improved design made the Kluge phenomenon less powerful. But the clever marketplace had another trick up its sleeve.

--

Image: T-Shirt Humor of Austin TX, 2005.

Over the Top at Watts Up

I have long been amazed and impressed at how sites like the Blackboard and Climate Audit allow mainstream opinion in comments section. Of course, one is immediately subject to such a barrage of antagonism at various levels of bakedness that it's difficult to maintain a presence. But in my experience Lucia Liljegren and Steve McIntyre have at least been scrupulously fair in letting posts through.

I've been slumming a bit at Watts', though. I had thought I was getting a similar treatment (fair from the moderator, but negatively reinforced by a variety of expressions of contempt from the mob) but now I have a posting that for some reason isn't making it through moderation. Here it is, in response to this comment:

"If Tobis took the time to notice, he would see that the rise in [harmless, beneficial] CO2 has been stagnant since the beginning of the year."

OK. I just looked. That is wrong. ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/co2_weekly_mlo.txt

You guys are being fed a lot of made up stuff. If you applied a tenth of the skepticism to the stuff you like or wish were true as to the stuff you don't like or hope is false, you might make more progress in understanding what's going on.

Oh, well. Just documenting for the ages. For what its worth, this year's CO2 cycle is about 2 ppmv higher than last year's. But I suspect it was the skepticism thing that got me purged.