Blue Monnett

The eye of Sauron has cast its gaze on Dr. Charles Monnett, the fellow who had the misfortune to be footnoted by Al Gore on the polar bear question.

Becky Bohrer provides a nice report in Huffington's, which is better on climate change than it is on medicine. A couple of quotes:

The federal investigation into suspended wildlife biologist Charles Monnett has focused on the scientific merit of a 2006 article in which he and a colleague recorded their observations of apparently drowned polar bears in the Arctic

...

The article, published in 2006 in the journal Polar Biology, is based on observations that Monnett and fellow scientist Jeffrey Gleason made in 2004. At the time, they were conducting an aerial survey of bowhead whales, and saw four dead polar bears floating in the water after a storm. In the peer-reviewed article, they said they were reporting, to the best of their knowledge, the first observations of the bears floating dead and presumed drowned while apparently swimming long distances.

The bunkosphere, of course, sees it differently.

First of all, this is not the sort of thing the administrative branch of the government should be focusing on.

Period.

If Monnett's reasoning about the observation is wrong, so be it. Do you expect a wildlife ecologist to simply ignore an observation like that? Surely it is his obligation to report on it. It would be hard to convince him not to think about what it means.

Being wrong is part of advancing hypotheses. It's part of science. It may be more fun to be right, but being wrong is not something you expect to bring down the Spanish Inquisition.

Now, I suppose this doesn't obviate the possibility of some gross misallocation of funds that Monnett manages, as has been darkly hinted. But the interrogation really doesn't seem to go to that point at all. Indeed, the transcript is quite funny in spots, in a sad and outrageous sort of way. It is the usual sort of nonsense that you can see everywhere on the internet, a person with vastly less knowledge making nonsensical allegations about a scientist's work in an arch tone suggestive of malfeasance, but in addition to the usual intellectual mismatch (Monnett can't seem to hide a sneer at one point) there is also the peculiar intrusion of legal authority into the life of a scientist.

As you consider the innuendo, consider in addition to the ludicrous transcripts of the intrepid gumshoes grilling the poor guy, the bizarre Bush-administration-science-commisars episode. (Also a minor echo here.) Lomborg goes on endlessly about them too. It is clear that the bunkosphere, the Bush administration and various career appointments they made to the executive branch, and the Inhofe-Perry axis, have an absolutely ridiculously huge and mean bug up their butts about polar bears.

Consider also that Monnett is under a gag order while the bunkosphere is not.
Also consider the Texas lease contingency scam. Scientists, even many of those who manage large budgets, are not trained or experienced administrators. Like Texas deeds of title, a flaw can always be found in how a project was managed if one has the heart to throw an innocent scientist and his entourage onto the fire. The acceptance or rejection of any particular management style is almost a matter of taste.

Thus if someone in authority wishes to hang aspersions systematically on results one dislikes and not on results one likes, for reasons which may have little to do with the underlying truth of the matter, there is plenty of rope around. Of course, once can resort to this extreme course only very rarely, as one does not actually want to have one's entire scientific community pack their bags for some less dangerous country. At least, one hasn't until now.

Real crimes should be prosecuted, of course, but neither hackers nor government appointees should be encouraged to go on vast fishing expeditions on the basis of accusations of marginal transgressions and judgment calls blown out of any reasonable proportion. This applies to Monnett, and applies to Sauron's previous and ongoing victims as well, notably Mike Mann who amazingly still manages to get some work done despite the constant harassment of (what I certainly hope is) the biggest fishing expedition in the climate world.

Update: For some reason (grumble) much of the conversation is happening at Eli's. Fair enough, but please, if you haven't looked at it before, don't miss the aforementioned bizarre Bush-administration-science-commisars episode. Polar bears make those people especially crazy for some reason.

Also Neven has had a very similar position up for a couple of weeks now.

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Image: Union of Concerned Scientists. More here. (I also really like #6.)

Five States with Strongest Obama Support in 2008

Which states gave Obama the most votes in the previous election?

Well, to be sure, this will weight larger states more. But in some ways that matters.

It matters what state has the largest numbers of supporters of a reasoned, reasonable policy. Those are people who can provide money and energy as well as electoral votes. Those are people who can swing local elections. Those are people you don't want to alienate.

The largest number of votes for Obama, by a wide margin, came from California, with 7.25 million. In second place, New York State, with 4.63 million Obama votes. In third place, Florida, with 4.14 million.

Texas is in fourth place with 3.52 million Obama voters (admittedly only 43.8 % of votes cast in Texas), edging out Illinois, Obama's home state, with 3.32 million or 61.8%.

There were more Obama voters in Texas than in Illinois, or Michigan, or Pennsylvania, or North Carolina. More than in Massachusetts and Connecticut combined. More than in Wisconsin and Minnesota combined. More than in Washington state and Oregon combined.

Kindly treat stereotypes of Texas the way you treat stereotypes of anybody else, please. Remember there are 43% of us who do not like the way Texas votes, and that is a whole lot of folks.

That's not enough to be pleased with but it's too many to ignore.

Thanks.

Texas Real Estate

"In many instances [the landholder] had received a first-rate skinning when his land was leased. For example, after an agreement had been reached on the terms of a lease, I may have switched the papers upon him while he put on his glasses. But the principal racket, and one it will do well to remember if you own an acre of land, is this.

"A wildcat (a shot-in-the-dark or blue-sky exploratory well) is being drilled within a mile or so of your land. I have timed my trip within a week or so of the completion of the exploratory well. You'd already been offered a dollar an acre, think it worth five, so you ask me ten.

"I try, for the window dressing, to beat you down on the price. But finally, though you are scared stiff that I am going to back away from the trade entirely, I let you have your way. I write something on a piece of paper binding both of us to the trade, contingent, of course, on the validity of your title. To that you, as a fair-minded person, agree. And I've got you stretched over a barrel.

"A flaw can be found in any Texas land title. The acceptance or rejection of any particular one is almost a matter of taste. If the wildcat makes a producing well, your lease is worth fifty dollars an acre and up, and I take it for the agreed-upon ten. If the well fails, I don't like your title, and would like to see the color of the man's eyes that can make me pay for it."

From "Texas: A World in Itself" by George Perry (1942)

Groundwater in Texas

The hydrology of Texas is amazingly complex. Here's the major aquifers:



There's a map of minor aquifers too. They can't easily show them on the same map because of overlaps.

Better version of this map and others are available for the clicking from TWDB

Tex: Post Factoids

Although Luling is much closer into Austin, the first Texas town I encountered which actually smelled of the oilfield it is surrounded by was Post TX, way up in the panhandle.

And you know, I never really felt the scale of the wind industry before driving through all of Boone Pickens's holdings south of Abilene. It was exactly the same way with the oil a couple of years earlier, and the moments when I "got it" were the moment when I saw the Dow plant near the coast, and the moment I smelled Post.

This wasn't even my first time in the Panhandle. There was the earlier trip through Spur and Turkey, with Irene.

Anyway, despite the odor, or arguably because of it, Post appears a relatively prosperous little outpost. (Wikipedia has a better-than-standard bunch of pics of Post, including one of the exact spot depicted here in my photo.)

The corner of the world where New Mexico and Texas meet is a place of amazing scale and purport, where long skeins of pipe carrying water, oil, gas, and even brackish water and CO2 hither and yon are in the process of doing what Texans have always done. What Texans do and have always done, in the short, amazing history of their vast, peculiar territory, always, since the age of the buffalo, is extract value from their surroundings and sell it to the world.

Despite what I now discover from Wikipedia are Post's utopian origins (almost every town in the West has idiosyncratic origins in one way or another), and despite the unusually good repair (particularly for rural Texas) of pretty much everything I saw in Post, Post is no Utopia.

It's not Utopia, it's just noplace. (*)

While Post is well-maintained and is probably a fine little community, there is little overt sign of the vast wealth that has poured through it. That is to say that all the crossed pipes heading every which way are supporting one and only one thing: the extraction of wealth from the landscape. That wealth is destined for delivery as nearly intact as possible to massive property holders with mansions near Houston or Denver or Santa Clara, and to bankers and stockholders everywhere whose great-granddaddy's were barely literate Tennessee mountain small game hunters who came down here once because why the hell not?

But there are two sides to this. Why not extract the wealth if you can manage it?

This land that is currently supporting more people than Australia doesn't look like much. The Mexicans ceded it to the coon hunters and wild men of the Appalachians because it was too hot, the weather too fickle, too far from civilization in Mexico City. They simply couldn't pull together a string of colonies to hold a Mexican society together, and not for want of effort. Except for the Gulf Coast, where a lost, purportedly naked, thermophile culture was obliterated very early on, and until the equestrian Comanche made the some native peoples' last stands in North Texas, the native presence was also rather light, though the locals have little trouble to this day finding arrowheads at likely camping spots near rivers.

How could the industrial civilization make so much of this place when its predecessors could make so little of it? A simple fact of geography explains it all. The land is porous. Skeins of fluid travel vast distances beneath it. So hidden under the harsh, unpromising terrain sit the three fluids of modern life.

Water. Gas. Oil.

(And, I can't help thinking, over the top of it all, now and again, the fourth fluid was spilled. Blood.)



The point is, there is plenty of wealth here. You just have to have the wherewithall to pump it out. And this we have done, or at least countenanced to be done on our behalf. And this we are still doing.

Does it matter that the soils of the panhandle are being used up? You could argue that it matters not a whit. The soils might as well be used up on the day the water runs out. Anything else wouldn't be cost-effective!

In these places where, even if the current droughtiness really isn't a harbinger of the future, it doesn't rain enough to be worth mentioning. But the soil is fertile and sunshine is ample and the growing season is long and water is to be had underground. In consequence one has two choices regarding the water. One can pump up the water and use it to grow lots of things and make a lot of money until the water runs out. Or one can do nothing while one's neighbor does the pumping and profiting.

Fluids are funny that way. They don't actually stay put.

So the ancient water underground is very much like the oil in another way.

The fluids are here because the land is limestone, an uplift of an ancient sea floor, chock-a-block with caves and underground rivers and deep ancient mysteries that haven't just been bulldozed by glaciers. And the person who owns the land above a given puddle or river, should he or she find it, has the right to pump up as much as the pump will reach. And the right to do nothing. But under the laws and traditions of Texas, no person has the right to prevent his neighbor from exploiting his own property.

The state will appropriate property for roads and reservoirs, but otherwise mostly prefers to keep hands off. And federal influence on local affairs has been frowned upon hereabouts from the day Texas entered the Union in 1845, never mind when it was forced to re-enter in 1865.

So the fluids are fated to be pumped. Nobody can imagine anything else happening. There is no mechanism imagined to stop it. And few of the beneficiaries really want anything to happen differently, at least until their own particular well dries out.

Of course, the oil and the gas will recharge even more slowly that the Ogallala Aquifer, but the calculation is the same. There's wealth down there. If I leave it there too long somebody else will get it. So someone who has enough land to matter is likely to suggest that one might as well drill here. Now.

Without understanding that a lot of livelihoods of real human beings are at stake, it is foolish to try to understand the opposition.

Yet, I am seeing the public awareness over climate science turn into a battle over climate policy, and then a battle over party, and now increasingly a really terrifying impulse to refight the civil war. Please, for the love of God, leave the region-baiting the f alone.

Guys, it's a purple country.



Please let's not get screwed up with stereotypes, especially hopelessly clueless ones.

Now the map is really interesting insofar as Texas is concerned. (Non-natives may not recognize it as representing proportion of democratic bluest to republican reddest votes by US county, scaled by population. Specifically this is the 2004 election of Bush II over Kerry.)

You will see that much of the state is not so red as you might presume. Rather, there is a bolt of shocking red through the parts of the state where the extractive industries are pretty much unmitigated by anything else. Leaving aside the remaining genuinely conservative strongholds of Utah and Indiana, not places that appeal to me but cultures worthy of respect, are the red zones really just the places where wealth is extracted as opposed to built up? The brightest red swaths are the open country, where most people work in or for extractive industries. The bright blue blobs are the cores of the cities.

Since our map is population-scaled already, the blue areas, though occasionally flamboyant, use less energy (per area on this map) than comparably sized red populations. (On the other hand, area-scaled the cities are much worse, and this is easier to perceive in real life without the assistance of a peculiar map.)

Anyway, please do us the kindness of thinking about Texas as a whole country, not as a character on a sitcom. Yes, we do have our eccentricities and we don't mind flaunting some of them on occasion. But so what. Do you really want your Texans bland and boring? But there are twenty five million of us. A few of us here and there are bound to have something to say for ourselves.

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PS. Of course this is not to justify in any sense the horribly overdrawn, Inhofesque attitudes toward climate science of our esteemed governor, never mind his grand ambitions.

Molly Ivins, who so personified Austin, is sadly no longer with us, but a quotation of hers is being widely quoted. It certainly seems relevant.

Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention.

Everybody knows what Molly would have advised. We are just sad not to know just exactly how she would have said it.

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(*) Yes, on purpose of course.

Stop the Environment!

Stop The Environment from Ed Asner

On Nonscientific Bias in Climate Research

A well-known researcher, who requested anonymity, said this in private communication:

On the claim that climate alarmism is due to research funding: this incentive exists in all science, yet it's never occurred in the past. And there's no evidence that it's occurring here: there's no way to dismiss the null hypothesis that scientists are worried because the data are worrying.

On the other hand, there is evidence that climate skeptics are truly working off an agenda. See Spencer's statement "I view my job a little like a legislator, supported by the taxpayer, to protect the interests of the taxpayer and to minimize the role of government." There's no way that you can reach that conclusion by looking at data. It's a pre-determined political goal.

Mr. Gore's Blurt

It might be said to be unbecoming to a former Vice President and former President-Elect to use foul language in public. It's possible he didn't want it published.

But it's true enough, every word of it. Even if there's room for argument at the fringes, the key points of the bunkosphere simply don't add up to a supportable view of what is going on. In fact, they don't even try.

As Eli says, Gore, and Romm, and Hansen (and one might add Eli and myself) may not be perfect but more importantly what they (we) are is mostly right. The posture that the situation is, without any doubt, not serious enough to merit a response is a combination of ignorance and arrogance that seems medieval, until you reflect that medieval errors could not do nearly so much damage.

Update: ABC news reports that the public release of this presentation was indeed inadvertent on Mr. Gore's part.

Chess

Photo + Micaël Reynaud

via + M. Ayche

Cluelessness

Watching the worst of the NotTheIPCC gang at work is probably not a productive obsession.

But sometimes the examples are so astonishing as to be entertaining if not revealing:

"The real problem with the models is they show an exponential rise in the rate of sea-level rise, the so-called hockey stick approach," [Professor emeritus F.] said.

I'd like to know whether an actual professor that emitted this third-hand muddled ignorant juvenile blithering, whether it was a complete fabrication by the reporter at the Australian, or whether it was a collaboration of some kind.

Regardless, a newspaper capable of stringing those words together and publishing them is providing no actual service.