How we talk about extreme events nowadays

Batting Average Change: an analogy to climate change/severe events discourse. Suppose a hitter has improved batting average this year
Now you see the batter get a base hit. Somebody asks you whether the base hit was because of the improved batting average.

The alarmist says "Of course the base hit was caused by the batting average! Batting averages cause hits!"
The Polyanna says "Obviously not! In fact, the base hit has nothing to do with the batting average!"

The journalist sees that truth must be somewhere in between. https://drboli.wordpress.com/2009/12/15/the-duck/ … SOME hits are caused by batting average, some not The wise scientist publishes a paper attributing 20% of the base hit to the improved batting average, the rest to natural variation. 

This happens every time there is a base hit. For some reason, this discourse illuminates nobody.

Writing Exercise

Took a 90 minute workshop on food writing.

 The thing I learned is that, while I was trained to stop using adjectives in college, for a non-academic audience, adjectives are good. So this is my attempt to re-adjectivate my writing.

 The exercise was to write whatever you were inspired to write by a paper plate containing a fig and a walnut.

People liked mine. I cleaned it up a bit but not too much. Here the lovely, adjectival, effusive, evocative, sentimental and personal thing is in all its overweening glory.

 ===

WHAT IS NOT ON THE PLATE 

A walnut half and a fig. Our distant ancestors would have taken such delight.
It's an atavistic plate, an ancient masterpiece.
One can imagine such a delight in the dynasties of Egypt. 

But not for the pharaoh, no, the plate demands more. 

Some goat cheese, a splash of balsamic vinegar, a dab of honey.
Broil it for a few moments.
And surely a glass of red wine. 

The fruity, sticky grit of the fig
The wild sweetness of the honey
The intricate pungency of the aged vinegar
The earthy smoothness of the goat cheese
The toothy sweet crunch of the toasted walnut
And the slow savoring of the cool, glowing, bittersweet wine. 

Bring on the pipers, the drums, the dancers, the jugglers, the fool!
Nothing has changed. 

Cooking is an old old story, but it is made new on every telling.

===

 The crowd really thought I had nailed it.

But I had to stop myself from apologizing just the same. You know what another food analogy is? Schmalz.

The top emitters and our quandary

ABC of Australia has provided a cute embeddable widget (*) to help visualize the emissions problem:

We see that these 15 "contribute" (if that's the right word. "dyscontribute"?) well over half of ongoing emissions.

Also, some interesting observations by Ken Caldeira cited by Joe Romm, which I will steal because they are worth considering:

There is some noise around the idea that it useful to think about some amount of “allowable CO2 emissions budget” that would keep the world under 2 C of global warming.

This concept is dangerous for two reasons:

1. There are no such things as an “allowable CO2 emissions.” There are only “damaging CO2 emissions” or “dangerous CO2 emissions.” Every CO2 emission causes additional damage and creates additional risk. Causing additional damage and creating additional risk with our CO2 emissions should not be allowed.

2. If you look at how our politicians operate, if you tell them you have a budget of XYZ, they will spend XYZ. Politicians will reason: “If we’re not over budget, what’s to stop us to spending? Let the guys down the road deal with it when the budget has been exceeded.” The CO2 emissions budget framing is a recipe for delaying concrete action now.

We should be framing the issue around what we need to do today: stop building things with tailpipes and smokestacks and start retiring the things we have already built that do have tailpipes and smokestacks. Stop using the sky as a waste dump for our CO2 emission.

These are things that we can hold politicians accountable to today. Trying to hold politicians to a budget that will be reached 30 years in the future is a recipe for disaster.

If our current crop of politicians is any indication, it is unreasonable to expect politicians to feel constrained by something that might happens 30 years from now, long after they have left office.

The key point is that every CO2 emission is bad; the budget for “allowable CO2 emissions” should be zero.

When I emit CO2, I am transgressing against nature and future generations. It is not something allowed; it is a violation.

As long as we are still building CO2-emitting devices, the politicians are failing, and we must hold them accountable for their failure today, not 30 years into the future.

So, in short, we have two problems. First, all of this emission is fundamentally illegitimate. Second, there is no global sovereignty to allocate the pain of slowing down, so in negotiations each nation jockeys for position to minimize its own commitment.So even in the unlikely event of successful negotiations, they will be inadequate.

The fact that no power speaks for the earth as a whole is systematically killing the earth.

===

(*) Actually, the widget is sort of gratuitous, and they'll probably take it down someday anyway, so here are the three views for later reference if the link breaks:

How Times Change

Seen on Facebook. Artist unidentified (attribution appreciated).

Image by Pierre Brignaud, a fellow Montrealer. The drawing won third prize in a contest, which had an award of absolutely nothing whatsoever:

3ème prix bidon: Un concours international de dessin d'humour organisé par un organisme renommé du Québec dont je tairai le nom m'a décerné le 3ème prix pour le thème : Humour noir.

Le premier prix : 2500$, 2ème et 3ème... Rien...

La première fois que je gagne un prix absolument sans valeur et qui me fait vraiment honte!

The Original Spartacus A P Pepsi Cola Oriental Restaurant

Well, I'm trying to pull together some longer writing and trying to keep my mind intact in the light of the fact that battle these days seems to be between the forces of malicious self-aggrandizement versus the forces of ignorant self-righteousness. Between that and having a cold and dealing with another aging relative, today I just couldn't cope.

I just wandered off to a Chinese buffet for some self indulgent soup and fried things and noodles. Irene being too sane to accompany me on this modest bit of self-destruction, I grabbed a book at random.

I don't recall why I purchased Daniel Pinkwater's memoir Chicago Days, Hoboken Nights in the first place.

I had been mildly amused by his monologues on NPR back in the days when I had to drive a lot and when All Things Considered was still a tolerable listen, before it too fallen prey to the forces of journalistic cowardice and compulsive difference-splitting that have pretty much destroyed the American collective capacity to think about any damned thing.

Maybe it was on special. I'm a sucker for a book bargain.

I recall reading it, and being mildly amused.

But Irene has this thing, you know, being a retired OCD and hoarding treatment specialist, this thing where you shouldn't have a collection of things that is too much bigger than the capacity of the house which contains it. And we're down to 1100 square feet, no attic or basement to speak of, and just two smallish closets. (Which by human historical standards is luxurious and all, to be sure. And it is a very nice little apartment with a spectacular location; please understand I'm not complaining.)

But the thing is, there's a perpetual battle where I want more bookshelves and Irene wants to me to own no more books than I will be able to read in my remaining years, as my mind continues to dwindle to a shadow of its former self.

So there have been several rounds of collecting up hundreds of books and selling them for two cents on the dollar to a reseller. Every time, I considered giving away this mildly amusing little book, read a few random paragraphs, chuckled, and spared it from recycling.

Today I started reading it again. I can't really explain how or why I suddenly adore this book so much. Maybe there's some nostalgic sentimentality for the twentieth century that couldn't really come into bloom until the time itself really began to fade.

I'm not sure how much value this book will be to people who are younger, unless they are writing period fiction set in the sixties. But somehow, despite its themes of incompetence and poor taste and failure and greed, to me it amounts to a celebration of the human spirit.

It's all non-fiction, but written by a guy with an eye for the stranger corners of the world, and who seems to belong there. This is a slice of the comedy hidden in the tragedy of gritty urban life in the middle of the 20th century. I've been there, but somehow nothing I write is like this, chosen literally at random:

Overall, my reaction to fashion food is this: ha! You may blacken all the redfish you like - I know there is nothing apt to be discovered or invented to surpass what I have experienced long years past.

I speak of the Original Spartacus A P Pepsi Cola Oriental Restaurant - the ultimate. It was known to regulars as the Original Spartacus - the sign outside displayed the full-length enigmatic handle. ... It was a Greek restaurant. In the same sense that Praxiteles was a stonemason. Dim and dingy, lit by a few fluorescent fixtures, no one of the with more than one bulb working, it was frequented by artists, communists, and Puerto Rican cab drivers, some of whom were artists and communists.

The walls bore one of the last examples of the work of the Mad Muralist - a specialist in Levantine and Middle Eastern restaurants, whose hallmarks were stencils and silver radiator paint. In the case of the Original Spartacus, the motif was many silver Acropoles applied at various angles to the blue walls.

There was no menu as such. Jimmy, the proprietor, sized you up and served you what he thought you needed. Some of Jimmie's creations were boiled porgies, dandelion salad, incredible tender lamb with orzo, coffee to raise the dead, and a sort of custard I've never encountered again.

The price for all this was determined by Jimmy's assessment of how much you appreciated his work. If you left anything on your plate, the price went up.

For page after page, Pinkwater has me somehow wishing I were there again and yet immensely glad that I'm not anymore. At the same time. Pretty much how I feel about my own time and place, except in reverse. I guess life's like that. But not everyone has the knack of reminding you.

I failed to fully appreciate Pinkwater's special knack for telling a colorful story over the years, and yet I saw it well enough to keep this odd little book while I let go of so many others.

I'm glad I kept it long enough to appreciate it for the gem that it is. And I'm glad I can recommend it to you in this day of instant gratification. You can get it on your Kindle for less than a buck.

I'm gladdest of all to note that despite being even fatter and more self-indulgent than myself, Daniel Pinkwater is alive and well enough to still be producing whatever the hell it is that he produces. I hope he'll notice this little review, and that he will accept my thanks for brightening a blazingly bright and ominously hot but otherwise spiritually gloomy Texas day.

Whaddya know, Pinkwater, you've been a Zen master all this time and didn't even know it.

They concede nothing; they can't

The perception of competing polarized scientific camps within climatology is a politically constructed illusion.

I argued as such in response to a question I saw on Quora:

What are the logical premises shared by both sides of the AGW debate?

 The questioner, Martin Stoehr, proposes for starters that:

* The average land surface temperature has increased over the last 200 years

 * A CO2 molecule does not absorb EM energy at visible wavelengths and does absorb EM energy at infrared and near-IR wavelengths (1437nm, 1955nm, 2013nm, 2060nm, 4257nm asym-stretch, 7205nm sym-stretch, 14993nm bending: Page on wesleyan.edu)

Well, you'd think.

I respond as follows:

---

The question holds a premise that there are two coherent scientific positions. But there aren't.

Within science, there is no polarization, although there is a spectrum of opinion on a lot of open questions. The illusion that there are two competing camps is promoted by political interests. If you look at the actual scientific perspective of the few people who are constantly invoked by the naysayer camp, you will find no coherence or commonality among their opinions. Many of them are frank crackpots, and all of them are, by definition, scientific eccentrics.

Therefore there is almost nothing or maybe nothing at all that they would agree to among themselves. They really don't have an alternative theory they are advancing.

 It should be considered settled that

* humans affect the climate in many ways
* greenhouse gases are among those ways
* CO2 accumulates so the greenhouse perturbation grows every year
* CO2 accumulation causes energy to accumulate in the climate system on short and long time scales, which causes warming, some of which is delayed
* warming is observed, most of which is a direct result of human impacts
*  a great deal more warming is to be expected.

That some warming has occurred is obvious - sea level is rising and this provides a crude global thermometer just by itself. You don't need a whole lot of observations and subtle data manipulations to observe this.

Also it is demonstrated that the rate of CO2 accumulation overwhelms the ocean's buffering, creating ocean acidification.

We can debate ethically, economically, and politically what to do about all these things. We can debate scientifically about the numbers and scales. But those facts should be considered established.

People questioning these points are very rarely real scientists in the physical climatology domain . Such exceptions as there are don't agree with each other, so they collectively concede nothing.

DSCOVR - Better Very Very Very Late than Never

You'd think people who think we have the earth's energy balance wrong would be eager to go ahead and fund a science mission that could prove it. But you'd be wrong. You don't seem to understand how know-nothingism works. The denier position is not that we don't know enough - it is that we can't know anything and therefore we can do whatever we want. (If you don't follow the syllogism, you still don't understand know-nothingism.)

So observing the energy balance of the sunlit side of the planet turns out to be possible because of a peculiar consequence of orbital dynamics. And it turns out that, although a clever idea for "an expensive screen-saver", and arguably worth it for that purpose alone, such a satellite, properly instrumented, could offer important constraints on the earth's energy budget.

In short, if the consensus understanding of climate change really were badly wrong, this instrument would almost surely provide enough information to prove it.

The instrumentation and platform was proposed in 1998 in conversations initiated by then Vice-President Gore and quickly constructed; it was ready for launch in 1999. But Republican pressure in the 1999 budget negotiations mothballed the project, disparagingly called "Gore-Sat" by its opponents. (In some circles, and mention of Mr. Gore is considered disparaging. He's sort of like Mike Mann in that way, a serious, moderate, thoughtful and highly competent person who has somehow been painted as a demon. Witness modern discourse at its best.)

And in mothballs it sat. Because Al Gore. Because conspiracy. Surely not because the data would utterly fail to upend the existing consensus and would help refine it.

Until this year, when it was launched. Until today, when its first image of the whole earth was released, to much calloo-ing and callay-ing.

Here's Neil de Grasse Tyson's celebration of the image, which was released as a memo by the White House.

Here's astronaut Scott Kelly.

Here's Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic.

All the happy talk today seems to be trying to bury the very interesting back story of Republicans practically sabotaging the launch by delaying it for an absurd amount of time. Wikipedia has links on that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Climate_Observatory
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/01/science/politics-keeps-a-satellite-earthbound.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/opinion/15park.html

Going back to what I myself said a few years back, there is likely to be a deeper and more interesting story here than has been told to date:

http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2007/09/earth-observation-covr-up.html

Would it have been more sensible to redesign the platform rather than launch an almost 2 decade old gizmo? Is this the best instrumentation for the mission to launch today?  I don't propose to have answers for those questions; I would not be surprised if the contemporary purpose of the launch is almost as political as the purposes of the absurd delay.

These are also things worth talking about.

That all admitted, I would defend the screen-saver aspect of it. Actual photos of the whole earth available on a daily basis are worth the few cents per capita that we actually spent on this thing. Providing collectively funded information of collective utility is a legitimate function of government.

Science has never been the sole purpose of NASA, or we wouldn't have sent astronauts to the moon.

Apparently taking pictures of Pluto is less controversial than taking pictures of the Earth, though.

Welp, Pluto is cool too. Perhaps a bit too cool, but that's another tale, nicht wahr?

Looking for Consensus in All the Wrong Places

There's lots of bother about what the climate community agrees or disagrees to and to what extent.

This all follows on from Naomi Oreskes' investigation into the existence of a consensus in the literature basically on the question as to whether the future holds an unusual amount of climate disruption. (It does and the literature is consistent with near unanimity on that question.)

But whether there is, as is commonly claimed a "97%" consensus depends crucially on who you include as a scientist, what question you are asking, and how you go about asking it.

I think the most consistent and interesting pattern is that the more a person specializes in climate as a physical system, the more alarmed they are by our future prospects. At least two surveys have shown this.

Doran & Zimmerman 2009

1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant? 2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures? 

... 

In general, as the level of active research and specialization in climate science increases, so does agreement with the two primary questions (Figure 1). In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change (79 individuals in total). Of these specialists, 96.2% (76 of 79) answered “risen” to question 1 and 97.4% (75 of 77) answered yes to question 2.

This result is further confirmed by a more recent and more extensive study conducted by Verheggen et al. There's much of interest there, but I'd like to focus on the following, which examines the distribution of opinion among the group that the prior study would consider the most expert.

Here we see that the gradient of concern vs expertise arguably goes even to the most expert. The more you have published, the more likely you are to consider the anthropogenic component of warming to date to be "strong". And that's worth considering.

When science discovers something alarming, how does the alarm propagate? It makes sense that the best informed people would be the most alarmed if the cause for alarm is real, while if it is dubious or baseless, the distribution would be very different.

But why examine the consensus itself? Why have there been these various follow-ons to Oreskes' study? It seems to be largely driven by a group of naysayers who wish to insist either that there is no such consensus at all, or that consensus is an illegitimate basis for argument.

 This should all come as something of a shock to people interested in public health, where a formal consensus process has long been the mechanism of interaction between science and policy. For instance, "In the United States, for example, the National Institutes of Health promotes about five to six consensus panels per year, and organizes this knowledge by means of a special Consensus Development Program, managed by the NIH's Office of Disease Prevention (ODP)."

 So why doesn't climate science have such a consensus process? That should settle all this argument and allow us to move on on the basis of formally selected information. It seems like a good idea. Indeed, right-wing commentator Peggy Noonan suggested exactly this in 2006:

During the past week's heat wave--it hit 100 degrees in New York City Monday--I got thinking, again, of how sad and frustrating it is that the world's greatest scientists cannot gather, discuss the question of global warming, pore over all the data from every angle, study meteorological patterns and temperature histories, and come to a believable conclusion on these questions: Is global warming real or not? If it is real, is it necessarily dangerous? What exactly are the dangers? Is global warming as dangerous as, say, global cooling would be? Are we better off with an Earth that is getting hotter or, what with the modern realities of heating homes and offices, and the world energy crisis, and the need to conserve, does global heating have, in fact, some potential side benefits, and can those benefits be broadened and deepened? 

Also, if global warning is real, what must--must--the inhabitants of the Earth do to meet its challenges? And then what should they do to meet them? You would think the world's greatest scientists could do this, in good faith and with complete honesty and a rigorous desire to discover the truth.

You know what would be a great pity, though? What if there had been a consensus process of just this sort in place for decades, and nobody noticed. Fortunately the world is not that silly, is it?

A Policy Naysayer Makes His Case

...with Lomborg grinning enthusiastically from the panel

 

Peter Huber’s video is interesting and worth watching.

He expresses the Prisoner’s Dilemma aspect of the situation very well. His conclusion “chasing the impossible is never worth the money” is of course a tautology.

But there are other players than individual economic interests and national economic interests. There is the interest of the whole world. And the collective interest at the global level is profoundly opposed to the sovereign national interests in a classic tragedy of the commons setup.

Economically, leaving the carbon in the ground is a hugely losing proposition as long as there is no accounting for the diffuse but accumulating and persistent damages of fossil fuels. Specific interests will always look for ways to continue this lack of accountability. The market will continue to slowly but hugely damage our collective future as long as this accounting is neglected.

Huber, like most people with an axe to grind, considers only one side of the ledger. So while most of what he says explicitly is right, his implicit selection of evidence is profoundly biased, and his conclusion is distorted by the blinders he is wearing. Others looking only in the other direction see the transition to carbon free fuels as an economic boon, which is, if anything, even sillier.

The energy/climate future will be expensive, difficult, and disruptive. It’s too late to avoid that. The longer we pretend that changes will be either unnecessary on one hand or easy on the other, the more expensive, difficult, and disruptive the future will be.

Wherein Mr Fuller Calls Me Out as a Kook

If you enjoy that sort of thing, go have a look.