Obstructionism Means Defeat For Republicans This Fall

Once again, the Republican obstructionists stop us from getting anything done--the defeat they deserve can't come soon enough.

Republicans have blocked efforts to bring a global warming bill up for a final Senate vote after a bitter debate over its economic costs and whether it would push gasoline prices higher.

Democratic leaders Friday fell 12 votes short of getting the 60 votes needed to end a Republican filibuster on the measure. The vote was 48-36.

Majority Leader Harry Reid now must decide whether to pull the bill and push the climate change issue to next year with a new Congress and a new president.

Let's get something straight--the Democrats in the Senate needs to quit playing games with Mitch McConnell. Bare knuckles and shin kicks are the rule of the day, and decorum is a fool's paradise with such people. Any Democrat that votes with McConnell from here on out gets heaped with scorn and abuse, and the promise of funding for a primary challenger. The best thing that can be said of this is that it would be worse if they were accommodating and reasonable. The way they're acting now means there will be more material to use against them in attack ads this fall. The Republicans are more and more vulnerable each and every time McConnell pulls this crap because they need to start breaking with that clown, and all of the other clowns, because they are going to run into a buzzsaw in November. Reid MUST campaign in Kentucky against McConnell, and he has to keep exposing the Republicans for what they are--bitter, pathetic obstructionists.

--WS

Creative Forestry Could Help Slow Down Global Warming

By selectively removing certain tree species, scientists are studying whether or not they can push the growth of trees that will absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere:

Chain saws scream in a northern Michigan forest, but it's not the familiar sound of lumberjacks. This time the tree killers are environmental researchers. They hope that years from now the aspens they remove will be replaced with a healthy mix of maples, oaks, beeches and pines - which should soak up more carbon dioxide from an ever warmer world.

The scientists hope to take a 100-acre section of the University of Michigan Biological Station research forest closer to the state it was in before logging, when it was dominated by different species of trees instead of the present-day aspens.

They say the experiment is the first they're aware of that involves removing large numbers of trees to promote growth of other species that will boost carbon absorption. It comes as governments and businesses around the world look for economically feasible ways to limit climate change.

It seems simple--a diverse woodland of thriving trees makes for a more balanced effort to produce and maintain forests that can better absorb carbon dioxide:

Carbon dioxide makes up more than 80 percent of the human-produced U.S. greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming, the Department of Energy says.

Scientists believe a diverse woodland will hold more carbon because it will be richer in nitrogen and use sunlight more efficiently. Both are key factors in photosynthesis, during which carbon is absorbed, said Christoph Vogel, a University of Michigan forest ecologist.

"We've been managing forests for lumber or pulp, or perhaps as habitat for deer or quail," said project leader Peter Curtis, an Ohio State University forest ecologist. "Many economists think that managing them for carbon will be a fact of life in the not-too-distant future."

The concern that I have is volume. It would take hundreds of thousands of acres of timber in virtually every region of the world where trees grow in order to make a dent in the problem. How much is enough to actually make an effort? How much forest land is available to be groomed in this way? Enough to make a difference?

Skeptics question forests' long-term reliability for sequestering carbon. They can be cut down, burned or destroyed by disease or insects. Also, it's hard to measure their storage capacity, said Jonathan Pershing, climate and energy program director for the World Resources Institute.

"Are you so sure you can tell us how much carbon is saved from your tree? That's the kind of question that makes people dubious about forest management" as a tool for limiting greenhouse gases, Pershing said.

Curtis and Vogel can't say yet how much carbon the new blend of trees will absorb, but they hope to find out.

The 10,000-acre research forest has two steel towers, both more than 100 feet high and roughly a mile apart, with devices that measure carbon dioxide flowing into and out of the trees. The towers transmit air samples to computers that track the data.

[Aerial photo of research area]

The researchers will compare carbon statistics from the woodlands where they've girded trees with data from the woodlands where they haven't. Aspens will remain in the latter area until they die naturally.

It should take seven to 10 years to determine whether the more diverse forest takes in more carbon, Curtis said. If so, the discovery could guide state and federal forest managers and even private landowners interested in using woodlands to fight climate change.

The Spy Who Posted His Professional Resume

No, it's not Instaputz...

A retired University of Tennessee professor is accused of conspiring to provide military secrets to a Chinese graduate student.

J. Reece Roth was indicted Tuesday on 18 charges related to violating the Arms Export Control Act and trying to defraud the U.S. Air Force.

The charges involve work performed by Roth and the student on an Air Force contract to develop flight controls for weapons-deploying unmanned aircraft.

The government says Roth failed to get permission to involve a foreign national in the work, carried sensitive documents on a lecture trip to China and directed wire transmissions of restricted technical data to China.

Roth's attorney says his client has done nothing illegal and conducted himself ethically and honestly.

Being the "wily" spy that he allegedly is, Roth seems to have committed the greatest sin that a spy can commit--he put his entire professional resume online. Here is the heavily edited version, and I'm just keeping all of the open references to working with foreign entities of interest, with China and with Chinese educators:

The most recent version of the professional resume [over ten pages in length] that Roth posted online and updated on January 3, 2008

J. Reece Roth, Ph. DProfessor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and IEEE FellowPlasma Sciences Laboratory (http://plasma.ece.utk.edu)Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The University of Tennessee
Knoxville, Tennessee
Dr. J. Reece Roth obtained an S. B. in Physics from MIT in 1959, and a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1963 with a major in Engineering Physics. He joined the NASA Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio in 1963, where he was Principal Investigator of the Lewis Electric Field Bumpy Torus Project until 1978. He is presently Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; an Honorary Professor at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, P.R.C; and an Interim Honorary Professor of the Shenzhen Campus of Tsinghua University, China.

...is an Honorary Professor, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 1992;

...and Interim HonoraryProfessor of the Shenzhen Campus of Tsinghua University, China, 2006-2008.

Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering

Iranian Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering

City of Hong Kong

Slovak Research and Development Agency

Prof. Roth published a 1985 textbook Introduction to Fusion Energy, which is now in its fifth printing, and a Chinese edition of which was published in 1993 by the Tsinghua University Press, Beijing.

Prof. Roth iscurrently writing a three-volume textbook, Industrial Plasma Engineering, the first volume of which was published by the Institute of Physics Press of Great Britain in January, 1995, and a Chinese edition of which was published in 1998 by the Chinese Academy of Sciences Press.

The second volume was published in July, 2001, and a Chinese translation is in preparation.

Since the early 1980’s, Prof. Roth has warned his students not to buy oceanfront property for their retirement because of the effects of global warming, and has devoted the first chapter of his fusion energy textbook (1985) and his industrial plasma engineering text (1995) to the issues of energy conservation and global warming.

"Mechanisms of Sterilization, Decontamination, and Surface EnergyEnhancement by Exposure to the One Atmosphere Uniform Glow Discharge Plasma (OAUGDP)",Paper No. D -1, Proceedings of the 12th Asian Conference on Electrical Discharges, November 19 -22, 2004, Shenzhen, P.R.C. (available at http://aced2004.tsinghua.edu.cn/)9.) Roth J. Reece (Invited)

I don't know about you, but anything this guy did was probably done by accident and by virtue of the fact that he was working on things well beyond a layman's understanding. I am not making the case that he is innocent. I am making the case that Professor Roth traveled the world, working on very complex subjects, and anything he may have transferred could have been done innocently and by accident. For some reason, I suspect that there has been a "misunderstanding" here.

It's just a hunch.

The Multi-decade Endgame of US Ascendancy

Change is on the way for the United States. Change is always around the corner, but it may be arriving faster than we think. Is it a new austerity? A new mindset? Something more humble and realistic, given the rapidly changing nature of our environment and our world? Or will there be a backlash against any kind of reordering of the American way of life?

Kevin Phillips looks at recent American history and sees parallels which should concern us all:

Premature fears have also dogged the United States. The decades after the 1968 election were marked by waves of a new national apprehension: that U.S. post-World War II global hegemony was in danger. The first, in 1968-72, involved a toxic mix of global trade and currency crises and the breakdown of the U.S. foreign policy consensus over Southeast Asia. Books emerged with titles such as "Retreat From Empire?" and "The End of the American Era." More national malaise followed Watergate and the fall of Saigon. Stage three came in the late 1980s, when a resurgent Japan seemed to be challenging U.S. preeminence in manufacturing and possibly even finance. In 1991, Democratic presidential aspirant Paul Tsongas observed that "the Cold War is over. . . . Germany and Japan won." Well, not quite.

In 2008, we can mark another perilous decade: the tech mania of 1997-2000, morphing into a bubble and market crash; the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; imperial hubris and the Bush administration's bungled 2003 invasion of Iraq. These were followed by OPEC's abandoning its $22-$28 price range for oil, with the cost per barrel rising over five years to more than $100; the collapse of global respect for the United States over the Iraq war; the imploding U.S. housing market and debt bubble; and the almost 50 percent decline of the U.S. dollar against the euro since 2002. Small wonder a global financial crisis is in the air.

Here, then, is the unnerving possibility: that another, imminent global crisis could make the half-century between the 1970s and the 2020s the equivalent for the United States of what the half-century before 1950 was for Britain. This may well be the Big One: the multi-decade endgame of U.S. ascendancy. The chronology makes historical sense -- four decades of premature jitters segueing into unhappy reality.

The most chilling parallel with the failures of the old powers is the United States' unhealthy reliance on the financial sector as the engine of its growth. In the 18th century, the Dutch thought they could replace their declining industry and physical commerce with grand money-lending schemes to foreign nations and princes. But a series of crashes and bankruptcies in the 1760s and 1770s crippled Holland's economy. In the early 1900s, one apprehensive minister argued that Britain could not thrive as a "hoarder of invested securities" because "banking is not the creator of our prosperity but the creation of it." By the late 1940s, the debt loads of two world wars proved the point, and British global economic leadership became history.

Any change or reordering of the way Americans live would affect vast areas of the country that were designed entirely for car travel and have almost nothing in the way of a public transportation infrastructure. Paul Krugman compares Atlanta and Berlin--to cities virtually identical in size. Berlin has subways, trains and bike riding areas and Atlanta has cars and very little else. The reality of rising energy prices means that suburban Atlanta could be isolated or abandoned in favor of living in a more densely populated area, served by public transportation. Krugman says that change is going to be difficult:

Changing the geography of American metropolitan areas will be hard. For one thing, houses last a lot longer than cars. Long after today’s S.U.V.’s have become antique collectors’ items, millions of people will still be living in subdivisions built when gas was $1.50 or less a gallon.

Infrastructure is another problem. Public transit, in particular, faces a chicken-and-egg problem: it’s hard to justify transit systems unless there’s sufficient population density, yet it’s hard to persuade people to live in denser neighborhoods unless they come with the advantage of transit access.

And there are, as always in America, the issues of race and class. Despite the gentrification that has taken place in some inner cities, and the plunge in national crime rates to levels not seen in decades, it will be hard to shake the longstanding American association of higher-density living with poverty and personal danger.

Still, if we’re heading for a prolonged era of scarce, expensive oil, Americans will face increasingly strong incentives to start living like Europeans — maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of our lives.

One thing that will likely change is the notion of extreme commuting, or living so far away from work that it is next to impossible to see how the costs of transportation could be covered by any reasonable salary:

It is said that doctors, when they ask you how much you drink, will take the answer and double it. When a commuter says, “It’s an hour, door-to-door,” tack on twenty minutes.

Seven hours is extraordinary, but four hours, increasingly, is not. Roughly one out of every six American workers commutes more than forty-five minutes, each way. People travel between counties the way they used to travel between neighborhoods. The number of commuters who travel ninety minutes or more each way—known to the Census Bureau as “extreme commuters”—has reached 3.5 million, almost double the number in 1990. They’re the fastest-growing category, the vanguard in a land of stagnant wages, low interest rates, and ever-radiating sprawl. They’re the talk-radio listeners, billboard glimpsers, gas guzzlers, and swing voters, and they don’t—can’t—watch the evening news. Some take on long commutes by choice, and some out of necessity, although the difference between one and the other can be hard to discern. A commute is a distillation of a life’s main ingredients, a product of fundamental values and choices. And time is the vital currency: how much of it you spend—and how you spend it—reveals a great deal about how much you think it is worth.

Resistance to any kind of change or rethinking of how to commute, how to improve our lives, and how to deal with new economic realities can best be explained by looking at the hysterical headlines from websites, such as the Drudge Report:



This headline, in underlined RED text while everything else is in regular black text, is designed to appeal to readers who might be offended that a Presidential candidate would suggest that Americans need to change their thinking about certain things. It is not designed to appeal to anyone who might agree with Obama, hence, the prominent position on the page (upper left, first story), the highlighting of the red text, and the out-of-context quote:

Pitching his message to Oregon's environmentally-conscious voters, Obama called on the United States to "lead by example" on global warming, and develop new technologies at home which could be exported to developing countries.

"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK," Obama said.

"That's not leadership. That's not going to happen," he added.

There may be new change and some form of austerity forced on Americans, but it won't happen quietly.

Al Gore Awarded Nobel Peace Prize

I awoke this morning to the news that the man we actually elected President in 2000 had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his tireless efforts on behalf of the planet to raise awareness of the impending climate crisis.

He shares the award with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Mr. Gore “is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted,” the Nobel citation said, referring to the issue of climate change. The United Nations committee, a network of 2,000 scientists that was organized in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program, has produced two decades of scientific reports that have “created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming,” the citation said.

Mr. Gore, who was traveling in San Francisco, said in a statement that he was deeply honored to receive the prize and planned to donate his half of the prize to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit climate group where he is chairman of the board.

“We face a true planetary emergency,” Mr. Gore said in his statement. “The climate crisis is not a political issue; it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.”

Congratulations Mr. President. You truly deserve the award. The Nobel committee has given the award to some specious recipients in the past. Giving it to you and the IPCC this year, following last year's award to Mohammed Yunnis goes a ways toward atoning for Kissinger and Arrafat.

That seizures, strokes and apoplexy are occurring all over right Blogistan is just gravy. Pass the popcorn, K-Lo is due to spontaneously combust in 5...4...3...2...1...

Arctic Sea Ice: an ecosystem in collapse

It's September, and all you weather wonks and wonkettes know what that means...the summer melt is for all intents and purposes over, and it is time to visit the National Snow and Ice Data Center and assess the state of sea ice in the arctic. This years news is frightening. This summers melt was the most extensive of any year since 1978, when the data was gathered the first time.

Let's start by defining what sea ice is. Sea ice is any ice floating in the ocean that formed from sea water. (Icebergs are not sea ice - they are pieces of glacier that have broken free.) Sea ice forms and melts with the polar seasons. While both arctic and antarctic sea ice are important parts of the ecosystem and vital to birds and mammals that rely on them for habitat; arctic sea ice appears to have a greater impact on climate regulation via heat exchange, and is important in the regulation of the salinity of the ocean and the moisture content in the air. During the winter months, it insulates the relatively warm ocean water from the frigid arctic air. The amount of moisture in the air determines the amount of cloud cover and precipitation received.

The satellite data is now available for this years melt, and it reveals that the regional ice cover is the lowest it has ever been. Previously, the worst year for sea ice was 2002, when it was 4% lower than any point since 1978, and 14% lower than the mean for the years 1979-2000. (Serreze et al. 2003). Historically, the low-ice years have been followed by returns to near-normal conditions, but 2002 was different. It was followed by two more low-ice years that almost matched the melt record of 2002, then a new record low was set again in 2005. When the data was tabulated for 2005, it was determined that the summers-end sea ice was diminishing by approximately 8% per decade, and was projected to be gone entirely during the summer months by 2070. That date will be adjusted to a point much nearer when the final results of this years data are tabulated.
The graph above is an updated time series of daily ice for 2007, as compared to the previous record, set in 2005 and the 1979-2000 average. Since this graph was generated on September 3, an additional 180,000 square kilometers (69,000 square miles) of sea ice have melted, although the day-to-day loss has slowed considerably, and the absolute minimum has likely occurred, or will any day. The minimum cover has occurred as late in the year as September 25. On September 10, the ice cover stood at 4.24 million square kilometers (1.63 million square miles), falling yet further below the previous record absolute minimum of 5.32 million square kilometers (2.05 million square miles) that occurred on September 20–21, 2005. The Northwest Passage became accessible a few days ago, and is still open.

Models of greenhouse warming have long shown an "arctic amplification" effect, and that climate change will be most pronounced over the Arctic Ocean. The loss of sea ice is accelerating, and the phenomenon is driving itself. Look at the photo of sea ice on the right. Water is dark, and ice is white. White ice reflects the heat of the sun back to space, dark water absorbs that light/energy and it is stored in the oceans in the form of elevated temperature. Expanses of dark water absorb massive amounts of the suns energy through the summer, and this heats the upper ocean. As air temperature drops in the winter, that energy is released back into the atmosphere, which increases air temperature, which slows the formation of sea ice...and so it goes.

The health of an ecosystem can be assessed by how well it's top predator fares. In the arctic, the top predator is the polar bear, and polar bears are not faring so well these days. Two years ago, researchers spotted polar bears swimming as far as 95 kilometers from shore, and the percentage of bears sighted in the water jumped from 4% to 20%. The carcasses of drowned polar bears have washed ashore and been recovered, and on post mortem examination, they show signs of starvation. Instances of cannibalism among the bear population have been reported as well. The species has been officially added to the endangered list, but it is entirely possible that the polar bear has passed the tipping point and will not survive in the wild. An ecosystem that loses it's top predator is an ecosystem in collapse. The collapse of the arctic ecosystem is something we should all be nervous about, because the effects will be far reaching, not just localized or isolated.

Well, at least they are consistent, right?

Then again, maybe not...

Steve McIntyre, a Canadian statistician and longtime global-warming skeptic had discovered a slight error in NASA's surface temperature records for the United States. He sent off an email to NASA, and James Hansen fixed the problem, crediting McIntyre for the good catch. Right-wing blogs went nuclear and said this shows that climate science is all a bunch of hokum.

But how big an error was it? Well, 1998 went from being listed as 0.01 degrees warmer than 1934 to being listed as 0.02 degrees cooler. That means 1934 is back to being the "official" hottest U.S. year on record, although it's still a statistical tie. Some of the other U.S. years in this decade were also downgraded slightly. This all had virtually no bearing on the global temperature record, in which 2005 still appears to be the hottest year on record, and Al Gore's claim that nine of the ten warmest years in history have occurred since 1995 is still operative. Check out RealClimate for some graphs.

0.03 degrees - hundredths of degrees are piffle when the climate scientists point to them, but reason to scrap thirty years of scientific research and consensus when it goes their way?

GMAFB.

Bring on the mockery, it is richly deserved

.
.
Oh good lord. They really are bringing out the d-string players here, everyone with three firing neurons having already retreated to lick their wounds and regroup, leaving the imbeciles standing sentry.

They are down to…Emily Yoffe – the “Human Guinea Pig” from Slate and “Day to Day” – whose claim to fame is humiliating herself for the amusement of others, and writing a book about a neurotic beagle. (So sure, I'll trust her expertise on matters of climate science...)

Not.

Why the fuck should I take this twit seriously on anything? Much less something so serious as Global Warming? What are her credentials that the Washington Post would give her a column to address a topic so serious as global climate change in the first damned place? (For the record, I don’t listen to Leonardo DiCaprio’s or Sheryl Crow's scientific pretensions either.)

She is just too precious. I fear I might have to spend a bit of time on this, so rich is the mock-worthy material. Let the fun commence!

It was a mild January evening, and people had filled the restaurant's outdoor patio. As our group walked past the tables, one of my friends said, "This terrifies me." I don't know if she was reassured later by the chilly April, but we are all supposed to be terrified of the weather now.

Hell, she shows her stupidity (ignorance can be helped, but stupidity is organic) when she doesn’t know the difference between climate and weather (hint: the former is an aggregate of the latter). It’s like expecting me to take a stem cell research opponent seriously when they can’t tell me what the hell a telomere is. I have already snorted.

In "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore tells us that unless drastic global changes are made, our cities will be inundated and those of us who haven't drowned will face a world wracked by cataclysmic weather and swarming with pestilence. One of his devotees, actor Leonardo DiCaprio, is coming out with his own environmental horror movie warning of human extinction if we continue living as we are. This would have a negative effect on the box office, but extinction might be preferable to the future Gore envisions.

See? What did I tell you! She is just precious! Let me explain this for you sweet-pea. When the sea ice started melting, it took on a snowball rolling down the mountain quality. Its simple physics – dark colors (water) absorb energy (heat) that white (ice) reflected back to space. This raises temperatures. This melts more ice, and raises the temperature further. Besides the fact that melting sea ice kinda totally jacks the polar and aquatic eco systems, the rising temperatures cause ice sheets and glaciers on land to increase their melt rate, and that raises sea levels. It all boils down to four little words: No Ice, No Us. Silly girl – she only needs to think about a glass of tea…when the ice melts, you still have roughly the same volume. But you can’t add more tea to a full glass. Ice melting on land has that effect. Frankly, anyone too stupid to get this by now should make sure they are wearing a helmet before they leave the house. What size are you Emily? About a 6 ¾? Or smaller? (The picture is of the arctic ice cap, the top shot taken in 1979 and the bottom one taken in 2003.)

I, however, refuse to see the apocalypse in every balmy day. And I think it's wrong to let our children believe they'll be swept away before they get a chance to fret about college admissions. An article in The Post this spring described children anxious, sleepless and tearful about the end; one 9-year-old said she worried about global warming "because I don't want to die."

Hmmm. Remember the Cold War? I do. People like me, who crawled under our desks at school on a regular basis grew up and worked for a nuclear freeze. I don’t know if there will be a correlation in ten years like there was with us, but I would be willing to bet the kids who are scared today do something tomorrow. God knows the Emily Yoffe’s are worthless in that regard.

Usually we want to protect our children from awful events, adjusting the message to suit their age. Certainly we tried to do that after Sept. 11. But an essential part of the global warming awareness movement is the belief that scaring us to death is the best way to spur massive change. Gore explicitly compares warming to the Nazis of the last century and terrorists of this one.

Again, air raid drills. Like wooden school desks would protect us from a nuclear blast. She acts like this is new. It isn’t. And while that was a possibility, or a potential, the probability of catastrophic damage because of climate change approaches 1.

That is worth getting excited about.

They sure seem to have a double standard for fear - if it can be used to whip up a military frenzy, they are all for it - but let it address something that can't have a gun pointed at it and it's just hysterical. I grew up in fear of nuclear holocaust. I grew up and did something about it, because my parents generation were not able to see the folly of their ways from their vantage point in history. And shutting up because it might upset the kiddies is a piss-poor excuse anyway.

And a recent New York Times profile of Gore tells that we are to be flooded with "An Inconvenient Truth." It is going to be shown in schools; book versions for children and young adults and a children's television show are planned. The global Live Earth concerts scheduled for July 7 are expected to raise millions, going to a three-year public relations effort, headed by Gore, to deluge us with bad news.

Maybe, just maybe, that is because it presents a message that is scientifically sound and presented in a format that is accessible and easily understood by anyone with an I.Q. above that of burnt toast.

Why the fuck did the Washington Post give this twit any ink on this matter? Says a lot about how Mrs. Graham's paper has lost it's way under Fred-the-Feckless Hiatt.

All this is not to say that it's not getting warmer and that curbing our profligate environmental ways is not a commendable and necessary goal. But perhaps this movement is sowing the seeds of its own destruction -- even as it believes the human species has sown its own. There must be a limit to how many calamitous films, books and television shows we, and our children, can absorb.

Objection. Assertion not in evidence. I seem to recall a couple of TV movies having a hell of an impact on the nuclear disarmament movement in the wake of Reagan scaring the shit out of everyone by saying something so patently absurd as “winnable nuclear war.” (Amiable dunce was too kind by half.) The Day After and Threads were broadcast in 1983 and 1984 respectively, and the Freeze movement moved into the mainstream. I lived on Davis-Monthan AFB at that time. I used to ride my bike around the plane graveyard, and I saw the crews taking the wings off the mothballed bombers for photographing by the Soviet satellites with my own eyes. I lived that part of recent history in the first person. Frankly, you get results when you reach ordinary people. Why are the deniers so fearful of education?

It doesn't seem sustainable to expect people to remain terrified by such a disinterested, often benign -- it was so nice eating out on the patio! -- and even unpredictable enemy. (I understand we're the enemy, but the executioner is the weather.) Recall that the experts told us last year would be a record-setting hurricane season, but the series of Katrinas never materialized.

It doesn’t have to be perpetually sustainable. It just has to get the attention of most for a while and keep the attention of enough. Been involved in any political movements ever? My question is, is she really this obtuse, or is she playing at it? and just because last year wasn't worse than 2005 for hurricanes brings on a shrug and a "So? Do you have a point?"

Since I hate the heat, even I was alarmed by the recent headline: "NASA Warns of 110-Degrees for Atlanta, Chicago, DC in Summer." But I regained my cool when I realized the forecast was for close to the end of the century. Thanks to all the heat-mongering, it's supposed to be a sign I'm in denial because I refuse to trust a weather prediction for August 2080, when no one can offer me one for August 2008 (or 2007 for that matter).

Well, pardon me, but she is quite literally a joke for a living, and I am more inclined to take the findings of this study by the National Research Council, or this heavily sourced article available at RealClimate, or anything posted at Gristmill, or any position espoused by my peers at the Union of Concerned Scientists - than her “hunch" and a pinch of wishful thinking.

There is so much hubris in the certainty about the models of the future that I'm oddly reassured. We've seen how hubristic predictions about complicated, unpredictable events have a way of bringing the predictors low.

What the hell is she talking about? Examples, please. And cite your sources. I’m not saying she wouldn’t be able find any, I am saying it is incumbent upon her to do so, having made the allegation and I am not doing her homework for her.

It's also hard to believe assertions that the science on the future of our climate is settled when climate scientists can't agree about the present -- or the past (there is contention about the dates, causes and even the existence of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age that followed). Now, Gore and others say that Katrina was a product of global warming and that we can expect more and bigger storms. But there is actually brisk scientific debate over the role global warming plays -- if any -- in the creation of hurricanes.

Who asserts this controversy, what are the sources of this claim? What are the credentials of the sources she elides to (but does not reference) that I should take them seriously? Where does the funding come from to conduct the studies she doesn't cite?

A study from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution last month, looking at 5,000 years of Atlantic hurricanes, found "large and dramatic fluctuations in hurricane activity, with long stretches of frequent strikes punctuated by lulls that lasted many centuries" -- with the stormier periods occurring during cooler ocean temperatures. But talking about Earth's constant, and still inexplicable, climate changes and cycles is not useful if you're trying to shock.

Does she have a point? Of course fluctuations have always happened. (El Niño ring any bells?) Thermodynamics, Darlin' - when we achieve equilibrium, it's over. The simple, inconvenient truth is that the pendulum has already swung farther than it has ever been known to go before, and it is showing no sign of reaching the breaking point and heading back.

Of the last twenty years, nineteen of them have set high temperature records.

In his new book, "The Assault on Reason," Gore denounces what he sees as today's politics of fear. Yet his own campaign of mass persuasion -- any such campaign -- is not amenable to contradiction and uncertainty. It's about fright and absolutes. But just because something can be plotted on an X and Y axis does not make it the whole truth.

WHAT??? You will have to pardon me for a moment while I collect myself. I am educated, and I am scientifically literate. That last sentence? I can not get my brain to dumb down to a level of stupid to even mock that absurdity of this idiot child in so far over her head. That little polar bear only thought he was out of his depth.

Touchy, Touchy!

Via Think Progress:

Rove ‘explodes’ at Crow over global warming.

Singer Sheryl Crow, “on a cross-country global warming awareness trip, got into it with Karl Rove” last night at the White House Correspondents Dinner. “Jawing like a baseball manager and an umpire arguing a call, Crow and Rove were disagreeing over global warming, with Crow’s pal, Laurie David, offering support.” David describes the scene:

We asked Mr. Rove if he would consider taking a fresh look at the science of global warming. Much to our dismay, he immediately got combative. And it went downhill from there.

We reminded the senior White House advisor that the US leads the world in global warming pollution and we are doing the least about it. Anger flaring, Mr. Rove immediately regurgitated the official Administration position on global warming which is that the US spends more on researching the causes than any other country. […]

In his attempt to dismiss us, Mr. Rove turned to head toward his table, but as soon as he did so, Sheryl reached out to touch his arm. Karl swung around and spat, “Don’t touch me.” How hardened and removed from reality must a person be to refuse to be touched by Sheryl Crow? Unphased, Sheryl abruptly responded, “You can’t speak to us like that, you work for us.” Karl then quipped, “I don’t work for you, I work for the American people.” To which Sheryl promptly reminded him, “We are the American people.” (emphasis mine.)

I could be wrong here, but I am of the opinion that Karl is stressed. Perhaps the bloom is off the (turd)blossom...

Let's do the math...

What the hell? It’s Pi day.

This is the sort of thing I consider fun. I know. I need help.

My obsessions and mental health issues aside, lets crunch the numbers and see how much carbon Matty B and his Caravan belch into the atmosphere every single day.

First off...Lets get the mileage and fuel economy information for the Chevy Surburban:

Fuel Economy

Fuel Type Regular

MPG (city) 14

MPG (highway) 18

MPG (combined) 15

Now, lets plug in our constants. The weight of a gallon of gas varies depending on temperature, but on average, a gallon of gasoline weighs 6.25 pounds.

Now for the mind-bending part…A gallon of gasoline produces nearly 20 pounds of CO₂.

“What?!?!” You may be asking about now. “How can that be? You have to be insane!”

Well, be that as it may my dear Watson, the math, and the chemistry, are both elementary.

First of all, lets talk about what happens when something is combusted. The mass does not go away, it is merely transformed into vapor, and while some chemical bonds are broken, others are created. When something burns, the atoms that are freed from their bonds form new bonds with Oxygen diatoms. This makes for a molecular byproduct (CO₂₎ with heavier molecular weight than the carbon-based fuel.

When Carbon (atomic weight 12) is released from gasoline during combustion, it quickly bonds with two Oxygens, each with an atomic weight of 16. So one molecule of CO₂ has a molecular weight of 44 amu., or roughly triple the weight of the petrol.

This gives us a number that is firmly in the ballpark of the official World Resources Institute conversion rate of 19.564 pounds of CO₂ per gallon of gas.

Now, Matty B’s caravan of six Suburbans travels 280 miles per day, minimum, and lets be generous and call them all highway miles. That means that each suburban in the caravan consumes 15.55 gallons of gasoline per day. I'm being generous here -

15.556 X 19.564 = 304.338 pounds of CO₂ per Suburban per day.

So daily, our Governor is responsible for 1826.026 pounds of CO₂ emissions.

Each week, the Governor’s Caravan of Spoiled Spouse Indulgence spews 9130.128 pounds of CO₂ into the atmosphere over our state.

These numbers piss me off, especially since I didn't marry the bitch and surrender my genitals.

How about you?