The Distant Ocean

Global warming, local version

We're having a heat wave here in San Francisco: it was near 90 yesterday, and overnight it never got below 78 in my apartment (like most people in the city I don't have air conditioning, so I'm at the mercy of the weather).  I've gone from sleeping with two heavy blankets earlier this week in the sub-40 degree weather to just a sheet and bedspread, with the fan on me.

It's not that this never happens here; though the fog usually keeps things cool, there are always three or four times a year when a high pressure system moves in and the temperature shoots up near or over 100 for days at a time.  You know, in the summer.  Like, say, July.  Usually late July.  But April?  Absolutely, totally, and in all other ways inconceivable.  In all the years I've been here I've never seen anything like it.

That's only the newest weirdness in our weather pattern.  We're also in our second year of lower-than-average rainfall.  Last year dangerously so, though this year we at least had a snowstorm or two in the Sierras—but that came to a screeching halt in March, and the water levels in the state are expected to be low (and the fire danger correspondingly higher) again this year.

Global warming?  Who can say?  But there's no mistaking that Things Have Changed.

Is that damn wolf still at the door?

Waiting to see what asinine thing Bush will say next is always fruitful, and especially so today:

Mr Bush, during a speech in which he ordered an indefinite halt in US troop withdrawals from Iraq this summer, called Iran one of the two "greatest threats to America in this century" - together with al-Qaeda.

Some other things that menace America approximately as much as Iran include:

• Insufficient flossing
• Ferrets
• Wii shortages
• Liechtenstein

This may seem like satire, but only until you recall that this is a country where Ronald Reagan was able to sell the notion that the Sandinistas were a grave existential threat because they were only two days from the Texas border.

Proud to be an American

You can send this to all your "But aren't the Iraqis better off without Saddam Hussein?" friends:

Ibrahim Khalil, who five years ago took part in the iconic toppling of a giant statue of Saddam Hussein in central Baghdad, said on Wednesday he now regrets taking part in the hugely symbolic event.

"If history can take me back, I will kiss the statue of Saddam Hussein which I helped pull down," Khalil told reporters on the fifth anniversary of the statue's toppling. ...

"All my friends who were with me that day feel the same as me," Khalil told reporters in Firdoos Square ...

"Now I realise that the day Baghdad fell was in fact a black day. Saddam's days were better," said Khalil, who along with his brother runs a car repair shop.

"I ask Bush: 'Where are your promises of making Iraq a better country?'

"These days when we go out we have to carry a pistol. In Saddam's regime, we were safe. We got rid of one Saddam, but today we have 50 Saddams."

Whether or not Americans think the Iraqis would have been better off with Saddam Hussein is (and always has been) beside the point, but the fact that they do beggars the imagination.  It took truly mythic levels of incompetence to create a disaster of this magnitude, and—as always—this nation was equal to the task.

So sure, it's true that we're not very good at our professed goals of spreading freedom, democracy, and hope.  But when it comes to killing people by the hundreds of thousands and shattering the lives of the survivors to the point that they'd prefer to live under a vicious dictator rather than having us there, we're second to none.  U-S-A!  U-S-A!

James Hansen on the Clinton administration

Here's Dr. James Hansen from Democracy Now! a few weeks ago, talking about the politicization of global warming research by the Clinton administration:

DR. JAMES HANSEN: Well, my concern is general with both Republican and Democratic administrations. They both feel that they can control what scientists say to the public. So their offices of public affairs in the science agencies are headed, in general, by political appointees, and they review the press releases before they go out. So, it doesn’t really make sense in a democracy. The public should be honestly informed. And then, of course, the publications are allowed to make the decisions, and they don’t have to follow exactly what the science says. There are other considerations that they have. But they shouldn’t influence what is presented, the scientific evidence. And I object to that, regardless of which administration is in power.

AMY GOODMAN: So, before we go on to the Bush administration, where you did have the most trouble, can you talk about what happened during the Clinton years and how you were able to express or not your research?

DR. JAMES HANSEN: Well, the one particular event that stands out in my mind is when I wrote a paper called “Global Warming in the 21st Century: An Alternative Scenario,” in which I emphasized that it’s not only carbon dioxide, but other climate forcings—methane and black soot—and we need to address those also. And for some reason, the people in the White House didn’t like emphasis on the non-CO2 parts of the story, and I just—the press release just kept coming back, and I would try to change it, they would change it, and finally I gave up. I just couldn’t get a press release through the way I wanted it.

I'd speculate that the "some reason" here was that Hansen was effectively undermining the Clinton administration's key strategy on global warming, which was to feign engagement while arguing that the US itself didn't have to reduce its emissions in any significant way—as per this article about the 2000 Hague summit:

The prime problem is America, the world's greatest emitter of carbon dioxide, which presses, with increasing insistence, that it should be spared from reducing its output and should instead be allowed to create new forests, both in the US and the Third World. These trees and plants, known collectively as carbon sinks, will soak up all that nasty carbon dioxide, say US delegates, and will obviate the need for Americans to abandon their profligacy.

The US also believes that by planting crops specially designed to soak up carbon dioxide, it could extend its 'sink' philosophy from the wild to the farmyard, thus strengthening its case for unabated industrial emissions. It was this idea, introduced at the Hague last week, that provoked that outburst of fury by Europe's delegates.

So by emphasizing climate forcings other than carbon dioxide, Hansen was undercutting the primacy of the Clinton administration's "carbon sink" argument—and that was anathema to Clinton and his global warming lieutenant, Al Gore, whose mission was to use arguments like that one to sell the illusion that the US was taking real action on climate change while forestalling any genuine, meaningful response.

Just once, in between the gentle caresses and soulful glances, I'd like to see an actual journalist actually confront Gore about the actual record he accrued on global warming back when he was in a position to do something more concrete about it than making movies and accepting Nobel prizes.

A darker cloud, but if you squint you can still see a silver lining

Climate hero James Hansen and some colleagues have found that it's worse than they thought:

Dr Hansen said the EU target of 550 parts per million of carbon dioxide — the most stringent in the world — should be slashed to 350 ppm.

He said the cut was needed if "humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed".

A final version of the paper Dr Hansen co-wrote with eight other climate scientists has been posted on the Archive website.

Instead of using theoretical models to estimate the sensitivity of the climate, the team used evidence from Earth's history, which they contend gives a much more accurate picture. They studied cores taken from the bottom of the ocean, which indicate carbon dioxide levels millions of years ago. They show that when the world began to glaciate at the start of the ice age around 35 million years ago, the concentration of carbon dioxide was about 450 ppm.

"If you leave us at 450 ppm for long enough, it will probably melt all the ice — that's a sea rise of 75 metres," Dr Hansen said. "What we have found is that the target we have all been aiming for is a disaster — a guaranteed disaster."

If you're interested, you can see the current full version of the paper here (pdf, and I warn you: hyar be science).

In case this has you feeling rampantly negative and glum, Hansen also has an article titled "Rampant Negativity -- No Reason to be so Glum," here (pdf).  You may or may not find your rampant negativity and glumness relieved by it, but if someone as knowledgeable as Hansen isn't ready to throw in the towel, who are we to disagree?  Of course, that optimism does require us to put people in office who don't prattle on about "realistic and achievable" limits rather than making the hard decisions that will be necessary to save life as we know it.

What's the Israeli national anthem?

Onward Christian Soldiers:

American evangelist John Hagee announced donations of $6 million to Israeli causes on Sunday and said that Israel must remain in control of all of Jerusalem. ...

Hagee and his group, Christians United for Israel, joined keynote speaker Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of Israel's hard-line opposition Likud Party, at a rally in support of Jerusalem remaining united and under Jewish control.

"Turning part or all of Jerusalem over to the Palestinians would be tantamount to turning it over to the Taliban," Hagee told an audience filled with Americans who waved Israeli flags and cheered.

(It's only an old joke if you've heard it before....)

The danger of Obama, part 4,112,367

Here's Mark Morford, the man who tries way too hard, exhibiting advanced symptoms of Obamamania:

Because the greatest thing about Obama isn't really about Obama at all, per se. It's actually about, well, us.

This is the great revelation: We still got it. The collective unconscious, the deep sense of inner wisdom, that intuitive knowing that borders on a kind of mystical proficiency, where millions of people can actually look beyond rhetoric and media spin and merely feel the presence of something great in the room? Yep, still there. ...

People feel it. They hear an Obama speech or read the articles or talk to like-minded folk, and they squint their eyes and weigh everything and then dismiss all that surface crap and get that look on their face that says, you know what? This guy gets it. He feels right. It's not a trick of light. It's not complete bulls—. It's not the usual spin and manipulation and fakery.

Here's some of that "surface crap" that Morford, in his deep collectively unconscious sense of inner intuitive knowing mystically proficient wisdom, has dismissed:

• "Tough-minded diplomacy, backed by the whole range of instruments of American power -- political, economic, and military -- could bring success even when dealing with long-standing adversaries such as Iran and Syria."
• "We should expand our ground forces by adding 65,000 soldiers to the army and 27,000 marines."
• "Our starting point must always be a clear and strong commitment to the security of Israel..."
• "Iran and North Korea could trigger regional arms races, creating dangerous nuclear flashpoints in the Middle East and East Asia. In confronting these threats, I will not take the military option off the table."
• "We must also consider using military force in circumstances beyond self-defense..."

But none of that matters, because Obama gives Morford the ecstatic frisson of plugging his wang directly into the cosmic essence of righteous certitude and greatness.  And after all, what else could possibly matter more than that?  Policies, schmolicies! Obama just makes me feel so good about myself for feeling good about him!

Morford's right in a way, though.  It isn't manipulation and fakery; Obama's putting this stuff right out there in plain sight for anyone to see.  But people like Morford, drunk on the affirmation of their own intuitive genius, are never going to notice—”not now, and not once the Anointed One starts actually committing the crimes he only contemplates now.

Jeff Jacoby's firm grasp on (white) history

Here's the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby, from a piece with the devastatingly sly title "It's still a question of Wright and wrong":

The problem for Obama is that Wright, the spiritual leader he has so long embraced, is a devotee not of [Martin Luther] King ...

Above all, the problem for Obama is that for two decades his spiritual home has been a church in which the minister damns America ...

And here's Martin Luther King:

I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

... In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

     O, yes,
     I say it plain,
     America never was America to me,
     And yet I swear this oath--
     America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.

Now, I know it's easy to laugh at Jacoby.  I did it myself.  But in fairness to him, he was talking about Smilin' White Disney Martin Luther King, not actual Martin Luther King.

Logic+irrational anger, just like oil+water

I noticed this red-meat liberal laff line in a review of William Poundstone's Gaming the Vote, a look at elections and electoral reform:

Range voting outstrips yes-or-no plurality voting in revealing voters’ nuanced opinions. It has been admired even by Ralph Nader — and that, Mr. Poundstone writes with typical dry panache, “is something like a spirochete endorsing penicillin.” Mr. Nader’s spoiler effect is exactly what “Gaming the Vote” means to assail.

Apparently by "typical dry panache" the author of the review actually means "failure to grasp elementary logic."  At the risk of belaboring the obvious: Poundstone's hypothetical spirochete wouldn't endorse penicillin because penicillin would kill it.  But Nader "admires" range voting—and has consistently called for electoral reform along the same lines (namely instant runoff voting) since his 2000 campaign—because it would allow people to support the candidate(s) they actually prefer, which would help him immensely.  Anyone with a modicum of knowledge or understanding would realize this, which doesn't augur well for the likely quality of Poundstone's observations in the rest of the book.

Poundstone's joke, and the reviewer's admiration for it, only make sense under the assumption that Nader's purpose in running for president has been to spoil elections for other candidates.  Which is absurd, of course—but hysterical, dudgeon-engorged liberals have demonstrated time and time again that there's nothing too asinine for them to believe when it comes to Nader.

As for range voting itself, it's worth a look for anyone who's interested in electoral reform.  Basically it's the rate-the-superhunks approach to voting: you give each candidate a rating from (say) 0 to 99, and the candidate with the highest average rating wins.  Its proponents say that it corrects shortcomings of IRV, and while I can see their point, I also think it would meet more resistance because (unlike IRV) it doesn't preserve the principle of one person, one vote.  Nonetheless, Poundstone can count me in with all the other spirochetal voters who'd like to see widespread adoption of range voting, IRV, or any other system that would make it more likely that people would be able to register their actual preferences—even if it would deny us our real goal of spoiling elections.