Monthly Archives: February 2013

Obama’s decision on the Keystone Pipeline IS a legacy making or breaking thing.

Is there a problem with John Abraham’s argument about Obama’s Legacy?

John Abraham wrote a piece in the Guardian titled Keystone XL decision will define Barack Obama’s legacy on climate change: Does the president have courage to say ‘no’ to a project that will lock us into decades of dependency on this dirty energy? in which he states: Continue reading Obama’s decision on the Keystone Pipeline IS a legacy making or breaking thing.

Educate yourself about the Keystone XL Pipeline. Please.

I was distressed to find many people who are essentially pro-environment and who generally understand climate change science being less than terribly shocked about the prospect of the Keystone XL pipeline being built. Then I began to realize that many people don’t realize the order of magnitude of the problem. I’m writing a blog post about this which I’ll post Sunday or Monday, but in the mean time I want to provide a list of handy dandy reliable and helpful sources of information about the pipeline and related issues.

Keystone XL decision will define Barack Obama’s legacy on climate change

An Updated Look at What Keystone XL and Alberta Tar Sands Mean for the Climate

Why not Keystone XL. Clear reasons why Keystone XL is not in the U.S. national interest

STUDY: The Press And The Pipeline

Keystone XL: A Tar Sands Pipeline to INcrease Oil Prices (JUST ADDED: PDF file)

5 Myths About Keystone XL, Debunked

Debunking Nature’s arguments for Keystone

The Keystone XL Pipeline: Red herring, symbol, or a piece of a puzzle?

Joe Romm on Climate, Obama, Keystone, and Consequences

New video explains the climate threat from the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline

New Analysis Shows Simple Math: Keystone XL Pipeline = Tar Sands Expansion = Climate Change

How Much Will Tar Sands Oil Add to Global Warming?

Make $20 and support a good cause at the same time!

American currency uses the phrase “In God We Trust” which is a clear violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution. This is to the First Amendment roughly like saying “No Guns Allowed” everywhere would be to the Second Amendment, but if we did that to the Second Amendment people would be up in arms (as it were). But since it is merely the First Amendment nobody cares.

Anyway, that is what our money says now, but in the past, it did not say that. The “In God We Trust” was added during the Red Scare, when American started putting screenplay writers in jail and neighbors turned in neighbors over their political views. The nation, it would seem, had a strong need to get in bed with god during the 1950s and early 1960s. Maybe this is because we were the first and only nation to drop Atom Bombs on other people and we were frightened four our souls. Who knows?

Anyway, there is still some of that old, pre “In God We Trust” money left, and Minnesota Atheists are auctioning some of it off to raise money to fund Atheists Talk Radio. As you know, Atheist Talk Radio often does interviews with interesting scientists, and sometime I do those interviews myself. (Sometimes I’m the one being interviewed.) So you know if they’re doing science, it’s a good show. I’ve interviewed John Hawks, Don Prothero, Kevin Zelnio and John Abraham, Martin Rundkvist and Yusie Chou, Neil deGrasse Tyson, PZ Myers, Ira Flatow, and Massimo Pigliucci. And more.

This is your opportunity to help raise a little bit of money for Minnesota Atheists. The money is being auctioned off here, on Ebay. PLEASE GO RIGHT NOW AND PLACE A BID so you can have a nice, framable god-free twenty dollar bill.

The auction ends in just a few hours so ACT QUICKLY!!!!

If you place the winning bid tonight, you’d be funding most of one Sunday’s worth of show time, approximately.

Amazing Scar Left By Tornado

This is not new, but I just found out about it from Paul Douglas’s blog. Back in 2011, an F3 tornado touched down and went straight for over 60 km. The beast (that’s the technical for a big-scary-tornaod) was almost a kilometer wide. It left an impressive scar, which you can see in this photograph:

masstornado_tm5_2011156

More recently, when so called “Nemo the Storm” swept across the same region, the scar became plainly visible, as shown in this image:

NEsnowNASA

The first image is from here, the second is from here.

Climate and Weather: Does your TV weather reporter get it?

You hear, again again, that climate and weather are not the same thing. This has led to assertions such as “you can’t attribute a single weather event to climate change.” But climate and weather are not distinctly different. Climatologists and meteorologists have made statements like this because people do confuse and conflate current conditions and weather forecasts on one hand with climate systems and climate change observations and modeling on the other. Saying “climate and weather are not the same thing” is a convenient segue into a discussion of how certain conclusions may be invalid or at least, underpowered. For example, we have seen that certain types of American voters change their opinion about global climate change depending on the current weather. Those who self identify as Independents “believe in” climate change if had been unusually hot over the previous 48 hours, but if it had been cooler than expected over that period of time they don’t accept the truth of climate change as readily. This is conflating and confusing weather and climate in respect to one of the most important differences between the two: time scale.

Weather and climate can be thought of as two sides of the same coin. That analogy is limited but useful. So, if one is going to walk around with weather in one’s pocket, there’s going to be climate in there too, just like if you are going to walk around with maple leaves in your pocket there’s going to be some loons in there at the same time. One can also think of weather as the short term and, possibly, geographically smaller face of climate, the latter being big in time and space. Thus, thinking of the two as “not the same thing” would be like thinking of the tail of a tiger as not the same thing as a tiger. That is somewhat true but if you yank on the tail, there will be a tiger there asking questions about that.

Over the last several months, we have done a pretty good job of putting aside the incorrect notion that a particular weather event can’t be linked to climate change. There are minimally two ways that the two are linked for a given weather event. One is that a weather event is what it is because of energy (heat) in the air and on sea and land (but mainly sea) surfaces and the distribution of water vapor in the atmosphere. Both of these things, heat and water, are different now than they were 100 years ago, or 30 years ago, because of climate change. Therefore, every single weather event, being functions of heat and water distribution and dynamics, is different than previously because of climate change. Some say that the extra energy raises the baseline for weather, but I don’t like that analogy because it is directional. Raising the baseline sounds like everything will then be more of something, more of the same thing (more hot, more wet, for example). But in fact, weather with climate change can be more wet or more dry (really, both, at the same time but in different places, or both in the same place but at different times) because of the reconfiguration of the water cycle due to climate change. Same with heat. Under climate change, we have increased extremes of both heat and cold (though on average conditions are warmer, but you need to average things out to see that). So the “raised baseline” explanation makes it harder for people to understand both floods and droughts as well as both heat waves and cold snaps, as being more severe as a result of climate change.

Rather than referring to a raised baseline, I’d rather refer specifically to a change in the configuration of heat and water. That is more accurate and people can understand that. To use a more appealing metaphor, one could say that when the various elements of the climate system, as a committee of forces and raw materials, sits down at the table to make the weather these days, that committee consists of individuals with much more polarized attitudes so the result is a bigger range of outcomes. Classically, we anthropomorphize the elements, Old Man Winter, the North Winds, giants bowling in the sky; Under climate change these characters are feeling their oats and demanding more, and the result is less compromise and more fluctuation between extreme outcomes.

The baseline metaphor does work well for certain specific areas of climate, though. For example, as the ice melts every year and reforms on the Arctic Sea, the baseline of ice reduces every year (thus the loss of “old ice”). Or, the sea level rises due to melting glaciers and thermal expansion every year, so the baseline for storm surges and coastal flooding, as well as the twice daily high tide line, goes up over time.

The second major way that climate and weather are linked (not unrelated to the first) is through configuration of major features of the sea and air. This is more complicated, more unknown, more recent, and more scary in some ways. If you follow the news about hurricanes, you’ll hear about a hurricane or tropical storm out in the Atlantic, and notice that the National Weather Service has drawn a line showing where that hurricane will go over the next week or so. That’s pretty amazing when you think about it, given that over time hurricanes go in many different directions along many different paths. But somehow they know where it is going to go and they are generally pretty close to correct these days. They also know how strong or weak the hurricane will get over time.

The way they do this is by understanding the effects of huge masses of air, and the distribution of sea surface temperatures. The Earth’s layer of air is like the surface of a fast moving stream. If you look at the surface of a stream you’ll see that parts of the stream are up high, like a hill, and others are down low. If you look more closely, you’ll see that most of the low parts are moving faster than the high parts, and if there are eddies (whirlpools) they are in the low spots. One could think of the air as acting like this, where the high spots are high pressure systems and the low spots are low pressure systems. In the atmosphere those high areas tend to determine where the low areas are going to form and where they will move, and how fast. A hurricane is just one of the lows, but more concentrated in energy than most (and with a number of other differences). The highs, typically less “visible” to us mere earthlings looking out our window (those are the clear mild days) are mapped at large scale and their configuration used to plot the future course of the big storms. (This is an oversimplification that ignores, fore example, the very important effect of jet streams, which actually require math to understand. I have noticed that any atmospheric system that requires calculus to describe causes severe weather. Just sayin’.)

Although the air covering our planet is very different from a stream surface, it has high and low areas and if you know where everything is on one day, all the highs and lows, you can be sure they are not going to be too different the next day. We also know the direction in which these features will usually move. In other words, the distribution of high and low regions in the atmosphere is measurable and predictable, to a very large degree.

With climate change, the basic configuration of lows and highs changes. We have seen a fundamental change in the way air is distributed in the far north, around Canada, Siberia, and farther north to the Arctic. These days, the air does stuff … climate stuff … in that region fairly often that it used to do only occasionally. A result is that the distribution of warm and cool air is different, thus the heat waves and cold snaps. Another result is the direction in which low pressure systems get steered during certain times of the year and in certain regions; thus, Superstorm Sandy hitting New York and New Jersey. Superstorm Sandy, a hurricane, was supposed to turn right. All the other storms turn right. If a storm hits the Northeastern US it hits it from the south before turning right, but usually a glancing blow or as a much diminished storm. Sandy got big and turned left instead of getting smaller and veering right. Climate change caused that weather event.

I mentioned sea surface temperatures as one of the changes that affects the overall configuration of weather qualitatively and not just quantitatively. Not only is the surface of the ocean generally warmer, but where the warm spots are has changed. Recently, the Gulf Stream has stalled. This means that warm water that normally runs up the US coast and disperses across the North Atlantic is hanging around in the Western Atlantic longer, and that area thus get warmer. For this reason, any of those big tropical storms and hurricanes that normally go north and get weak are going to go north and stay strong, or even strengthen. Then, more of them will turn left instead of right because of the new configuration of air masses. This means that all those people who have moved from New York to Florida over the last 50 year to get near hurricanes can move back to the Northeast and still have their hurricanes!

You can see a pattern here. Climate change alters both quantitative and qualitative aspects of climate. Quantitative changes in weather involve more extreme temperatures (both hot and cold) and more extreme water related conditions (floods and droughts). Climate change alters the qualitative aspects of climate in such a way that what happens where and when has shifted. Quantitaviely, more North American spring and early storms may have more tornados; Qualitatively, tornado alley now includes a big swath of Canada, and Dixie alley (the southeastern tornado region) will probably have more “off season” storms. Quantitatively, we may have more tropical storms form or transition to hurricanes, and those hurricanes may be stronger than before. Qualitatively, where they go seems to have changed; Historically, a very large percentage of Atlantic hurricanes go north, turn right, weaken, and make Iceland and Svalbard foggy and wet, but now some of those storms will stay strong and turn left. We have yet to see if this will qualitatively alter Nor’easters, to bring them ashore more often, but quantitatively storms like Nemo are clearly more common than they were decades ago. The Great Storm of 78 was a once in a lifetime storm that was not expected to happen again any time soon. Since then, that sort of storm has become commonplace in New England.

And this all brings up a problem. For some reason, possibly innocent reasons possibly nefarious ones, many TV weather reporters, many of whom are meteorologists, have been on the denialism side of global warming. Here in Minnesota, we once had three main news stations with weather. One of them had a meteorologist who occasionally downplayed climate change (in those days, it was always called global warming) and even got snarky about it. Another weather reporter, who was a meteorologist, seemed to be quit open to the idea that climate was changing. (I never watched the third station so I don’t know what was going on there.) Over time, the former became a more vehement climate change denier, and the latter a more outspoken climate hawk. The former always gave good weather reports. The latter always gave outstanding weather reports. The former is still at his station reporting weather but I think he stopped talking about climate change. The latter is Paul Douglas, who to all Minnesotans is a hero and icon of intelligent weather forecasting.

Then a thing happened that often happens in Minnesota. We are a donor state to the rest of the country. We produce great local politicians, like Hubert Humphrey and Water Mondale, but then thy go off to the White House or Congress and become nationally important. A Minnesotan took the luke warm trend of putting the wheels on your skates in a row and turned that into Rollerblades, which the world has embraced. Many years ago a quiet non-assuming Minnesotan with a cabin on the lake strapped barrel staves to his feet and got his friend to try to pull him around behind the motorboat on a rope. Today, waterskiing is everywhere.

Paul Douglas left his post as meteorologist at WCCO (CBS) a few years ago, and at that point I pretty much stopped watching local news. WCCO still had Don Shelby, and I still had to watch the news for various reasons sometimes, but without Paul giving the weather, really, what’s the point? I can get mediocre weather from the Internet. But Paul had plans, apparently. He founded a new network which you may or may not have heard of called Weather Nation, which is now on several cable channels. It’s like the Weather Channel but different. I don’t get the Weather Channel but I do get Weather Nation, and that’s what I watch. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I tune in when Paul is doing one of his overviews, but usually it is someone else. He’s not the weather forecaster any more, he’s the owner. (And if you knew the details of how he got his start on TV that would be even more interesting!)

Paul raised a lot of interest in climate change when he published a “Message from a Republican Meteorologist on Climate Change” last year. Yes, there are some good Republicans. Well, there’s Paul, anyway. Do read the letter, and send it to all of your Republican friends and relatives!

Paul Douglas was one of a handful of meteorologists featured in a recent NPR report.

Last March, longtime Minnesota meteorologist Paul Douglas, founder of WeatherNationTV, posted an impassioned letter online urging his fellow Republicans to acknowledge that climate change is real.

“Other meteorologists actually emailed me and said, ‘Thanks for giving voice to something I’ve been thinking but was too afraid to say publicly,’ ” he says.

Douglas is part of a group pushing to tighten certification standards for meteorologists.

“If you’re going to talk about climate science on the air,” he says, you would “need to learn about the real science, and not get it off a talk show radio program or a website.”

(Here’s the audio of that report.)

What if. What if over the last few decades most of the TV meteorologists were Paul Douglas, or at least, like him. The general public would have been informed of climate change the best way possible, by understanding the nature of climate and how it is changing from the view of the local weather one experiences. That is possible and reasonable because climate and weather are not different things. They are two overlapping views of the way air and water on this planet work. If every TV meteorologists had been like Paul Douglas over the last 20 years, I’d venture to say we’d be 50 ppm of Carbon Dioxide lower than we are now and more on our way to a green economy. We’d have a chance to address this problem of climate change.

We can fix this whole thing with two simple devices: A time machine and a cloning machine. Somewhere in a small town in Minnesota, perhaps there is some innovative guy named Ollie Knutson working on that….

Duck Stamps and Duck Hunting

I just put up a post in 10,000 Birds reporting on a recent study of duck stamp sales and duck hunting. There have been changes in recent years in the patterns of both waterfowl hunting and the purchase and use of federal duck stamps. Waterfowl hunters are required to have a duck stamp, and about 90% of the funds raised through the sale of these artistic quasi-philatic devices are used to secure wildlife preservation areas. For decades, duck population numbers and duck stamp sales were closely correlated, but recently this correlation has broken down. Read the post to find out the details and possible explanations.

There has been a discussion about the idea of developing a federal wildlife stamp that bird watchers or other nature enthusiasts could buy, either voluntarily or as a requirement for access to certain wildlife areas, to supplement wildlife protection projects. Such a stamp would also bring non-hunters to the table and secure a position for them as stakeholders in conservation policy making. While hunters clearly contribute to wildlife protection (up to the point that they pull the trigger and shoot a wild thing, that is!) it is also true that non-hunters both benefit from wildlife protection and would like to do more to make a contribution. The current situation in many states seems to be that hunters have more of an influence in conservation policy than perhaps they should given that they are only one part of the equation. But licensing fees for hunting, including duck stamp sales, may give hunters more of a voice in the process than one would expect in considering the diverse range of individuals who support and benefit from conservation. A wildlife stamp would help increase available funds for these projects and result in a more even distribution of influence.

Again, go read the post for more details.

Charge of the Lite Brigade

On February 17th, some 40,000 people showed up at an event in Washington DC in order to draw attention to the most pressing issue of our time: Climate Change. Another group of people also attended that rally. They represented the Climate Science Denialists, which in the US overlaps considerably with the Tea Party. They wore yellow jackets and called themselves “The Light Brigade.” This follows the tradition of the Tea Party, who in their early days used the nickname “Teabaggers” for themselves, a term which refers to a particular sexual act, or so I’m told. I was reminded of this because the original Light Brigade was a hapless military unit commanded by incompetent boobs who made major mistakes causing the unnecessary deaths of a large number of people carrying out a futile and senseless act.

In other words, the Light Brigade that showed up at the Forward On Climate Rally in Washington DC on February 17th, 2013 of which there were about 15 according to reports, resembles the Light Brigade, the unit of light calvary at Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War that charged to their deaths on October 15th, 1854, in a number of ways. However, the real victims of science denialsm is everybody, not just the soldiers who forgot to question, to reason.

So, in honor of Climate Science Denialism and the new Light Brigade, which I’ve decided to rename the Lite Brigade, I’ve adapted the famous poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. As follows:

The Charge of the Lite Brigade
by Greg, Lord Mockingyou

Half a brain, half a brain,
Half a brain onward,
All in the valley of Climate Change
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
“Charge for the facts!” he said:
Into the valley of Climate Change
Rode the six hundred.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man inform’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Someone had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Climate Change,
Rode the six hundred.

Carbon to right of them,
Carbon to left of them,
Carbon in front of them
Tornadoes and thunder;
Superstorm’d with surge befell,
Blindly awash in the the swell,
Into the rise of temps,
Into the mouth of Hell
Ocean acidification.

Flash’d all their untruths bare,
Flash’d as they denied in air,
Science and data there,
Charging and lying, while
All the world wonder’d:
Plugged in the battery-charger,
But the coal based grid was broke;
Hannity and Rush they
Reel’d from the IPCC report
Shatter’d and sunder’d.
Then they got a new contract, but
Not the six hundred.

Carbon to right of them,
Carbon to left of them,
Carbon behind them
Hurricanes with thunder;
Superstorm’d with surge befell,
New Orleans went to Hell,
Tea did not come out so well
Lies through their jaws brought Death
Told science to go to Hell,
And left it all to them,
Storms for our grandchildren.

What were they thinking, crazed?
O the wild charges they made!
All the world wondered.
WTF are have they said?
Look at the Light Brigade,
Ignorant six hundred.

Ubuntu Linux Made Easy

I checked out the book Ubuntu Made Easy: A Project-Based Introduction to Linux by Rickford Grant and Phil Bull (No Starch Press). With any book like this, the trick is matching it to the correct user. If you are the kind of person inclined to install the latest version of Ubuntu on your computer, you probably have already done enough with Linux to not need this book. If you are the kind of person who believes the trash talk about how bad Linux is, or who is frightened of the idea of stepping away from Windows or your Mac for any reason, run away now. This book is not for you. But, if you are the kind of person who has been thinking about installing Linux on that second or older computer you’ve got sitting there and want to do it in a relatively painless way, then this is a good choice. You can get all the info you need off the internet, but then you have to deal with snarky self aggrandizing technogeek obfuscation which is annoying.

I happened to be in need of a new installation of a Linux system when this book arrived; I had just gotten a new Solid State Drive and wanted to try it out in an old laptop. Ubuntu Made Easy: A Project-Based Introduction to Linux comes with a Ubuntu install disk, like in the old days when computer books always came with disks. Just for the heck of it I pulled out the disk and tried installing the most current version of Ubuntu Linux on the system free laptop. That worked fine, and I had Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin up an running.

I think I should mention that I may be one of the few people you’ll ever meet (if you meet me) who has Pangolin on his computer and has eaten pangolin. But I digress.

The newer Ubuntu systems have a new desktop environment called Unity. When Unity first came out, I, like may others, hated it. I prefer, and probably still prefer, the older Gnome 2.0 style desktop. But, since I had Ubuntu Made Easy: A Project-Based Introduction to Linux in hand I went through with the process of using the text to inform me about using Unity and I actually changed my mind. I still hate it .. in particular, I hate the way Unity has ruined the functionality of menus and scroll bars, two of the most important things in any desktop environment. But, I also like it now in certain ways. In particular, I like the fact that I can press the “Super” key (formerly known as the Windows key) and then type in a string of text that corresponds to a known piece of software and run it. This is using the Heads Up display which at first I thought I would not like but now realize is cool. In the near future, I will attempt to install a heads up display on a more traditional version of gnome

In general, one of the things you’ll find most valuable about this book is the tutorial on how to navigate among your software and stuff on the Unity desktop. A little time with that will save a lot of time later. this includes using software like MyUnity (chapter 9) to fix up the Unity desktop more to your liking.

Ubuntu Made Easy: A Project-Based Introduction to Linux also guides you through the use of the standard software, not just the system, such as the various office and graphics applications as well as Shotwell, the only photo management software I’ve ever let near my real photographs. (In this book I learned about Phatch Photo Batch Processor which looks like a functioning and very nice version of some of my own bash scripts I’ve had to write.)

I’ve always ignored Linux games, but the chapter on games in Ubuntu Made Easy: A Project-Based Introduction to Linux included a lot more than I remembered ever being there and I may have to revisit that activity. Overall, you’ll get a summary of some of the software in each category of possible software, and if you are installing Linux for the fist time you’ll want to sample in each area. Installing software in Linux is very easy. If someone tells you it is not, that “compiling from source” and/or “dependencies” will make it difficult, ignore them they know not of what they speak. That’s like saying “Windows is hard because all the software is written in C++ and that is hard to program in” or “driving a Subaru is difficult because it was really hard to engineer that balanced drive train thingie they are famous for.” Yes there are hard way to run any OS. Just don’t do it the hard way. The book will help here.

All books I’ve ever read about setting up Linux have a fair percentage of the text devoted to running you through some of the more esoteric (to the average person) functionality that you will probably never use, but is mainly only easily available on a Linux machine, like programming in Python or using vim as a text editor, etc. etc. This book has some of that but much less than other books. As with any system or software guide, you simply have to give yourself permission to skip some of the chapters. Having said that, do work your way through the chapters on using the command line because it is easy, fun, and sometimes useful.

Go ahead and try installing Linux, using this book as a guide. Just remember, Linux is not for everybody.

Some Linux/Ubuntu related books:
Ubuntu Unleashed 2016 Edition: Covering 15.10 and 16.04 (11th Edition)
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Desktop: Applications and Administration
The Linux Command Line: A Complete Introduction