Monthly Archives: September 2015

Donald Trump Eats His Enemies

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Eating your enemies is a time honored method for winning. It is rarely used by American politicians or their supporters.

Here is how you eat your enemy. I’ll use a generalized example based on several events during the GOP debates.

Moderator: Mr. Trump, you’ve said ‘bla bla bla bla’. Alternate Candidate, what do you have to say to Mr. Trump about this?

Alternate: Yada yada yada.

Donald Trump: [smiling, nodding giving thumbs up] I agree with all that.

More typically, a politician in this situation would find a way to separate themselves form Alternate Candidate, playing off the moderator’s suggestion of a difference, even if there isn’t much of a difference. But Trump, instead, simply takes Alternate Candidate’s position and indicates, “That’s great.” Eating your enemy.

This might seem odd or counterproductive because it would seem to muddle Trump’s actual policies and make it easier to claim that he is being inconsistent. But that doesn’t matter, because Trump has a voracious appetite and he can eat that too.

Moderator: Mr. Trump, earlier you said ‘bla bla bla’ but when Alternate Candidate said ‘yada yada’ you agreed with him. How can that be?

Donald Trump: [nodding during question] That’s right, I agree with him, he’s a smart guy. What can I say?

See what he did there? He ate the moderator.

Now, take this whole theme and imagine it happening in the board room, with Trump as Chairman of the Board.

Board Member One: I totally disagree with Two. Two has it all wrong, and here’s why. Yada yada yada.

Donald Trump: Great idea, thanks for bringing that to the table.

Board Member Two: One is wrong, here’s what we should do. Bla bla bla.

Donald Trump: You’r totally right about that.

[one month later, at a second board meeting, Board Member One and Board Member Two are missing]

Donald Trump: [on being asked where One and Two are] Oh, I fired those guys.

Board Member Three: But you agreed with what they both were saying, even though they were saying opposite things.

Donald Trump: That was then, this is now, I can do that. What’s the next item on the agenda?

Board Member Three: [grimly] Mr. Trump, I think we should not move on until we’ve resolved this issue about One and Two and why they were fired even tough you …..

Donald Trump [interrupting] You’re fired.

This is not Trump the Chairman of the Board being random. It is Trump not taking sides or getting in a fight, but rather, eating his board members one by one. He’s not asking them to go along with his ideas, and he’s not really going along with any of their ideas. He’s just letting the conversation go and eventually making his own decisions. Meanwhile, he he munches on them for a while, then spits them out and lets them live (minus some juices and a bit of flesh). Then, when it comes time to make a decision, he just makes the decision, unencumbered by any prior positioning on his own part.

I have to say, it is a little like how an experienced professor operates a seminar. Don’t take a stand, let the seminar participants yammer on here and there, encourage everybody even if you are encouraging conflicting ideas. When a real conflict emerges, deflect and shift focus, and so on, letting ideas go and go. But then, at some point, near the end of the seminar, the professorial voice of wisdom emerges, perspective is imposed on the conversation, previously ignored or undervalued facts are foregrounded, and smart things are said. Since everybody got a chance to be both smart and stupid, less butthurt, and an interim quasi-consensus on the nature of reality is accepted, at least until the seminar adjourned to the Rathskeller, where things heat up again until everybody gets too drunk to remember what the heck they were arguing about.

So this is Trump’s modus operandus, but what is it for?

One of the main benefits in a debate format of eating your opponents, instead of merely trying to not let them touch you, or for you to seem like them, is the commission. The commission is the little percentage you get when your opponent says something, their supporters cheer and applaud, then you agree with it. You get a percentage.

On a stage with 11 antagonists, the one antagonist that gets to eat each opponent once or twice, maybe three times for some, gets a lot of small commission payments. If none of the other candidates are doing that, then there is one broker getting paid off with every transaction, regardless of how that transaction goes. Trump took a little piece of every one of those conversations. In the end, he went home with his pockets stuffed.

Also, eating your enemies while your enemies are busy eating their own young (the exact opposite strategy) may be pretty effective.

Screen Shot 2015-09-17 at 7.14.11 AMThe conflict between Trump’s strategy and what usually happens, and what is expected, caused the post-debate pundits to “give” the debate to a wide range of different candidates, including but not exclusively Trump. After the first debate, informal on-line polls indicated that the majority of everybody else, everybody who is not a pundit, gave the debate to Trump. This is because the politically astute observers didn’t even know what they were looking at, since it is so unusual of a strategy. It turned out that these informal online polls accurately predicted the ensuing formal properly done polls. Trump moved forward in his lead after that debate.

It is too early to say if the same pattern will occur with the second debate, but there are early indications it is the case. Among the numerous commentaries by the usual pundits, Trump took the win for only a few. But among the few informal on-line polls I’ve seen, Trump may have actually done even better in this debate than he did during the first. We’ll wait and see what the formal polls show.

It isn’t really true that Trump is the only person out there who eats his opponents. I think he is the only one among the current crop of Gops running for the nomination. Bill Clinton could eat his opponent, and President Obama had been known to do it too. Neither is probably as good at it as Trump, though.

This is not, by the way, an endorsement of Trump. I’m merely placing some of what I’m seeing in an anthropological perspective. I actually think Trump could be a better president than most of the other Gops. This is partly because some of them are religious fanatics, the last thing we need running the US right now. Others are strong political ideologues, and the only ideologue I want to see in the White House among those running is Sanders (because we share most ideologies). Others are bought and paid for by various nefarious special interest groups. Many are combinations of the above. I can imagine Walker doing everything he can while in office trying to eliminate unions, because his main support structures seems to come from anti-union forces. I can see Trump sitting down and working with unions. Paul would be horrible on climate change because he doesn’t believe it exists, and if it does, there is no Libertarian answer to climate change. I can see Trump, not owned by the Koch Konsortium, perhaps (maybe) doing something about climate change because, after all, shifting to clean energy is a huge business opportunity (but see this).

By the way, being both a Democrat and a Republican (which is true for Trump) is also a way of eating your own young.

One final thought: The most poetic version of a Trump candidacy would be having Ross Perot as Vice-Chairman. I mean, Vice President. If you understand why that would be poetic, then you probably get Trump. If not, think about it.

Making Liquid Fuels From Sun And Air

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Liquid fuel powering internal combustion engines is inherently inefficient. This is because innumerable explosions causing kinetic work to be done also makes piles of heat, and for other reasons. The same amount of energy put into an electric motor and an internal combustion motor produce more usable work for the former than the latter. Also, electric motors can operate at similar efficiencies across a range of speeds, while internal combustion motors require more messing around to change speeds. And then there is torque. Torque is apparently at the center of coolness for many vehicle aficionados. If you can get your hot car or motorcycle to go from zero to fast in a second or two, that is considered cool, even if it has almost no day to day applications. An electric motor has that ability out of the box, an internal combustion motor has to be a super motor to do that well.

Also, liquid fuels spill and smell bad and can explode, and all that. On the other hand, electricity has its limitation too. In the long run, we probably need to change most of our moving things, vehicles, planes, etc. over to mostly electric (with energy recovery from brakes, etc.). But liquid fuel will still be important in certain applications. Mission critical backup generators that you hardly ever need but are life or death are probably best run on liquid fuels stored long term, like at the South Pole research station or in any hospital. We probably will eventually see electric airplanes, but for long time we are probably going to have to put liquid fuel in flying machines. So, in order to not destroy the essential yet merely good enough in pursuit of an unrealistic simplistic perfection of some sort, we need to keep liquid fuels on the table. But, having said that, we need to entirely stop using fossil petroleum based liquid fuels and switch entirely to non-fossil molecules.

One way to do that is to simulate the production of burnable liquids (as nature does) in machines, using non fossil based raw materials. Obviously biodiesel and ethanol are example of this, but these fuel sources have a serious limitation. They take up agricultural resources, and over the next few decades we are likely to hit a ceiling in our agricultural productivity. There are a lot of ways to address that problem, and one of the key ways on the table right now is to not convert much more agricultural land to ethanol or diesel production.

So what about a machine that takes sunlight, CO2 from the atmosphere, and some water and produces a burnable liquid?

The current issue of Science has a writeup on recent research in this area. I’m fairly certain it is not behind a paywall, and can read it yourself: Tailpipe to tank by Robert F. Service.

The writeup talks about multiple alternative research projects that are approaching this problem with various difficulties and various levels of success. This is all very early research but it is all very promising.

The task essentially boils down to running combustion in reverse, injecting energy from the sun or other renewables into chemical bonds. “It’s a very challenging problem, because it’s always an uphill battle,” says John Keith, a chemist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. It’s what plants do, of course, to make the sugars they need to grow. But plants convert only about 1% of the energy that hits them into chemical energy. To power our industrial society, researchers need to do far better. Keith likens the challenge to putting a man on the moon.

The basic method seems to be about the same in all cases. You take a CO2 molecule and convert it to CO by knocking off one Oxygen atom, then combine the CO with H2) to produce “syngas” which can be converted to methanol (a kind of alcohol) which can then be converted into a variety of products. A similar process in widespread use uses fossil methane as a base molecule instead of atmospheric CO2.

A paper about to be published in Advanced Science details a process that uses CO and H2 and photovoltaic generated electricity.

It focuses a broad swath of sunlight onto a semiconductor panel that converts 38% of the incoming energy into electricity at a high voltage. The electricity is shunted to electrodes in two electrochemical cells: one that splits water molecules and another that splits CO2. Meanwhile, much of the remaining energy in the sunlight is captured as heat and used to preheat the two cells to hundreds of degrees, a step that lowers the amount of electricity needed to split water and CO2 molecules by roughly 25%. In the end, Licht says, as much as 50% of the incoming solar energy can be converted into chemical bonds.

This and other methods of making a sun, water, and air based liquid fuel would at least initially be expensive. But who cares? If we convert most of our energy to motion machinery to electric, we won’t need that much, and the remaining uses will be relatively specialized. So what if a hospital has to pay $10.00 a gallon to have a thousand gallons of fuel for use as a backup source of energy to run generators during emergencies? That would be a tiny fraction of the cost of running a hospital. A tiny fraction of a fraction.

And, it need not be super expensive. There is not a rare substance that must be mined from third world war torn client states, or taken away from some other critical use, involved. Go read the original writ-up for a lot more detail on various processes and their potential (and potential costs).

I want to make this point: This is not a way of forestalling climate change by removing CO2 from the air. It would remove CO2, but the amount of CO2 humans have added is huge, and the use of sun/air/water liquid fuels would be small, and their use would return the CO2 to the air. So this is not carbon capture.

Also, this. An industry that produces a synthetic liquid fuel can preferentially use a peak energy. I think we need to explore this idea more. For example, imagine collecting piles of recycled aluminum at a plant that uses great amounts of electricity to melt it down and turn it into ingots for industrial use. The entire plant could be designed to operate on demand and only now and then, when there happens to be piles of extra electricity in a clean-energy rich energy ecosystem, perhaps because it is sunny and windy and other demands happen to be low. The employment structure of the plant would also be designed to do this, drawing on-call workers off of other activities to run the plant. This would essentially amount to carrying out a high energy demand industrial task with free energy. Well, a sun/air/water liquid fuel system could work this way as well. This idea has not gone un-thought:

…Paul Kenis, a solar fuels researcher at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, argues that the broad penetration of solar and wind power offers hope. Denmark, for example, already produces some 30% of its electricity from wind farms and is on pace to reach 50% by 2020. On a particularly blustery day in July, the nation’s wind turbines generated as much as 140% of the country’s electrical requirements. The excess was sent to its neighbors, Germany, Norway, and Sweden. But the oversupply added to utilities’ fears that in times of peak renewable power production, the value of electricity could fall to zero or even below, as producers would have to pay others to take it so as not to damage their grid.

That’s where solar fuel producers could stand to benefit, Kenis says: By absorbing that power and using it to make fuels and other commodities, they could essentially act as energy banks and perhaps earn some cash as well. For now, Kanan argues, it still makes the most economic sense simply to shunt excess renewable power into the grid, displacing fossil energy. But someday, if renewable power becomes widespread enough and the technology for making renewable fuels improves, we may be able to guzzle gas without guilt, knowing we are just burning sunlight.

This story on Slashdot

Service Robert F. Feature Article. Tailpipe to Tank. 2015. Vol. 349 no. 6253 pp. 1158-1160. DOI: 10.1126/science.349.6253.1158

September 16th Is Buy A Teacher A Book Day

Education

OK, not really, I just made that up. But it should be! As all the kiddies are going back to school, especially yours if you’ve got ’em, and you are going to have your first meetings with the teachers (Parent Night, Conferences, etc.) over the next few days, this is a good time to bring your kid’s teacher(s) a nice book.

A book on the Evolution Creation Debate for your kid’s biology teacher, or school administrator. A nice science activity book, not necessarily to use in class, but for the elementary school teacher to get some ideas from.

Some ideas:

A local guide to birds or trees or something for a teacher that is known to take the kiddies out to the pond in the back of the school to collect stuff. Or a bird related book for the art teacher would be nice. That sort of thing.

One nice book, that I just reviewed, is Climate Change Discover How It Impacts Space Ship Earth. Related would be Mike Mann’s pictorial version of the latest IPCC Report’s science volume. Genie Scott’s book on Evolution vs. Creationism.

A kid’s book on global warming or one on evolution would be nice for the elementary school teachers.

Loonacy

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Check out my latest contribution to the bird blog 10,000 birds:

Faithful Loons and Human Lunacy

Every year there manage to be two Loons out in front of the cabin, up in Minnesota’s lake country. They nest on the same, ever-expanding semi-floating but occasionally shrinking nest over behind the point, so we can’t see the nest without going across the marsh in a canoe. It is a great place to nest, but for one small detail. Behind the embayment formed by the point is a tall bluff, the edge of an ancient river valley that passed through the area during one or more (probably a few) prior interglacials. Maybe it was a version of the Mississippi River, maybe it was a version of the Warren River, likely both. Atop the ridge, where no one will ever build cabins because it is too high up, is a grove of white pines. A good way up one of the tallest pines is an Eagle’s nest.

Every year there manage to be two eagles up there in that nest. Plus hungry offspring.

So the Loons produce, probably, two chicks. Often …

Read the rest here.

Arctic Sea Ice Minimum: Achievement Unlocked

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The National Snow & Ice Data Center has declared that the Arctic Sea ice extent has reached its annual minimum and is now starting to expand. I was thinking that it was too early to say this, since in past years what looks like a minimum can sometimes be reversed by some additional melting. But they are the experts, so I suppose we should go with it for now.

If this is the case, then this is the fourth lowest minimum in the good data set covering the last several decades.

They do hedge a bit. Here is what they say:

On September 11, Arctic sea ice reached its likely minimum extent for 2015. The minimum ice extent was the fourth lowest in the satellite record, and reinforces the long-term downward trend in Arctic ice extent. Sea ice extent will now begin its seasonal increase through autumn and winter. In the Antarctic, sea ice extent is average, a substantial contrast with recent years when Antarctic winter extents reached record high levels.

Please note that this is a preliminary announcement. Changing winds or late-season melt could still reduce the Arctic ice extent, as happened in 2005 and 2010. NSIDC scientists will release a full analysis of the Arctic melt season, and discuss the Antarctic winter sea ice growth, in early October.

Drought, Heat, Rain, Ice, Rising Seas, Hurricanes

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A few items for you.

California drought: Sierra Nevada snowpack falls to 500-year low

The Sierra Nevada snowpack that is a critical water source for California fell to a 500-year low last winter – far worse than scientists had estimated and underlining the severity of the current drought, according to new research.

The snow accumulation in the mountains was just 5% of what is normal, inflating the risk of wildfires, drying up wells and orchards, and pushing communities into water rationing.

Climate Central has a couple of interesting US maps showing trends in change over time in Fall temperatures and precipitation. Have a look.

Peter Sinclair has something on sea ice. This is actually a bad year for sea ice. For various reasons related to climate change, Antarctic sea ice has become somewhat larger in extent. This is probably because of an overall increase in winds in the Souther Ocean, which blows the sea ice (and the albatross, as it turns out) around more. When you blow the forming sea ice around it spreads it out and the newly exposed open water freezes, so you get more. But this year, southern sea ice is low in its extent. The Arctic, nearing its minimum extent right now, is probably at its second or third lowest ever see in the available data (over the last several decades). So the two combined results in a very low year.

Clearly, if you burned all the fossil fuel you’d get a warmer planet. In the past, when there was a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere (like during certain ages of dinosaurs) this happened. Recent work by Ken Caldeira explores this concept, and NPR has a story on it. HERE.

Meanwhile, check out the ESSC Atlantic Hurricane prediction data for the last several years. For 2015, we’ve already hit 8, and the prediction is for 7.5. Another two may be forming now as we speak. So, the first thing to note is that these predictions are pretty accurate. The second thing to note is that we may be having a relatively active Atlantic hurricane seasons even if it does not seem like it.

That is all for now, thank you very much.

When is the best time to give birth?

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After, not before, you get to the hospital, I always say.

But seriously, Robert Martin, the famous primatologist, has an interesting piece in Psychology Today exploring this question. Go read it. I’ve got a few thoughts spurred by this research I’ll list briefly here.

First, it seems that wild primates give birth during their daily down-time, the period of time that they are generally inactive. Dirunal primates do so more at night, nocturnal primates do so more during the day. Various reasons have been proposed. I’ve not read the primary literature on this, but in my ignorance I wanted to propose a possible (maybe additional, maybe already covered) idea. It has been suggested that this is to avoid predation. It could also be the case that the down time itself happens when it does for the same reason, to avoid predation while resting. Consider just diurnal primates for a moment. Resting is probably a time that primates are more likely to be preyed on for one specific reason: they don’t have as many eyes scanning from as many angled over a large area. This would apply only to social primates, especially those that sometimes forage in multi-species groups. So, resting times would be times of lower vigilance, so those times are ideally placed during times when predators are less active. Nocturnal/crepuscular primates are least active during the part of the day that primates are less active, and diurnal primates that start to hunt in the morning may have fed by them.

I quickly add that this is a counterintuitive idea (the part about resting being placed during the low-risk time of the day). The assumption is usually that resting means you are quiet and hard to find, so less susceptible to predation. But the predators already know where the primates are, and can find them. Being more active may make primates more visible to other primates including human primatologists (arboreal monkeys can be hard to spot when they are just sitting there … usually you spot them when branches are swaying and calls are sounding). So it would be a tradeoff between increased vigilance associated with foraging (because you are out and about and observant), decreased vigilance associated with foraging (because you are busy stuffing your face with goodies), increase vigilance because you are resting (because you can sit there and look around without distraction) and decreased vigilance because you are resting (because you are zoning out and if you are hiding among thick vegetation have less of a view). Being a primate is complicated.

Like other diurnal primates, humans seem to give birth more at night. This is perhaps the baseline starting point for humans further developing a nocturnal active phase to their activities, which for a long time has been thought an important part of evolution. We social beings invent fire and this produces a sitting around the fire thing where we use language to do stuff. Sex too. Diurnal primates not only feed and move about during the day, but also have sex during the day, and in the open. The human pattern is to generally have sex at night, and more privately. This is what happens, perhaps, when you take a monogamous bird/gibbon-like mating system and deploy it in a highly social primate.

So the night time behavioral niche includes a number of activities, including sex, gossip, and popping out babies. All closely related things.

Anyway, go read Robert Martin’s article.

Climate Change and Earth Science Kids Activity Book

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Climate Change: Discover How It Impacts Spaceship Earth (Build It Yourself) covers many concepts in earth science, from paleontology to climate systems to how to make a battery out of apple (how can a kid’s science activity not include the apple battery!). This book represents an interesting concept, because it involves kids in mostly easy to do at home projects, covers numerous scientific concepts, and takes the importance of global climate change as a given. There is a good amount of history of research, though the book does not cover a lot of the most current scientists and their key work (I’d have liked to see a chapter specifically on the Hockey Stick and the paleo record, thought these concepts are included along with the other material).

One of the coolest things about the book is the material on what an individual can do to address energy and climate related problems, including (but not limited to) advice on activism, such as writing letters to government officials.

Climate Change: Discover How It Impacts Spaceship Earth (Build It Yourself) is listed as for reading ages 9-12 (reading level U), but with a parent working with the kid, this can work for much younger children, especially if you focus on the projects. I intend to work with my five year old on some of the projects, and use a couple of the sections as night time reading material. When he gets a bit older he can read the book himself. This would also be a good book to give as a gift to your kid’s school library, or even better, the appropriate elementary school teacher.

Screen Shot 2015-09-15 at 10.31.48 AMThe book also addresses Common Core Standards for literacy in science and technology.

From the Publisher:

How do we know the climate is changing? For more than 200 years, scientists have been observing, measuring, and analyzing information about our planet’s climate. In Climate Change: Discover How It Impacts Spaceship Earth, young readers examine real studies concerning planetary science, Arctic ice bubbles, migratory patterns, and more. Kids explore the history of human impact from the Industrial Revolution to our modern-day technology, as well as the science and engineering innovations underway around the world to address global climate change.
The idea of climate change can be scary, but every one of us has the ability to make a difference. Focused on a pro-active approach to environmental education, Climate Change engages readers through hands-on activities such as building a solar pizza oven, along with deconstructions of myths, hypotheses, and communications. Kids are directed to digital supplemental material that enhances the discussion of climate change and makes complex concepts easier to understand through visual representation. Climate Change offers a way to think of our Spaceship Earth as the singular resource it is.

The projects in the book include:

<li>Make a telescope</li>

<li>Build a solar cooker out of a pizza box</li>

<li>Build a sundial</li>

<li>Make an anemometer</li>

<li>Measure moisture in the air</li>

<li>Perform a transportation energy audit</li>

<li>Write a letter to they mayor</li>

The book is by Erin Twamley and Joshua Sneiderman. Erin is a professional educator and communicator, and Joshua is an experienced science teacher. Mike Crosier is the illustrator.

Californians And Their Drought: New Poll

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California voters feel increasingly squeezed by their drought, according to a new USC Donrslife/Los Angeles Times poll.

September 11, 2015 — As one of California’s most severe droughts on record continues to worsen, more than one in three state voters say the drought has had a major impact on them and the lives of their families, according to results from the latest USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences/Los Angeles Times Poll.

Thirty-five percent of California voters said the drought has had a major impact, 50 percent said it has had a minor impact, and 14 percent said it has had no impact at all, according to the poll. That’s an increase since last September, when the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Poll showed 22 percent said the drought had had a major impact and 28 percent said it had no impact at all.

Overall, 92 percent of voters called the drought a “crisis or major problem,” with just 7 percent saying it was “minor or not a problem,” according to the poll. That’s a slight uptick since last September when the 90 percent of voters said the drought was a “crisis or major problem, according to the poll.

“Last year, Californians thought the drought was a problem for the politicans to handle,” said Dan Schnur, director of the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Poll and director of the Unruh Institute of Politics of USC. “This year, it’s a daily challenge in our own lives.”

Among Latinos, 47 percent said the drought has had a major impact on their lives, the poll showed, with another 40 percent who said it’s had a minor impact.

California voters also strongly believe that the El Niño weather phenomenon forecasted to bring heavy rain this winter help the state’s water shortage and drought: 78 percent said El Niño will help, as opposed to 7 percent who said it will make no difference or make it worse, the poll showed.

Here’s a video:

The rest of the press release:

Voters are also increasingly less willing to pay higher water rates and bills to decrease water use, the poll showed.

When asked about a number of potential solutions to address the drought, 58 percent of voters said they would oppose increasing water rates and bills, as opposed to 38 percent who would favor it. In September 2014, voters opposed to raising water rates and bills, 51 to 44.

When asked to choose between two statements, 46 percent said they would be willing to pay higher water bills “to ensure a reliable, long-term water supply,” as opposed to 47 percent who said their water bills “are high enough” and are not willing to pay more to ensure the long-term water supply, the poll showed. In September 2014, the USC Dornsife/LA Times Poll showed 48 percent would pay more as opposed to 41 percent who believed their bills were high enough.

Voters gave high approval marks on water and drought issues to Gov. Jerry Brown – who in April issued an executive order calling for mandatory cuts in urban water use. Fifty percent of voters said they approved of the job being done by Brown on water and the drought, as opposed to 34 percent who said they disapprove. A year ago, the poll showed 39 percent of voters approved and 42 percent disapproved of the job Brown has done on water and the drought.

“Clearly as the state has put in the mandatory measures and implemented Gov. Brown’s policy, people are actually feeling this in their everyday lives. But California may be reaching the end of their rope in terms of the personal sacrifices they are making,” said Drew Lieberman, vice president of Democratic polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, part of the bipartisan team with Republican polling firm American Viewpoint that conducted the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Poll.

Among the policy prescriptions most favored by voters: 95 percent favor both recycling more water and improving the state’s ability to capture storm water; 80 percent said investing in desalinating ocean water to make it suitable for household use; and 69 percent said build new dams and reservoirs.

But only 53 percent of voters said they favored requiring farmers and the agriculture industry to reduce water use. Voters were also unwilling to suspend environmental regulations that protect fish and wildlife to help address the drought, with 54 percent saying they oppose suspending environmental regulations and 42 percent saying they would favor it.

“Voters seem to have decided that they’re doing their share, there are other things that need to be done to impact the drought but it doesn’t need to affect the state’s other policy priorities,” Schnur said. “Voters are clearly concerned about the drought but tend to see it in isolation and not related to the state’s other policy challenges.”

When asked to choose between a pair of statements, 50 percent of voters said California should protect the environment, even if it hurts the water supply, as opposed to 34 percent who said the state should ensure the water supply even at the expense of the environment. In September 2014, 46 percent of voters said California should protect the environment and 37 percent said the state should ensure the water supply even if it harms the environment.

Californians were slightly opposed to allowing the government to impose fines of up to $10,000 for violations of water conservation rules, with 44 percent in favor and 49 percent opposed.

What (or who) is to blame for the drought?

When asked which factors were most to blame for California’s water supply problems, 90 percent said “not enough snow and rain,” followed by old delivery systems and not enough water storage (79%); Californians using too much water (78%); too much growth and development (72%); global climate change (69%); and environmental regulations (67%).

Sixty-five percent of voters said they blamed the agricultural industry, up from 54 percent a year ago, the poll showed. Support for requiring farmers to decrease water use jumped 16 percentage points over the September 2014 USC Dornsife/LA Times poll.

Latino voters were more likely than white voters to blame global climate change (76-65) and environmental regulations (76-62) for the state’s water supply problems.

“Given that a lot of these voters feel they’ve already made sacrifices, if other people had to take a further pinch they’d rather it be someone other than them. The agriculture industry is an easy victim to choose,” said David Kanevsky, research director of Republican polling firm American Viewpoint.

The latest USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Poll, the largest statewide survey of registered voters, was conducted Aug. 29 – Sept. 8 and includes a significant oversample of Latino voters as well as one of the most robust cell phone samples in the state. The full sample of 1,500 registered voters has a margin of error of +/- 2.8 percentage points.

August was a very hot month, globally.

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According to the Japan Meteorological Agency, “The monthly anomaly of the global average surface temperature in August 2015 (i.e. the average of the near-surface air temperature over land and the SST) was +0.45°C above the 1981-2010 average (+0.79°C above the 20th century average), and was the warmest since 1891. On a longer time scale, global average surface temperatures have risen at a rate of about 0.65°C per century.”

See graphic above.

Arctic Sea Ice Extent Is Not Extensive

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September is when the melt of the Arctic Sea Ice stops, and the re-freeze starts. We are probably not at the minimum yet, but the amount of melting is starting to level off so we can see where we are. The above graphic, made here (go and play with the interactive graph) shows the first ten years of ice freezing and remelting in the data set to use as a baseline for comparison, and the present year. Yes, there is much less sea ice on the northern end of the planet than usual.

This version of the graph shows the years with less ice, so far, than the present year. This includes the famous 2012 when the ice melted a lot lot more than usual, instead of merely a lot more. 2007 probably had less ice than this year will see, but we can’t be sure yet. 2011 and the present year are almost the same. Again, we’ll see but currently 2011 had a tiny bit less sea ice extent.

Screen Shot 2015-09-13 at 11.25.31 AM

So, 2015 will end up being the second or third most ice free year on record. Keep in mind this is only surface, not volume. Still, surface is very important because it is part of a feedback system; the more surface ice the more reflection of sun’s energy back into space, the less surface covered with ice, the more the Arctic sea is warmed by the sun during the summer.

National Geographic: The Whole World Is Watching. Something.

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Someone just asked on Facebook if humans are naturally carnivores. My response: What is a carnivore? Taxon? A certain percentage of meat in the diet? Some, even if just a few, humans living mostly off meat? What? Then, what is “naturally”? Genetically determined and unavoidable? Required because of our gut, or some nutritional thing? What if we were like cats, genetically driven to be effective hunters but seeming in need of some training from mom. Does that make it not natural? And, finally, of course, define the verb “to be” here. Thank you.

So, with that in mind, what about the sentence…

“Rupert Murdoch Bought National Geographic.”

11215063_10206537192685263_5276108758147554290_nI’m seeing this all over the place, along with much consternation and the occasional meme (I’ve included a couple of the memes here). Few people articulate their reasons for consternation, probably because it is so obvious. We don’t want a truth-hating right wing anti-environment jerk running a major Earth-loving institution, with a great magazine and TV specials and everything. It would destroy a long tradition, all that. The truth is too precious, especially the truth about the earth and the environment.

And I would agree with that more or less if it turns out to be true. People should be concerned about the recent thing that happened. But, if you are concerned about that because the truth matters, then please, don’t produce or repeat so much unmitigated bullshit.

Again, I reiterate my concern, because if I don’t I’ll be accused of thinking FOX news is great or for being a Rupert Murdoch Fan or something, because, after all, the truth really matters little even to those who claim it (care about the truth) is central to their very being. So if you were going to do that, just don’t. But let us please look at what is really happening here so you know exactly what to watch for, and to help guide your thinking as things unfold.

First, “National Geographic” is not a thing. It might be a short hand for the magazine, or the web site, or various TV specials, or “The National Geographic Society” which is involved in all those things. I would say that the shorthand “National Geographic” best applies to the society. If it does, then the phrase “Rupert Murdoch bought National Geographic” is simply not true because that simply did not happen.

Second, “bought” is not an appropriate word here. What did happen is that the National Geographic Society (NGS) and a commercial media company have partnered to run the National Geographic Magazine. The news agency has bought into the is partnership at just over 70%, NGS with the remainder. That is not buying the magazine, it is restructuring who is financially running it, though yes, the media company is in control with a major share of the partnership. You might thing that is the same thing as buying something, but if you do, you’d have a dangerously oversimplistic view of these things. So don’t.

Third, Rupert Murdoch did not buy anything. Well, he’s bought lots of stuff, of course, and a few years ago he bought and sold and restructured stuff so there cane to be a new version of 21st Century Fox and News Group. News Group was Murdoch’s old company, and 21st Century Fox comes down from the long time famous studio. News Group now owns or engages in print, 21st Century Fox now owns or engages in pixels, more or less, as far as I can tell. It is a publicly owned company, so if you have a mutual fund or something there is a chance that YOU BOUGHT NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC HA HA HA. Right?

Anyway, having said all that, one could argue that the Evil Entity Known as Fox-Murdoch has effectively taken over National Geographic Something Something (where Something Something is the magazine and the Cable network and stuff). Fine. Think that, be concerned, be mad, and complain about it. But don’t complain that “Rupert Murdoch Bought National Geographic” because it is not correct.

11986346_1637083499902501_1321351435246200901_nPedantic? Yes, in part, but also important. For example, knowing so little about the situation to go all apoplectic and throw out your old National Geographic Magazines and cancel your subscription would be a sign of ignorance more than good activism. For at least two reasons.

First, did you know that FOX and NGS were already partners in a large amount of their prior activities, and this simply expands it? Where were you then, where were the memes then, were was the outrage?

And, second, did it make any difference? Did you see the Politics of Murdoch imprinted in the National Geographic Society ventures? Probably not. And this brings us to the more expanded second reason. 21st Century Fox is a huge company and has more interest in making profit than in imposiing its political will on all things it does. Hell, it has enough political will being imposed in a handful of its ventures, it hardly need to do something else.

Also, the Magazine part of this venture is being run by a Murdoch son, and the Murdoch son is famously different from dad politically. And, 21st Century Fox has promised to keep hands off.

Finally, what was so pure about National Geographic Magazine before? A great travel magazine, much less anthropological than people usually think. Did you really ever read it? Do you know what you are trying to save? I’m not saying there is anything wrong with NG Magazine, but it may not be what you were thinking. It really is a travel magazine for the 1% and those who wish to be them. The National Geographic Society, of course, is different. That is bigger, involved in all the other things mentioned, and provides grants for some pretty cool research.

Be outraged if you want, but please be outraged about the outrageous. We don’t know if this is outrageous, or even different. Having said that, watch closely. Very closely. And be triply outraged if the “hands off” policy turns out to be anything but hands off.

Be ever vigilant. But about real things.

How To Evaluate Science Stories

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I’m on my way to a taping of the Humanist Views with Host Scott Lohman. I do these now and then and have done so since I first moved to Minnesota back when it was still cold here. We’ll be talking about science knowledge, and why basic science knowledge is important. We’ll also be talking about how to go about evaluating science stories you encounter in the news, or more likely, on your Facebook feed or in other social media.

Pursuant to this, I wrote a blog post that talks about how science stories go out to the general public. I also report on a request I sent out a few days ago to my own Facebook Friends for their thoughts on which Internet sites are good science sources, and which are not so good.

So, here goes…

How a scientific finding comes to you

A first year graduate student comes up with a project. The idea is that change in A causes a change in B, and this could be important, although in truth the natural phenomenon being studied is a bit esoteric. After a year or so of experimentation, learning, literature search, and thinking about the problem, the graduate student comes to understand that a change in the level of disorder in the state of A is associated under certain conditions, some known and some unknown, with a threshold change in B, but it doesn’t always happen. The threshold itself is as yet unmeasured, but seems like a threshold. In the end, more questions have been raised than answered, but also, more is known about A and B and related things than before.

Eventually, there is a paper, peer reviewed, and about to be published. The University Press Office is informed. The University writer who covers this area of science is on vacation, so a different person not so familiar with that area of science takes on the job of writing the press release. An interview with the graduate student doesn’t go too well, because scientists have dialects that are sometimes more difficult for a non-specialist to understand than are the diverse dialects of a widely spoken language (like English) by someone unaccustomed to them.

During the conversation the writer presses the graduate student for more on the significance of the study. The graduate student claims the study results are significant. But the writer is thinking “cures cancer” or “a better mousetrap” significance, and the graduate student is thinking about statistical tests and p-values. But, during the conversation something is said about something that sounds significant to the writer. The paper is about statistical variation in ATP use in a muscle fiber, and muscle fibers are what’s messed up in many different diseases, as well as in aging. So now the writer contacts a couple of scientists unrelated to the exact research project and asks about its significance. During that conversation it is made clear that curing heart disease is important, even though this research really has little to do with it. But it could be related in the sense that the more we know about muscle and ATP in muscle fibers, the more we know in general, and that can’t be bad when it comes to heart disease, or a long list of other problems.

So the writer writes up the story, and focuses on the value this new research will have in curing heart disease and multiple sclerosis. The real meaning of the original research, which is that we should be measuring the order and disorder of the state of a particular molecule in muscle fibre, instead of measuring, for instance, how much the muscle twitches in a test tube, is not even mentioned in the writeup because it is too difficult to understand and too esoteric.

Under deadline, the writer asks the editor if the near final copy should be run by the graduate student to see if it is right. The editor says no, explaining that “we don’t let the people we interview see the copy because it would not be fair to the other people you interviewed,” or some such excuse. So the copy moves along in the process. The editor creates a title that makes the research look sexy. The writer, feeling the title might be misleading, asks that the title be toned down a bit, and the editor agrees. But the process of putting the press release onto the University web site has already begun, and the original, overstated, title is still in the HTML Metacode where it will show up as the title on a Facebook post about the research.

Then, somebody spots the research and posts it on their Facebook feed. It gets shared and shared and shared and shared, with the original bogus title on top of every share. Almost nobody reads the text under the title; had they done, they would notice a conflict between the title and the text. Even fewer people click through and read the original text of the press release, so almost no one notices that there may be more, or really, less, to the story than the title suggests. Even fewer people, maybe one in 1,000, have a look at the original article, and if they do, they don’t understand much of it because the process of publishing peer reviewed papers also involved making science being reported less, rather than more, understandable. Also, it is only an abstract because the paper is behind a firewall.

Everybody is now stupider than they were before this whole thing started.

(See a cartoon version of this here, hat tip: Michael Tobis.)

And, importantly, this is how science gets muddled even when there are sincere efforts to not muddle it, and in the absence of nefarious muddling by anti-science operatives.

This is not how it goes with all scientific stories. Many scientists, often those once or twice burned, are more careful in dealing with press offices. Many press offices are actually pretty good, and have great writers, and the press releases they produce are better. Many stories get picked up by crack science writers and bloggers who bother to read the original paper, talk to experts, contact the author with questions, then do a good job of presenting the material. But often, something like the above, or a subset of the above, happens. Stupider, many become.

How does the average person who is interested in science, or a particular topic important to them because of something in their life, avoid becoming stupider, and maybe, just possibly, become even smarter? Here are a few guidelines, most of which have to do with encountering this information on the Internet.

1) Do not assume that a title reflects the research. It often does not.

2) Do not assume that a third party writeup is not messed up. It often is.

3) The internet is made of tubes. Some of these tubes are little more than conduits of original press releases, scraped from myriad sources and turned into what look like news stories. These are good places to find out about newly published research. They are entirely unreliable to find out what that research is about. They are like search engines that lie.

4) Find interpretive outlets you can trust. There are many science writers and science bloggers (overlapping entities) who regularly do a good job of describing current or recent research.

5) Time is your friend. Often, even among the better interpretive sites, mistakes are made and research is accidentally mis-represented. But usually, eventually, corrections are made. An absolutely fresh report of new research may be misleading, while just a week or so later, the reporting gets straightened out.

6) In some fields, there are people who are involved in the research (specifically or generally) who also write about it in a blog. The best example I can think of has to do with climate change. RealClimate blog is written by climate scientists. Very often, the blog posts they produce are written by the actual authors of the new papers. They write these blog posts specifically to inform the general interested (and at least somewhat field-aware) public of their findings. Sometimes they write blog posts specifically designed to address misunderstandings that have emerged, as described above, or as is often the case in climate science, because nefarious science deniers have muddled up the message on purpose. Similarly, there are science based medicine sites that write about health and medicine related news, though in my experience these bloggers are experts in their fields but not generally the authors of the work they are writing about, as is often the case with RealClimate.

PLEASE NOTICE THE TWO SPECIALIZED SEARCH ENGINES IN THE SIDEBAR TO THE RIGHT, ONE FOR GOOD SCIENCE SITES IN GENERAL (SKEPTICAL SEARCH ENGINE) ONE FOR CLIMATE SCIENCE SPECIFICALLY!!!

7) In some fields, there are relatively reliable web sites that cover everything encyclopedia style. Again, with Climate, SkepticalScience.com covers every aspect of climate change, as well as denial of climate change science. If something isn’t there, it is because it is so new it hasn’t been covered yet, but will be. You can even contact the authors of this site and ask for more, or for clarification. Other sites are more like topical sites. This is trickier. There are bogus health and diet sites and there are good health and diet sites. Nature News is crap according to everyone I know (I don’t track that site). WebMD tends to be reasonably good, The Mayo Clinic’s site is very reliable. The CDC does a good job of covering disease. These sites will be less current, and very cautious. They won’t say stuff if they are afraid you will misuse the information, but they go out of their way to address common goofs people make in their thinking about the issues they cover.

8) This should be number 1, but in fact, applies to very few people for various reasons, so I put it down here. If you want to be able to evaluate new scientific research in a given area, learn all about that area and become an amateur expert on it. That is not easy. People will tell you it is easy, and claim they have done this. It is not and they did not – if they thought it was easy they missed something. But if your sources are good, you are honest with yourself, have a bit of training or experience with thinking about things in a scientific way (and haven’t simply told yourself you can do this) then you can make this happen.

9) Pursuant to number 8, use sources like Google Scholar to find actual peer reviewed research of interest to you and read it. Many peer reviewed papers will not be easily available to you because they are behind firewalls, but many are OpenAccess. Others, probably all others, can be obtained at a good library, though that can be a lot of trouble. For something really important, where your need for a paper goes beyond your own interest – maybe you are a teacher teaching about the topic – go ahead and contact the paper’s “corresponding author” and ask for a copy. If the paper is an older one, go first to the authors’ web sites and see if there is a downloadable copy there, often this is the case. Try Googling the entire title of the paper, in quotes, followed by the words “download” and “PDF.” Every once in a while this works, just like magic.

There are some great science communicators some of whom are also scientists.

A couple of quick tips on how to tell a good communicator:

  • They communicate in the field they work in, or at least, communicate a lot in. So they know stuff.
  • When they talk they make sense (by itself not a good clue, but helpful).
  • They manage to use some big words or concepts but make them fully understood.
  • They are often interviewed on comedy central, the only really good news network.

Caution: self styled skeptics are often bad sources because they really do think they understand the science, but may not.

  • As a rule if a non-specialist or highly experienced writer tells you that a certain area of science is simple to understand, check your wallet.
  • If a skeptic tells you that “many peer reviewed studies” have proven/disproven something, check your wallet. Then check for the studies.
  • If an argument is the counter to the argument that the science is controlled by big business, chances are both the original argument and the counter argument are worthless.
  • Notice how self styled skeptics often follow a party line that is as much derived from authority as any other argument they may reject because it is derived from authority.

So what are some good science sources, and what are the bad ones?

A few days ago I asked my Facebook friends to suggest what they thought were good, vs. bad, sources on science. Below I’ve placed their recommendations, without links. That is partly because I don’t want to have links to bad sources on this site. If you enter the term supplied here you can find the referenced resources easily.

If you disagree with anything on this list, or want to add to it, just drop a comment below.

I have not included sites like Physorg and other science news aggregator sites. See above for my opinion on those sites. Interestingly, these sites were listed by Facebook friends as either bad or good. In truth, they are probably either bad or good depending on what you do with them.

Not everything here is exactly a science site but you can see where those listings are still relevant.

Science Sources People Say Are Good

The Global Warming Fact of the Day Facebook Page
RealClimate
SkepticalScience.com
Science Based Medicine
Bad Astronomy
PolitiFact
Christian Science Monitor
Wikipedia (Especially as a really smart search engine)
Talk Origin
SCOTUSBlog
Federation of American Scientists
Cultural Cognition Project
Questia
Mayo Clinic
Carl Zimmer
XKCD

Science Sources People Say Are Bad

Whats Up With That
Briebart
InfoWars
Natural News
The Truth Wins
Thunderbolts.info
Answers in Genesis
Discovery Institute
Real Science
Dr. Oz
Mercola
Collective Evolution
Food Babe
Spirit Science
International Medical Council on Vaccination