Monthly Archives: May 2016

The Alberta/Fort McMurray Wild Fire (Update)

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Remember that big wild fire that threatened, and damaged, Fort MacMurray, causing major evacuation in the oil sands mining region of Canada?

Well, the fire never went out and has now changed directions to threaten settlements again.

Update (mid day Tuesday): The fire is now actually burning some homes/buildings in Ft. McMurray. One of them may have actually exploded. Maybe two.

On the other hand, the oil sands camps to the north seem to be less threatened, or not threatened. The area around these sites are clear of major vegetation, and there are “industrial firefighters” on the scene.

The main concern outside of Fort McMurray are logging facilities that are deep in the forest.

In fact the fire may be worse. I don’t think the Alberta fire services were making accurate estimates of the fire’s size for a few days there last week because they were a bit distracted, but the fire maxed out on their information service web site at about 150,000 hectares. At present, the fire is over 250,000 hectares, and still “out of control” according to that service.
This time, Fort McMurray is being threatened again, but also, the fire seems to be moving north towards the big oil sands work areas, which were previously not directly threatened by the burn (though menaced by the smoke).

The Syncrude and Suncor oil sands sites are being evacuated with employees moved to the north. Various camps out in the nearby wilderness are under mandatory evacuation. The oil sands evacuations are precautionary and suggested not mandatory, as I understand it.

The total number of people being moved around is in the hundreds, not thousands, mainly because the previously evacuated people are still evacuated.

Fort McMurray is probably not going to burn again, mainly because the nearby forest has already been burned. But the threat to the Oil Sands facilities to the north is very real.

Please read: On The Meaning of the Fort McMurray Fire.

More info from the Edmonton Journal.

How Bernie Sanders Lost Nevada Four Times

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First, Sanders lost Nevada because Hillary Clinton won the caucus.

Then, the Sanders campaign put their ground game into effect, in an effort to overtake Clinton during the nearly-unique-to-Nevada process that allows for changes in pledged delegates at later caucuses. But he didn’t get enough delegates to achieve that. The Sanders campaign does get credit for getting more delegates than they had before, of course.

Then, at the State Convention, Sanders had enough delegates in place to gain a couple of more delegates and possibly tie with Clinton in the end. But the organizers for the Sanders campaign failed to ensure that all the delegates to that convention were totally on board with what they needed to do in order to be credentialed at the event. Of the thousands of delegates at the convention, a handful of Clinton delegates failed to be credentialed (an expected number) but something over 60, initially, of the Sanders delegates were not legit, so they could not participate. A few of those managed to get credentialed by clarifying their information, but most did not. I’m not 100% certain of this, but I think that had they all been credentialed there would have been enough Sanders delegates to win one more delegate.

The fourth failure is complex, and mainly philosophical. First, Sanders supporters around the country are complaining a lot about how the Democratic Party process is an insiders game and ignored the will of the people. This is odd, considering that the will of the people leans strongly towards Clinton. In any event, the Sanders campaign playing the ground game in the middle of the Nevada process was inside politics. This sort of inside politics is perfectly normal, legal, expected, and what you have to do if you want to win. But by complaining loudly about the Clinton campaign doing this sort of thing, and then doing this, Sanders lost a moral high ground. The fact that this particular moral high ground does not exist to begin with means that this is merely an annoyance, but it is annoying.

Another part of the fourth failure is the cacophony of Sanders voices complaining about getting screwed in Las Vegas (I’m sure they weren’t the only ones that evening). This is a problem because it engenders bad feelings among democrats, but the accusation is based on nothing. What really happened is that the Sanders campaign tried to grab a couple of more delegates, but owing, I think, to too many people involved being ignorant of how the system works, failing to do as well as they might have. This same ignorance has led to unfounded complaints about what happened at the Nevada convention. This whole thing, this fourth way of losing, has given people whoa are getting tired of the Sanders followers more of a reason to call for Sanders to drop out of a race he has already lost. That loss may be more important than the small number of delegates that the Nevada Sanders campaign organizers failed to get.

A few points for those not fully aware. First, the numbers of delegates at the convention is very large, and the number of delegates who were not credentialed is very small, a fraction of a percent. Second, yes, this convention was chaotic, but guess what: they are all, always, chaotic. What happened at this convention was mostly pretty normal, though the Sanders antics did make the event run way more over time than usual. Another thing that was a bit unusual was that they were allowed to go over time by three hours. That is fairly remarkable. Usually, a extended event (caucus or campaign) shuts down much sooner.

Both campaigns had people involved in counting delegates, credentialing delegates, and running the meeting. This was not a case of Sanders people all on the floor and Clinton people running the show. Rather, both Clinton and Sanders people were involved in all aspects of this convention, and both Sanders and Clinton people, for the most part, acted properly during the event. I think it was just a small number of Sanders people who were causing all the extra raucous, and later complaining about it.

When considering the events in Nevada, remember that no two caucuse systems are alike, and the Nevada system is probably much less like the others than any. People are calling for a revision of the Nevada system, to not allow so much changing around of delegate pledges after the initial causus (though that has nothing to do with what happened Saturday), but actually, this system is better for the campaign process and for democracy. First, candidates have to demonstrate that they are willing to do more than just show up for a few days of stumping and buy a few ads. They have to be involved at the state and local level the whole time. Second, if there is a shift in the opinion of party mebmers as to who should get the state’s delegates, this allows for that adjustment. In this case, the adjustment mainly indicated a shift towards Clinton and away from Sanders. Thus, the Sanders people are a bit upset. Understandable, but just part of the process.

By and large, a lot of Democrats (both Sanders and Clinton supporters) are deciding to love or hate a the process, or a particular part of the process, based on whether their candidate won or lost. Please stop. In fact, estopp. You signed up for the game, this is the game, these are the rules. Feel free to suggest changes in the rules, but you can’t issue a complaint when the rules are followed but you didn’t get your way.

How the Venus Flytrap Evolved

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The trick to understanding evolution is less about finding good answer to questions, but rather, finding good questions to answer.

Read that sentence twice, because it is very important.

Years ago, Niko Tinbergen developed a method of formulating questions about biology. I’m pretty sure the Tinbergenian method has not been integrated into most science standards and teaching curriculum. It should be.

There are four types of questions one could formulate about a biological system, trait, or observation.

1) Mechanistic. How does this thing work? What cellular processes are involved in a metabolic process, or how do the lever forces work in a joint, or how does a heterotroph get some food into its gut.

2) Ontogenetic. Given the various parts of an organism, how did they arise initially during development? Thinking only of multi-celled animals for a moment, all animals can be divided into large categories that have a common body plan, and that body plan is easily seen in the embryonic state. Looking at a fully formed adult, at any particular organ or part of an organ, we can ask, how did this thing form during the process of differentiating this particular taxonomic category? For example, mammalian pituitary glands are a combination of a bit of what would otherwise be brain, and a bit of what otherwise would be the roof of the mouth. This helps make sense of the pituitary gland.

3) Phylogenetic. How is a particular feature of an organism potentiated or constrained, in its development or function, by ancestry? Birds have either two or four wings (the four winged birds are all extinct). Birds with two wings have two legs. Why not have two legs, two arms, and two wings? Because birds evolve within a taxonomic group that have four limbs, so wings are modified versions of those limbs.

4) Functional. Sometimes called “ultimate” this category of question is largely (but not entirely) about natural selection. What is it about this trait, or this particular form of this train in this species (or sex of a given species) that enhances fitness. This is about the aspect of the trait that presumably caused the trait to spread and become typical, or that caused a particular population (the population with this specific trait) to become more representative over time, due to selection.

A simpler version of this divides all features into two categories, “proximate” and “ultimate.” The proximate stuff is the immediate description, what it looks like, how it works, etc. The “ultimate” bit is the functional question (number 4 above). I prefer to keep the four categories in mind.

By the way, there is a thing I call Greg’s Rule of Tinbergenian Inquisition (GROTI). This is not a hard and fast rule of nature or logic, but just a common occurrence. If you consider all four Tinbergenian questions in relation to a given trait, one of the four questions will produce a boring answer or a tautology. There are probably deep underlying philosophically interesting reasons for this, but the rule is more important as a guide to teachers. If you want to teach the Tinbergenian method of asking questions about evolution, by example, you will probably need to come up with two or more examples in order to not have one of the four approaches look silly. But I digress.

You want to know how the Venus Flytrap evolved, and some recent research sheds some light on this by looking at the ontogenetic and phyogenetic aspects of known traits.

Venus flytraps are plants that capture and then digest insects (or other small critters). The ultimate reason they do this may have to do with nutrients. Capturing and absorbing the tissues of insects provides nitrogen and some other often rare nutrients. So, the adaptation is to nutrient poor environments. One might guess that this is a trait that was selected for in nutrient poor environments, or one might guess that it is a trait that emerged largely by accident and then allows plants that do this to do better in nutrient poor environments. Or, one might not be too concerned by this distinction and guess that both features of the emergence of a trait are likely to be involved in the evolutionary history of a particular species and its adaptations. But, again, I digress.

So, the Venus flytrap has sensors on it that tell the plant that there is prey present. Then it snaps shut (that is the coolest ting about the plant, but we’re not actually going to go into that here). Then a liquid engulfs the prey and digestion happens, then a different liquid is exuded and this facilitates the transport of nutrients into the plant.

Now, think about plants, generally. Plants have all sorts of chemicals in them, or on them, that do all sorts of things. Is there anything about plants in general, about what they normally do, that could provide the genetic (and therefore metabolic or processual) basis for any of these things?

Yes.

Plants have hairs on the that detect the presence of possible herbivores.

Herbivores may use certain chemicals to break down plant tissue, for ingestion and digestion.

Plants have evolved chemicals that break down those chemicals.

The chemicals that counteract the breakdown of plant tissues probably scare off herbivores, or limit their success, but the can also break down some of the molecules that herbivores are made of.

Meanwhile, plants have genes that are expressed in roots that produce chemicals that facilitate the transport of nutrients from the roots into the rest of the plant.

So, from a recent write-up in Science:

To catch an invertebrate that has blundered into its snare, the flytrap relies on an ancient alarm system. It starts ringing when the victim jostles trigger hairs. The hairs in turn generate electrical impulses that somehow stimulate glands in the trap to produce jasmonic acid—the same signal that noncarnivorous plants use to initiate defensive action against herbivores. Patterns of gene expression in the two kinds of plants confirm the similarity…

…In noncarnivorous plants, jasmonic acid triggers the synthesis of self-defense toxins and molecules that inhibit hydrolases, enzymes that herbivores secrete to break down the plant’s proteins. As part of their counterattack, plants also produce their own hydrolases, which can destroy chitin and other components of insects or microbes. In the flytrap, … [t]ens of thousands of tiny glands make and secrete hydrolases. The trapped invertebrate is drenched in the same digestive enzymes that another plant might use in smaller quantities to ward off an enemy….

Then, plant genes code for chemicals that help absorb the nutrients from the insect.

Experiments showed that many of these genes are the same ones expressed in the roots of other plants. “We looked at each other and said, ‘Yes, it’s a root,’” Hedrich says. “It made immediate sense,” because the flytrap draws its nutrition not from soil, but from its prey.

We now have a phylogenetic look at a large part of the Venus flytrap’s unique insectivores adaptation. As is generally the case, these novel adaptations are reworkings of pre-existing adaptations.

And, ontogenetic questions arise (but are not directly addressed by this research). How did the genes and their products normally found in roots get into the “stomach” thingie of the flytrap? Did the site of differentiation of root structures move to elsewhere in the plant, or is it just the genes being expressed in different cells? This question came to my mind reading this story, but I’m more of an animal guy than a plant guy. Animals have homeobox genes that control the overall differentiation of tissues, and stem cells that determine and limit, at various levels, what the possible cell types are in a give part of the developing animal. Plants are different. This is one of the reasons that plants can propagate vegetatively and few animals do anything similar.

So I asked Dr. Rainer Hedrich, the flytrap guy who produced, with his team, this research, if this was a case of the movement of root tissue into the business end of the flytrap, or, alternatively, the expression of genes in tissue that are not normally expressed there in a plant.

He told me, “The flytrap develops from tips of Dionaea leaves. So, the trap is a leaf on one side. The inner surface of the trap is covered by a turf of glands, and these glands express genes one otherwise finds in roots. So, the trap is a leaf with root function. Most likely, to serve carnivory, Dionea modified a transcription foactor or promoter of root genes and so directed them into the glands.”

So, the story remains one of phylogeny, not ontogeny. The ontogeny part of the story is uninteresting, but the funcitonal, phyogenetic, and mechanistic parts of the story are fascinating.

The paper:

Venus flytrap carnivorous lifestyle builds on herbivore defense strategies. Felix Bemm, Dirk Becker, Christina Larisch, Ines Kreuzer, Maria Escalante-Perez, Waltraud X. Schulze, Markus Ankenbrand, Anna-Lena Van de Weyer, Elzbieta Krol, Khaled A. Al-Rasheid, Axel Mithöfer, Andreas P. Weber, Jörg Schultz, and Rainer Hedrich. Genome Res. Published in Advance May 4, 2016, doi:10.1101/gr.202200.115

Graphic at the top of the post from here. Caption: Venus flytrap with its turf of glands and some gland complexes under the microscope – color enhanced transmission electron micrograph (TEM). B) Cross section of a gland complex showing the three characteristic cell types (Picture: Dirk Becker, Sönke Scherzer, Christina Larisch)

A very promising inexpensive Android tablet

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I’m just passing this information on, I’ve not handled this device. But the price and performance seem like such a sweet spot that I am compelled to tell you about it. Let me know in the comments if you have experience with this item.

The Dragon Touch M8 2016 Edition 8 inch Quad Core Tablet is a competitively priced high quality tablet, with excellent reviews. It costs 80 bucks. A while back, I asked if you should buy a $50 Kindle Fire Tablet. I concluded that maybe you should, because it is cheap and if the main thing you are doing with your tablet is grazing your Amazon Kindle booklist, it is actually idea. The Dragon Touch M8 (2016) is larger (8 inch display), and runs basic Android (different from the fire) and while a bit more expensive, it is also cheap.

Click through to see the specs. . It is a quad core with 1gb of ram, has a memory card slot for an extra 32 gigs of storage above the built in 16 gigs, GPS (that requires, I think, wireless), blue tooth, an HDMI plug, which might make it ideal for carrying around to give presentations (though you might need a ).

Scanning the reviews on Amazon, it seems that the bad reviews are about individual tablets that are broken in some way. The good reviews are pretty glowing. There are some complaints about the forward facing camera, but this may arise from the fact that at least in some tablets, this camera has a separate protective film on it that some may not have removed.

This tablet is not going to be as good as an iPad or a Google Nexus 9. It may be noticeably slower, especially with high demand apps like some games. But, if you simply can’t afford a tablet this may be a good choice, or if you want a second device for specific purposes that are not that demanding, you can probably skip some mid-priced pleasure (like going out to eat or something) and totally justify the purchase.

Climate Change Not Good For Red Knots

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You’ve heard the phrase, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” an insightful phrase penned in 1972 by Theodosius Dobzhansky. I would like to add a second part to that phrase, and it goes like this: “… and, nothing in evolution makes sense except in the light of co-evolution.” This would hardly be an exaggeration, and it can hardly be better exemplified than with examples from migratory birds. Migratory birds have to be adapted to at least three different ecological settings. They breed in one area, migrate (and often spend considerable time) through another area, and winter in a third area. In each area they must feed and avoid predators, and in the nesting area, they must have make and protect nests, and the feeding is even more critical because they are growing their chicks.

Changes in one or more of these zones can change the viability of a bird species’ strategy, and even influence the bird’s survival chances in other areas. In the case of one subspecies of the Red Knot, a migratory bird, changes in the breeding ground caused by anthropogenic global warming have caused changes in the morphology of the bird, which in turn have caused changes in the birds’ ability to survive in the migratory zone.

The Red Knot (Calidris canutus) is a shorebird, a kind of sandpiper, with a global distribution. The subspecies C. c. canutus breeds in the Taymyr Penninsula and migrates to Western Europe then western and southern Africa.

The birds arrive in Arctic in the spring, where the adults, and later, their chicks, feed on insects. The insects are abundant after the snow melt. So, the birds arrive, ideally, just in time to take advantage of the abundant insects. The young then grow, and migrate south where they stay an entire year before doing their own migratory thing. While in Europe, these birds feed on bivalves that hide in mud, and on plants. The long beak of this bird facilitates their foraging on the bivalves. Having a long beak is good, because the shallower and more readily accessible bivalves are smaller, less abundant, and slightly toxic, especially to young birds (adults may have somehow adjusted to the toxin), but deeper bivalves are less toxic and more abundant.

Climate change has caused the timing of the snowmelt in the Arctic to change, with the snow melting off on average a half a day per year earlier over the last three or do decades.

This has caused the insects to emerge earlier. Also, the earlier snowmelt has affected the insects so they are less abundant, and their body sizes are smaller.

However, the Red Knots continue to arrive at about the same time every year, so the abundance and quality of the insect food source is measurably reduced. This, in turn, has stunted the growth of the young. The smaller young have smaller beaks. So, when they arrive in Europe, they have access mainly to the shallower, somewhat toxic bivalves, and plant material, and can’t get as easily at the deeper, more abundant, and non toxic bivalves down deeper in the mud. This, in turn, causes a lower survival rate for these young birds.

The population of these Red Knots has been declining, and this may be the reason.

Meanwhile, the adults that have lived for a few years are seen to have longer (normal length) beaks. It is likely that some Red Knots either grow more quickly or have some other way of addressing the problem of food supply. It is possible that natural selection is changing this bird population to manage these changes in climate.

This may be a good thing long term, but it is hard to say. The Arctic has indeed been warming more than the rest of the planet, and this is likely to continue. It is not easy to predict how Arctic insect populations will change under these changing conditions. If insects end up emerging over a more prolonged period of time, or if some other aspect of the ecology changes that causes the insects to be exploited more efficiently by a competitor of the Red Knot — or less efficiently — or if some other change in ecology happens in the wintering grounds or the flyways, then this could get even more complicated.

Climate change has happened in the past, and it is certainly true that many populations of birds and other critters have adapted, in an evolutionary sense, to these changes. Just as likely, species or subspecies have gone extinct. Every population of migratory bird probably has a very interesting (and often harrowing) story behind how they arrived at their current co-evolutionary relationship to the world around them. The problem with the currently changing climate, changing because of the human release of copious amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, is that this change is happening at a rate that has rarely, if ever, been seen since birds evolved to begin with.

This is not entirely unexpected. JP Myers and Robert Lester predicted, in the 1992 book Global Warming and Biological Diversity that asynchrony of insect emergence and shorebird migration would cause population declines in shorebirds like the red knot.

Caption to the figure at the top of the post:

Fig. 3. Prey choice and prey availability at the Mauritanian wintering grounds. (A) Analysis of stable isotopes of blood samples shows that juvenile red knots (n = 676 birds) largely ignored the most abundant but mildly toxic prey, Loripes. However, with an increase in age, adult red knots (n = 1664) added substantial amounts of Loripes to their diet, but only if they had long bills. Plotted are means ± SE. (B) This bill length–dependent diet shift may be explained by the depth distribution of Loripes. The majority of these bivalves live between 30 and 40 mm below the seafloor, which is precisely the range of the bill lengths. The other two food sources, Dosinia bivalves and Zostera rhizomes, are found at shallower depths and are accessible to all red knots. Bars indicate medians, boxes indicate 25th to 75th percentiles, and whiskers indicate ranges.

The research is reported in this paper:

Body shrinkage due to Arctic warming reduces red knot fitness in tropical wintering range. BY JAN A. VAN GILS, SIMEON LISOVSKI, TAMAR LOK, W?ODZIMIERZ MEISSNER, AGNIESZKA O?AROWSKA, JIMMY DE FOUW, ELDAR RAKHIMBERDIEV, MIKHAIL Y. SOLOVIEV, THEUNIS PIERSMA, MARCEL KLAASSEN
SCIENCE13 MAY 2016 : 819-821

Abstract:

Reductions in body size are increasingly being identified as a response to climate warming. Here we present evidence for a case of such body shrinkage, potentially due to malnutrition in early life. We show that an avian long-distance migrant (red knot, Calidris canutus canutus), which is experiencing globally unrivaled warming rates at its high-Arctic breeding grounds, produces smaller offspring with shorter bills during summers with early snowmelt. This has consequences half a world away at their tropical wintering grounds, where shorter-billed individuals have reduced survival rates. This is associated with these molluscivores eating fewer deeply buried bivalve prey and more shallowly buried seagrass rhizomes. We suggest that seasonal migrants can experience reduced fitness at one end of their range as a result of a changing climate at the other end.

The 2016 Atlantic Hurricane Season

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This year’s Atlantic Hurricane season will be stronger, forecasts suggest, than that of the previous two years, and stronger than the average year.

The Atlantic Hurricane Seasons starts on June 1st. But, there was a hurricane that happened already, either late in last year’s season or very early in this year’s season, called Alex. That hurricane had to go somewhere, and I suppose the keepers of the records had already put their spreadsheet to bed when Alex came along on January 7th, so that storm gets counted as part of the season that will nominally start at the beginning of next month.

A lot of factors determine the number and strength (and path) of hurricanes in the Atlantic. One is sea surface temperatures. An El Niño in the Pacific tends to cause vertical wind shear, which attenuates hurricane formation. Saharan dust also reduces the chance of formation or strengthening of these storms. There may be an association with La Niña conditions and a stronger hurricane season.

A small number of agencies or groups put out their forecasts. Often, the forecasts are similar to each other, and typically they are reasonably accurate. One of the more famous groups comes out of Colorado State University and until his recent death, was led by Hurricane Expert William Gray. NOAA also puts out a forecast. The Earth System Science Center (ESSC) at Penn State has been issuing forecasts since 2007.

The following graphic shows the relationship between the median number of named storms predicted each year by those three sources and the actual number of named storms in the Atlantic.

Screen Shot 2016-05-12 at 2.07.29 PM

The first thing I notice is that the total range of variation in the predictions per year is less than the total range of variation in actual numbers over several years, and that the predictions roughly track the actual number of storms. This indicates that something is working. But I also note that the actual number of storms is often outside the range of predictions. So, while the predictions, in terms of number of named storms, give a reasonable estimate of the overall severity of the hurricane season, it is hard to predict these storms accurately months or weeks before the season starts.

This year, we are coming off an El Niño, which added surface heat to the already warm tropical seas, which of course is a result of human caused global warming. Also, we are probably heading into a La Niña season. If you look at the chart, you’ll notice that the last two seasons were relatively weak in the Atlantic. Last season’s El Niño and, probably, Saharan dust the season before, probably contributed to this.

This year, however, the two plotted forecasts (NOAA and ESSC) suggest a stronger season. There are two other forecasts, not shown on this graph, that also suggest a stronger season.

The average number of named storms for a base period of 1981-2010 is 12.1, so this year is predicted to be above average. The record high number of named storms was 28, in 2005 a year that also produced the record number of full-on hurricanes (15) and major hurricanes (7). That was the year of Katrina, Rita and Wilma, which were very memorable. (2005 was the year they ran out of names, remember?)

The ESSC report has, naturally more detail. From that report (emphasis added):

ESSC scientist Michael E. Mann, alumnus Michael Kozar, and researcher Sonya K. Miller have released their seasonal prediction for the 2016 North Atlantic hurricane season, which officially starts on June 1st and runs through November 30th.

The prediction is for 18.9 +/- 4.4 total named tropical cyclones, which corresponds to a range between 14 and 24 storms with a best estimate of 19 named storms. This prediction was made using the statistical model of Kozar et al. (2012, see PDF here). This statistical model builds upon the past work of Sabbatelli and Mann (2007, see PDF here) by considering a larger number of climate predictors and including corrections for the historical undercount of events (see footnotes).

The assumptions behind this forecast are (a) the persistence of current North Atlantic Main Development Region (MDR) sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies (0.88 °C in late-April 2016 from NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch) throughout the 2016 hurricane season, (b) development of a La Niña (Niño3 anomaly of -1°C) in the equatorial Pacific during boreal Fall/Winter 2016-17 (Climate Prediction Center April 2016 ENSO Discussion), and (c) climatological mean conditions for the North Atlantic Oscillation in Fall/Winter 2016-17.

If no La Niña develops (Niño3 anomaly between +/- 0.5 °C), then the prediction will be lower: 16.1 +/- 4.0 storms (range of 12-20 storms with a best guess of 16).

Using an alternative model that uses “relative” MDR SST (MDR SST with the average tropical mean SST subtracted) in place of MDR SST yields a slightly lower prediction (11.4 +/- 3.4 total named storms). This alternative model also includes the development of a La Niña.

So, as you can see, if there is no La Niñ this fall, there may be fewer storms in the Atlantic.

Sheldon Whitehouse and Ted Lieu Demonstrate Superior Climate Change Activism

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Subtitle: Politicians School Scientists In How To Do It

Alternative Title: Where were Bernie and Hillary????

You need to know right away that the Lede to this story is buried way the hell down the page.

That’s OK, though, because others are covering this, and the point of my missive is to put the current situation into a somewhat larger context. Ultimately, the point I want to make is this: Even when a problem is mired in deeply entrenched corporate interests, small groups of tenacious heroes can make the world measurably better, and there is such a thing happening right now in the interaction between scientists, one of the world’s largest scientific organizations, one of the world’s largest energy companies, and a handful of elected officials who are doing the right thing.

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

-jfk

A handful of citizens recognize some sort of economic or social injustice involving a corporation. They organize on their own time (they have day jobs) to fight the injustice, and have some success.

A handful of employees of those businesses, or trade organizations that are funded by those businesses, are in charge of public relations and lobbying. They fight the citizens on both fronts, but the citizens were too well organized and the citizen efforts took them by surprise.

The citizens go home at the end of the day, have a party to celebrate their victory, and go back to their day jobs.

The public relations and lobbying employees go home at the end of the day, play with their kids and binge-watch something on Netflix. Then, they also go back to their day jobs. The thing is, their day jobs are to make sure that nothing like this happens again. And, if they can eventually undo the citizens’ group’s success, and maybe even push back a step or two, they get to keep those day jobs.

While the citizens are busy being librarians, sales people, school teachers, and union electricians, the public relations and lobbying employees are busy making sure that the next time a group of citizens comes out of nowhere to effect change, they won’t be able to. It may take a bit of time, but laws will be passed, regulations adjusted, and details of the the inner workings of the corporations and the think tanks and trade organizations that they fund will be updated.

If you’ve ever spent any time in a coffee house in an iffy neighborhood, you know about this problem, because at some point (this may have been more true back a few decades) you were approached by a young man or woman, or even a couple, carrying a clip board and a short stack of tabloid format newspapers. You had a conversation, and you and this person found yourselves in nearly complete agreement on all the issues: education, workers’ rights, health care, military spending, voting rights, women’s rights, social justice, and all of it.

But then the conversation takes an unexpected turn. The person you are talking to points out that every time the people (and you and this person are the people, as are the citizens in the story I related above) manage one step forward, pull off some sort of success, put into effect a small but meaningful incremental change, the corporations and their allies in government change the system to make sure that doesn’t ever happen again. And, for a bonus, they anticipate the next one or two possible incremental changes and make sure they don’t happen either. One step forward, two steps backwards.

Actually, that is not the unexpected turn in the conversation. You actually were already thinking that before the person in the coffee shop mentioned it. Once you think about how things actually work, you realize that incremental change is often the product of temporary and short term efforts by people otherwise involved in other things, but the efforts to stop such change is the product of well trained, richly resourced, and highly effective experts with full time employment with the job description of stopping future incremental change that is not in the interest of the corporation.

Then, the truly unexpected part of the conversation happens. The guy in the coffee shop makes the observation that incremental change will not only always ultimately fail, but it will generally strengthen the establishment and make future change increasingly difficult, so the only way to effect real change is to totally overthrow the government and their corporate overlords.

The only way to make the world work for regular people is a full scale bloody revolution.

The scary part of this conversation is that for a moment it makes total sense to you.

You realize that your new friend in the coffee shop, who by the way has the clip board out and is trying to sell you a subscription to Socialist Worker Monthly, is right. For a moment you imagine yourself wearing all black, with a beret, meeting in the basement of the pet shop down the street, learning how to make bombs or disassemble and reassemble an assault rifle. If you are a young straight unattached male and the guy in the coffee shop is an attractive girl, you may be liable to actually join the revolution for a few months.

But, most likely, that fantasy of overthrowing the government will be soon replaced with memories of some of your history lessons and Wikipedia readings. You’ll realize that these violent revolutions generally take decades, everybody dies, and the scenario, with the establishment cronies managing the opposition, also works at a much larger scale. For example, huge proto-corporate (and Royal) interests manipulated the government and military to maintain the lucrative Triangle Trade in the 18th century, with the American Colonists getting screwed on taxes and expected to be grunts in their colonial wars. The American Revolution put an end to that. But today, Big Energy, Big Ag, Big Pharm and all the rest are capable of pulling the strings of the government marionettes, exploiting the post-Revolutionary free American workers to do their bidding. In the words of Bono, F*ck the revolution.

“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness”

-Desmond Tutu

Sounds pretty bad. Like there is no hope.

Hope does come along now and then, though. Bernie Sanders was hope for a lot of people, who saw his possible presidency as a full on revolution that would totally change the system, and contrasted that with a Clinton presidency, focused on incremental change.

But Sanders would have been one person, in one of the three equally powerful parts of our government, against 535 members of Congress whose careers require funding from the established corporations. And he’s not going to win anyway. So maybe we need to make the best of incremental change.

“The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

-The lede of this post

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) is one of the largest scientific organizations in the world. The AGU runs an annual meeting as well as a number of other programs that cost money, and there are many sponsors. One of those sponsors is ExxonMobil. This makes sense, because ExxonMobil, and other petroleum companies, rely on the science practiced by many member of the AGU. Not only does it make sense, but it is right and just that major corporations that benefit from a particular area of science spend money on that science. That expenditure can take many forms, including having well funded research laboratories staffed by excellent scientists within the corporation, supplying grants to scientists working at universities or think tanks, and pitching in with the AGU to help fund their conference.

But, remember those full time employees who were briefly bested by that organized group of citizens? Well, ExxonMobil has that. They have people who are focuses on managing their corporate interests at many levels. And, it recently became apparent that the excellent scientists who worked in the ExxonMobil (the name of the corporation was different then) decades ago had discovered, verified, and documented the important fact that Big Oil’s corporate activities would ultimately lead to catastrophic change in the planet’s environment because of the release of previously trapped carbon, though the burning of oil and gas (and coal as well).

Decisions were made to suppress that research. This is a little like a company making an unsafe car seat keeping their own research indicating this danger under wraps. But it is different from that example because car seats are inherently a safety device. So it is a little more like producing a profitable kind of food that has a serious, but hidden, health effect.

But really, those analogies are weak and, frankly, not needed. What it is like is producing the energy that runs our society and economy and knowing full well that using this form of energy to do so many things will, itself, be a civilization ending enterprise, while at the same time being aware that there are alternatives. But, those alternatives are the business interest of other corporations. So you keep that information under wraps.

The suppression of this important research became known just recently, and a highly specialized set of citizens – scientist associated with the American Geophysical Union – agitated to get the AGU to stop taking funding from ExxonMobil.

The higher ups in the AGU considered this possibility, and eventually decided that “it is not possible for us to determine unequivocally whether ExxonMobil is participating in misinformation about science currently, either directly or indirectly.”

A lot of people saw that as a ridiculous justification for a bad decision. Some might even figure that the previous acts of an earlier incarnation of this giant corporation would be sufficient for the AGU to refuse future sponsorship. But, one could argue that they were bad guys back then but now are good guys, so, well, the AGU needs the money anyway, so why not forgive and forget and get on with it?

Graham Readfearn at Desmog now tells us that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and House Representative Ted Lieu, have written a letter to the AGU explaining how ExxonMobil has pulled the wool over the AGU’s eyes, causing us to take a step or two backwards with this decision to continue receiving funds.

The letter is to AGU president Margaret Leinen (quoted above) and expresses disappointment with the AGU’s decision.

Here’s the key fact. The AGU has a policy to not accept funding from entities that spend money to promote science disinformation. The AGU had determined that they could not unequivocally know if ExxonMobil was doing so. Part of the reason the AGU determined this is because ExxonMobil told them that they were not funding science misinformation.

The letter from Senator Whitehouse and Representative Lieu states:

EM gave money as recently as 2014 to several organizations that cast doubt on climate change, so we are surprised at AGU’s conclusion. According to EM’s most recent Worldwide Giving and Community Investments report, in 2014, EM funded several organizations that publicly promote misinformation of science, including:

  • American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) ($61,500): ALEC has promoted model legislation with a finding that human-induced global warming “may lead to deleterious, neutral, or possibly beneficial climatic changes.”[1]
  • Hoover Institution ($50,000 to its Arctic Security Initiative): Hoover Senior Fellow Terry Anderson, who is not a climate scientist, argued that climate data since 1880 supports a conclusion that it would take as long as 500 years to reach 4 °C of global warming.[2]
  • Manhattan Institute of Policy Research ($100,000 to its Center for Energy Policy): Institute Senior Fellow Robert Bryce stated, “The science is not settled, not by a long shot…. If serious scientists [at the European Organization for Nuclear Research] can question Einstein’s theory of relativity, then there must be room for debate about the workings and complexities of the Earth’s atmosphere. Furthermore, even if we accept that carbon dioxide is bad, it’s not clear exactly what we should do about it.”[3]
  • National Black Chamber of Commerce ($75,000): Chamber President and CEO Harry Alford stated, “[NOAA and NASA] have reported that there has been no global warming detected for the last 18 years. That is over 216 months in a row that there has been no detected global warming…. Scientists, as well as NOAA and NASA, call this state of no warming a ‘Global Pause.’ How long it will last no one predicts. For all we know it may last another 20 years or even forever.”[4]
  • Pacific Legal Foundation ($10,000): A senior attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation attacked EPA’s authority to regulate CO2 because it is a “ubiquitous natural substance essential to life on Earth.”[5]

We have seen no evidence to indicate EM’s behavior has changed since 2014.

You can read the entire letter here.

“There is no comparison between that which is lost by not succeeding and that which is lost by not trying.”

– Francis Bacon

This is obviously a significant development, with respect to the AGU, climate scientists, and all that. But this breaking new story has led me to think about four related but rather extended points.

First, Senator Whitehouse and Representative Lieu are true climate hawks, with records of congressional action on climate change. They are rare birds, too rare. It is not common to be fully active on climate change and have a job in the United States Congress. We need to appreciate their efforts and demand that others join them.

Second, the work done here by these two elected officials should have been done by the AGU. The AGU made weak decision, favoring the financially beneficial status quo and justifying this by not doing the research that was needed. The AGU had its eyes closed, and it is hard to imagine how that could not have been on purpose.

Third, and perhaps tangential to the current issue, but perhaps not: Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders didn’t do what Whitehouse and Lieu did. I’m sure it is unfair to accuse them of negligence by not having picked up on this particular story, going after ExxonMobil and correcting the AGU. But think about this for a second. If either one of them had done this – if either’s campaign staff had figured this out and developed a public statement by the candidate that looked a lot like the Whitehouse-Lieu letter – their climate change stock would have gone through the roof, and they would have done something that could actually make a difference.

I don’t fault either of these Democrat’s campaign for failing to do this one specific thing. That would be asking too much. But the fact is that neither candidate has done anything like this during the current primary season, or ever in their previous career. A Sanders supporter might point to Sanders’ prior work on climate change legislation, but it must be understood that Sanders supports a reduction to 80% reliance on non fossil carbon fuel by 2050, which is too little too late. That has been his position for several years, and it is out of date and widely recognized as inadequate, especially following the post-Paris reorientation to a 1.5 degree limit.

A president Donald Trump would probably burn fossil fuel on purpose to piss off the hippies. Either Sanders or Clinton would be a thousand times better. But that stark difference should not lead us to accept mediocracy in our leaders in the issue of climate change.

So the fourth point is this, and it is not about the AGU, but inspired by these recent developments. There are climate hawks in Congress, but only a few, and none of them are running for president. In choosing between Sanders and Clinton to determine which one might have the best climate change policy, it is easy to decide that one of them (or even both of them) have a good policy. But the truth is, neither candidate is where we need them to be on climate change. Both candidates have strong points, and different strong points, backed up by detailed policy positions and enhanced by histories of legislation or activism of one sort or another. And when we list those strong points, we do not find climate change policy among them.

I reject all efforts to compare Sanders and Clinton on climate change, at this point in the primary process, for two reasons.

First, Clinton will be the nominee, based on math. So the comparison is moot. Second, the Democratic Party did not put forth a sustained climate change savvy candidate for us to choose. So, we can’t like what we have now, we can not be satisfied. We have to hold the candidate’s feet to the fire, push, cajole, insist, vigorously engage.

The scientists who asked, in a letter, the AGU to cut ties with ExxonMobil tried to take a step foreword. The AGU caused us to take a step backwards. Let’s help Whitehouse and Lieu push us two steps forward, one against ExoonMobile (by helping the AGU to make the right decision) and one in the current presidential race, by demanding better of our candidates.

Ft McMurray Fire and Climate Change: Michael Mann Comments

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This is a segment of The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann, in which climate scientist Professor Michael Mann provides important perspective on the link between climate change and other disasters such as tornadoes. (See also: The Meaning of the Fort McMurray Fire).

Michael Mann is the author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, and Dire Predictions, 2nd Edition: Understanding Climate Change (a visually rich summary of the most recent IPCC report) as well as the forthcoming book combining climate science and political cartooning, The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial is Driving Us Crazy!.

For more information on the science showing the link between climate change and weather patterns, discussed in the video by Professor Mann, see these items:

<li><a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2015/03/12/new-study-on-how-global-warming-changes-the-weather/">New Study On How Global Warming Changes The Weather</a></li>
<li><a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2014/08/14/more-research-linking-global-warming-to-bad-weather-events/">More Research Linking Global Warming To Bad Weather Events</a></li>
<li><a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/09/28/global-warming-and-extreme-weather-climate-agw/">Global Warming and Extreme Weather – #climate #agw</a></li>
<li><a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/06/04/linking-weather-extremes-to-global-warming/">Linking Weather Extremes to Global Warming</a></li>

See also:

<li><a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2016/04/20/this-is-the-worst-coral-bleaching-episode-in-australias-history/">“This is the worst coral bleaching episode in Australia’s history”</a></li>

A Television Series Set At The Renfest!!!

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How about a television series made by some very talented people set in the context of a Renaissance Festival?

That, lords and ladies, is the plan.

Screen Shot 2016-05-07 at 12.54.38 PMRenfest is a serial set in a RenFest, filmed at an actual Renfest, that combines the themes of “office politics,” a sort of anachronistic Big-Bang Theory, produced, written, stared in, and developed, by an outstandingly talented team including Shawn Otto (a Renaissance man himself, whom readers of this blog know well), Mary Jo Pehl, Jamal Farah, Dave Allen, and Trace Beaulieu.

The trailer demonstrates that this is an excellent project, and the plot layout of the first season makes me want to binge watch it as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, the show does not exist yet. The creative team has decided to get this off the ground with a very ambitious but I think quite doable Kickstarter. The idea is to develop the project to the extent that it will be impossible to avoid it either getting picked up by a major distributor, or to become an excellent web based project. Personally, I’d love to see it be a Netflix Original or something along those lines, as the quality of the material is top notched.

Screen Shot 2016-05-07 at 12.52.35 PM

Politics and battles of profound import and little consequence ensue. RenFest is a thoroughly entertaining workplace satire that will have you snorting your turkey leg as it skewers today’s complex social issues ripped from the headlines and writ ridiculously small. Sample future episodes listed below.

The show features the comic antics of Elisabeth (Mary Jo Pehl: MST3K, Cinematic Titanic) and her Somali-American assistant, A.K. (introducing Jamal Farah), as they tangle with festival general manager and despot Lloyd Gunderson (Dave “Gruber” Allen: Freaks & Geeks, Ned’s Declassified, Bad Teacher), the woefully inaccurate Viking (Trace Beaulieu: MST3K, Freaks & Geeks, Other Space) and other festival denizens. Think “The Office” or “Parks and Recreation” set amid the vibrant world of Renaissance festivals.

Screen Shot 2016-05-07 at 1.03.16 PMWe shot a trailer and an incredibly funny mini-pilot in the fall of 2015. It’s written by Shawn Otto, who wrote House of Sand and Fog and developed a TV show with the legendary Joel Surnow (co-creator of 24). Award-winning veteran commercial director Joe Schaak helms the series with world-class cinematographer Jeff Stonehouse crafting the imagery. Paul Sadeghi oversees postproduction at Pixel Farm and we have a built-in cast of thousands.

The Kickstarter page for the project is here, rich in information and including a teaser video, and down the page a bit, a trailer.

Please click through and have a look, and give them money.

West Virginia Democratic Primary UPDATED

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I’ll combine my post predicting the outcome of today’s Democratic Primary in West Virginia, and my post giving and discussing the results, here.

My prediction is on this table, on the left side of the line, and the actual results on the right side, for the last several primaries.

Screen Shot 2016-05-11 at 2.12.13 PM

Every state is special, and some are more special than others. West Virginia has 29 pledged delegates, but not all of them were assigned today. I assume they will be assigned later. Thus, the slight difference in numbers between what I predicted and what happened.

A key message here is this. Clinton and Sanders did exactly as well in the West Virginia primary as my model predicted, and that has been very close to exactly true for most primary races all along.

There is something important about this likely win that I want to point out.

According to many (but not all) of those pushing the candidates on climate change, Sanders is THE man when it comes to climate, and Clinton will be throwing the planet under the bus the moment she is elected. The degree of contrast between Sanders and Clinton in the minds of many leading climate activists is an overstatement, and highly inaccurate. Both candidates have stated that we need to come to the point where we keep the fossil Carbon in the ground, but Sanders is the only candidate who has come out with a weakened version of this, where we only try to attain 80% non-fossil fuel use by the middle of the century. Sanders wants to make fracking illegal, which he is unlikely to be able to do, while Clinton wants to regulate it into near nothingness, which could be achieved in a year or so. On the other hand, Clinton did say to a coal miner the other day that we have to find a way to keep mining coal as long as it does not add CO2 to the atmosphere. Sure, let’s do that! But first, we’ll have to change physics, because we GET energy from releasing fossil Carbon, but we have to USE energy to re-attach the Carbon to something solid.

In other words, neither candidate is where they need to be on climate change, and we will have to work to make that situation change. But, if you ask most people, they will probably tell you that Sanders is the climate change guy, and Clinton not so much. But we also know that addressing Climate Change means, essentially, shutting down the main industry in West Virginia, which is coal mining.

So why is Sanders beating Clinton in West Virginia?

I’ll put the results of the primary below later this evening or tomorrow morning. I’ll be busy during the time the returns are coming in, visiting with my friend Emo Phillips, but I’ll update the post at a later time.

Fixing The Super Delegate Problem

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Super Delegates exist for good reasons. In order for them to do their job, which hopefully is never, they need to have two characteristics. These are:

1) The capacity for thoughtful and well informed decision making at the convention, in case something untoward has happened to require this.

2) Independence with respect to whom to vote for … in other words, being unpledged.

A big downside of Super Delegates is that they tend to endorse a candidate early in the process. This is their right as Americans and it may be seen by some of them as their duty as politicians or party officials (which most are). This results in a lot of problems, not the least of which is people wanting to get rid of Super Delegates, forgetting that they can have a very important role now and then.

So, I have a solution that I think would work. It is blindingly simple. It will be opposed by elected officials and party officials who like being Super Delegates, because as part of my plan, they don’t automatically get to do this job.

Here’s the plan.

First, you decide what percentage of delegates should be unpledged (the more correct term for “Super Delegate”). Let’s say, for now, 10%.

Then, you have a primary or caucus in a given state. Say there are 100 delegates in total normally awarded in that state.

Then, you proportion the delegates across the candidates, for the first round of voting at the national convention. Say each candidate got half the votes in a primary, this means you are sending 50 delegates for each candidate. So far this is very simple, very democratic.

Then, the last step in choosing delegates among these that have the potential to act as super delegates should the need arise.

At the convention, there are two possibilities. One is that there are no Super Delegates, and everyone votes as pledged proportionately. The other is that the 10% of designateed Super Delegates are released, and can do what they feel is right.

At the opening of the convention, when rules are being adopted, the motion is put to the convention as to whether or not the designated Super Delegates be released. The default rule is that they are NOT released. Normally, a rule suspension (which would be required to release the delegates) would require a 60% vote. So, if the full body of delegates at the convention choose with a 60% majority to release the delegates, then they are released. Normally, this would not happen.

The down side of this is the possibility that a candidate can pack the delegates with unfaithful individuals. I’m Candidate A, you are Candidate B, and I am going to play this game with you. I get a bunch of potential delegates, actual individuals who have a good chance of becoming delegates to the national convention, to pretend to represent you. They get elected as your delegates in this state where we each got 50% of the vote, but I secretly have 60+% of the individuals in this delegation at my bidding. When it comes to rule suspension, my people vote to suspend the pledge rule. I do this in every state, and now the Super Delegates can vote for whomever they want, plus I’ve got these sleepers that, if there is as second ballot, I own. If the race is close, this could give me the majority on the first vote, if it is somewhat less close, it could cause a failed ballot the first time around, then I get my other sleepers to vote for me, I win, you lose. Bwahahahaha.

This sort of game playing is a) likely to happen (similar things have happened before) and b) not likely to be very successful. But it could be successful enough. Therefore, it might be a good idea to make the required super majority to be 65% rather than 60%.

Anyway, with this system, most election years, there really won’t be any Super Delegates, effectively, but they are there if needed.

This could work. Somebody start a petition or something!

Beware Democratic Party Optimism

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I’ve seen it said again and again that the Trump nomination will be a debacle for the Republicans. The Republican party will fall apart, become small, become insignificant. Clinton will easily crush trump. We’re done. Ding dong.

But this is all wrong.

The Republican Party is in power in more state houses than ever, and in most cases, are solid in those state houses.

There are more Republican governors than Democratic governors, and this is a recent phenomenon never seen before. Most are pretty solid. Even the much maligned Walker of Wisconsin could not be gotten rid of when he messed with the most power parts of the Democratic establishment there.

The Republicans control both the House and the Senate. I think the Democrats may take the Senate back this year, but these days the Senate goes back and forth pretty regularly. The fact that the Democrats may take a lead by one or two Senators this year does not mean that the Republican Party is done.

The Republicans will likely control the House after this year. Then, they are likely to strengthen their lead in two years, if Clinton is elected president, because that is what always happens.

And, Republicans hate Hillary, and will eventually congeal in their support of Trump, who may be busy right now reshaping his message to help make that happen. A Trump loss is not inevitable.

Notice the date on the tombstone at the top of this post. The Death of the Republican Party has been celebrated before. But always prematurely.

Complacency is the hobgoblin of defeat. Or defeat is the hobgoblin of complacency. Whatever. Don’t be complacent, don’t be defeated.

Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid understand this, of course:

The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial is Driving Us Crazy!

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The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy, by climate scientist Michael Mann and cartoonist Tom Toles is now available for pre-order. I’ve not gotten my review copy of it yet, but it looks fantastic.

From the publisher:

The award winning climate scientist Michael E. Mann and the Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Tom Toles have fought at the frontlines of climate denialism for most of their careers. They have witnessed the manipulation of the media by business and political interests and the unconscionable play to partisanship on issues that affect the well-being of millions. The lessons they have learned have been invaluable, inspiring this brilliant, colorful escape hatch from the madhouse of the climate wars.

Through satire, “The Madhouse Effect” portrays the intellectual pretzels into which denialists must twist logic to explain away the clear evidence that man-made activity has changed our climate. Toles’s cartoons collapse counter-scientific strategies into their biased components, helping readers see how to best strike at these fallacies. Mann’s expert skills at science communication aim to restore sanity to a debate that continues to rage against widely acknowledged scientific consensus. The synergy of these two commonsense crusaders enlivens the gloom and doom of so many climate-themed books–and may even convert a few of the faithful to the right side of science.