Monthly Archives: February 2017

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451

Paper burns at 451 degrees Fahrenheit.

So does civilization.

Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 is a masterwork of twentieth-century literature set in a bleak, dystopian future.

Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.

Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.

When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life.

Hypothesis: Trump does not hurt his fellow Republicans in elections, and most Democrats don’t care.

Everybody is all upset about Trump and his Republicans, but in truth, that seems to matter little. Here in Minnesota we had a local house district open, there was a special election, and the Democrats didn’t even try to win it, apparently. So they lost it. It was probably winnable.

Same with GA-06. This is one of four seats opening up because of Trump appointments. Will the Democrats try to win these seats?

Of course not. The Democratic Party does not seem to care that the Republicans are in charge, and will not fight them vigorously. The official word from the DCCC is “… we have to acknowledge that those seats are all held by Republicans…” No effort will be put into a fight. (I quickly note, the DCCC has not had my support since they gave Ted Kennedy’s seat to the Republicans.)

I’m reminded of a moment in the TV series “The West Wing,” where the white house, staffed, sadly, by Democrats who think they should never fight if they can’t win, are told by a Democratic Party leader “Look, we know we can’t win this one, but why do you want to make it easy for them?”

Below is Maddow on this madness. I personally will not be helping any version of the Democratic Party that won’t fight. Get up off your damn asses and fight, Democrats!

Meanwhile, let’s kick out the Democrats that won’t fight.

I would love to see my hypothesis proved wrong, but so far it is not happening.

Republican Fast Food Pusher Andrew The Putz Puzder Not In Labor

As the Republican led US Senate has voted to confirm (or deny) the party leader’s cabinet picks, they’ve done a poor job, approving, for example, people who have acted in direct opposition to the areas of government they are expected to serve, or in some cases, being abjectly incompetent. The Republicans in the Senate were not vetting the nominees. Some of the Democrats were, but even there, we saw failures of conscious.

The Senators need to be reminded that the critical choices made by the Trump administration tend to be poor ones. Look, for example, at the first NSA choice. General Flynn was caught engaged in acts that were at least unethical and annoying, if not downright illegal and, worst case scenario, treasonous. Why would we expect the Trump administration to had better choices to the Senate for their approval?

"This would have been really bad." Former fictional Secretary of Labor, Leo McGarry.
“This would have been really bad.” Former fictional Secretary of Lbor, Leo McGarry.
I’m pretty sure the Republicans in Congress have no clue what “advice and consent” means or what the Constitution says, or history says, about this.

The total number of Senators voting for each of Republican President Trump’s nominees is less than usual, with many, sometimes most, Democrats voting against the various and often very unqualified nominees. The Democrats who did vote for these individuals will be held to account over coming years, especially those who voted for Tillerson, and others who may ultimately be linked to currently developing scandals.

But now we have an interesting development. One of the most awful choices ever put forth for a high cabinet post ever, in any government by any president — equal to in level of insult and injury to the Betsy DeVos nomination which Congress narrowly approved — was Andrew Puzder as labor secretary.

The public outcry about putting this particular fox in charge of that particular hen house should not have exceeded the outcry against Tillerson or the others, but the general public and, certainly, Trump’s Republican Congress, appear not to understand too much about what happens in government and why it is important. But an attack by Oprah, armed with withering truth, seems to have mattered. Outrage over Puzder’s misconduct in business and personal life, some of which could be an embarrassment even to the Trump administration and to Republicans generally, was too much.

Moments ago, Puzder made a move we wish so heartily that Republican Donald Trump’s father had done years ago: he withdrew just in the nick of time.


By the way, have you read Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few by former actual good Secretary of Labor Robert Reich?

America was once celebrated for and defined by its large and prosperous middle class. Now, this middle class is shrinking, a new oligarchy is rising, and the country faces its greatest wealth disparity in eighty years. Why is the economic system that made America strong suddenly failing us, and how can it be fixed?

Screen Shot 2017-02-15 at 4.05.55 PMLeading political economist and bestselling author Robert B. Reich presents a paradigm-shifting, clear-eyed examination of a political and economic status quo that no longer serves the people, exposing one of the most pernicious obstructions to progress today: the enduring myth of the “free market” when, behind the curtain, it is the powerful alliances between Washington and Wall Street that control the invisible hand. Laying to rest the specious dichotomy between a free market and “big government,” Reich shows that the truly critical choice ahead is between a market organized for broad-based prosperity and one designed to deliver ever more gains to the top. Visionary and acute, Saving Capitalism illuminates the path toward restoring America’s fundamental promise of opportunity and advancement.

The Meaning of Antebellum Politics in America vis-a-vis the Current Collapse of The Republic.

I am reading Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin, whom you may know from her occasional and always informative appearances on various TV news shows as a ranking Presidential Historian.

I started reading it because I wanted to see in some detail what was going on in American politics during the decade or so prior to the start of the Civil War. What I did know about it indicated that there would be interesting parallels, and important differences, between then and right now. It turns out that this suspicion was well founded, and I am probably learning quite a bit. Will it be applicable and how? Not sure yet, but I want EVERYBODY to read this book so we could have a conversation about it!

Here’s the blurb:

Acclaimed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin illuminates Lincoln’s political genius in this highly original work, as the one-term congressman and prairie lawyer rises from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals of national reputation to become president.

On May 18, 1860, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, and Abraham Lincoln waited in their hometowns for the results from the Republican National Convention in Chicago. When Lincoln emerged as the victor, his rivals were dismayed and angry.

Throughout the turbulent 1850s, each had energetically sought the presidency as the conflict over slavery was leading inexorably to secession and civil war. That Lincoln succeeded, Goodwin demonstrates, was the result of a character that had been forged by experiences that raised him above his more privileged and accomplished rivals. He won because he possessed an extraordinary ability to put himself in the place of other men, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires.

It was this capacity that enabled Lincoln as president to bring his disgruntled opponents together, create the most unusual cabinet in history, and marshal their talents to the task of preserving the Union and winning the war.

We view the long, horrifying struggle from the vantage of the White House as Lincoln copes with incompetent generals, hostile congressmen, and his raucous cabinet. He overcomes these obstacles by winning the respect of his former competitors, and in the case of Seward, finds a loyal and crucial friend to see him through.

This brilliant multiple biography is centered on Lincoln’s mastery of men and how it shaped the most significant presidency in the nation’s history.

It Can’t Happen Here

It Can’t Happen Here is the only one of Sinclair Lewis’s later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America.

Written during the Great Depression, when the country was largely oblivious to Hitler’s aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a president who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, sex, crime, and a liberal press.

Called “a message to thinking Americans” by the Springfield Republican when it was published in 1935, It Can’t Happen Here is a shockingly prescient novel that remains as fresh and contemporary as today’s news.

Here is the beginning of the book:

The handsome dining room of the Hotel Wessex, with its gilded plaster shields and the mural depicting the Green Mountains, had been reserved for the Ladies’ Night Dinner of the Fort Beulah Rotary Club.

Here in Vermont the affair was not so picturesque as it might have been on the Western prairies. Oh, it had its points: there was a skit in which Medary Cole (grist mill & feed store) and Louis Rotenstern (custom tailoring—pressing & cleaning) announced that they were those historic Vermonters, Brigham Young and Joseph Smith, and with their jokes about imaginary plural wives they got in ever so many funny digs at the ladies present. But the occasion was essentially serious. All of America was serious now, after the seven years of depression since 1929. It was just long enough after the Great War of 1914-18 for the young people who had been born in 1917 to be ready to go to college . . . or to another war, almost any old war that might be handy.

The features of this night among the Rotarians were nothing funny, at least not obviously funny, for they were the patriotic addresses of Brigadier General Herbert Y. Edgeways, U.S.A. (ret.), who dealt angrily with the topic “Peace through Defense—Millions for Arms but Not One Cent for Tribute,” and of Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch—she who was no more renowned for her gallant anti-suffrage campaigning way back in 1919 than she was for having, during the Great War, kept the American soldiers entirely out of French cafés by the clever trick of sending them ten thousand sets of dominoes.

Nor could any social-minded patriot sneeze at her recent somewhat unappreciated effort to maintain the purity of the American Home by barring from the motion-picture industry all persons, actors or directors or cameramen, who had: (a) ever been divorced; (b) been born in any foreign country—except Great Britain, since Mrs. Gimmitch thought very highly of Queen Mary, or (c) declined to take an oath to revere the Flag, the Constitution, the Bible, and all other peculiarly American institutions.

The Annual Ladies’ Dinner was a most respectable gathering—the flower of Fort Beulah. Most of the ladies and more than half of the gentlemen wore evening clothes, and it was rumored that before the feast the inner circle had had cocktails, privily served in Room 289 of the hotel. The tables, arranged on three sides of a hollow square, were bright with candles, cut-glass dishes of candy and slightly tough almonds, figurines of Mickey Mouse, brass Rotary wheels, and small silk American flags stuck in gilded hard-boiled eggs. On the wall was a banner lettered “Service Before Self,” and the menu—the celery, cream of tomato soup, broiled haddock, chicken croquettes, peas, and tutti-frutti ice-cream—was up to the highest standards of the Hotel Wessex.

They were all listening, agape. General Edgeways was completing his manly yet mystical rhapsody on nationalism:

“. . . for these U-nited States, a-lone among the great powers, have no desire for foreign conquest. Our highest ambition is to be darned well let alone! Our only gen-uine relationship to Europe is in our arduous task of having to try and educate the crass and ignorant masses that Europe has wished onto us up to something like a semblance of American culture and good manners. But, as I explained to you, we must be prepared to defend our shores against all the alien gangs of international racketeers that call themselves ‘governments,’ and that with such feverish envy are always eyeing our inexhaustible mines, our towering forests, our titanic and luxurious cities, our fair and far-flung fields.

“For the first time in all history, a great nation must go on arming itself more and more, not for conquest—not for jealousy—not for war—but for peace! Pray God it may never be necessary, but if foreign nations don’t sharply heed our warning, there will, as when the proverbial dragon’s teeth were sowed, spring up an armed and fearless warrior upon every square foot of these United States, so arduously cultivated and defended by our pioneer fathers, whose sword-girded images we must be . . . or we shall perish!”

The applause was cyclonic. “Professor” Emil Staubmeyer, the superintendent of schools, popped up to scream, “Three cheers for the General—hip, hip, hooray!”

All the audience made their faces to shine upon the General and Mr. Staubmeyer—all save a couple of crank pacifist women, and one Doremus Jessup, editor of the Fort Beulah Daily Informer, locally considered “a pretty smart fella but kind of a cynic,” who whispered to his friend the Reverend Mr. Falck, “Our pioneer fathers did rather of a skimpy job in arduously cultivating some of the square feet in Arizona!”

How Science Can Resist Trump

The March for Science, in April, may be a June to September romance between academia and and political activists, but prior experience in Canada suggests we are in it for the cold hard winter.

march_for_science_shirtA conservative government in the land of the maple leaf took wide ranging action to shut down and control science and science communication. The populace became outraged, and the politicians were put on ice. The fight continues, and it looks like the position of science in Canada will end up more secure than it ever was before. Don’t mess with Canadian scientists and the citizens that respect them.

Meanwhile, in the United States we have good news and bad news. The bad news is that the Republican Party has taken over the country, led by an oligarch by the name of Trump, and science is under more severe threat than ever before. The good news is that the United States has Canada to serve as an example, and, as Katie Gibbs notes, the US also has a large number of powerful institutions already in place to fight the new repressive regime.

So, now it is a race. How fast can the Republicans remove voting protection and continue their ongoing gerrymandering, so a small right wing majority can continue to rule? How fast can Progressives shift the Congress so Trump can be stopped and the Republicans, ultimately, pushed out of government? (And, make no mistake: we can no longer have a two party system where one of the parties is Republican. They are traitors and we must fully marginalize them.)

DC20130915-01-300x169I assume that by now you know that I have a podcast, with Mike Haubrich, called “Ikonokast.” We interviewed the aforementioned Katie Gibbs, Executive Director of Evidence for Democracy, which took part in organizing the Death of Evidence March of July 2012. Dr. Gibbs gave us the lowdown on what happened in Canada, and we discussed what we might to in the United States to Resist Trump. Please go listen to our podcast, which is available here, on iTunes, and Google Play.

Where does the Trump Presidency stand a fortnight and a half in?

The most recent polling indicates that Donald Trump has a 43% approval and 53% disapproval rating. So he is not exactly loved by the American people, which is odd because he seems so lovable. And, he has told us that the American people love him. And his victory in the November election was unbelievably big league. But, that’s how it is, according the scientific polling.

Approval and favorability are apparently slightly different, but the pattern holds. The same polling tells us that the American people have a 45% favorable attitude about the president, which would be tremendous for any product in a market economy. But for a president it is not so good, as a majority of Americans, 52%, look at the president with an unfavorable eye.

But what about some of the specific, Trump Brand signature issues? How’s he doing, and what do people think?

Building The Wall

The wall is still not built, but Trump still intends to build it. But, the promise was that Trump would “make Mexico pay for it.” The president has now learned that you can’t do that, and it is in fact not going to happen. And, the wall is still not built yet.

According to this recent poll, 56% of Americans oppose building the all, 37% are in favor of it, if Americans are paying for it.

The Muslim Ban

Trump promised to ban Muslims from the United States, and to practice extreme vetting. One of the main reasons he got elected was because of this promise. How’s that going?

A Trump Tower in Turkey, a Muslim country not banned.
A Trump Tower in Turkey, a Muslim country not banned.
Trump’s idea of “extreme vetting” seems to be “don’t let anyone in who is trying to get in legally.” Which, of course, leaves the death squads that are streaming across our borders leave to come, but leaves people like graduate students, professors, folks who went overseas to visit their grandmothers, etc. in the lurch.

Also, the ban on Muslims only banned some Muslims, from certain countries, so Muslims from countries where Trump does business are unaffected. So there may be an ethical issue there.

As you know, a key Federal court ruled unanimously to uphold a lower court decision to stay the ban because it negatively affects people and states. No higher court ruling has come down about the Second Amendment violation but that may happen later. There are more law suits against this ban than hairs on a dog, so we can expect a lot more news in this regard.

Meanwhile, the recent pol shows that 49% of Americans are opposed to the ban, with 45% in favor of it.

More interestingly, though, the vast majority of Americans, a whopping 66%, think Trump’s ban was poorly executed (27% thought everything went just fine). A majority of Americans recognized the “Muslim Ban” as an effort to ban Muslims. (Trump’s people claim it never was, even when it was called a “Muslim Ban.”) A strong majority (65% over 22%) do not think Muslims should be banned. In a sense, the courts are helping Trump out here, by shutting down this whole operation so we can move past what has turned out to be one of the most self damaging political nosedives witnessed in American history.

By the way, a strong majority of Americans trust Judges over Donald Trump to make the right decisions for the United States.

Repealing and Replacing Obamacare

Trump promised to repeal and replace Obamacare. Most observers were under the impression that Trump and Congress, between them, had no idea what to replace Obamacare with. Boy, were they ever right! Congress made a couple of initial procedural moves that will allow them to later undo Obamacare, ran in to major opposition, forgot to have any ideas about reforming Obamacare, and then stopped.

"The White House response is that he's not going to release his tax returns. We litigated this all through the election. People didn't care.  They voted for him, and let me make this very clear: Most Americans are -- are very focused on what their tax returns will look like while President Trump is in office, not what his look like."
“The White House response is that he’s not going to release his tax returns. We litigated this all through the election. People didn’t care. They voted for him, and let me make this very clear: Most Americans are — are very focused on what their tax returns will look like while President Trump is in office, not what his look like.”
The White House has been mostly silent on the issue. Polls show that a strong plurality of American support Obamacare (far more than those who oppose, with 47%-39% supporting-opposing). A YUGE majority of Americans, 65%, do not want Congress to repeal Obamacare and, rather, keep what works in the plan.

Keeping his Tax Returns Secret

Trump never did release his tax returns. He promised to release them after an “audit” was over. But soon after the election, spokes-minuteman Kellyanne Conway, announced a new policy: since Trump won, it must be true that nobody cares about his tax returns, or why would the majority of Americans have voted for him?

There are two problems with this “logic.” First, a majority of Americans voted for Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump. Second, at present, an overwhelming majority of Americans want Trump to release his tax returns. (58% say yes, 31% say no.)

Keeping his business ties ethical

LOL.

Screen Shot 2017-02-10 at 1.13.12 PMAt his first press conference, Donald Trump showed us piles of folders containing all of the plans to unlink him from his businesses. A lawyer explained how all the ethical rules would be followed. We were also told that all the ethical rules did not apply to the President anyway, and that nothing would really be done.

The folders, we learned later, were as empty as his earlier promises to disassociate his business and his activities as president. Indeed, just yesterday, Kellyanne Conway went on Fox News, representing the White House, and urged listeners to buy Trump’s daughter’s products. Perhaps, technically, though I don’t know, Trump himself has no direct ties to this business. But it is his daughter’s business so legal and ethical constraints apply. Conway should not have made the statement she made.

Had she been a Democrat, the calls for her being fired would never end. But since she is a Republican, there was a minor outcry. But, the event was a clear enough case of unethical behavior that even the FOX news people sensed something was wrong:

The moment three FOX news anchors realize that Kellyanne Conway stepped over the line, legally and ethically.
The moment three FOX news anchors realize that Kellyanne Conway stepped over the line, legally and ethically.

By the way, 62% of Americans think Trump should fully divest himself from his businesses.

The Investigation of Voter Fraud

In his never ending but always unsuccessfull effort to not be the Biggest Loser, Trump issued the blatant lie that millions of people, mainly Illegal Immigrants, voted illegally in the last election, and that this is why he actually lost the vote. As you know, great efforts were made to recount the votes in several states, and this showed no problems. Also, the Secretaries of State across the country declared that there was no measurable problem with the voting. The White House has been relatively silent about this issue lately, perhaps because they sensed that the country was against them on this. Indeed, it seems that about 55% of Americans think there was no illegal voting by millions of people in the last election.

Be Presidential

During the election, Trump told us that he’ll be big league presidential. I assume this means, among other things, being, or at least, seeming, credible.

How’s that going?

Well, the poll I’ve been referring to all along (see below) pits the New York Times against Trump in credibility, which is appropriate because Trump has been engaging in an aggressive Twitter war against the Paper of Record. The result? 52% of Americans think the NYT is more credible than Trump, 37% think the opposite.

Saturday Night Live, the fictional, comedy, all the stuff is made up TV show of fame, doesn’t do quite as well as the New York Times. A mere 48% of Americans put SNL above Trump in credibility, with 43% saying the opposite. So, while it may be stranger than fiction, it seems that Trump is less credible than fiction in the minds of a plurality of Americans.

People are about evenly divided on whether or not Trump should be impeached, with about 46% saying each “yes” and “no.” That is a lot of people who want to see his presidency ended immediately. But, one might expect a higher percentage of people saying “Impeach” than indicated here, given all the above information.

Rachel Maddow has a theory as to why more people don’t, at the moment, want to see Trump thrown out of office. I’ll let her tell you. Watch the whole video, but the key moment starts about 4 minutes.

I hope you watched that whole thing to see how Trump supporters seem to not know about, or care about, the Constitution.


El Nino Season Two?

It is like that stabby lady in the bath tub in that movie.

Here, I’ll give you a more readable version of the graphic from NOAA:

Screen Shot 2017-02-07 at 3.10.43 PM

The chance of an the Pacific ENSO system being neutral, meaning, not adding extra heat to the atmosphere and not removing extra heat form the atmosphere, is about 50% from now through mid 2017.

But, the chance of a la Nina is pretty darn low, and the chance of an El Nino, which would add more heat to the atmosphere than the average year, is not only approaching 40% but it has been growing.

A second El Nino this close on the last one, which was a very severe El Nino, will not be as strong because there is that much heat stored up in the Pacific. A lot of it came out last time. But there is a fair amount left in there, so we could have a real, if not major, El Nino event this summer or fall.

Or not. This is really up in the air, as it were. But it is a little unusual to see a second El Nino this close in time, so I thought you might find this interesting.

Introduced Into The House: H.R.861 – To terminate the Environmental Protection Agency.

Representative Mat Gaetz (Republican, Florida) introduced HR 861, “To terminate the Environmental Protection Agency” which is said to defund and remove from existence the Environmental Protection Agency.

Details are unclear, but the idea is to have states and local communities regulate their environmental pollution.

The EPA centralizes research programs, policy guidance, and regulatory procedures. To ask each community to do this amounts to a huge tax increase, because the same effort would have to be repeated many times across the country.

The reason we have a national EPA is because pollution does not respect boundaries. People who live in states run by anti-environmental lawmakers will not pay for pollution mitigation, and the pollution they create will flow down stream or blow down wind to states where people act responsibly about the environment. This is unacceptable.

Ask your house member how they stand on the bill. Ask them to explain their position and report how they intend to vote.

Encourage your house member to vote against the bill.

Encourage your house member to act responsibly with respect to the environment.

Natural Hazards and Risk Reduction in the Modern World

Great disasters are great stories, great moments in time, great tests of technology, humanity, society, government, and luck. Fifty years ago it was probably true to say that our understanding of great disasters was thin, not well developed because of the relative infrequency of the events, and not very useful, not knowledge that we could use to reduce the risks from such events.

This is no longer true. The last several decades has seen climate science add more climatic data because of decades of careful instrumental data collection happening, but also, earlier decades have been added to understanding the long term trends. We can now track, in detail, global surface temperatures well back into the 19th century, and we have a very good idea of change over time, and variability in, global temperatures on a century level scale for centuries. There is a slightly less finely observed record covering hundreds of thousands of years and an increasingly refined vague idea of global surface temperature for the entire history of the planet.

This is true as well with earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis. Most of the larger versions of these events leave a mark. Sometimes that mark is an historical record that needs to be found, verified, critiqued for veracity, and eventually added to the mix. Sometimes the mark is geological, like when the coastline of the Pacific Northwest drops a few meters all at once, creating fossilized coastal wetlands that can be dated. Those events are associated with a particular kind of earthquake that happens on average every several hundred years, and now we have a multi-thousand year record of those events, allowing an estimate of major earthquake hazard in the region.

And so on.

The theory has also developed, and yes, there is a theory, or really several theories, related to disasters. For example, we distinguish between hazard (chance of a particular disaster happening at a certain level in a certain area) vs. risk (the probability of a particular bad thing happening to you as a results). If you live and work in Los Angeles, your earthquake hazard is high. You will experience earthquakes. But your risk of, say, getting killed in an earthquake is actually remarkably low considering how many there are. Why? Partly because really big ones are rare and fairly localized, and partly because you live in a house and work in a building and drive on roads that meet specifications set out to reduce risk in the case of an earthquake. Also, you “know” (supposedly) what to do if an earthquake happens. If, on the other hand, you live in an old building in San Francisco, you may still be at risk if the zoning laws have not caught up with the science. If you live near sea level in the Pacific Northwest, your earthquake hazard is really low, but if one of those giant earthquakes happens, you have bigly risk. Doomed, even.

Since my own research and academic interests have involved climate change, sea level rise, exploding volcanoes, mass death due to disease, and all that (catastrophes are the punctuation makrs of the long term archaeological and evolutionary record), I’ve always found books on disasters of interest. And now, I have a new one for you.

Man catastrophe books are written by science-interested or historically inclined writers, who are not scientists. The regurgitate the historical record of various disasters, giving you accounts of this or that volcano exploding, or this or that tsunami wiping out a coastal city, and so on. But the better books are written by scientist who are very directly, or nearly directly, engaged in the work of understanding, documenting, and addressing catastrophe.

Curbing Catastrophe: Natural Hazards and Risk Reduction in the Modern World by Timothy Dixon is one of these. Although I was aware of Dixon’s work because of his involvement in remote sensing, I don’t know him, so I’ll crib the publisher’s bio for your edification:

Timothy H. Dixon is a professor in the School of Geosciences and Director of the Natural Hazards Network at the University of South Florida in Tampa. In his research, he uses satellite geodesy and remote sensing data to study earthquakes and volcanoes, coastal subsidence and flooding, ground water extraction, and glacier motion. He has worked as a commercial pilot and scientific diver, conducted research at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and was a professor at the University of Miami, where he co-founded the Center for Southeastern Tropical Advanced Remote Sensing (CSTARS). Dixon was a Distinguished Lecturer for the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) in 2006–2007. He is also a fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the Geological Society of America (GSA), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He received a GSA Best Paper Award in 2006 and received GSA’s Woollard Award in 2010 for excellence in Geophysics.

Screen Shot 2017-02-06 at 11.21.23 AMThis book covers risk theory, the basics of natural disasters, uncertainty, and vulnerability of humans. Dixon looks specifically at Fukushima and the more general problem of untoward geological events and nuclear power plants, and other aspects of tsunamis (including the Northwest Coast problem I mention above). He talks about energy and global warming; I found his discussion of what we generally call “clean energy” a bit outdates. He makes the point, correctly, that for various reasons the increase in price of fossil fuels that would ultimately drive, through market forces, the development of non-fossil fuel sources of electricity and motion is not going to happen for a very long time on its own. Environmentalists who assume there will be huge increase in fossil fuel costs any time now are almost certainly mistaken. However, Dixon significantly understates the rate at which solar, for example, is becoming economically viable. It is now cheaper to start up a solar electricity plant than it is to start any other kind of plant, and the per unit cost of solar is very low and rapidly declining.

Dixon is a bit of a free marketeer, which I am not, but a realistic one; He makes valid and important points about science communication, time lags and long term thinking, and he makes the case that more research can produce important technological advances.

By the way, two other books in this genre — catastrophe examined by experts — that I also recommend are Yeats “Earthquake Time Bombs” and the less up to date but geologically grounded Catastrophes!: Earthquakes, Tsunamis, Tornadoes, and Other Earth-Shattering Disasters by Don Prothero.

Climate change is real, it is a problem, and it is getting worse

The year 2016 was messy and expensive and full of climate change enhanced weather disasters. There were, according to Jeff Masters and Bob Henson, over 30 billion dollar disasters last year.

This is the fourth-largest number on record going back to 1990, said insurance broker Aon Benfield in their Annual Global Climate and Catastrophe Report issued January 17 (updated January 23 to include a 31st billion-dollar disaster, the Gatlinburg, Tennessee fire.) The average from 1990 – 2016 was 22 billion-dollar weather disasters; the highest number since 1990 was 41, in 2013.

The frequency of flood disasters in Europe have doubled over 35 years.

The number of devastating floods that trigger insurance payouts has more than doubled in Europe since 1980, according to new research by Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurance company.

The firm’s latest data shows there were 30 flood events requiring insurance payouts in Europe last year – up from just 12 in 1980 – and the trend is set to accelerate as warming temperatures drive up atmospheric moisture levels.

Globally, 2016 saw 384 flood disasters, compared with 58 in 1980, although the greater proportional increase probably reflects poorer flood protections and lower building standards in the developing world

As I’m sure you’ve heard, he year 2016 was the hottest year on record, and 2017 is also going to be hot. (I personally doubt 2017 will be hotter, but then again, I was thinking that 2016 might not break the 2015 record.)

Mark Bgoslough as an interesting piece here on how global temperature records are made, analyses, and reported. I recommend reading that. Here, I want to use a graphic he made for that item to point something outI’ve added the green lines. I’ll just leave it here without comment.

paus_in_global_warming_never_happened

People in the northeastern US should be about 50% more concerned about global warming than everyone else, because new research suggests that this region will warm about 50% faster than the globe in coming years.

The fastest warming region in the contiguous US is the Northeast, which is projected to warm by 3°C when global warming reaches 2°C. The signal-to-noise ratio calculations indicate that the regional warming estimates remain outside the envelope of uncertainty throughout the twenty-first century, making them potentially useful to planners. The regional precipitation projections for global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C are uncertain, but the eastern US is projected to experience wetter winters and the Great Plains and the Northwest US are projected to experience drier summers in the future.

John Abraham summarizes and interprets the results here.

Regardless of the so-called temperature target, what this study shows is that even if we do keep the globe as a whole to a 2°C temperature increase, some regions, like the Northeast United States will far exceed this threshold. So, what is “safe” for the world is unsafe for certain regions.

A recent poll tells us that 90% of rural Australians are concerned about the impacts of climate change. Most were concerned about drought and flooding. Fewer than half this coal fire power stations should be phased out.

I think that if you did a similar poll in the US, you would find that most rural Americans don’t are about climate change, and even fewer think coal should be phased out. Since all rural people, Australians or Americans and everyone else, have already been affected to at least some degree by climate change, and since the science strongly suggests that things will get much worse for them in the future, all of these folks should be concerned and all of them should be for doing something about it. The good news is that the cognitive dissonance we see in the Australia between climate change and concern may be a harbinger for future changes in American attitudes. Australia has probably been affected by severe weather caused or enhanced by climate change to a much larger degree than has Rural America. In short, I expect disdain for coal to catch up to concern about climate change in Oz, while in America, eventually, people will get more and more on board with both.

Americans are more concerned about not offending farmers than they are about saving them. In American farmlands, we expect climate change to reduce staple crop production substantially by the end of the century. The farmers need to get on board more quickly if they want their grandchildren to be able to be farmers too.

A question on everyone’s mind: “Is the California Drought over and what does this mean?”

It looks over. Reservoirs are filling, snow is piling up in the mountains, everything is wet.

However, there are several things still to consider. For one, the recharging of water supplies is not complete, and if near-zero-rain conditions return right away, the drought will slowly return. This is of course always a concern, but right now we have a slightly different question to ask for California. Is it the case that the conditions that led to the California drought are the “new normal” (a phrase I’m not really happy with) I the sense that from now on, there will be less snow pack, less rainfall, etc. In other words, is it the case that the future of California is generally much dryer all the time with the occasional drenching rainy season, because of climate change?

We don’t know yet, but there is one fairly obvious area of concern: Snow pack. Snow pack plays a role in watering California. Snow pack forms during the rainy winter, and slowly melts thereafter. If that precipitation wasn’t temporarily stored up as snow, the winter rains would be more flooding, and there would be less water retained in the system for the rest of the year. Increasing warmth, due to global warming, has caused more of the precipitation that falls in the mountains to be rain rather than snow, and it has caused the snow to melt more quickly.

Warmer temperatures also mean more evaporation, so getting everything all wet and squishy for a few months during the Winter may mean less a few months later when a warm and dry atmosphere starts to drunk the moisture out of the ground and off the reservoir’s surfaces at an accelerated rate.

This piece by Andrea Thompson at Climate Central does a great job of summarizing the current situation in California.

I have been noting for years (well, for a couple of years) that the best available paleo data suggest that the current levels of CO2 and/or temperature, protracted over a reasonable amount of time, should be associated with sea levels of about 8 meters. In other words, if you are worried about sea level rise, and you should be, the amount of sea level rise that we are currently locked into is enough to inundate much of Southeast Asia’s rice growing land, large parts of various US states such as Louisiana and Florida, and to cause retreat from many of the world’s most densely settled cities.

Over recent months the interface between the scientific research and journalism has started to squeeze out the occasional example of this startling fact, one we’ve known for years but have been afraid to say about else we be considered non reputable. From the Independent:

The last time ocean temperatures were this warm, sea levels were up to nine metres higher than they are today, according to the findings of a new study, which were described as “extremely worrying” by one expert.

The researchers took samples of sediment from 83 different sites around the world, and these “natural thermometers” enabled them to work out what the sea surface temperature had been more than 125,000 years ago.

How long will this take? Nobody knows. This depends on how fast the major glaciers melt.

Carlos Gimenez, mayor of Miami, is already rolling up his pants:

“Let’s be clear, sea-level rise is a very serious concern for Miami-Dade County and all of South Florida,” Mayor Carlos Gimenez told the crowd Wednesday morning at the South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center during his annual State of the County address. “It’s not a theory. It’s a fact. We live it every day.”

Read more here.

The British Antarctic Survey is abandoning its Halley Base, in Antarctic, because the ice shelf on which it is located had developed a huge crack, so it is no longer safe to be there. They’l be out by the end of March. The crack is known as the “Halloween Crack.” Here’s a short video:

In the Arctic, sea ice growth so far this year is below any previously observed year. From the National Snoe and Ice Data Center:
Screen Shot 2017-02-05 at 12.08.19 PM

About Bangladesh:

Along the coast lies Kutubdia, an island in the Bay of Bengal where lush green rice fields give way to acres and acres of flat fields. Consisting of small rectangles of varying hues of brown, they are salt fields. The encroachment of saline water from rising tides has made rice farming impossible.

They now “farm” salt. That is not euphemism for farming in salty conditions. They take salt out of the water. That is not a business that will have a lot of future when everybody else along the coasts of low lying countries are doing it as well.

At the end of 2015, it looked like the negative effects of climate change were accelerating. That turned out to be true, and acceleration of the effects continues. This is probably not a good time to official deny the reality and importance of climate change, but that seems to be what we are doing in the United States.

How to develop a digital plan to make change

Rosa Parks wasn’t just some kid who decided to defy white authority and relinquish her seat on the bus.

For one thing, she was a bit older than a kid. For another, she carried out this defiant act as part of a larger strategy to cause necessary and urgent change in the rules of society.

When the 106th Congress awarded Parks a medal honoring her activism, they called her the “the mother of the freedom movement.” Never mind that today, one member of the Republican party, which again controls Congress, thinks it is “Time for another Kent State … One bullet stops a lot of thuggery.” We have in fact come a long way, and most of that progress can be attributed to acts of individual heroism, group action, the occasional moment of great oratory, all that, embedded in a less obvious but carefully constructed plan.

Without the plan, it doesn’t work. Random acts of unplanned activism can waste resources, and can even have negative consequences. In a simplified version of recent history, the #Occupy movement energized and invigorated a lot of people who were already energized and invigorated, and produced almost no change. From within that movement there emerged a more thought out plan, the “Draft Warren” movement, which made much more of a mark, and from that, more or less, came the Bernie Sanders bid for the presidency. Sanders didn’t get the nomination, but he could have; his was not a candidacy of conceit. One might conjecture, in fact, that if #Occupy was more purposefully organized and carefully planned out, with the idea in mind of eventually putting forward viable candidates for various offices, that Sanders would have gotten the nomination, or at least, somebody anointed by millennial progressives, and that the movement would have resulted in a very different situation than we have at the moment of this writing.

I know, that’s a pipe dream, but the point is real: organized activism produces results, having a plan matters. Not having a plan is little more than “raising awareness” and that is not a suitable objective. Raising awareness by itself can eventually lead to an inured population. That’s the last thing we need as we tweeter on the edge of civilization’s collapse.

I wonder what Rosa Parks would have tweeted when she was being carried off the bus? I wonder what the bus driver would have tweeted? I wonder what the blogosphere would have said about this? I wonder what the Change.org petitions would have looked like? The truth is, any and all of that digital yammering would have had little to no effect on the progress of the civil rights movement, at that time and that place.

Unless, of course, they had a plan.

Brad Schenck has a plan, or more exactly, is prepared to help you get your plan together, with this newly available book: The Digital Plan: A practical guide to creating a strategic digital plan. It is inexpensive as a soft bound volume, free as a Kindle Unlimited book.

I became interested in this book because of its use in political activism, but once I got a copy of it I realized that it has much broader uses, including general marketing or selling a product, perhaps a self published book, or a new technology project idea, or whatever.

The fundamental theory behind this book is first that without a plan you are very unlikely to make the change you want happen, so you need a plan. Believe it or not, regardless of how straightforward that sounds, it is very difficult to get people to accept that idea. The second key concept presented in the book is this: one you know you need a plan, don’t expect to just think up the ideal plan on your own. There is a long history of development of strategy in general and a somewhat less time-deep history of strategic digital planning. For the price of this book, you can access a healthy dose of that hard earned knowledge.

From total beginner to technical expert, you will be digitally empowered by engaging with The Digital Plan. Whether you’re the director of a digital communications department or you’re a member of any team wishing to wield or understand the power of digital, this book will provide you with the tools you need to plan and execute digital strategy with ease.

Using his many years of experience directing digital strategies for campaigns and organizations, Brad A Schenck outlines everything you want to know about digital planning, utilizing digital tools and making the most of your collaborative efforts.

In this book, you should expect to find: Expert guidance framed with thoughtful questions you should ask. Bullet points of the most up-to-date tips and lots of them. Templates that will help you frame your plan, whatever your goals may be. Stories and anecdotes from someone who has advised hundreds of digital plans at the highest level. From the very technical to the more artistic, The Digital Plan covers everything from design and social media to data and analytics. This book is a must-have for anyone wishing to make the most of their digital presence to create powerful impact by driving community action.

This book started as an Indiegogo campaign, which was fully funded.

Brad Schenck worked on the Obama campaign’s digital strategy (2012), the Digital strategy for Organizing for Action, oversaw the 2010 regional digital strategy for the DNC, and several other major projects of note. Most recently, he has worked with the Rainforest Action Network and Vote.org.

I highly recommend The Digital Plan: A practical guide to creating a strategic digital plan. for your digital organizing edification!

The website for the book is here.

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