A kindle version of The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World: Stories
This is an anthology including A Boy and his Dog.
And while we are on the topic, check out this lost video of Harlan Ellison:
Greenland Ice Melt On Track to be Worst Case Scenario
Ice has been melting from Greenland and Antarctdica’s glaciers at a rate six times greater than 20 or 30 years ago. According to NASA, “If the current melting trend continues, the regions will be on track to match the “worst-case” scenario of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of an extra 6.7 inches (17 centimeters) of sea level rise by 2100.”
Keep in mind two things, when you read this 6.7 inch statistic. 1) Historically, the most hand-wringing, pearl clutching ice melt experts underestimate the rate of melting. That trend has been consistent for two decades. 2) When talking about both Greenland and Antarctica, if Greenland is a big deal, but if Greenland is big, Antarctica is Humongous. Greenland experiences, melty summers and snowy winters, so there is a regular flux of ice mass, with the trend being net loss over time in recent years. Antarctica experiences below freezing temperatures even in the summer over most of its ice mass. Well, until recently. Recently, there have been daytime temperatures sufficient to melt the surface.
In all, the Greenland Ice Sheet has enough water to raise global sea levels by 7.4 meters, if it all melted. From the article in nature:
Over recent decades, ice losses from Greenland have made a substantial contribution to global sea-level rise, and model projections suggest that this imbalance will continue in a warming climate… [Recent research has shown a] five fold increase in the rate of ice loss from Greenland overall, rising from 51 ± 65 Gt yr?1 in the early 1990s to 263 ± 30 Gt yr?1 between 2005 and 2010. … There was, however, a marked reduction in ice loss between 2013 and 2018, as a consequence of cooler atmospheric conditions and increased precipitation. Although the broad pattern of change across Greenland is one of ice loss, there is considerable variability; for example, during the 2000s just four glaciers were responsible for half of the total ice loss due to increased discharge, whereas many others contribute today. Moreover, some neighbouring ice streams have been observed to speed up over this period while others slowed down, suggesting diverse reasons for the changes that have taken place—including their geometrical configuration and basal conditions, as well as the forcing they have experienced. In this study we combine satellite altimetry, gravimetry and ice velocity measurements to produce a reconciled estimate of the Greenland Ice Sheet mass balance between 1992 and 2018, we evaluate the impact of changes in SMB and uncertainty in glacial isostatic adjustment and we partition the ice sheet mass loss into signals associated with surface mass balance and ice dynamics. In doing so, we extend a previous assessment to include more satellite and ancillary data and to cover the period since 2012.
The result of this melting has been .7 inches of sea level rise, or a third of all sea level rise, during the study period.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/10/sea-level-in-the-5th-ipcc-report/comment-page-3/
Previusly, the IPCC estimated that global sea levels would rise about 28 inches by 2100. That is enough to remove Cape Hatteras and possibly require New York City to build dikes or move to avoid flooding in much of its area. But, the IPCC gave a range of possible scenarios, and this study suggests that the worst of those is well within the range of possibility.
HERE is the link to the research team’s site.
Source: The IMBIE Team. 2019/2020 (first early publication Dec 10 2019, published in March 12 2020 issue). Mass blanance of the Greenland Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2018. Nature 579, 233-239(2020)
Congratulations Kerry Emanuel
The BBVA Foundation has awarded climate scientist Kerry Emanuel the Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Climate Change.
MIT’s press release:
Emanuel’s research has provided fundamental contributions to understanding of tropical cyclones and how they are affected by climate change.
The BBVA Foundation — which promotes knowledge based on research and artistic and cultural creation, and supports activity on the analysis of emerging issues in five strategic areas: environment, biomedicine and health, economy and society, basic sciences and technology, and Culture — recognizes MIT Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Atmospheric Science Kerry Emanuel’s body of research on hurricanes and their evolution in a changing climate, as well as his effectiveness for communicating these issues. The annually bestowed Climate Change award acknowledges “both research endeavors in confronting this challenge and impactful actions informed by the best science.”
“By understanding the essential physics of atmospheric convection…he has unraveled the behavior of tropical cyclones – hurricanes and typhoons – as our climate changes,” cites the foundation’s conferring committee.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, after completing degrees at MIT and later joining the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) faculty, Emanuel pinned down the mechanisms behind hurricanes and how warming surface oceans fuel storms and increase intensity as the climate changes. This issue is of particular concern to humanity because, of the natural events, tropical cyclones cause many deaths and bring about high economic costs. Further research has probed connections between anthropogenic global warming and cyclone frequency, intensity, development time, and geographical expansion of hurricane occurrence.
The selection committee noted Emanuel’s exceptional theories and research that “has opened new approaches for assessing risks from weather extremes.” He has expanded this work by co-founding the MIT Lorenz Center, a climate think tank which fosters creative approaches to learning how climate works.
For Bjorn Stevens, BBVA Foundation committee chairman and Director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, “it is hard to imagine an area of climate science where one person’s leadership is so incontestable.”
What will happen on Super Tuesday 2020? (Updated to exclude Buttigieg and Klobuchar)
Super Tuesday is coming up, and I have my predictions.
Last cycle, I predicted the relative performance of Sanders and Clinton in each race, and my predictions were uncannily accurate. I did better than polling and other predicting agencies or individuals. This year, things are more complicated, and I have less confidence now than I did near the end of the last primary cycle. One reason is the larger number of candidates that are not as clearly distinct. Another reason is Bloomberg. It is simply hard to tell what effect he is having.
A third point of difficulty is, of course, those odd states. Minnesota is one of these this year, since Senator Kobuchar is popular here, so a model based any information outside of Minnesota does not help. Same with Vermont (Sanders).
This model is a little complex so I’ll explain how it works. The simple version is that I predict the performance of each candidate, in absolute terms (but incidentally scaled from 0 to 100) based on a regression model using ethnic makeup of each state. The regression model is derived from actual performance of that individual (out of 100% among the investigated individuals). However, the “actual performance” data exists only for Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. This is not enough data, and it is for various reasons screwy data. So, I add in the polling data form the better polled states (such as California, Texas, etc.) So actual and polling data from 13 states are used to predict all of the states. Since some of those polling states are on Super Tuesday and some are not, the resulting table of data includes a mix of polling and prediction. This is fair because those polling data are used IN the prediction.
The original ethnic data included various flavors of Asian and Hispanic numbers. when including these numbers, statistical confidence dropped. As was the case last cycle, the best predictive data is simply percentage of white vs black in a state. This makes sense for a lot of reasons we can discuss at another time. I will simply point out at this time that when it comes do Democratic Primary and Caucus results, #BLM in a big way.
R-squared values for the regression runs was generally close to 0.85.
Bottom line: Sanders comes in first in most states, with Biden second in number of firsts. But remember, this is a delegate fight, so the number of delegates matters.
I’m not going to try to predict the number of delegates since that is so dependent on things like the 15% threshold that it would be easier to just wait until Wednesday and see how it comes out!
Here are my predictions, UPDATED to reflect recent changes in the field of candidates:
Funniest Thing Ever (Elizabeth Warren on Billionaires)
Can we please be done with fetishizing early voting?
It is said that about two thirds, maybe more, of Democrats who participated in the Nevada Caucuses of a few days ago had voted, using early voting, prior to the nationally televised and widely watched Democratic presidential debate in which Elizabeth Warren performed so well that pollsters and pundits assumed she would gain a significant boost. But because most of the voters voted before Warren’s very good day, nothing happened.
An uninformed vote is not as good as an informed vote. In the dynamic electoral process in which we undeniably live, especially during a primary, an early vote is a less informed vote, and thus, not as good as a vote on voting day itself.
Early voting and similar programs were created to make it possible for more people to get to the polls. It was not created to help a majority of voters become less informed. Yet, it seems to have had that effect.
Meanwhile, we have placed early voting on a pedestal it does not deserve to be on. During the last election cycle, I witnessed the same scene several times. At the launch of a door-to-door canvas, the organizer implores the volunteers, who will be knocking on scores of doors to engage potential voters, to remember to remind people that they can vote early. Why? Because early voting is how we win! When challenged, when asked how we win by voting earlier instead of later, the response was usually simple and almost cult like: When we vote early we win!
What is behind that idea? This: When early voting started to happen, Democrats did a lot of it, and at the same time, this increased Democratic turnout. (After a few years of early voting in a region, this effect might in some cases flatten out and early voting stops favoring one party.) More turnout is thought to help Democrats, and more Democratic turnout, obviously, helps Democrats. So, early voting gave Democrats a leg up. Why does early voting help Democrats? Because early voting offsets the limitations some people have with respect to time, health, mobility, etc. Republican tend to not have these negative priv-points. Republicans just have the priv. They can mostly vote on election day because they are more likely to be the ones in charge of deciding where other people go, or to have the resources to overcome what might to others be limitations. It is also probably true that Republicans are more politically disciplined than Democrats. A very typical community might have 40% Republicans and 55% Democrats, but Republicans win with margins of 52-48% at the voting booth, because Republicans all get out to vote and Democrats often don’t. But in years when Democrats really rock the vote, they win, barely, in those same places by increasing turnout. It is an old and tried and tested formula. The first 5-8% of extra turnout may be something like 70% Democratic.
This makes early voting a good thing for Democrats, all else being equal.
What has been missed, though, is that people who were going to vote anyway, no matter what, don’t get a better vote when they vote early. Their vote is not worth more. Their vote does not do more, or get more, or count for more. But, it is a vote they may be casting and regretting.
Vote early if you need to. If not, don’t fetishize the ability to vote early. Don’t think your early vote is a better vote. Stop trying to talk everybody into always doing it. Don’t be a totally time-abled and physical-abled person and run around bragging that you voted two months early in the middle of a rapidly changing context. Your vote might be a less informed vote, and thus, not as good as a vote you cast on election day.
Having early voting as an option is a good thing. Actually voting early, way early, when you don’t have to, is not necessarily a good thing.
Lack of coronavirus COVID-19 in Subsaharan Africa?
That there is no coronavirus COVID-19 reported in Subsaharan Africa is a huge concern.
Why?
1) It seems likely that this virus spread out of China in part by Chinese people working or visiting overseas.
2) China has had a long standing diplomatic and commercial presence in several areas of Subsaharan Africa including the Congo and Sudan, and some other places.
3) These are places where illness are only barely monitored and generally not well reported.
My guess is that coronavirus COVID-19 is in the Congo and Sudan and a few other places, and it is not being addressed.
Sara Gideon Vs The Pearl Cluther
Everyone in the world is annoyed with Maine Senator Susan Collins. She is constantly pausing to grab the nearest string of pearls, to clutch vibrantly in front of whatever media outlet is watching. Then when push comes to shove, or as they say in Maine, it’s time to cut bait or fish, she’s back in the lobster boat pulling traps for Mitch or Donnie.
A recent poll shows that one of the handful of challengers that have emerged to replace Collins, Sara Gideon, has pulled neck and neck. Or, as they say in Maine, this race has become tighter than bark on a tree. Collins is in a gaum at 42% and Sara Gideon is happier than a clam at high tide with 43%. That difference is just a dite, but considering Collins’ last election, it feels a like christly big gap.
In 2014, Collins left her opponent, Shenna Bellows, in the culch with a 36% margin. Being neck and neck with Collins in this most recent poll is a wicked pissah.
The poll is here.
Gideon’s campaign site is here.
A dictionary of Maine terms that will help you translate this post is heah, heah, heah, and heah.
NOAA Gets Cool New Computers
NOAA will be adding two new Cray computers (one operational and one backup) to replace existing hardware used in weather forecasting. According to a press release, “the computers — each with a 12 petaflop capacity — will be operational and ready to implement model upgrades by early 2022 after a period of code migration and testing. They will replace the existing Cray and Dell systems, “Luna” and “Mars” in Reston, Virginia, and “Surge” and “Venus” in Orlando, Florida.”
When combined with other hardware that will remain in use, the total capacity will rise to 40 petaflops. (A petaflop is a measure of computing speed equal to one thousand million million (1015) floating-point operations per second.) Given upgrades in storage and connectivity, and this increasing computing power, there will be a noticeable increase in resolution and other features of NOAA’s modeling of earth systems.
There is a rumor that the Trump Whitehouse plans to sell off the hardware to some friends who live out near the airport in Queens, and replace it with lower grade equipment that Trump claims works just as well (see illustration).
Though the press release does not give details, a spokesperson for NOAA just informed me that these computers will run the Linux operating system. I had assumed so, but wanted to check. Linux is the standard operating system for super computers, because it is a super operating system. Nobody wants to see the Blue Screen of Death in the middle of their tornado warning.
Specifically, the computers will run the Cray Shasta Linux Environment. This is a high performance suit designed to run large and complex applications on more than a half a million cores, with docker container support, and the robust Cray system management support including staged upgrading capabilities and the low overhead Cray system snapshot analyze.
Your Cranky Uncle vs Climate Change
It is said that scientists are lousy at communication, lousy at telling everyone else about their science, in understandable and compelling terms.
This is of course absurd. There are tens of millions of scientists, and dozens of them are really excellent communicators!
One of the leading science communicators of the day is cognitive scientist John Cook. John is at George Mason University. He is so tightly linked to the founding and development of the Skeptical Science project that “Skeptical Science” is the name of his Wikipedia entry. This binds John and his mission to a lot of us. Where we once might have said, “I am Spartacus,” we now say, “I am Skeptical. Science!” For John, it is just “I am SkepticalScience.”
Cook is likely known to you for the Consensus project. There were two main projects, a few years back, in which scientist attempted to measure the degree of consensus over the idea that anthropocentric climate change is real. (It is real, and the consensus is near 100% in both peer reviewed literature and the conclusions of actual scientists.) John and his colleagues did one of those, and beyond that, widely promoted the results so that everyone knows about it.
“Cranky Uncle vs. Climate Change: How to Understand and Respond to Climate Science Deniers
I don’t have a cranky uncle anymore (he died). But I do have a lot of neighbors who like to write in ALL CAPS. They show up when I give a talk on climate change, and they bring their conspiracy theories, logical fallacies, cherry picked “facts”, absurd expectations, and references to fake research done by fake experts. It is a lot to deal with. But now, I can use the Lewis Black technique for dealing with evolution deniers, but instead of pulling out a trilobite, holding it up and saying “Fossil!” I can pull out a copy of Cranky Uncle vs. Climate Change
Cranky Uncle vs. Climate Change: How to Understand and Respond to Climate Science Deniers
For completeness, here is Lewis Black demonstrating the fossil technique:
Should I wear a facemask to avoid the flu or some other nasty virus like Coronavirus COVIC-19?
The scientific jury is not unanimous on this issue, but it looks like wearing a surgical mask matters enough to recommend their use under certain conditions, and their use, or the use of a more effective respirator, is recommended under certain conditions. In my experience, face masks are routinely distributed patients arriving in urgent care centers and similar when influenza is cranked up in the community.
Washing your hands a lot AND using a face mask seems to reduce transmission within a household where there is a sick person. This practice probably works, and is standard and recommended, for health care workers. People wandering around on the landscape who don’t have the flu or other virus probably don’t get real protection from wearing a surgical mask, but sick people probably transmit less, if for no other reason than it reduces the amount of nose/mouth-to-hand transfer of viral kooties.
Most of the research on this topic was done during either the H1N1 or SARS hyperawareness period, as expected, but I’ve not seen anything contradictory since. Here are some examples:
” Face masks and hand hygiene combined may reduce the rate of ILI and confirmed influenza in community settings. These non-pharmaceutical measures should be recommended in crowded settings at the start of an influenza pandemic.” (Aiello et al 2012)
“This is the first RCT on mask use to be conducted and provides data to inform pandemic planning. We found compliance to be low, but compliance is affected by perception of risk. In a pandemic, we would expect compliance to improve. In compliant users, masks were highly efficacious. A larger study is required to enumerate the difference in efficacy (if any) between surgical and non-fit tested P2 masks.” (MacIntyre et al, 2008)
“Hand hygiene with or without facemasks seemed to reduce influenza transmission, but the differences compared with the control group were not significant. In 154 households in which interventions were implemented within 36 hours of symptom onset in the index patient, transmission of RT-PCR–confirmed infection seemed reduced, an effect attributable to fewer infections among participants using facemasks plus hand hygiene (adjusted odds ratio, 0.33 [95% CI, 0.13 to 0.87]). Adherence to interventions varied.” (Cowling et al. 2009)
The CDC is not sure if asymptomatic non healthcare workers get much benefit, but they don’t say not to do it. They do say to get your vaccinations, and if you get sick, get medical attention which might include an anti-viral. Health care workers are told (by CDC) to always have a mask or respirator if they are within 6 feet of a sneezy coughy diseased person.
Australia’s wildfires: Is this the ‘new normal’?
Where to go to get the info on Climate Science and its deniers
My field is paleoanthropology, where I’ve focused on the relationship between large scale change in climate (like the spread of grassland habitats, or the cooling of the Earth since the Miocene) and the evolution of our family, genus, and species. So when people say “climate has changed before,” I get it. How does one understand the importance of ongoing anthropogenic climate change in the context of such large, long term change?
A partial answer to that question: 1) most changes in the past have been slower; 2) When they were fast they were devastating; and 3) our genius emerged less than 2 million years ago, and our species less than a half million years ago. Everything recently adapted about us is adapted to a cooler environment than the one we are heading for now. You think climate change super-charged storms are bad? Well, they are, but when a three degree latitude band around the equator becomes uninhabitable by mammals, that point will become very clear.
If you go to the Skeptical Science web site, my go-to web resource for climate science denial answers, you’ll see “Climate’s changed before” right at the top of the list of “Most Used Climate Mythis” (left sidebar). Click that, then click the “intermediate” tab, and you’ll find the Skeptical Science answer to that myth, with excellent graphics.
Skeptical Science does not shy away from complex and nuanced questions. It is the single best, and most comprehensive, source of description and explanation for both climate science denial and the science itself. Skeptical Science links peer reviewed research with the thoughtful study of communication and brings them right to your uncle Bob.
Is Forbes Magazine a Danger to Scientists?
The other day a friend asked me, “Is Forbes Magazine legit? Should I believe what it says about climate change?”
It was a good question, since there are many outlets that have clear biases in favor of climate inaction, or even, climate reality denial.
I’m actually not sure if Forbes is a trustworthy source. I’ve seen articles about energy that are informative, and I’ve seen articles about energy that are misleading. I don’t remember off hand any articles about climate change per se.
Until now.
Roger Pielke Junior has an op ed that does damage to Forbes’ reputation, and to Roger’s reputation as well. And, unfortunately, it is a sad story. In the OpEd Roger seems to be claiming that the volunteer organization, Skeptical Science, has done damage to a short list of academics, including his father, his colleague Judith Curry, and himself. What Roger does not understand is that the criticisms that come from Skeptical Science are true. The damage to these three was self inflicted.
Here is the story.
There are two Roger Pielkes: Senior and Junior. Both are academics, and both have produced work that has been criticized by the climate science community. I’m not actually all that familiar with Senior’s work, but Junior’s work has been on my radar screen for some time, and it is an enemy ship, as it were. Junior’s main point is to contradict the increasingly well established science on the frequency, level of impact, and importance of major storms like Atlantic Hurricanes. He has variously made claims that they have not gotten stronger, that climate change is unrelated to these storms, that they are not coming with more frequency, and that their impact is not important. I believe that way down deep in his analysis, there is a fundamental flaw. He shows that the overall economic status of the US is not impacted by hurricanes, but the former is measured by GDP, and GDP increases with increasing devastation by major storms. This is because when a major storm comes along and wipes out cities or coastlines or whatever, there is so much economic activity spent on recovery that GDP goes up.
Junior has taken criticism from other academics poorly, and he has taken it personally. He has teamed up with another academic who has also been criticized heavily. This is Judith Curry. Curry’s work has been criticized by the climate community for a few reasons, but mainly this: She claims that the trend towards increasing global surface temperature is predictable by a non-global-warming scenario in which some other internal variation explains the warming. This idea, however, seems to come from a misunderstanding of the underlying stochastic (and other) dynamics of the models she has used. She is, I’m pretty sure, wrong. There may have been a time, perhaps 15 years ago, when her interpretation of the data could stay alive while more information was gathered, but that time has long past, and sadly, she has not allowed her hansom hypothesis to die an honorable death by fact.
The third element in the current drama is the organization and web site “Skeptical Science.” It is a volunteer run entity that has help from a lot of scientists and communicators. Some of my own work has been reprinted there, and I use it as a reliable and well organized source of information on climate denialism, and actually, climate change itself. If you don’t know skeptical science, you should. It is an excellent resource.
Now, here is the sad part. Rumor has it that Roger Pielke Sr. has recently become ill, and it appears that Junior is in a state of upset, possibly depression, and almost certainly in some kind of socio-psychotic episody state of some sort. I’m not qualified to diagnose so I won’t, but in the vernacular sense Junior has gone ’round the bend, and is in a mode of attacking the Skeptical Science people who, over the years, have been hard on Senior, Junior, and Curry, all three.
This is not an over the top inappropriate hardness, that Skeptical Science has produced. In fact, it is relatively toned down compared to the feelings the three deniateers have produced when they hate on science and love on the fossil fuel industry, indirectly, in their writings, their congressional testimony, and so on.
Having said that, I can’t say what exactly is going on with Roger Junior other than that he is clearly upset. He has produced a large number of tweets attacking Skeptical Science and its volunteers. He has tweeted out personal and private information about Skeptical Science people and other scientists, information that was previously stolen by denialist hackers. His tweets have been, at least in part if not majority, taken down by Twitter, and his account was, at least for a time, suspended.
Roger Pielke Junior attacked volunteers and scholars who had been defending science, attacked them, and science, in inappropriate ways, and for his trouble he has been chastised by Twitter.
I and several colleagues have contacted Roger, or friends of Roger, to see if someone can talk to him, to see if someone can talk him down.
But what happened instead, is Roger published an OpEd airing his grievances in Forbes, raising the stakes, and making his attack official and sanctioned by a major publishing outlet.
This is a credibility hit for Roger, but not one that will matter to him. This is a credibility hit for Forbes. I have no idea if Forbes Magazine cares about its credibility in the science community, or in the environmental community.
Regardless of what Forbes intended, or wanted, it got this: Scientists and science communicators must now regard Forbes Magazine, or its editorial staff, as dangerous. Roger Pielke Junior, having some sort of apparent breakdown, was easily able to weaponize Forbes. That can only have happened if Forbes wanted it to happen. Stay away from Forbes, my friends and colleagues. Don’t touch it with a ten foot pole, unless your ten foot Pole is a very tall Eastern European attorney with experience in libel law.
This is a developing situation. Much of it is happening on Twitter. One of the more pertinent tweets I’ve seen so far is this one by Climate Scientists Gavin Schmidt:
Sunday afternoon thought: it’s fascinating to see some folk whose opinions have been heavily criticized for flawed science or misrepresentations convince themselves instead that it’s their honesty & stand on integrity that makes them unpopular.
Pro tip: it’s not.
— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) February 9, 2020
And now (added) Dana Nuccitelli has tweeted this, with a link to a new Skeptical Science post addressing this issue:
Lately there has been a great deal of misinformation regarding the origins and purpose of @skepticscience. Let's debunk the myths about our myth debunking:https://t.co/OG25AqcB1k
— Dana Nuccitelli (@dana1981) February 10, 2020
And from Katharine Hayhoe:
If one does not want to be held accountable for spreading climate misinformation, it's an easy fix. As Dr Phil would say: JUST STOP. https://t.co/9PgHJ6edxZ
— Prof. Katharine Hayhoe (@KHayhoe) February 10, 2020
How the US National Press Is Hurting Democracy Right Now
I am astonished at how utterly ignorant journalists from national outlets are of the Iowa Caucus. If the Iowa Caucus going “wrong” can be the virtual end of the Democratic Party as we know it, and the end of all caucuses, you would think the press would know what they are. The press never notices that the total number of delegates awarded on precinct caucus night is less then the total number awarded by Iowa. You would think that if the caucus results being available a few hours after Chuck and Andrea’s bed time was an existential crisis for democracy, that they would also have noticed that half of the delegates that Iowa will send to the National Convention are not ever awarded on on this fateful evening to begin with. Until the TV talking heads can explain how that works, they should really tone down their rhetoric on what did and did not happen in Iowa.
Here is a piece of information that might be helpful. If the following is new to you, then you didn’t really know what the caucuses are. If it sounds familiar, you probably still don’t know, but at least you have a vague idea. If you read and absorb all of this, you still don’t know because this is a 20,000 foot look at parts of a large and important grassroots system.
There is no such thing as “a caucus.” On “caucus night” there are hundreds of individual caucuses, and although there are prevailing rules, they are independent conversations happening among voters during which several tings are decided, including electing a very large number (maybe thousands?) of delegates to go on to engage in other levels of activity, things like resolutions to shape the party platform, party business, party officers, and so on. Oh, and during the Iowa precinct caucus process, there is the first part of a multi-part process that involves deciding on some of the national delegates. So in that sense, what we think of as the Iowa Caucus is one piece of a multi-part part of a multi part thing. The day Chuck Todd can tell us how that works without screwing up the explanation is the day he gets to tell us what went wrong in any given year.
“The Iowa Caucus” is also not “A caucus” because it is the first of several stages of meetings. The first one is called a caucus, and the later ones are called conventions. But the conventions are still caucuses, and at them, delegates are elected, generally among the larger initial number. I believe (I’m a Minnesota caucus guy, not an Iowa caucus guy, so I many have this muddled a bit) that Iowa ultimately selects, during precinct caucuses, delegates who will ultimately be selected among to operate at the County level, Congressional District level, State level and National level. These are grassroots party activists who engage in several important party activities, basically running the party, thus ensuring that the Iowa Democratic Party remains a grassroots organization with lots of knowledgeable and engaged volunteers.
Here is a common conversation on social media I am having these days:
Other person: “Caucuses suck. They dont’ work. There should just be a primary. The system is broke. Bla bla bla.”
Me: “Which caucuses have you been involved in, I’d love to know specifically what is wrong.”
Other person: silence because they have never been to a caucus and have no clue
Make no mistake. There are people who are involved in caucuses who don’t like them. But, that doesn’t make them right. Most of the complaints they have are invalid for one of the following reasons:
1) There are things wrong with caucus, and things wrong with primaries. You can’t only complain about the one and not the other.
2) Things like “accessibility” and the like are often complained about. That is a factor, but it can be fixed, and good organizing units have fixed it. For instance, the caucus I help run is done at a huge facility that is among the most accessible in the region, and since the facility is capable of handling many thousands of people all day every day, our caucuses don’t stress things like handicapped parking, etc. (Other caucuses are not as good as us, but that is not the problem of the caucus, but a problem that can and should be fixed.”)
3) Complaining about the caucus but ignoring the entire party structure, with conventions, central committees, etc. is like saying you don’t like a person because of their hat. Maybe they have a stupid hat, but their hat is not as bad as your determination that they are a bad person because they have a bad hat.
4) It is said by haters that a caucus limits participation because it is held at a certain time at a certain place. That is true, for some potential participants. But it is also true that the caucus and convention system on balance enhances involvement, and that matters. In addition, as noted several times already, the caucus is part of a larger process. Anybody in Minnesota’s Senate District 44 want to get meaningfully involved in DFL politics but can’t do the caucus? Find me, I’ll fix you up. You can be very involved, influentially involved, meaningfully involved. But not if we have only a primary.
For every complaint about caucuses, I have one countervailing complaint about primaries: You can’t really buy a caucus (no, you can’t), but you can buy a primary. In a time when we should be eating the rich, do we really want to give up the last of our grassroots power?
I’ll just add this to complexity things. Tonight I’m going to caucus with some people over support of a particular candidate for a local race. Two night ago, Iowa had its precinct caucus, and on Feb 25th Minnesota does that as well (though there will be nothing about the presidential race at that caucus). I’m a member of the DFL Environmental caucus, which does not caucus. Recently, the Democrats in Minnesota, whose caucus is in the majority in the house but not in the Senate, formed the House Climate Change Action Caucus. And so on.
Not only is the thing that they call the “caucus” only one part of a larger, and good, thing, but the word “caucus” is a bit like the word “desktop” in that it means many things. Until Chuck and Andrea and the other national reporters can keep all of this straight, and not just some of it, it is irresponsible of them to force changes in our political system because they are annoyed at the scheduling of events.