And The Gold Goes To NASA

Commentary By Ron Beasley

It's appropriate that the MSL, Curiosity Rover, landed during the Olympics.  It was a gold medal for NASA.  I'm an engineer and I know that if anything can go wrong it will.  But nothing went wrong.  They were even able to to get a picture of the descent.

Is that cool or what?  It will be a couple of weeks before Curiosity  gets down to work and it will incease our knowledge of not only the Red Planet but the solar system.  But the real story is the engineering itself.  This is a real example of American exceptionalism.  It's not how many countries we can invade and occupy but ideas that make the United States exceptional.  I have been both a hardware and software engineer and I find this accomplishment  nothing less that amazing.

Political Minders are back

By BJ Bjornson

There�s a conference under way in Montreal to celebrate the recent International Polar Year, under whose auspices there was a major amount of scientific work completed in the Arctic. Given Canada is the host of said conference, I can�t help but be more than a little embarrassed by the antics of our Republican North party�s efforts to avoid having Canadian scientists say anything that might put the Canadian government in a bad light. Which, given we are talking about the Republican North party, would be just about anything the scientists say, so better to make sure they can�t say much of anything.

Government media minders are being dispatched to an international polar conference in Montreal to monitor and record what Environment Canada scientists say to reporters.

. . .

�If you are approached by the media, ask them for their business card and tell them that you will get back to them with a time for (an) interview,� the Environment Canada scientists were told by email late last week.

�Send a message to your media relations contact and they will organize the interview. They will most probably be with you during the interview to assist and record,� says the email obtained by Postmedia News.

It was also noted that recordings of the scientists� interactions with the media will be forwarded to the media relations office in Ottawa.

There is more than a little bit of threat implicit in these instructions. As is the case most everywhere these days, austerity and spending cuts to offset the tax breaks our Conservatives lavished to their supporters were part of the budget the Conservatives are pushing through. Though they�ve been often tight-lipped about just where all of these cuts are coming, they do seem to be concentrated in areas such as environmental monitoring, food safety, support for minorities and the disadvantaged, and pretty much any other of the regular Con hobbyhorses that may interfere with their vision of a Conservative utopia by presenting unwelcome facts to the mix. Not all of the pink slips have gone out to the civil service quite yet, so the Environment Canada scientists performance at this international conference just may mean their jobs.

Although it is important to note that this latest outrage is part and parcel of the pattern the Cons under Harper have been implementing since they first came to power.

Last week, the Ottawa Citizen reported how a reporter�s simple question about a Canada-U.S. study on snow generated a blizzard of paper at the National Research Council. 

While a NASA scientist was free to pick up the phone and answer questions in a simple 15-minute interview, the NRC declined to let anyone speak with the reporter about the snow study. Instead 11 people in the Canadian agency eventually produced a list of equipment used in the study � information of little use in the story.

Environment Canada�s media office also often takes hours if not days to answer reporters� questions, and to decide whether interviews will be granted.

I�ll leave the last word to Andrew Weaver from the University of Victoria.

�It�s going from bad to worse,� says Weaver, a vocal critic of the way the federal government has been silencing and muzzling scientists in recent years. He describes the email instructions to the polar scientists as �unbelievable.� 

He also says the instructions are also �absurd� since anyone � including a journalist � is allowed to ask questions after presentations at scientific conferences. It is also common for the media to conduct impromptu interviews with speakers immediately following sessions to clarify details before filing stories on tight deadlines.

Having media minders take charge of arranging interviews and sending recordings to Ottawa is reminiscent of the way the Soviets used to send KGB agents to conferences with scientists during the Cold War, says Weaver. �It�s an affront to democracy.�

But then democracy is such a bother when an ideological agenda is at stake.

It Could Happen Here

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Could the catastrophe that caused the nuclear disaster at Fukishima been predicted?  It not only could have it was. But Japan's nuclear regulators and utilities not only ignored the predictions but supressed them.

But some insiders from Japan�s tightly knit nuclear industry have stepped forward to say that Tepco and regulators had for years ignored warnings of the possibility of a larger-than-expected tsunami in northeastern Japan, and thus failed to take adequate countermeasures, such as raising wave walls or placing backup generators on higher ground.

They attributed this to a culture of collusion in which powerful regulators and compliant academic experts looked the other way while the industry put a higher priority on promoting nuclear energy than protecting public safety. They call the Fukushima accident a wake-up call to Japan to break the cozy ties between government and industry that are a legacy of the nation�s rush to develop after World War II.

�March 11 exposed the true nature of Japan�s postwar system, that it is led by bureaucrats who stand on the side of industry, not the people,� said Shigeaki Koga, a former director of industrial policy at the Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry, or METI, which both promotes and regulates the nuclear industry.

One of those whose warnings were ignored was Kunihiko Shimazaki, a retired professor of seismology at the University of Tokyo. Eight years ago, as a member of an influential cabinet office committee on offshore earthquakes in northeastern Japan, Mr. Shimazaki warned that Fukushima�s coast was vulnerable to tsunamis more than twice as tall as the forecasts of up to 17 feet put forth by regulators and Tepco.

Minutes of the meeting on Feb. 19, 2004, show that the government bureaucrats running the committee moved quickly to exclude his views from debate as too speculative and �pending further research.� None of the other 13 academics on the committee objected. Mr. Shimazaki�s warnings were not even mentioned in the committee�s final report two years later. He said the committee did not want to force Tepco to make expensive upgrades at the plant.

�They completely ignored me in order to save Tepco money,� said Mr. Shimazaki, 65.

But it's different here in the US, right?  Wrong! (via The Agonist)

Transcript available at The Center for Investigative Reporting.  The same story, the regulators are captives of the nuclear industry placing millions of Americans in danger.

Cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

Solar Storm

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Hang on BJ there is a solar storm headed your way.

A powerful solar flare Tuesday evening caused the surface of the sun to shudder. A second smaller flare followed about an hour later, and the blasts caused by those flares have hurled a �big blob of magnetized material� toward Earth.

So says Alex Young, solar physicist at NASA Goddard, who spoke with The Times on Wednesday about the flares and their predicted impact.

The good news and the bad:

The results of the coming geomagnetic storm may be pleasant -- auroras as far south as Illinois -- or unpleasant, such as GPS and communications problems, according to Young.

...........

When the material from the coronal mass ejection hits the Earth�s magnetic field -- or magnetosphere -- it causes the field to �ring like a bell,� or oscillate, Young said. This generates electrical currents that move around in the upper atmosphere and, when strong enough, causes electrical currents on the ground.

That means possible disruptions in electricity distribution -- �severe storms can knock out power grids,� Young said. GPS and radio communications can be affected, and electrical currents can even be picked up by oil pipelines, contributing to their corrosion.

So with a little luck we may see some lights in the sky and it won't be our only source of light.

It's easy to get pushed over when you're already on the edge

By BJ Bjornson

An interesting new study out showing that the collapse of the Maya civilization was accompanied not by a severe drought, but rather a relatively mild constraint on their water supplies.

Now, two Earth scientists have carefully analyzed rock samples from the Yucat� which revealed water levels in local lakes, as well as chemical traces that show likely rainfall over the decades of the collapse. What the scientists found was more evidence that the region suffered from drought during the typically rainy summers � but the drought was fairly mild. There were probably fewer hurricanes in the ocean driving rainstorms to land. In a paper published today in Science, researchers Mart�Medina-Elizalde and Eelco J. Rohling call it "a succession of extended drought periods interrupted by brief recoveries."

Is it really possible that a mild drought, no matter how many centuries it lasted, could really topple an empire? After all, civilizations in Europe have endured everything from plagues to the Little Ice Age, and people did not abandon the cities.

Medina-Elizalde and Rohling suggest:

If these repeated episodes of drier climate had a significant role in the fate of the Classic Maya civilization, as suggested by archaeological evidence, then this would imply that the ecological carrying capacity of the Yucat�Peninsula is highly sensitive to precipitation reductions.

In other words, it's possible that it didn't take much of a drought to usher in a catastrophic series of crop losses or other environmental problems. And these problems, in turn, could foment dramatic social upheavals.

This is important for more than the Yucatan, which may see a repeat of such conditions due to Climate Change, because while we may not be entirely certain what the carrying capacity of the Earth is for humanity, in many cases we are already over-consuming what the planet can produce on a renewable basis, not to mention our drawing down of non-renewable resources. All of which is to say that even a relatively minor disruption could cause massive damage to our civilization as it did the Maya, and at the rate we�re going, the disruption Climate Change is going to cause will be far more than minor.

Well that's rather anti-climatic

By BJ Bjornson

It appears that the superluminal neutrino results that had everybody excited for a few months may have a pretty mundane explanation.

What might have been the biggest physics story of the past century may instead be down to a faulty connection.

In September 2011, the Opera experiment reported it had seen particles called neutrinos evidently travelling faster than the speed of light.

The team has now found two problems that may have affected their test in opposing ways: one in its timing gear and one in an optical fibre connection.

More tests from May will determine just how they affect measured speeds.

Not that I was expecting that a century of physics was about to be overthrown, but I was kind of holding out hope that the explanation would be of a type that might throw light on some heretofore undiscovered phenomena and so enhance our knowledge of the universe.

Bad wiring isn�t going to do that, and so even though it was always the most likely explanation for the results, I can�t help but be disappointed now that said simplest explanation appears to be the right one.

Climate Denialism: A Future Crime

By Steve Hynd

TP Green notes that Mitt Romney is climbing aboard the denialist crazy train in his search for GOP primary votes, attacking Gingrich in a public email for appearing in a 2008 ad for Al Gore's climate campaign.

Romney�s campaign spokesman Ryan Williams bashed Gingrich as being part of the �Soros agenda� for the advertisement:

"It is interesting to see the latest attack from Speaker Gingrich and his disintegrating campaign. Unlike Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney never sat next to Nancy Pelosi in an ad funded by George Soros on behalf of Al Gore�s global warming initiative. As recently as 2008, the Soros agenda had no better friend than Newt Gingrich. Nice try, Mr. Speaker."

For most of the world, anthropogenic climate change is settled science. We get that putting more energy into the system (a.k.a global warming) means not just an overall temperature rise but also vastly more energetic and unpredicatble weather systems leading to things like unusual cold spells and snowfalls in Winter, or to stronger tonadoes and heavier flooding in areas where such already occur. The evidence is overwhelming and the notion that climate change is some Soros-created conspiracy is just crazy. Anyone who believes otherwise has a reality-map which is so divergent from what is actually happening as to fulfil the primary requirement for a psychosis: a thought disorder in which reality testing is grossly impaired.

But the Republican Party has been bought and paid for by the Energy lobby; the Kochs and Halliburton, Exxon and the rest. Scientific shills for hire take to the pages of rightwing newspapers to push the Energy lobby's agenda and that filters down to the Republican rank-and-file as a gospel teaching to which purity tests apply. Both Romney and Gingrich, along with others in their party like McCain in 2008, have had to shift their public stances on climate change to a full-on denialism under the sway of this psychosis.

I'd understand if the GOP's position was that anthropogenic climate change was real, was happening, but that it was economically unviable to try to halt its progression. I'd disagree but at least it'd be a logically consistent position and the GOP could join the rest of us in talking about how we handle the effects of that change. Instead, their denialist intransigence is shaping up to become the greatest crime against humanity the Republicans have ever backed - and I include Iraq, their many bigotries and their "I'm alright, Jack" economic support for the 1% against the 99% in that statement. If they won't admit there's a cause, they cannot begin to formulate policies to deal with the problems.

Analyst Jack Whipple puts it succinctly:

"Taken together, the decline and eventual near cessation of fossil fuel production and that of many other minerals, disruption in global weather patterns, and the growing food and water scarcity will constitute the third great transition. Unlike the previous transitions in which life arguably got better for some, if not most, of the world's peoples, any upside to this transition seems to pale in the face of what is to come."

While a 2007 report by the centrist think-tank CNAS was rather more explicit:

In the case of severe climate change, corresponding to an average increase in global temperature of 2.6�C by 2040, massive nonlinear events in the global environment give rise to massive nonlinear societal events. In this scenario...nations around the world will be overwhelmed by the scale of change and pernicious challenges, such as pandemic disease. The internal cohesion of nations will be under great stress, including in the United States, both as a result of a dramatic rise in migration and changes in agricultural patterns and water availability. The flooding of coastal communities around the world, especially in the Netherlands, the United States, South Asia, and China, has the potential to challenge regional and even national identities. Armed conflict between nations over resources, such as the Nile and its tributaries, is likely and nuclear war is possible. The social consequences range from increased religious fervor to outright chaos. In this scenario, climate change provokes a permanent shift in the relationship of humankind to nature.

The tipping point for that 2.6�C radical change has already been reached.

As TP Green's Brad Johnson noted last year:

The Republican Party is doing its utmost to cripple our nation�s ability to prepare for and respond to climate disasters. At Majority Leader Eric Cantor�s behest, House GOP slashed clean energy investments to pay for emergency disaster relief following the Joplin and Tuscaloosa tornadoes. They cut the DHS disaster preparedness budget, including firefighter funding, in half (after Democrats raised an outcry, some firefighter grants were restored). They have blocked funding for the NOAA Climate Service, and slashed money for critical weather satellites. In states throughout the nation, conservatives are gutting clean-energy programs and attacking climate science, while local emergency services budgets are stripped to the bone.

With the security of our homeland under the clear and present threat of global warming, conservatives are choosing to cripple our defenses, simply to serve the obscene profits of climate polluters.

Climate change is the big anvil-to-be around the GOP's neck. In decades to come, their denialism for so many years will wreck their claims to be the strong party on national security, as it becomes clearer that their intransigence (and being in hock to the energy lobby) for nearly a decade in power under Bush left the US lagging behind others in facing up to the security challenges climate change entails. Mitt and the other GOP frontrunners want to repeat that crime of ommission for another term or two. Meanwhile, many people will die and others will live miserable lives. Their denialism constitutes a crime against humanity "in waiting".

Not really a laughing matter

By BJ Bjornson

Though sometimes humour is the only way you can deal with some things. Today�s news brings a UN report noting that humanity�s future, or at least the future for a good chunk of humanity, is looking quite grim.

As the world's population looks set to grow to nearly 9 billion by 2040 from 7 billion now, and the number of middle-class consumers increases by 3 billion over the next 20 years, the demand for resources will rise exponentially.

Even by 2030, the world will need at least 50 percent more food, 45 percent more energy and 30 percent more water, according to U.N. estimates, at a time when a changing environment is creating new limits to supply.

And if the world fails to tackle these problems, it risks condemning up to 3 billion people into poverty, the report said.

Knowing that we�re already pushing up against the limits of some of the critical resources we would need increase food production, I think it�s safe to say that there�s a very good chance that we�re not going to reach those targets. We�re already past sustainability on a number of fronts, and increasing production by draining away aquifers, looting the ocean of fish stocks, or otherwise further destroying our chance for future sustainable uses of land and water isn�t really going to help in more than the very short-term, and lead to an even bigger crash on the other side.

But since dwelling on that fact is kind of depressing, I�ll leave you with this recent, and oddly prophetic, Onion piece,

Saying there's no way around it at this point, a coalition of scientists announced Thursday that one-third of the world population must die to prevent wide-scale depletion of the planet's resources�and that humankind needs to figure out immediately how it wants to go about killing off more than 2 billion members of its species.

. . .

"I'm just going to level with you�the earth's carrying capacity will no longer be able to keep up with population growth, and civilization will end unless large swaths of human beings are killed, so the question is: How do we want to do this?" Cambridge University ecologist Dr. Edwin Peters said. "Do we want to give everyone a number and implement a death lottery system? Incinerate the nation's children? Kill off an entire race of people? Give everyone a shotgun and let them sort it out themselves?"

. . .

"The longer we wait, the higher the number of people who will have to die, so we might as well just get it over with," said Dr. Chelsea Klepper, head of agricultural studies at Purdue Univer�sity, and the leading proponent of a worldwide death day in which 2.3 billion people would kill themselves en masse at the exact same time. "At this point, it's merely a question of coordination. If we can get the populations of New York City, Los Angeles, Beijing, India, Europe, and Latin America to voluntarily off themselves at 6 p.m. EST on June 1, we can kill the people that need to be killed and the planet can finally start renewing its resources."

Is it too late to get on board for that moon base?

And Hell Freezes Over

Commentary By Ron Beasley

I never thought it would be possible - yes a hell freezes over moment - but Charles Krauthammer as a column in the Washington Post that I can appreciate, Are we alone in the universe?  He points out that judging from the number of stars and hence the number of planets that could support life number in the millions or even billions we have received no radio signals that would indicate intelligent life.  This argument may be flawed since we really haven't been looking that long and the signals would take 100s or 1,000s of years to get here.  But if life is common and wide spread then why is intelligent life so uncommon we can't find any evidence of it?

That silence is maddening. Not just because it compounds our feeling of cosmic isolation, but because it makes no sense. As we inevitably find more and more exo-planets where intelligent life can exist, why have we found no evidence � no signals, no radio waves � that intelligent life does exist?

It�s called the Fermi Paradox, after the great physicist who once asked, �Where is everybody?� Or as was once elaborated: �All our logic, all our anti- isocentrism, assures us that we are not unique � that they must be there. And yet we do not see them.�

Did the late great Carl Sagan have the answer?

So why the silence? Carl Sagan (among others) thought that the answer is to be found, tragically, in the final variable: the high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves.

In other words, this silent universe is conveying not a flattering lesson about our uniqueness but a tragic story about our destiny. It is telling us that intelligence may be the most cursed faculty in the entire universe � an endowment not just ultimately fatal but, on the scale of cosmic time, nearly instantly so.

Although he does ignore man made climate change he does get this right.

Why, a mere 17 years after Homo sapiens � born 200,000 years ago � discovered atomic power, those most stable and sober states, America and the Soviet Union, came within inches of mutual annihilation.

Rather than despair, however, let�s put the most hopeful face on the cosmic silence and on humanity�s own short, already baleful history with its new Promethean powers: Intelligence is a capacity so godlike, so protean that it must be contained and disciplined. This is the work of politics � understood as the ordering of society and the regulation of power to permit human flourishing while simultaneously restraining the most Hobbesian human instincts.

There could be no greater irony: For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty � statecraft). Because if we don�t get politics right, everything else risks extinction.

We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics � in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations � is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it.

Fairly or not, politics is the driver of history. It will determine whether we will live long enough to be heard one day. Out there. By them, the few � the only � who got it right.

He's right of course but what he doesn't mention is that both now and historically those politicians responsible for "the ordering of society and the regulation of power" are more often than not sociopaths or even psychopaths. It is the politics and the politicians that are making sure we don't survive.

Brutal Logic

By BJ Bjornson

David Roberts has a couple of posts up at Grist regarding the quite ugly situation facing us in regards to climate change. Starting with the second, Roberts notes some rather ugly points that doesn�t give one much in the way of optimism for humanity�s future.

We pretend that 2 degrees C is our threshold. Yet the climate scenarios and plans presented to policymakers do not actually reflect that threshold. As Anderson and Bows say, "most policy advice is to accept a high probability of extremely dangerous climate change rather than propose radical and immediate emission reductions."

Note, also, that most popular climate scenarios include an implausibly early peak in global emissions -- 2010 in many cases, 2015-16 in the case of the Stern Report, the ADAM project, and the U.K.'s Committee on Climate Change.

Why do climate analysts do this? Why do they present plans that contain wildly optimistic assumptions about the peak in global emissions and yet a high probability of overshooting the 2 degrees C target?

The answer is fairly simple, and it has to do with the answer to question (4), regarding what level of emissions reductions is reasonable to expect. According to the Stern Review and others, emissions reductions of 3 to 4 percent a year are the maximum compatible with continued economic growth. And so that's the level they use in their scenarios. Yet reductions at that pace offer very little practical hope of hitting 2 degrees C.

In other words, climate analysts construct their scenarios not to avoid dangerous climate change but to avoid threatening economic growth.

That would make sense if being richer would help us prosper in a 4 degrees C [7.2 degrees F] world. But ... no such luck.

That�s where we start looking back at the initial post, which notes that the long-stated target of 2 degrees C no longer looks like it will actually avoid the �acceptable� level of dangerous changes. Instead, the damage once expected at 2 C is now expected at much lower temperatures, which means that even the stated target is going to be bad.

He then gets into talking about what it will take to actually hit that target, and that doesn�t look too good either:

Anderson is adamant that the familiar targets almost all politicians and many scientists use in public -- e.g., "80 percent reduction in the rate of emissions by 2050" -- are deeply misleading. As far as the climate is concerned, the rate of emissions in 2050 relative to the rate of emissions today is meaningless. CO2 stays in the atmosphere for over a century; the atmosphere doesn't care what year it arrives. (Though targets in the distant future are comforting to politicians, for obvious reasons.)

The only thing that matters in limiting temperature rise is cumulative emissions, the total amount we dump into the atmosphere this century. When the total concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere rises, temperature rises. That is the correlation that matters.

. . .

Right now, global emissions are rising, faster and faster. Between 2000 and 2007, they rose at around 3.5 percent a year; by 2009 it was up to 5.6 percent. In 2010, we hit 5.9 percent growth, a record. We aren't just going in the wrong direction -- we're accelerating in the wrong direction.

. . .

The growth of emissions is making the task ahead more and more difficult. The longer we wait to start shrinking emissions, the faster we'll have to shrink them to stay under budget. Here's a visualization of what that means -- some sample reduction curves with varying peak years (the four different lines are based on the four main IPCC scenarios):




As you can see, if we delay the global emissions peak until 2025, we pretty much have to drop off a cliff afterwards to avoid 2 degrees C. Short of a meteor strike that shuts down industrial civilization, that's unlikely.

How about 2020? Of the available scenarios for peaking in 2020, says Anderson, 13 of 18 show hitting 2 degrees C to be technically impossible. (D'oh!) The others involve on the order of 10 percent reductions a year after 2020, leading to total decarbonization by 2035-45.

After that, things start getting scary:

It might seem that, given the extraordinary difficulty of hitting 2 degrees C, we ought to lower our sights a bit and accept that we're going to hit 4 degrees C. It won't be ideal, but hitting anything lower than that is just too difficult and expensive.

It's seductive logic. After all, to hit 4 degrees C we would "only" have to peak global emissions in 2020 and decline thereafter at the relatively leisurely rate (ha ha) of around 3.5 percent per year.

Sadly, even that cold comfort is not available to us. The thing is, if 2 degrees C is extremely dangerous, 4 degrees C is absolutely catastrophic. In fact, according to the latest science, says Anderson, "a 4 degrees C future is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond 'adaptation', is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable."

He goes on to explain that the reason for the potential instability is that the positive feedback loops such as melting Arctic permafrost releasing methane to cause greater heating and more melting start becoming self-reinforcing and negate whatever humanity does to try and stop its own emissions; the �tipping points� we always hear about. We might hit them before a 4 degree C change, but will almost certainly hit them with it.

At that level, there's good reason to believe that some positive feedbacks will become self-reinforcing. In other words, 4 degrees C would very likely be a way station on the road to much higher temperatures.

Moving back to the second post, the conclusion of the paper Roberts is using as a basis for these is pretty plain,

This is the stark conclusion drawn by Anderson and Bows: "The logic of such studies suggests (extremely) dangerous climate change can only be avoided if economic growth is exchanged, at least temporarily, for a period of planned austerity within Annex 1 nations and a rapid transition away from fossil-fuelled development within non-Annex 1 nations."

All of which points to, �not gonna happen�, at least within the current political climate. It basically boils down to one of those wishes that we hit peak oil fast enough to for the austerity and transition away from fossil fuels to become forced rather than planned, because if we have to hope for a planned austerity that does anything outside of rescue the gambling banksters corrupt politicos like what�s happening in Europe and the U.S. these days, it will never happen.

Life still unfair, but more unfair to some

By BJ Bjornson

Every now and again, it�s nice to remind myself how nice it is to born male in our society. Actually, not so nice a reminder, and more it�s about how much it sucks to be female in our society.

First up is this story on how its better for a guy to be on the disagreeable side if he wants to get ahead in life, at least financially, with the disagreeable types averaging about $7,000 more than their agreeable colleagues. Such tactics don�t work near as well for women, on the other hand, with the disagreeable women only getting an extra $1,100, and more to the point, women overall were still earning almost $5,000 less than their male colleagues on average.

The point about there not being much of a disagreeability premium for women brought to mind this post by Kevin Drum regarding the whole �men get paid more because they�re more willing to negotiate for a better salary� issue, and quotes from another story where some research was done into the subject, with again less than pleasant results.

Their study, which was coauthored by Carnegie Mellon researcher Lei Lai, found that men and women get very different responses when they initiate negotiations. Although it may well be true that women often hurt themselves by not trying to negotiate, this study found that women's reluctance was based on an entirely reasonable and accurate view of how they were likely to be treated if they did. Both men and women were more likely to subtly penalize women who asked for more -- the perception was that women who asked for more were "less nice".

"What we found across all the studies is men were always less willing to work with a woman who had attempted to negotiate than with a woman who did not," Bowles said. "They always preferred to work with a woman who stayed mum. But it made no difference to the men whether a guy had chosen to negotiate or not."

Lovely no? This in part explains why there isn�t that much of a disagreeableness premium for women. They are far more likely to be penalized, one way or another, for their willingness to stand up for themselves. And if that wasn�t enough, there is one more depressing result from the first story I linked to.

What�s driving this depressing correlation? In their final study, the researchers conducted an experiment on 460 undergrads in a business management class at a large Southern university. The students were given eight hypothetical job candidates, all of whom were described as smart, insightful and conscientious. However, their levels of agreeableness were varied, so that some candidates were described as much more trusting, altruistic and humble than others. The undergrads were then asked which of these male and female candidates should be fast-tracked for management.

Once again, the results were unforunate: Those candidates with higher levels of agreeableness were much less likely to get fast-tracked, especially if they were male. (Women were slightly less likely to get picked for promotion regardless of their personality.)

That�s actually doubly depressing, even if not much of a surprise. After all, it says something about society overall when trustworthiness, being humble, and altruism are seen as barriers to getting ahead in life. Even here though, simply adding a penis seems to improve your chances.

I like to think of myself as being somewhat enlightened on these matters, and I hope I�ve behaved better than the average male in those studies, but it seems pretty clear that collectively, we still have a ways to go when it comes to treating the sexes equally.

Climategate II - The Yawning

By BJ Bjornson

I was going to do up a post on the release of more of the hacked emails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, but I think I�ll just outsource this one to Brendan DeMelle, who has a thorough round-up of the coverage and what you need to know about this latest dumping of additional documents from the original hack.

In the end, it appears to be a poorly disguised attempt to derail the upcoming UN climate summit. (Though given the certainty of a complete lack of action from the U.S. and the likely attempts at outright sabotage from countries like Canada, why even bother at this point?)

More interesting to me is the apparent lack of effort by the UK police to track down the hackers themselves.

The Pepper Spray Myth

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Jennifer Fox a 19 year old Seattle woman had a miscarriage after she claims the police hit her in the stomach and gave her a shot of pepper spray.

�I was standing in the middle of the crowd when the police started moving in,� Fox recalled. �I was screaming, �I am pregnant, I am pregnant. Let me through. I am trying to get out.��

She claimed that police hit her in the stomach twice before pepper spraying her. One officer struck her with his foot and another pushed his bicycle into her. It wasn�t clear if either of those incidents were intentional.

�Right before I turned, both cops lifted their pepper spray and sprayed me. My eyes puffed up and my eyes swelled shut,� Fox said.

While there is evidence that she was shot with pepper spray there is little evidence of the physical abbuse she claims.

But this brings up another issue, the myth that pepper spray is safe, - pepper spray is dangerous and can be fatal.

As the chart makes clear, commercial grade pepper spray leaves even the most painful of natural peppers (the Himalayan ghost pepper) far behind. It�s listed at between 2 million and 5.3 million Scoville units. The lower number refers to the kind of pepper spray that you and I might be able to purchase for self-protective uses. And the higher number? It�s the kind of spray that police use, the super-high dose given in the orange-colored spray used at UC-Davis.

The reason pepper-spray ends up on the Scoville chart is that � you probably guessed this - it�s literally derived from pepper chemistry, the compounds that make habaneros so much more formidable than the comparatively wimpy bells. Those compounds are called capsaicins and � in fact � pepper spray is more formally called Oleoresin Capsicum or OC Spray.

And yes it's dangerous stuff.

My own purpose here is to focus on the dangers of a high level of capsaicin exposure. But as pointed out in the 2004 paper, Health Hazards of Pepper Spray, written by health researchers at the University of North Carolina and Duke University, the sprays contain other risky materials:

 

Depending on brand, an OC spray may contain water, alcohols, or organic solvents as liquid carriers; and nitrogen, carbon dioxide, or halogenated hydrocarbons (such as Freon, tetrachloroethylene, and methylene chloride) as propellants to discharge the canister contents.(3) Inhalation of high doses of some of these chemicals can produce adverse cardiac, respiratory, and neurologic effects, including arrhythmias and sudden death.

We have seen the police spraying it into protestors mouths:

The more worrisome effects have to do with inhalation � and by some reports, California university police officers deliberately put OC spray down protesters throats.  Capsaicins inflame the airways, causing swelling and restriction. And this means that pepper sprays pose a genuine risk  to people with asthma and other respiratory conditions.

Update:

NYPD pepper sprays man to death

The death of a Bronx man who suffered a fatal asthma attack after cops pepper-sprayed him has been ruled a homicide by the city medical examiner.

An autopsy found that Kemp Yarborough cause of death was by�acute bronchial asthma attack during a physical altercation including pepper spray,� the city medical examiner told the New York Daily News.

We're so screwed, Part 2,347

By BJ Bjornson

Sometimes the news just gets really depressing to read, even when its information you already know. This quite-excellent article from Al Jazeera certainly qualifies. Some excerpts:

"From a climate change/fisheries/pollution/habitat destruction point of view, our nightmare is here, it's the world we live in."

This bleak statement about the current status of the world's oceans comes from Dr Wallace J Nichols, a Research Associate at the California Academy of Sciences. Al Jazeera asked Dr Nichols, along with several other ocean experts, how they see the effects climate change, pollution and seafood harvesting are having on the oceans.

. . .

In March 1958, when high-precision monitoring began, atmospheric CO2 was 315.71 parts per million (ppm). Today, atmospheric CO2 is approaching 390 ppm.

. . .

The Zoological Society of London reported in July 2009 that "360 is now known to be the level at which coral reefs cease to be viable in the long run."

In September 2009 Nature magazine stated that atmospheric CO2 levels above 350 ppm "threaten the ecological life-support systems" of the planet and "challenge the viability of contemporary human societies."

. . .

At a 2008 academic conference Exeter University scientist Kevin Anderson showed slides and graphs "representing the fumes that belch from chimneys, exhausts and jet engines, that should have bent in a rapid curve towards the ground, were heading for the ceiling instead".

He concluded it was "improbable" that we would be able to stop short of 650 ppm, even if rich countries adopted "draconian emissions reductions within a decade".

That number, should it come to pass, would mean that global average temperatures would increase five times as much as previous models predicted.

. . .

Historically, oceans have been chemically constant, but less than 10 years ago oceanographers were shocked when researchers noticed the seas were acidifying - 30 per cent more acidic - as they absorbed more of the carbon dioxide humans have emitted into the atmosphere, a process that Britain's Royal Society has described as "essentially irreversible."

The oceans are already more acidic than they have been at any time in the last 800,000 years. At current rates, by 2050 it will be more corrosive than they have been in the past 20 million years.

. . .

In this kind of environment, shellfish cannot produce thick enough shells. By 2009, the Pacific oyster industry was reporting 80 per cent mortality for oyster larvae due to the corrosive nature of the water.

"Acidification has the potential to change food security around the world, so I think it's incumbent upon the entire world to recognise this and deal with it," Cooley told Al Jazeera.

Lovely no? And that�s before it starts taking about the other effects of pollution and overfishing on the ocean�s species, including those that we depend on for a not-insignificant portion of our food supply.

Now add to that this story, �Worst extinction ever linked to massive CO2 spill�

Scientists finally know the date � and hence the likely cause � of a massive extinction that wiped out 95 per cent of life in the oceans and 70 per cent of life on land more than 200 million years ago.

. . .

The precise timing coincides with a huge outpouring of carbon dioxide and methane from volcanic lava flows in northwest Asia known as the Siberian traps.

"That led to cascading effect � global warming, aridity in various areas, giant wildfires, acidification of the ocean," said Charles Henderson, a geosciences professor at the University of Calgary who co-authored the paper with a large international team.

"All of these things led to a very inhospitable world."

It would be nice if we learned something from that history, but I noticed one other point that will likely mean this information won�t matter all that much either.

Most affected species met their demise within 20,000 years � a blink of an eye on the geological timescale.

A blink of an eye on the geological timescale (for those of us that accept the world�s more than 6,000 year old), but still a lot longer than those next quarterly profit reports are due, so likely it�ll be business as usual until it�s too late to do anything about the extinction level event we�re causing to the planet�s species, with our own species included.

Hoping for the sun to be brighter tomorrow

By BJ Bjornson

There is much to like about Paul Krugman�s article regarding the increasing affordability of solar power, not the least of which is his indictment of fracking and its supporters.

Speaking of propaganda: Before I get to solar, let�s talk briefly about hydraulic fracturing, a k a fracking.

Fracking � injecting high-pressure fluid into rocks deep underground, inducing the release of fossil fuels � is an impressive technology. But it�s also a technology that imposes large costs on the public. We know that it produces toxic (and radioactive) wastewater that contaminates drinking water; there is reason to suspect, despite industry denials, that it also contaminates groundwater; and the heavy trucking required for fracking inflicts major damage on roads.

Economics 101 tells us that an industry imposing large costs on third parties should be required to �internalize� those costs � that is, to pay for the damage it inflicts, treating that damage as a cost of production. Fracking might still be worth doing given those costs. But no industry should be held harmless from its impacts on the environment and the nation�s infrastructure.

Yet what the industry and its defenders demand is, of course, precisely that it be let off the hook for the damage it causes. Why? Because we need that energy! For example, the industry-backed organization energyfromshale.org declares that �there are only two sides in the debate: those who want our oil and natural resources developed in a safe and responsible way; and those who don�t want our oil and natural gas resources developed at all.�

So it�s worth pointing out that special treatment for fracking makes a mockery of free-market principles. Pro-fracking politicians claim to be against subsidies, yet letting an industry impose costs without paying compensation is in effect a huge subsidy. They say they oppose having the government �pick winners,� yet they demand special treatment for this industry precisely because they claim it will be a winner.

Now, I happen to think Krugman is quite optimistic regarding solar�s near-term future, not just because of the energy trap, but because, as even he notes, the entire GOP has made investment into renewable energy alternatives that might threaten the fossil fuel industry into part of their endless �culture war�; something to be opposed as a matter of litmus-test identification. This story from Grist provides a good example of that fact.

So you'd think this would be a home run, right? At a time when jobs are at the top of every politician's mind, surely a bit of low-cost economic stimulus that doesn't increase the deficit and leverages tons of private capital and creates tens of thousands of jobs can serve as the rare locus of bipartisan cooperation. Right?

Except the industry in question is the solar industry. And because this industry involves clean energy rather than, I dunno, tractor parts, it has been sucked into conservatives' endless culture war. Rather than lining up to support the recession's rare economic success story, Republicans are trying to use the failure of a single company -- Solyndra -- as a wedge to crush support for the whole industry

This is highly unfortunate, because regardless what any of the propaganda may tell you, we�re heading for a world with diminishing fossil fuel supplies. Tom Murphy at the Do the Math blog has a good post on the facts underpinning the peak oil phenomena, complete with multiple informative charts, the most striking of which I found to be this one.




This goes very much to what Ron posted a few days ago.  Those �big� discoveries you keep hearing about are only big in relation to the meagerness of discoveries overall in the last several decades. There is simply no way to look at that chart and believe that we're going to have all the oil we need for very much longer.

The sun may be coming out, but it seems unlikely that it will be bright enough to save us from our mostly self-inflicted fossil-fuel withdrawal pain.

What's the harm?

By BJ Bjornson

I only saw this story a few days ago, but it is a good reminder that misinformation and bad beliefs do have real-world consequences.

Canadian health officials are warning that with more than 250 people in Quebec infected by measles, the outbreak could start spreading to the rest of the country too.

There have been 208 cases of measles reported in Quebec since May 1 and a total of 254 since the beginning of the year. That's a huge number, considering that there are typically only 11 cases a year in all of Canada, says the Public Health Agency of Canada.

This is now the largest measles outbreak in Canada since measles was essentially eradicated from Canada in the mid-1990s.

The U.S. is having one of its worst years yet for measles, as well. Health officials there say 118 cases have been reported so far this year -- the highest number this early in the year since 1996. The U.S. normally sees about 50 cases of measles in a year

According to the CBC, the Quebec outbreak has now reached 750 cases in a province that normally only gets one or two a year. It also notes that part of the problem is that a proportion of the population has never been vaccinated for the disease, which is resulting in the possibility that the disease will return as major health issue in the Americas. But it is the original story that notes one of the reasons for that part of the population not getting vaccinated in the first place.

. . . many haven't had the vaccine, in part because of a bogus study that linked the MMR vaccine to autism. While that study has since been debunked and the doctor behind it discredited, the worries raised by that study eroded public confidence in vaccines, leading to drops in vaccination rates in some areas.

I admit that, being old enough to have had the measles as a kid and that it wasn�t entirely unusual at the time, I was quite surprised to discover the disease had been all but eradicated from North America over a decade ago. To watch it make a comeback due to a deliberate fabrication of a unscrupulous hack combined with the ignorant boosting of said hack by certain celebrities all preying on the fears of parents drives my rage up a few pegs.

The damage those idiots have caused and are continuing to cause will be significant, and I can only hope that they will one day be held accountable for it.

Fukishima Clean-up a Long Haul

By BJ Bjornson

It has been about eight months since the earthquake and tsunami in Japan that started a crisis at the Fukishima power plant. Since then, news about the plant has pretty much disappeared from the headlines, since stories that proceed in a slow, long and painful pace don�t tend to be terribly exciting. Still, it bears mentioning that the clean-up is far from over, and in fact, has barely even started.

Experts in Japan have warned it could take more than 30 years to clean up the Fukushima Daiichi power plant.

. . .

The commission called on the facility's operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), to begin removing the fuel rods within 10 years. The damage to Fukushima is more difficult to repair than that sustained at Three Mile Island, where fuel removal began six years after an accident in 1979.

. . .

Towns near Fukushima have responded cautiously to plans to build temporary storage sites for massive quantities of radioactive debris generated by the accident.

Almost eight months after the start of the crisis the government says the facilities will not be ready for at least another three years. In the meantime, towns will have to store the contaminated waste locally, despite health concerns.

I�ve never been terribly afraid of nuclear power, but there is no question that when things go wrong, the effects of that going wrong tend to linger for quite some time. As a result, the massive redundancies and safety systems required for every new generation of nuclear power plants grows to where it will never be an economical replacement for fossil fuels. We should really get used to that idea already.

Some Things Just Get Worse

By BJ Bjornson

This really isn�t much a surprise to anyone paying attention, but it deserves repeating all the same.

The bad news just got worse: A new study finds that reining in greenhouse gas emissions in time to avert serious changes to Earth's climate will be at best extremely difficult. Current goals for reducing emissions fall far short of what would be needed to keep warming below dangerous levels, the study suggests. To succeed, we would most likely have to reverse the rise in emissions immediately and follow through with steep reductions through the century. Starting later would be far more expensive and require unproven technology.

. . .

"The alarming thing is very few scenarios give the kind of future we want," says climate scientist Neil Edwards of The Open University in Milton Keynes, U.K. Both he and Rogelj emphasize the uncertainties inherent in the modeling, especially on the social and technological side, but the message seems clear to Edwards: "What we need is at the cutting edge. We need to be as innovative as we can be in every way." And even then, success is far from guaranteed.

At this point, I don�t see any real prospect of our avoiding a future where the world is different, and maybe far different, place climatically. This is in no small part due to the fact that opposition to climate change (or to the belief that climate change is human-caused, or to the belief that any and all proposals to do so something about it are the wrong way to deal with it, see my previous post), has become a matter of faith and litmus test with one of the two major parties in the U.S. which continues to wield sufficient power to at least block any progress on that front. And said party and the fossil fuel industries that support it have numerous allies elsewhere.

Add to that things like the energy trap, which ensures that any action we take will be immediately more painful than doing nothing and you�ve set yourself up for a future where the dramatic action needed will simply never come until it is far too late.

The sad part of that being, what comes of putting those hard decisions off is going to be a lot more painful in the long run.

The rising sea will wash across great swaths of South Florida. Salt water will contaminate the well fields. Roads and farmland and low-lying neighborhoods will be inundated. The soil will no longer absorb the kind of heavy rainfalls that drenched South Florida last weekend. Septic tanks will fail. Drainage canals won�t drain. Sewers will back up. Intense storms will pummel the beachfront. Mighty rainfalls, in between droughts, will bring more floods.

The economic losses and the mitigation costs associated with the effects of global warming over the next few decades will be overwhelming. It will cost a medium-sized town like Pompano Beach hundreds of millions just to salvage its water and sewage systems.

Think adaptation, in the personal rather than evolutionary sense, because we�re heading for a changed climate whether you like it or not.

The Ogallala Aquifer

By BJ Bjornson

I hadn�t heard of Charles Pierce until a couple of days ago when he was referenced a couple of times over at Balloon Juice, but I am glad that I�ve started reading him.  There is an excellent, if somewhat long read on his blog now regarding an issue that I�ve seen mentioned every now and again, and which will become far more important in the very near future, the Ogallala Aquifer.

Under the high plains of the midwest, there is a resource called the Ogallala Aquifer, which is a subsystem of a huge underground mega-system called the High Plains Aquifer. It is made of permeable layers of sand, sandstone, and gravel within which are contained billions and billions of gallons of water. The nature of the aquifer geology makes the water easy to pump. The system covers 174,000 square miles beneath eight different states, ranging north-south from North Dakota to Texas, and from Nebraska in the east all the way west to parts of New Mexico. Nebraska depends most vitally on the water found in the aquifer. And there are two concerns about the aquifer that ought to be serious concerns in our politics, but that aren't. One of them isn't being treated as a concern at all. The other is not being treated seriously, but instead as a slogan and one more litmus test by the Republican presidential candidates, and as some sort of nuisance complaint by a Democratic administration that appears to be falling down on the job.

The first problem is that portions of the aquifer are running dry. The second is that Trans-Canada, the Canadian oil giant, wants to run a pipeline through a portion of the aquifer in Nebraska. How you feel about that depends entirely on how much you trust oil companies these days, because your State Department appears to be taking a dive on the question, and your Environmental Protection Agency is dodging it entirely.

Make no mistake. You screw with the Ogallala Aquifer and you screw with this nation's heartbeat. Twenty percent of the irrigated farmland in the United States depends upon it. Pumping the water from it is all that has kept the Dust Bowl from coming back, year after year. Any damage to it fundamentally changes the lives of the people who depend on it, their personal economies, the overall national economy, and what we can grow to feed ourselves. Absent the aquifer, and the nation's breadbasket goes back to being a prairie, vast grasslands that the people who first crossed them referred to as a desert. You end up with dry-land corn and some dry-land wheat. And the aquifer is far easier to empty than it is to fill. The technology to fully exploit it has existed only since the 1950's, and portions of it are already dangerously low. It won't be fully recharged until the next Ice Age.

The whole thing is worth reading, and it is worth remembering that this is a subset of a much larger problem that�s becoming more common everywhere.  Water is only renewable to the extent that you don�t take more out a system than can be replenished by it, and in far too many cases, we�ve been doing just that, not just for drinking and bathing, but to cool our power plants and water our lawns (okay, no lawns where I live, but you know, in general).  Even worse is how it gets used for things like fracking and processing bitumen from the tar sands, which doesn�t just suck up the water resources available, but contaminates it so it can�t be recycled for other uses later.

This is already the source of actual armed conflict in many places, and it is an issue that will only spread as climate change shifts rainfall patterns.

The Energy Trap

By BJ Bjornson

In a comment to my post regarding electricity use and cars, Bill H. said the following:

Well it doesn't really matter whether a car, electric or internal combustion, uses more or less electricity, but whether it uses more or less energy. Electricity is, for the near future, generated almost entirely with fossil fuel, but even when that eventually is no longer the case, the consumption of energy in any form is detrimental to some degree.

And there is still the matter of the amount of energy and natural resources consumed in manufacturing the car, the type and availability of resources needed to make the energy storage devices for the car, and the disposal of worn out cars and, in particular, expired energy storage devices for the cars.

We don't need to be thinking in terms of cars that use a little bit less energy, we need to make a quantum change in the way we interact with our planet, such as thinking of a way to live without cars at all.

The comment brought to mind this rather excellent post by Tom Murphy on the Energy Trap:

In brief, the idea is that once we enter a decline phase in fossil fuel availability�first in petroleum�our growth-based economic system will struggle to cope with a contraction of its very lifeblood. Fuel prices will skyrocket, some individuals and exporting nations will react by hoarding, and energy scarcity will quickly become the new norm. The invisible hand of the market will slap us silly demanding a new energy infrastructure based on non-fossil solutions. But here�s the rub. The construction of that shiny new infrastructure requires not just money, but�energy. And that�s the very commodity in short supply. Will we really be willing to sacrifice additional energy in the short term�effectively steepening the decline�for a long-term energy plan? It�s a trap!

He proceeds to lay out a pretty good analysis of the issue, and I encourage you to read through it. For my purposes, it is important to note that a major part of the reason for this trap is the significant upfront costs in energy for most renewable sources such as solar and wind. To use solar or wind power, you need to build all of the components and energy storage devices ahead of actually getting any energy out of it, and that upfront cost counts against what you have left over to use.

Best way to avoid having to deal with such an issue would be to invest in those upfront costs while enjoying a surplus, which on the energy front has been the case for most of the last several decades. The only problem being that we haven�t really worked all that hard in preparing for fossil fuels� replacement, and we�re now getting to a point where the trap starts to limit our decisions.

Even more fun from a policy standpoint is the fact that fossil fuels don�t tend to fall into the same kind of trap.

For resources that do not require substantial up-front cost in the form of infrastructure, the trap does not apply. Fossil fuels tend to be of this sort. The energy required to deliver a barrel of oil or a ton of coal tends to be specific to the delivered unit, and is not dominated by up-front cost. It is similar for tar sands, which requires substantial energy to heat and process the sludge. Even at 5:1 EROEI, filling a 2-unit gap can be achieved by producing 2.5 units of output while losing 0.5 units to investment. Thus it is possible to maintain a steady energy supply. The fact that fossil fuels don�t trap us encourages us to stick with them. But being a finite resource, their attractiveness is the sound of the Siren, luring us to stay on the sinking ship. Or did the Sirens lure sailors from ships?  Either way, fossil fuels are already compatible with our transportation fleet, strengthening the death-grip.

Two things of further note. We are already at peak production of oil, which is why we�re seeing such wild swings in prices with major upswings whenever the economy starts to show signs of life and people start driving and using more energy again. While sinking our resources into new and improved ways of extracting the resource (and continuing the doom that is climate change and just plain old pollution) will help in flattening out the decline, it won�t stop it, and will likely assist in our reaching the peaks of other fossil fuels even faster.

The second point is that the analysis in Tom�s post assumed a constant energy need or usage, at least in respect to fossil fuels. Even at that point, we�re looking at painful shortages if we want to replace the source of that energy with renewables, but the situation is in some respects even worse.

The reality is that we�ve been increasing our energy needs year by year, even despite greater efficiency is our use of said energy. This is mostly due to more people using that energy, as living standards in even the Third World start increasing, but the end result is that the coming crunch will be worse due to the fact that we won�t just be trying to maintain a constant amount of energy for our use, but trying to find a way to continue increasing the energy available.

This is where you run into the reality that such a solution is just plain impossible. As the economist Graeme Maxton noted in a video Ron posted last week, �on a finite planet, the only people who believe we can grow forever are the mad, or economists.�

All of which brings us back to Bill�s point that we need a quantum leap in the way we deal with our planet. We are, and have been for some time, living well beyond our means, pilfering the planet�s inheritance at an astonishing and ever accelerating rate. This holds most obviously with fossil fuels, but also includes nominally renewable resources such as aquifers, forests, fish stocks, and numerous others, and it simply cannot last.

One way or another, we are going to be forced back into balance with nature, either through some incredibly tough choices or our effective self-destruction. Given our history, I wouldn�t put very good odds on the former, which means your best hope is probably something along the lines of John Robb�s resilient communities idea, where you hope you can leverage local surpluses now to create places that can survive the coming disruptions intact.

Any way you look at it, the future isn�t looking to be all that bright a place for humanity.