The Myth of the Scientific Liberal

Those who tout science should accept its findings.

Those who deny that germs cause disease shouldn’t call their opponents anti-science. But that’s exactly what HBO comedian and germ-theory-denier Bill Maher routinely calls Republicans to hearty applause.

The core trait of a scientific mind is that when its commitments clash with evidence, evidence rules. On that count, what grade do liberals deserve? Fail, given their reaction to the latest evidence on universal health care, global warming, and universal preschool.

Ice Cores Reveal Green Arctic

ScientificAmerica

The Arctic wasn’t always covered in ice. Samples of sediment layers beneath a frozen lake show this region used to be a lot warmer—and may thaw out again in the future. The work is in the journal Science. [Julie Brigham-Grette et al., Pliocene Warmth, Polar Amplification, and Stepped Pleistocene Cooling Recorded in NE Arctic Russia]

El’gygytgyn, a Russian lake 100 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, contains layers of sediment that date back to the lake’s formation 3.6 million years ago. Analyses of sediment cores have revealed that back then summers reached about 15 to 16 degrees Celsius, a good 8 degrees warmer than modern Arctic summers. These warm temperatures, which supported plants like Douglas fir and hemlock, lasted until about 2.2 million years ago.

Using a sediment core as a detailed history of climate change, scientists can see how the forested Arctic gradually became covered in ice and snow. These changes help us understand details about the development of Ice Ages. In addition, the sediment comes from a window of time during the Pliocene Epoch, when greenhouse gas levels were only slightly higher than they are today. Such sensitivity to small carbon dioxide changes hint at a warm Arctic future.

Sahara went from green to desert in a flash

NBCNewsScience

From lakes and grasslands with hippos and giraffes to a vast desert, North Africa’s sudden geographical transformation 5,000 years ago was one of the planet’s most dramatic climate shifts.

The transformation took place nearly simultaneously across the continent’s northern half, a new study finds. The results will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

The findings come from analyses of dust blown west from Africa and dropped into the Atlantic Ocean. Researchers sifted through 30,000 years of dust and ocean bottom muck retrieved with ocean drilling ships. The changing levels of windblown dust in the ocean sediments provide scientists with clues to Africa’s climate and how it has changed over time. Simply put, a lot of dust means drier conditions and less dust means a wetter environment.

Why We Need More Solar Companies to Fail

MITTechnologyReview

The recovery of the solar market will depend in part on how fast companies are allowed to fail. It will also depend on expansion of the worldwide market. The drop in solar panel prices is opening up new markets as solar power starts to look competitive with conventional sources in many places—especially countries like Chile, where sunlight is abundant and electricity prices are high. But it’s not clear how fast those markets can grow.

It’s Called ‘The Weather’

JWF

Apparently while rehabbing his broken ankle New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter has been studying to be an amateur climatologist.

Derek Jeter interrupted his rehab work on his surgically repaired left ankle to rub shoulders with the world’s most powerful at the Davos Economic Forum. Jeter — invited by Pepsi — said he hopes climate change would be discussed: “I was in New York for Hurricane Sandy . . . It’s something that needs to be addressed because we’re seeing more and more natural disasters each year, it seems like. Something has to be causing it.”

Clearly he’s concerned about the planet. Meanwhile, his mansion uses enough energy to power a small country.

Perhaps he can team with Tom Brady to lecture us about Earth Hour this year.

Embracing the Suck

Readability

But this desire for a feeling of security doesn’t only lure us into irrationality when it comes to air travel: it lures us into irrationality all the time. We live, we’re constantly being reminded, in highly insecure times; huge swathes of our personal lives and our politics, in response to everything from the eurozone crisis to climate change, are directed by the quest to feel secure. But those responses, all too often, are counterproductive. Afraid of physical dangers, people move to gated communities, thereby undermining community cohesion and increasing the potential for more danger. Climate denial, one might similarly argue, is a way not to feel terrified about the fate of the environment, yet makes things worse – though the same might be said for giving up plastic shopping bags, then imagining you’ve “done your bit”, and need do no more. The quest to feel secure helps explain the political appeal of “austerity” economics: tightening the purse strings can feel like the safe and cautious path.

The essence of life is flux and impermanence, and “if I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life,” he wrote. “Yet it is this very sense of separateness which makes me feel insecure… in other words, the more security I can get, the more I shall want.”

It would be easy to interpret this as appallingly glib. “Embrace insecurity,” after all, sounds like exactly the sort of message that the chancellor of the exchequer might find cynically helpful to inculcate in a society facing ever more precarious circumstances. Were he still around, though, Watts would presumably say that this misses the point. Our woes have their roots in security-chasing to begin with: politicians wanting to feel safe, bankers wanting to feel safe, voters wanting to feel safe. And truly to embrace insecurity wouldn’t mean resignation in the face of social or economic inequity; it would simply entail the recognition that chasing the feeling of security isn’t the way to solve them. Insecurity is the only condition in which any change – the good stuff as well as the bad – can happen. “To put it still more plainly,” wrote Watts, “the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing.” Here’s to a less security-fixated 2013.

Fracking Amazing: US Carbon Emissions in 2012 Will be Lower than in 2007 Due to Fracking

Reality

US energy related carbon emissions in 2012 will fall below 5,300 million tons or down about 12%, compared to the peak emissions of 6,023 million tons in 2007.  Through this September, carbon emissions have been down every month in 2012, when compared to each of the first 9 months of 2011 and 2010. No other country matches that record. www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec12_3.pdf/sec12_3.pdf/.

US GDP has grown every quarter since July 1, 2009, and today our economy is bigger than it was in 2007, the peak carbon emission year.  Yet, even with an economy in 2012 that is bigger than in 2007, our carbon emissions will be 12% lower than they were in 2007….

Only the USA has had a shale gas boom and only the USA has cut substantially its carbon emissions since 2006….the shale gas boom substantially decreased US carbon emissions.  Moreover, US electricity prices in 2012 have barely increased and natural gas prices have plummeted.

Inside the meat lab: the future of food

TheGuardian

Van Mensvoort is contemptuous of the food corporations’ nervousness, especially when so much is at stake, pointing out that “if the industry sees a word like ‘pharmaceutical sushi’ they say, ‘You can’t put our name near that!’ They’re afraid.” I have first-hand experience of this: at a scientific conference on food and nano-technology (engineering at sub-molecular level) an executive from Europe’s biggest food company begged me not to print the fact that he was there.

It’s all Monsanto‘s fault. “It was a historic mistake that GMO started with herbicides, and that the US government gave the corporations the freedom to introduce them,” says Professor Fresco, who wants to feed not just the rich, but the hungry all across a future world of 9 billion people. Monsanto, the Dr Frankenstein of our time, certainly generated appalling publicity around its callous and careless marketing of GM pesticides in the United States and in India. The public’s subsequent collapse of faith in bio-tech science, says Fresco, has not just put the brakes on new foods for the rich world. It’s also damaging the fight to end hunger. Hundreds of millions of Africans who depend on an unreliable staple, such as cassava, are deprived of the technology that could make it disease- and pest-resistant. GM rice could raise productivity by 40%.

And the Beat Goes On…

NationalReview

Here is a list of some of the tax credits:

• $78 million to retain an accelerated tax write-off for owners of NASCAR tracks

• $62 million tax credit for companies operating in American Samoa

• $222 million tax rebate for rum distillers

• $222 million in accelerated depreciation for businesses located on Indian reservations

• $430 million over two years in tax breaks for film and television producers who incur production costs incurred in the United States, with a special bonus if the costs are incurred in economically depressed areas in the United States

• $59 million in tax credits for cellulosic biofuels

• $2.2 billion in tax credits for biodiesel and “renewable diesel”

• $7 million in consumer tax credits for buying plug-in motorcycles

• $154 million for the manufacturers of energy-efficient appliances

• $650 million in tax credits for builders of energy-efficient homes

• $12 billion in wind-energy-production tax credits

Jumping off the cliff now…

 

Russia won’t renew Kyoto Protocol

TheVoiceofRussia

Moscow won’t join the second phase of the Kyoto Protocol, which starts on January 1st 2013.

Russia decided to discontinue its participation in the protocol because the world’s major producers of greenhouse gases – the United States, China and India – are still refusing to commit themselves to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Because of that, Russian leaders say, the Kyoto Protocol, which came into force seven years ago, had no impact on the rate of global warming.

The less the UN’s teeth are sunk into the body of the world, the better…