Decline of the Empire

Wash, Rinse And Repeat

I've been writing about human-caused destruction of the biosphere for quite some time now. As new scientific studies come to light, the press coverage follows a depressing pattern. These stories are usually climate-related. Here's the standard Washington Post version along with some other details.

• The research institution in question issues a press release.

• The climate beat writer (i.e., Chris Mooney) explains the meaning and consequences of the new study. He quotes the lead researcher. Other mainstream stories follow his lead.

• If there's a good graphic from the study, Chris includes that.

• Chris calls upon Penn State climate researcher Michael Mann to put the new finding in perspective. Mann is a dependable "go-to" guy. Mann further explains what we must do to avoid this calamitous outcome.

• The science press coverage quotes the lead researcher again at the end of the story. The researcher emphasizes the importance of more research or data.

• The 24-hour news-cycle cycles on. The story disappears, never to surface again.

And that's it. Over and over again. Wash, rinse and repeat.

Save Us From Ourselves?

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
   — Carl Sagan

Elizabeth Kolbert's latest is called Unnatural Selection. It's about using genetic engineering to save various species, including dying corals and trees. I'll quote the ending.

Advocates for techniques like assisted evolution and genetic engineering argue that the moment for being hands off has passed. Humans have already so violently altered the world that without “deliberate intervention” the future holds only loss and more loss.

“There’s just too many people right now,” William Powell told me. “I always say, ‘We need a full toolbox of methods to keep our forests healthy.’ And we shouldn’t limit it by saying, ‘Well, you can do this method but you can’t do that method.’ 

“You have emerald ash borer going through right now,” he went on. (The borer, another import from Asia, is killing ash trees from Colorado to New Hampshire.) “Should we just leave the ash trees and say, O.K., they’re gone? Woolly adelgid is killing the hemlocks. If we lose all the hemlocks, do we just say, O.K., that’s gone? There’s what’s called thousand-cankers disease that’s spreading on walnuts right now. Is that the kind of attitude we should have? We have all these challenges out there, and the question is: Should we just let the trees die out? And to me that’s not an option.”

When I was in Hawaii, I found myself wavering. I would listen to Ruth Gates and agree with her: there’s no going back. Then I would get on the little ferry and try to picture the super-coral project moving forward. My head would start to ache. Corals are slow to reach sexual maturity, and, when they do, most spawn only once a year. Crossbreeding requires many generations, and in that time—however long it may be—the seas will have grown that much warmer and more acidified. Well over a thousand species of Scleractinia [corals] have been identified, and probably lots more await discovery. To save reefs is a project akin to saving forests; one species of super coral wouldn’t be enough. You’d need to breed hundreds of them. And, even if this could be accomplished, how would you get billions and billions of polyps settled in the ocean?

Gates acknowledges the long odds. “It is daunting,” she told me. “But I’m a realist. I cannot continue to hope that our planet is not going to change radically. It already is changed.

“There are many, many unknowns,” she went on. “And people are very quick to criticize based on ‘But what happens if this doesn’t work and what happens if this doesn’t work?’ And I say, ‘Well, I don’t know now, but I know I’ll know more when I get there.’ And I feel that we’re at this point where we need to throw caution to the wind and just try.”

Read the complete article at The New Yorker.  

Futurist Jamais Cascio thinks we can save ourselves from ourselves — "success can be ours if we are willing to try." Hmm....

 

Pale Blue Dot

Video by Patrick Mylund Nielson. Text by Carl Sagan. Music by Ludovico Einaudi.

 

What Would Wise Governance Look Like?

Let's start with a wise and telling quote from an anonymous source. Who wrote this?

[When running for office a second time,] the path of least resistance — of fund-raisers organized by the special interests, the corporate PACs and the top lobbying shops — starts to look awfully tempting, and if the opinions of these insiders don’t quite jibe with those you once held, you learn to rationalize the changes as a matter of realism, of compromise, of learning the ropes. The problems of ordinary people, the voices of the Rust Belt town or the dwindling heartland, become a distant echo rather than a palpable reality, abstractions to be managed rather than battles to be fought.

Irony On Earth Day

The Paris climate agreement will be signed today in New York. Today is Earth Day. 

Sarcasm about the human prospect seems redundant given the fact that we reached 1.5°C during the first 3 months of 2016 (rounding up).

Global leaders are meeting in New York this week to sign the Paris climate agreement. One of the expressed purposes of the document is to limit warming to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C.”

A Climate Central analysis shows that the world will have to dramatically accelerate emissions reductions if it wants to meet that goal. The average global temperature change for the first three months of 2016 was 1.48°C, essentially equaling the 1.5°C warming threshold agreed to by COP 21 negotiators in Paris last December. 

February exceeded the 1.5°C target at 1.55°C, marking the first time the global average temperature has surpassed the sobering milestone in any month. March followed suit checking in at 1.5°C. January’s mark of 1.4°C, put the global average temperature change from early industrial levels for the first three months of 2016 at 1.48°C.

This is likely a temporary spike due to the exceptionally strong (but now weakening) El Nino. But maybe not. After the 1998 El Nino-driven spike, it took several years to get back to that level of warming. 

Limiting warming to 1.5°C was inserted as an "aspirational" goal at the December Paris talks to appease small island nations. Oh, the irony! 

Have a nice weekend.

 

Not Making It In America

A remarkably frank story appears in the May issue of The Atlantic. Writer and film critic Neal Gabler introduces his subject in the opening text.

Since 2013, the Federal Reserve Board has conducted a survey to “monitor the financial and economic status of American consumers.”

Most of the data in the latest survey, frankly, are less than earth-shattering: 49 percent of part-time workers would prefer to work more hours at their current wage; 29 percent of Americans expect to earn a higher income in the coming year; 43 percent of homeowners who have owned their home for at least a year believe its value has increased.

But the answer to one question was astonishing. The Fed asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency.

The answer: 47 percent of respondents said that either they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling something, or they would not be able to come up with the $400 at all. Four hundred dollars! Who knew?

Well, I knew. I knew because I am in that 47 percent....

The timing and source of this story are also remarkable. The Big Story of 2016 is the quasi-revolution happening in the United States. Perhaps a majority of all votes cast (or near that) have been cast for Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump, whose basic premise is that America sucks in ways too numerous to list here.

In particular, America's economy doesn't work for many (if not most) of its citizens. In response, elite interests, now commonly labeled the "establishment", have waged war on reform candidates in the mainstream media those elites control. Media flacks have told struggling Americans over and over again how well they're doing. Look that the official jobless rate! What's the problem?

That sanguine message flies in the face of the lived experience of most voters. Those voters are angry. The cat is out of the bag. It is damn near miraculous that Neal Gabler talks about America's dirty little secret in The Atlantic, which is as mainstream as media gets.

You can read the full story online. Here I will simply quote a few of the most revealing bits. Here's Gabler talking about the common experience of many Americans.

Best Bullshit Prize?

I wrote the third Flatland essay in late 2014. Most of that essay tried to explain the prevalence of bullshit in human affairs. It is now 2016, an election year, and it is obvious to the cognoscenti—those with functioning Flatland bullshit detectors—that self-serving nonsense crops up everywhere all of the time. It might be useful to repeat the definition of bullshit used in that essay.

In individuals or social groups, bullshit, or spin, is a self-serving post-hoc rationalization of some unconscious motivation. Bullshit arises when there is an unconscious need to—

(1) maintain a positive self-image or manage positive impressions of the self by others;
(2) deflect existential threats to the self or group; or
(3) advance the agenda of the bullshitter (representing himself or the group).

This list is not meant to be exhaustive, nor are these needs mutually exclusive.

Bullshit stands opposed to a reasoned, objective search for truth. Spin often departs from reality in a serious way, or, more commonly, contains "half-truths" which advance the agenda of the bullshitter. Otherwise, if speech or writing does not depart from reality by the 1) assertion of falsehoods or 2) omission of crucial facts, even when unconscious motivations exist—unconscious motivations always exist—the discourse in question is not bullshit.

The bullshit I'm going to examine today checks all the boxes—(1), (2) and (3) above. This bullshit is of such fine quality that I should create an annual DOTE Bullshit Prize to be bestowed on those who put out that year's best bullshit.

What Are People For?

Today I ran across yet another article telling us that wages for American workers are going nowhere (Quartz, hat tip Tim Iacono).

As you age and progress in your career, your earnings normally increase. And for many Americans that’s still the case. Using the US Census Bureau’s March Current Population Survey, I estimated median earnings of 31 to 36 year olds in 2000, a group made up entirely of those considered Generation X. I aged them one year, each year, until 2015 (ending with them between 46 and 51). And, like generations before them, the typical Gen Xer’s earnings increased over that time. The figure below plots Gen X earnings and the median earnings of the whole population.

... But here’s a really important point about the Gen X data: nearly all the gains occurred before 2009, and the increases you’ve seen over the last couple years have only gotten us back to our pre-recession levels. Hardly anyone has gotten a significant raise since the recession. Gen Xers are worth singling out because they’re in their peak earning years. They’ve now missed out on what should be the biggest raises of their careers.

Lately, when I see this kind of stuff—Gen-X workers getting screwed—I am reminded of Kurt Vonnegut's famous question, which is posed in the title of this post. The Nation's ‘I Was There': On Kurt Vonnegut explains the question (May 16, 2012).

Doubts About Will

I have from time to time quoted William Shakespeare on DOTE. And as regular readers know, I am not in the least prone to conspiracy theories.

April 23, 2016 is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, but I have doubts about Will. I do not believe the man called "Shakespeare" (or "Shakspere", etc.) wrote the plays his name is forever linked with. That man existed, certainly, but was he the author of the plays? I don't believe it, and haven't for many years now.

Read the declaration of reasonable doubt about the identity of William Shakespeare if you are unfamiliar with this controversy. You will see that Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud, among others, also had their doubts about the so-called authorship question. At least I'm in good company.

If you too are skeptical after reading the declaration, you can add your name to the list of doubters. To believe that the Stratford man wrote the plays requires many extraordinary leaps of faith, leaps so implausible that one might call them miracles. I don't believe in miracles.

Most Shakespeare scholars and many, many others who are "vested" in Shakespeare the historical figure refuse to admit there is an the authorship question. Here we see Flatland "bad news" filtering in action. We see simple denial, or ad hominem attacks on "anti-Stratfordians", or out-and-out fantasies. There are lots of ways to avoid or deflect bad news.

I can demonstrate this directly. Watch the video. For example, there is no historical evidence whatsoever that Shakespeare ever attended even the grammar school in Stratford.

 

An honest discussion of the authorship question does not in any way diminish the contributions of the true author (or authors) of the plays themselves. Naturally there are endless debates about who that/those person(s) was/were (whew!). That's where things stand. This will likely never change. We will never know who actually wrote the plays.

Here's an introductory video on the authorship question.

 

Unusually Early Greenland Melt

And then there is this—

Based on observation-initialized weather model runs by DMI, almost  12% of the Greenland ice sheet had more than 1mm of melt on Monday 11 April, following an early start to melting the previous day.

Scientists at DMI were at first incredulous due to the early date.

"We had to check that our models were still working properly" said Peter Langen, a climate scientist at DMI. “Fortunately we could see from the PROMICE.dk stations on the ice sheet that it had been well above melting, even above 10 °C. This helped to explain the results”. The former top 3 earliest dates for a melt area larger than 10% were previously all in May (May 5, 2010, May 8, 1990, May 8, 2006).

"Even weather stations quite high up on the ice sheet observed very high temperatures on Monday", said Robert Fausto, a scientist at GEUS who maintains PROMICE.dk melt data.

"At KAN_U for example, a site at 1840 m above sea level, we observed a maximum temperature of 3.1°C. This would be a warm day in July, never mind April." Other PROMICE stations in the network at lower levels had daily average temperatures between 5 and 10 °C. 

And NOAA finally re-scaled this graph, but they're running out of room again. These lazy scientists need to get with the program. 

Have a nice weekend.