Ya betcha they are nice

A Small Triumph of Civility Over Stupid:
[Via Balloon Juice]

This was refreshing:

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Really nice. People from Minnesota have a reputation for being ;nice’ but this was really fun to watch. Several people disagreed with him but they let him speak and he really tried to answer their questions. With facts when he could and with feelings when he could not.

And with respect for those that disagreed as well as agreed.

And the best thing, the thing I did not know, was that since Minnesota has no for-profit insurance companies, close to 90 cents on every dollar paid goes to healthcare. In other states this varies from 70-80 cents.

He said that if each state just went to this same approach that Minnesota used, reform could easily be paid for. I wonder if that is true.

These are the sorts of discussions that should be happening.

UPDATE: Besides talking well, he can also draw a map of the US with all 48 states from memory, starting with Minnesota. Not many people could name the states, much less draw them all.

Technorati Tags: Politics

It’s easy to misinform when perspective and facts are left out

by eviltomthai
Fox News on EPA endangerment finding: “Some skeptics say regulating carbon dioxide, a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, may be a difficult task, especially since people emit carbon dioxide with every breath”:
[Via Climate Progress]

How does the other side get their warped views? Consider a Friday story from FoxNews titled, “Don’t Exhale: EPA Expected to Declare Carbon Dioxide a Dangerous Pollutant. Here’s the opening:

Don’t exhale.

That advice may need heeding if the Environmental Protection Agency declares carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases dangerous pollutants, a move – expected in the next couple weeks – that would require the federal government to impose new rules limiting emissions.

But some skeptics say regulating carbon dioxide, a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, may be a difficult task, especially since people emit carbon dioxide with every breath.

And, no, sadly, this isn’t intended to be humorous story. It’s just run-of-the-mill disinformation disguised as a “straight news” story.

Interestingly – or perhaps I should say typically – FoxNews doesn’t actually offer any “skeptics” who say regulating CO2 may be difficult because people exhale CO2. It was apparently just the reporter’s own inane idea.

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The article also says this:

That’s just the start, however. Aides say later rules will extend to other sources and require a permit from the EPA to build anything that emits more than 25,000 tons of these pollutants. That could include schools, nursing homes or a Walmart.

The rules themselves, which have not been directly released yet, appear to only deal with structures that produce 25,000 tons of CO2 a year. That is 50 million pounds.

A back of the envelope suggests that a single human exhales about 400 liters of CO2 a day or 146,000 liters a year. Under standard conditions, CO2 has a density of about 2 grams per liter. This results in about 300,000 grams a year being exhaled per person which works out to 660 pounds.

So, a town with over 80,000 people would not produce enough CO2 to hit the 25,000 pound limit. The top 10 power plants in the US average about 20 million tons of CO2 each produced annually!! That means each plant produces as much CO2 as 60 MILLION people. They produce almost twice as much CO2 than the entire population of the US exhales.

Exhaling will never be part of any regulation from the EPA. No nursing home will be regulated, simply because its residents breathe. But CO2 producing power plants will. And if my child was in a school that produced 25,000 tons of CO2 a year, I’d look for a different school. (80,000 kids is a lot for any school to deal with)

That is what will be regulated, not people exhaling. Never, ever only use FOX to get facts. They use few. It makes it easier to mislead.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science

A warming Arctic

Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, “seminal” study finds:
[Via Climate Progress]

A Hockey Stick in Melting Ice

Arctic temperatures in the 1990s reached their warmest level of any decade in at least 2,000 years, new research indicates. The study, which incorporates geologic records and computer simulations, provides new evidence that the Arctic would be cooling if not for greenhouse gas emissions that are overpowering natural climate patterns.

So reports the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), which coauthored the study to be published in Science Friday. [I'll put the link up when it's posted.] The Washington Post story notes:

The analysis, based on more than a dozen lake sediment cores as well as glacier ice and tree ring records from the Arctic, provides one of the broadest pictures to date of how industrial emissions have shifted the Arctic’s long-standing natural climate patterns. Coupled with a separate report on the region issued Wednesday by the World Wildlife Fund, the studies suggest human-induced changes could transform not only the Arctic but climate conditions across the globe.

“It’s basically saying the greenhouse gas emissions are overwhelming the system,” said David Schneider, a visiting scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and one of the Science article’s co-authors.

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Nice hockey stick there. I figure the deniers will be pouring over this paper trying to figure out, once again, why facts just do not fit their reality.

The huge change in just the last 100 years or so is quite startling. It obliterates the 2000 year (maybe even 7000 year) trend.The blue line, which is the reconstruction of 2000 years worth of temperatures derived from over 20 well spread out sites using ice cores, lake bed sediments and tree rings, fits quire well with the red line, which shows the actual warming based on direct measurements.

The cooling trend looks to be due to the precession of the Earth’s axis. These Milankovitch cycles describe changes in the axis of rotation with respect to the sun. Sometimes the Northern axis points towards the sun when the Earth is closest to the sun and other times it points away from the sun at its closest approach to the sun. This results in a 26,000 year cycle of changing intensities of solar irradiation during summer in the Arctic.

So sometimes the Arctic is cooler in summer than other times, simply because of the precession of the Earth’s axis.

The Arctic has been emerging from a hot point in this cycle and has been cooling for the last 7000 years. The trend seen above matches very closely the rate of the cooling trend seen since the end of the Halocene Thermal Maximum. At least until the last century or so.

In fact, in a short 100 years or so, the temperature of the Arctic has not only reversed the trend of the last 7000 years but may now be very close to the HTM temperatures seen then.

This sort of reversal is another point to support anthropogenic causes.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science

The need to ignore models that do not work

by David Paul Ohmer
Nobelist Krugman eviscerates macroeconomics:
[Via Climate Progress]

Here’s the conclusion of “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?” a long, brilliant piece in the forthcoming NYT magazine by the leading progressive economist:

VIII. RE-EMBRACING KEYNES

So here’s what I think economists have to do. First, they have to face up to the inconvenient reality that financial markets fall far short of perfection, that they are subject to extraordinary delusions and the madness of crowds. Second, they have to admit — and this will be very hard for the people who giggled and whispered over Keynes — that Keynesian economics remains the best framework we have for making sense of recessions and depressions. Third, they’ll have to do their best to incorporate the realities of finance into macroeconomics.

Many economists will find these changes deeply disturbing. It will be a long time, if ever, before the new, more realistic approaches to finance and macroeconomics offer the same kind of clarity, completeness and sheer beauty that characterizes the full neoclassical approach. To some economists that will be a reason to cling to neoclassicism, despite its utter failure to make sense of the greatest economic crisis in three generations. This seems, however, like a good time to recall the words of H. L. Mencken: “There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible and wrong.”

When it comes to the all-too-human problem of recessions and depressions, economists need to abandon the neat but wrong solution of assuming that everyone is rational and markets work perfectly. The vision that emerges as the profession rethinks its foundations may not be all that clear; it certainly won’t be neat; but we can hope that it will have the virtue of being at least partly right.

Read the whole damn indictment. Any politician, journalist or opinion maker who worships at the feet of the false gods of neo-classical economics is no better than Bernie Madoff (see “Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?“).

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A huge problem that we see again and again in so many areas is the need to continue using a model long after it has been shown to no longer reflect reality. An example would be the very complex epicycles that were developed to try and make the Solar system fit the views of Aristotle and Ptolemy.

Here, not only was the Earth at the center of the Universe, but every object orbited the Earth in perfect circles. Perfection of the model was more important than reality. So, as more data became available, the orbits had to remain circular, requiring some very complex adaptions to make the model continue to fit.

Even Copernicus did not fully correct the model. He still thought that all the orbits were perfect circles. He still felt that epicycles were important. In fact, the only really advantage he proposed for his system was soe simple math to explain how perfect circles could still provide a model for the data.

It took Brahe, Kepler, and finally Galileo to kill the geocentric model for good. Galileo’s identification of the phases of Venus was the killing blow for the Ptolemaic view and it happened 100 years after Copernicus.

People hate to change a model, even when it no longer works. Many economists need to realize that the orbits are not circular, that the world is not perfect and assuming anything involving humans can be reduced to simple equations may be a recipe for disaster.

Technorati Tags: Economy, Science