Anti-science politicians are sign of America’s decline

Dangerously Unprepared: Congressional Budget Cuts are Leaving Americans Vulnerable to Climate Extremes
[Via ClimateScienceWatch]

In 2011, the U.S. has been hammered by climate extremes, with economic damages by mid-June approaching a record $32 billion. Yet determined Congressional opponents of federal climate change efforts are doggedly impeding Federal activities to inform and engage the public around climate impacts, vulnerability and risks; and to prepare for those impacts. Such tactics have successfully stymied progress on climate policy for over a decade, but at a high cost that is becoming increasingly evident: they have left  Americans dangerously unprepared for an era of climate disruption.

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Politicians that fail to understand science, that create obstacles for doing science and who prevent any funds to be spent that could inform us will never have to face the ramifications of their Luddite behavior. But they should.

They withhold funds for underatsngin how to adapt to warmer temperature. They would prevent the Army Corp of Engineers from learning how changing climate might affect such things as levees.

Apparently, by not having any data that might inform us about the future, these politicians are comforatble wallowing in their ignorance.

The fact that scientific study is so hated by members of Congress makes me realize that Idiocracy was not satiric but prophetic.

Below is a video is how I imagine most of the Congressional committee meetings are run today. Only without as many intelligent politicians (Idiocracy has one.)

Congress failing to do its duty creates an Imperial President

The Debt Ceiling and the Imperial Presidency
[Via Outside the Beltway]

Russell Korobkin has a post up discussing what the Treasury Department’s ideal policy is for paying the U.S. Government’s obligations in the event that the debt ceiling isn’t raised. Personally, I find this problematic, because the Treasury Department doesn’t actually have any legal authority to prioritize payments. Felix Salmon isn’t as bothered. He relies on a GAO report from 1985 that states that in the absence of Congressional direction, the Secretary of the Treasury is empowered to prioritize payments from the government.

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The Debt Ceiling and the Imperial Presidency! This is the problem we face and have failed to deal with for at least 30 years. and something I have written about many,many times. In fact, I am just reformatting another Message to my Mother that I sent her at the end of July.

There is no constitutional authority for the Secretary of the Treasury to do any sort of prioritization of spending. That is the job of Congress. Yet no one in Congress seems to mind that the Executive branch is preparing to do this.

In fact, they seem to feel that it is just peachy that the President could do this. I’ve commented before on the weird aspect that conservatives and strict constructionalists are so open to giving the Executive branch much more far ranging powers than it is supposed to have.

I added this:

At one time, I had hoped Obama might be able to repair some of this damage. In fact, I think he really tried to allow Congress to do its job of legislating and just focus on carrying out the will of Congress. BUt things are so broken that we can not actually function without a strong Executive spending most of his time telling Congress what to do.

Here is how Knapp phrases the same point:

But on the other hand, it goes to a trend in our politics that has been escalating since the 1960s. More and more, Congress has been willing to simply forego its role in making policy to the President. This trend has only been highlighted during the Obama Administration, because Obama, more than any President in recent memory, has been deferential to Congress’ role as policymaker. We saw that in the Health Care Bill and Stimulus Packages, and we’re seeing it now in the debt ceiling fiasco. The result is an almost desperate flailing by Congress to get the President to do something. That’s a bad thing for Constitutional governance.

The problem of an Imperial President is something I have been mentioning since at least 2003 – here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. This cuts across parties and Presidents. Bush was just a guilty of this as Obama. In fact, every President since Reagan has done something to enhance the Imperial President with the acquiescence of Congress.

And just a few months ago, I expounded on the parallels between our decline in legislative power with that of the Roman Republic. Knapp recognizes the same danger:

One of the reasons that Rome went from being a Republic to an Empire is that the Senate kept abrogating its authority to Caesar. Personally, I’d prefer we not follow in Rome’s footsteps.

I have the same hope but the current session of Congress provides little optimism.

Congress is broken and both parties like it that way. The Presidency is broken and both parties like it that way. The Judiciary is broken and both parties like it that way.

They want to keep us all divided so that they can continue to accrete money and power. A wide segment of the population will not listen to ANYTHING said by a liberal. Another wide swath will never listen to ANYTHING said by a conservative.

As long as we allow them to divide us, they will succeed.

The Founding Fathers were made up of men as far apart politically as we find ourselves today. Yet they were able to come together, forge coalitions and make compromises that created the United States.

Until the American people can come together, overcome their differences and prevent these power-hungry politicians from both parties from gaining more power, I fear America will fall further and further away from its ideals.

Fry and Laurie, almost 20 years ago, help educate us to what is going on in Britain today

I’ve added A Bit of Laurie and Fry – The Complete Collection to my Wish List.

And when is the Two Ronnies going to be avalaible in the US?

Enjoy the weekend. It might be the last nice one for the American economy for quite some time.

by ryen123

Washington: American political dysfunction runs amok
[Via BusinessInsider]

So some version of the Reid plan it will be. The Boehner plan isn’t just dead, it’s inconceivable. The notion that Congress might “debate” a second tranche of deficit reduction six months from now — as the Boehner plan requires –isn’t ever going to fly. There is only so much that people can take.

If some version of the Reid plan it is, then it will have to pass the House with Democratic and Republican votes.

Democrats who vote for it will not be punished in their primaries next year.  Some, maybe many Republicans who vote in favor of the Reid plan will be punished in primaries next year. The Tea Parties will see to that

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I hope that something note worthy happens over the weekend. But I expect there is not enough time to produce something that will prevent our debt from being rated lower.

Who wants to loan money to anyone with such a dysfunctional system of government? And the House wants to do this all over again in a few months?

I think we are  about to see the end of the dollar as the reserve currency. The BRIC countries will probably like that. As it hits the bottom line of every American.

That could have huge impacts on our economy and on the cost of things. All because we have a government that can not govern.

The last words of the article are, unfortunately, both scary and realistic:

It’s no longer clear that the “August 2nd deadline” and “technical default” really matter any more.  The truth is the political system has, by its behavior, already declared its bankruptcy. And since it is the political system that has stewardship of fiscal matters, it follows that the United States government is bankrupt, politically and as a fiduciary.

Jim Cramer was on television today, saying that he thought it was possible that the Congress might authorize the sale of all the gold in Fort Knox to cover expenses for the week of August 2-August 9.  If you had heard such a thing 30 years ago, you would have said: “that’s insane.”  When I heard it this afternoon, I thought: “we could do that. We might have to do that.”

What happens to the social fabric of a nation that is bankrupt?  Does anyone know?  Care to hazard a guess? My guess is that the United States of America begins to untie, unravel. Truth is, the unraveling is already well along. The question is whether it accelerates or reverses itself with renewal.

All the political signs point to acceleration.

 

 

Rebutting the sensationalist hype of a recent Climate Change paper

by Double–M (formerly DoubleM2)

“Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedback”
[Via RealClimate]

Guest commentary by Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo

The hype surrounding a new paper by Roy Spencer and Danny Braswell is impressive (see for instance Fox News); unfortunately the paper itself is not. News releases and blogs on climate denier web sites have publicized the claim from the paper’s news release that “Climate models get energy balance wrong, make too hot forecasts of global warming”. The paper has been published in a journal called Remote sensing which is a fine journal for geographers, but it does not deal with atmospheric and climate science, and it is evident that this paper did not get an adequate peer review. It should not have been published.

The paper’s title “On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance” is provocative and should have raised red flags with the editors. The basic material in the paper has very basic shortcomings because no statistical significance of results, error bars or uncertainties are given either in the figures or discussed in the text. Moreover the description of methods of what was done is not sufficient to be able to replicate results. As a first step, some quick checks have been made to see whether results can be replicated and we find some points of contention.

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There has been a lot of hype from the denialist camp on this paper as though one paper could completely upend all the previous work. Not too likely.

Getting a paper published in an inappropriate journal is one thing to worry about with a new paper. If this was so important, why not a higher profile place (remember Nature published a naturopathic paper why back when, just for the controversy).

For another thing, for this groups model to work, clouds have to cause weather, not weather causing clouds. So I guess a hurricane is caused by the clouds that form rather than the weather system driving it? That is what is meant by a forcing. Carbon dioxide is a forcing because it causes the temperatures to go up.To call clouds a forcing seems to completely at odds with what we expect that it requires greater proof than assertion or model building.

Denialists hate models, Except this paper is all based on models,ones that have apparently been cherry-picked to give the results desired by the researchers. As RealClimate states:

To help interpret the results, Spencer uses a simple model. But the simple model used by Spencer is too simple (Einstein says that things should be made as simple as possible but not simpler): well this has gone way beyond being too simple (see for instance this post by Barry Bickmore). The model has no realistic ocean, no El Niño, and no hydrological cycle, and it was tuned to give the result it gave. Most of what goes on in the real world of significance that causes the relationship in the paper is ENSO. We have already rebutted Lindzen’s work on exactly this point. The clouds respond to ENSO, not the other way round [see: Trenberth, K. E., J. T. Fasullo, C. O'Dell, and T. Wong, 2010: Relationships between tropical sea surface temperatures and top-of-atmosphere radiation.Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, L03702, doi:10.1029/2009GL042314.]

No error bars or statistical significance are other weaknesses. The fact that others are stating that there is not enough information to replicate their work really makes this a worthless paper, even if it was demonstrating something extra-ordinary.

And finally, rising carbon dioxide levels have much greater impact than just raising temperatures. We must do what we can to lower our production.

Al Gore is exactly right

by simone.brunozzi

Mr. Gore Finds the Link
[Via Only in it for the gold]

There’s a fairly obvious link between the impending economic train wreck in the US and the disastrous response to climate change. Al Gore spells it out.

We haven’t gone nuts — but the “conversation of democracy” has become so deeply dysfunctional that our ability to make intelligent collective decisions has been seriously impaired. Throughout American history, we relied on the vibrancy of our public square — and the quality of our democratic discourse — to make better decisions than most nations in the history of the world. But we are now routinely making really bad decisions that completely ignore the best available evidence of what is true and what is false. When the distinction between truth and falsehood is systematically attacked without shame or consequence — when a great nation makes crucially important decisions on the basis of completely false information that is no longer adequately filtered through the fact-checking function of a healthy and honest public discussion — the public interest is severely damaged.

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Al Gore may not always be right. he is human, after all. But I feel he nails it here.

America is at its best when it brings the full diversity of thought to the table, solving complex problems that require many different viewpoints.

When America is lead by people who think only they know the right way, whose view of the other side is that they are traitors or idiots or corrupt or some other ‘other’, whose positions are hardened into concrete, then we all lose.

America is not at its best right now. It has not been for quite some time. Falsehoods, craven lies and bullying are the common tools of the modern ‘conversation of democracy’.

The West Wing explains the debt ceiling

[youtube=hthttp://youtu.be/v5igKuNF1rII

Or as Lincoln described a similar process:

A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!”

Why can’t Microsoft make real ads as funny and hard hitting as this?

Gmail Man
[Via Daring Fireball]

No other company than Microsoft would produce a video like this. So utterly Microsoftian in its awkwardness. But it’s a fascinating competitive angle to take against Gmail.

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Here it is:

New sequencing technology helps solve some mysteries of E. coli outbreak

by adonofrio

Pacific Biosciences DNA sequencing technology yields new insights into German E. coli pathogen
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science news]

An international team of scientists has successfully employed single molecule, real-time (SMRT™) DNA sequencing technology from Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc. (NASDAQ: PACB) to provide valuable insights into the pathogenicity and evolutionary origins of the highly virulent bacterium responsible for the German E. coli outbreak. Published online today in the New England Journal of Medicine, the results provide the most detailed genetic profile to date of the outbreak strain, including medically relevant information.

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The ability of next generation DNA sequencing techniques to rapidly look at a lot of different genomes almost simultaneously opens the door to rapidly understand why a disease outbreak occurs – such as what virulence factors are present and where they might have come from.

We will be generating huge databases of these organisms of disease in the coming years.

Fires in the tundra destabilize the permafrost

by benwatts

Largest recorded tundra fire yields scientific surprises
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science news]

In 2007 the largest recorded tundra fire in the circumpolar arctic released approximately as much carbon into the atmosphere as the tundra has stored in the previous 50 years, say scientists in the July 28 issue of the journal Nature. The study of the Anaktuvuk River fire on Alaska’s North Slope revealed how rapidly a single tundra fire can offset or reverse a half-century worth of soil-stored carbon.

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As long as there is not another fire in 50 years, the area will be stabilized. But the fire exposes the permafrost to the surface, increasing the liklihood it will  melt and release more methane.

That would not be good.

The release of methane causes extinction events

by Dave Hogg

Did Methane Cause the Mass Extinction That Made Way for the Dinosaurs? [Via 80beats]

What’s the News: Two hundred million years ago, half of the Earth’s species vanished in the blink of a geological eye, clearing the way for rise of the dinosaurs in the Jurassic. The cause of that mass extinction, a new study suggests, may have been gigatons of methane released from the sea floor after a slight rise in the earth’s temperature, triggering much greater warming. And if that sounds familiar, it’s because scientists are worried the same thing will happen today.
What’s the Context:

The primary theory as to what went wrong at the end of the Triassic period, when this extinction took place, holds that tons of carbon dioxide released during the breakup of the supercontinent Pangaea ratcheted up global temperatures to deadly levels over the course of several hundreds of thousands of years. But these researchers’ work seems to indicate that the change took place even more quickly than that. In a previous study looking at limestone, which is the remains of ancient sea creatures, this team found that it disappeared from the geological record quite suddenly—a mere 20,000 years after the extinction event began.

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The researchers found a spike of carbon dioxide followed by a massive release of methane right at the boundary of the extinction event. They found warming effects in plant growth at the time and an enahnced hydrological cycle – all symptoms of global warming.

Huge amounts of methane – which is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide – are found under the ocean’s surface under the forzen permafrost of the Northern reagions.. The structures that hold them in place break down with warming, resulting in catastrophic release of the methane into the atmosphere.

There have already been reports describing how much methane is being relased in Siberia due to warming. Now we are getting a better idea of just what can happen when all that methane is released, as what apparently happened at the Permian-Triassic extinction– the greatest extinction eent ever; 96% of all marine species gone; 70% of all terrestrial species gone; 5-6 million years before any sort of recovery and 30 million until complete recovery.

A tipping point with ocen acidification could cripple ocean ecosystems but the release of methane in such large amounts would decimate everything.

We may have very little time to solve these problems before they are on a path that can not be altered.

The media is now talking about what I mentioned regarding a default

The NYT has an article that also details much of what I wrote earlier. For example:

There are other risks in waiting. The Treasury must continue to repay debts as they come due, then borrow the same amounts anew. Officials are concerned that it will become harder to find investors for United States government securities, and that remaining buyers will demand higher interest rates.

The Treasury plans to auction about $87 billion in short-term securities next Monday and Tuesday. The following week it plans to hold a much larger auction of long-term debt.

All told, the government plans to borrow almost $500 billion in August. If interest rates climb by even a tenth of a percentage point, the annual cost would rise by $500 million.

A real rise in the interest rates would trickle through the economy in a way to have devastating effects on a recovery.

Some police do it correctly

How Should Law Enforcement Handle Being Filmed? Officer Lyons Provides The Perfect Example
[Via Techdirt]

As Techdirt readers are aware, the general attitude of law enforcement tends to worsen quickly once the cameras come out. From holding citizens at gunpoint until they destroy their cameras to pressing charges against bystanders filming from their own property, hardly a week goes by without another uploaded video demonstrating that, for the most part, the easiest way to get on a cop’s bad side is to whip out a phone or a camera.

Fortunately, there are exceptions. Reason Hit & Run directs our attention to Officer Matthew J. Lyons of the Oceanside, California police department. Lyons runs into a few issues that usually send other officers scrambling for their handguns and threats: an openly-carried weapon and a camera.

However, Lyons handles the situation in a professional, cordial manner, even as the person filming the encounter declines to show him any ID or provide a last name. Even better, he commends him for exercising his rights.

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So often we hear about police getting things done incorrectly. It is nice to see one do things in a positive way.

The actual numbers in our country’s bank accounts

How much money is in the federal bank account? These two graphs, updated daily, tell the story. – By Chris Wilson – Slate Magazine
[Via Slate]

Here’s one way to express how catastrophically screwed the U.S. government’s finances are: If the entire U.S budget were cut to zero, effective immediately—the military, all entitlements, the electricity bill for the Capitol—there still wouldn’t be enough money to cover the payments on old debt that come due every day. In fact, by Slate’s calculations, the payments would have dried us up in under a month. So for decades the strategy has been to borrow new money to pay down old debt—plus a little extra to kick to the Treasury’s coffers, since we habitually spend more than we take in. That continued to work this year until May 16, when we maxed out our congressional credit card. Since then, the Treasury has been living on savings and whatever revenue comes in. The first graph here very simply shows the balance in the Treasury’s bank account, which is published every weekday. The light-colored bars at the end represent the Bipartisan Policy Center’s projections for how long we can make it before the money all dries up. That date is Aug. 3.

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I’ve been looking for this data and am glad to see not only where to find it but also a nice graph. The Daily Treasury Statement is like the bank statement we get monthly, except that it comes out daily.

It summarized the US Treasury’s cash on a daily basis, allowing us to see how we are doing and whether we actually have enough cash in the ‘bank’ to meet our obligations. Read some of the statements as they tell you just how much was withdrawn or deposited on a daily basis

On May 16, we hit the debt ceiling ($14.294 trillion) and have stayed at the limit since. This can easily be seen in the figure below from the article.

We can borrow money but only that amount equal to the amount we pay down the debt. So the line remains flat.

Here is a graph of the daily bank acount going back to October:

You can see the paid depletion of money in the bank account as we hit the debt ceiling, as we could no longer borrow money to replenish the coffers. The balance has been maintained by a variety of tricks – much like moving around accounts, selling off 401K accounts or selling off our family valuables on ebay.

But eventually,  we run out of things to sell and have no more investments to sell. We are left with only borrowing more (which the debt ceiling prevents us from doing) or only paying a little of what we owe out of what we bring in each day.

After August 2, we will only be able to pay off things with the money that comes in each day. That works out to about $76 billion every two weeks. $22 billion in SS benefits goes out every two weeks and about $20 billion goes out to Medicare.  About $8 billion ininterest payments would need to be made. $26 billion would go to Defense spending.

All that adds up to $76 billion.

And that leaves no money for Mecicaid, for any non-defense salaries, for VA programs, for Unemployment benefits, or for any non-Defense government program.  Nothing into FDIC funds, research at Univerisites shut down, and no more  food programs for poor children.

So, we can meet some basic stuff but it will harm the poor, put hundreds of thousands of people out of work and pretty much devastate those least able to deal with the default.

Another thing I worry about is the fact that we have to pay our debt every so often, because securities held by others are redeemed. We need the cash to pay them and thus we have auctions every so often to get the money to pay those redemptions.

We have been doing that without raising the debt ceiling. Normally not a problem.We sell the debt at an auction and the enthusiasm of the buyers determines the interest rate. If lots of them want to buy, the push down the interest rate. If they are reticent, we have to offer a higher interst rate to get them to buy the debt. Except after defaulting, we HAVE to sell at any prices in order to pay off redemptions. We have no other way to get the money for redemptions.

The buyers know we HAVE to sell the debt at any cost. And that cost could be higher interest rates.

This would mean that the interest rate on almost everything would go up. It wouldbecome much harder for cities to borrow money becuase the cost of muicipal bonds would go up. Home loans would go up.

Just about everything would go up if the auctions resulted in higher interest rates.

August may not be a fun month at all  if we default.

 

 

10 Westerns I like

I made it twelve because I can. I will watch anyone of these, even if it is the last 15 minutes.

The four John Wayne

1. The Searchers (the ending shot of Wayne always brings me to tears.)
2. Red River (the movie that shows that John Wayne can bring a depth not often seen in his other movies)
3. Rio Bravo (the most fun of any of Wayne’s movies and it has Walter Brennan in full mode)
4. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (One of the best, and most cynical last scenes in a Western)

 

The four Clint Eastwood

 

 

1. High Plains Drifter (The best gothic Western ever made)
2. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (demonstrates that greatness does not need many words; plus the cemetary scene is miraculous)
3. Outlaw Josey Wales (One of the best “misfits make a family” movies ever made)
4. Unforgiven (a real morality play, where morals seem to shift throughout)

 

The rest

 

 

1. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (best set pieces in Westerns – the beginning: Ask him to stay so we can go; the knife fight: Let’s discuss the rules first; the train heist: Make sure you use plenty of dynamite; the escape and jump: Who are those guys?; and the final still shot)
2. True Grit (2010) (the best ensemble cast in a dramatic Western, although some of Ford’s Cavalry trilogy come close)
3. The Magnificent Seven (Best Western music and Yul Brynner)
4. High Noon (Shot in almost realtime, it is the most tension-filled Western)
5. Blazing Saddles (the best parody done with a lot of love)

And my guilty pleasures The Quick and the Dead (seeing Stone, Hackman, DiCaprio and Crowe all deliciously chewing the scenary with Sam Raimi quirkyness throughout), Cat Ballou (best balladeers ever in a Western and Lee Marvin’s genius), and Support Your Local Sheriff (the sanity of Garner, the insanity of Hackett and the delightful comedy of Brennan and Dern).